Finding the right balance between the group and the individual

'Balancing Rocks' by Viewminder
under a CC license

We often hear that successful organisations are based on effective teams. Almost equally often we hear that successful organisations are those with charismatic, efficient leaders. Those statements are complementing rather than contradicting each other. However, as the headcount and complexity of structure, operations and objectives of organisations increases, the importance of the teams that operate them becomes increasingly important. A major challenge in teams of a given composition is how to balance between the needs/ priorities of the individual and the needs/ priorities of the group.

Face-to-face meetings. Still much needed.

'Penguins have a meeting' by
Laura Taylor under a CC license

Businesses and people have grown past the local scale for quite some time now making communication an obvious priority. Despite the increasing number of communication means available, face-to-face meetings still persist. That happens in spite of their higher cost compared to other commonly available alternatives. Why is that? Are they truly irreplaceable?

In all the jobs I had so far, the king of communication means was e-mail. Formal or informal, long or short, pre-run by the management or not. Yes, I have had the experience of the occasional paper-printed letter and, unfortunately, a bit more often, the experience of its distant cousin, the fax message. And then it has been the phone. Plenty of my working hours have been spent there. Every once in while, though, I had to arrange for or participate in face-to-face meetings. So far, that has been with clients or potential clients, project partners, funding bodies, policy makers, working group members, colleagues and peers, top management executives, middle management, trainees, sector stakeholders, ..., you name it...

Have all those face-to-face meetings been worth the time and the cost, especially when international travel was involved? Yes. Even when the hard objectives of the meeting were not met.

You see, when you interact with others in the real word, you exchange much more information than that which words alone convey. This can be via body language, via facial expressions, via interactions with others that may be present but not part of the meeting, via comments that although irrelevant to the topic of the meeting convey information when perceived in context, etc. More importantly, this exchange of information goes both ways. At the end of most of my meetings I had a clear feeling on where things were going and that, in turn, helped me choose my follow-up actions accordingly.

Face-to-face meetings are engaging, too. Agreement (or disagreement) on actions feels firmer. Trust (or distrust) is established more easily and so are other things, such as tolerance, patience and understanding - all necessary from time-to-time in successful, durable collaborations - that we exhibit in our everyday life but are harder to do when using, say, written means of communication.

I admit that I haven't done any hard-fact cost-benefit analysis. But face-to-face meetings still get a lot of praise, having several valid reasons in their support. True, virtual meetings, including video conferences (conference calls never really appealed to me), have a lot of potential but they also come with their own disadvantages, as people in the meeting consultancy side say. Of course, when resources are running thin, one can always try to make the best out of virtual meetings. After all, face-to-face meetings do have their own peculiarities :-)

(as anything that involves people)

 

(but are still better than conference calls)

Could we increase ideas' diversity by simply switching languages?

'Language' by
<leonie di vienna> under
a CC license

The idea that language and thought are interconnected is not new. Discussion is very much ongoing on whether it is the language which is shaped by perception or vice-versa. A number of interesting examples surface from time to time, demonstrating the link among language, perception and - possibly - thinking.

For instance, Pormpuraawans, an aboriginal community in Australia, use cardinal directions in their speech (north, south, east, west) instead of relative ones (left, right). This seems to be associated with a very high awareness of orientation, even indoors. As described by L. Boroditsky, those people, when given a series of cards representing images of temporal nature (such as an aging man), they used the east-west orientation to put them in order, while subjects using English would use a left-to-right order and Hebrew speakers a right-to-left order for the same thing.

While all those are, indeed, interesting, I find intriguing the idea that by simply switching languages our perception of reality may shift. I sounds like being able to change viewpoint above a problem or think out-of-the-box taking that one easy step (if one is bilingual or multilingual, of course).

I do remember one of the teachers of mine supported that in order to learn and then master a language one should stop merely translating from one's mother tongue to the new language but, instead, think what one needs to say in the new language altogether. I know, it sounds confusing but there may be some truth in that advice. To my small experience, different population groups think differently, their language often reflects that and using that language helps a foreigner understand that different way of thinking, at least if he/she has been exposed to the corresponding culture.

Should the facts be right and the hypothesis on the 2-way link between language and thinking be valid, there is certainly considerable potential here. Imagine that one could instantly enhance opinion diversity simply by having a group discuss a topic in a different language or by keeping notes - and later reviewing them - in a different language or, even, by producing - at a later stage - a summary of thoughts and decisions in a different language. Alternatively, in a more traditional approach, one could try mixing people with different mother tongues in the same working group, although that may not always be feasible or practical. Some thoughts on activities, actions or interventions that may sound less likely to be successful or too unconventional in one language may sound perfectly reasonable or manageable in another. That could be simply because the two languages may be linked to societal perception of different dynamism. Of course, all that assumes that people are well immersed in the second language they use, which typically happens when they have a very good level in that language. Such people, however, are increasingly more common today. There is, unfortunately, the catch that regardless of how good or bad something sounds in a discussion, implementing a decision will be having its own effect (good or bad) independently of the discussion that preceded. Still though, views diversity should be a plus for identifying problems, solution, risks and opportunities.

At any rate, while not the only such approach, this is a route that should be easy to explore since there is no extra cost involved (since most people tend to know a second language, anyway). Maybe it will prove too good to be true, maybe not. Well, having said that, it will be feeling rather awkward and unconventional, at least at the beginning, but - hey - there is no real harm in trying that once or twice :-). After all, because of the internet, international collaboration, globalisation, world politics, etc., using a language different to one's mother tongue is not that rare any more...