Collaboration in the Time of Coronavirus

Can we recreate this collaboration in a virtual environment?

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

On January 11, 2020 the Science Magazine reported that “Chinese researchers reveal draft genome of virus implicated in Wuhan pneumonia outbreak” and “had also deposited the sequence in GenBank.” The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. Since then other countries around the world including France, USA and India have been sharing SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences. (As an aside, coronavirus is a name that describes a type of virus, while SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus of that type which causes a disease, named COVID-19.) Computing giants including Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft and NVIDIA have given access to their technologies such as IBM Summit and NVIDIA Parabricks for free to researchers sequencing the coronavirus in a global collaboration. Such a global collaboration can hopefully bear fruit in the form of drugs and vaccines sooner rather than later.

While we can appreciate the tremendous potential of global collaboration to find a cure for COVID-19, in our business and professional lives, we face the challenge of collaborating in a world where we are physically isolated. We need to collaborate with customers to understand their problems and provide them the right solutions, with colleagues to build new solutions and implement them and with business partners for joint solution development and marketing opportunities. We need to do this in a remote, virtual environment. We need to do it now, rather than wait for later. Right now, we don’t know what later means.

Basic communication model

The key to collaborating with others is communicating. The traditional communication model as shown here has a sender, a receiver, a message, which is encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver. In addition, a feedback loop from the receiver to the sender and noise from the environment.

However, when we talk about collaboration, we need all parties to be active participants. So, it is better to imagine all parties as communicators instead of classifying them as senders and receivers. In this two-way or multi-way communication which needs to happen among team members, between customer and provider or between partners, there are five types of communication challenges to overcome in increasing order of difficulty.

Collaboration challenges to overcome in a remote, virtual environment

Challenges, techniques and tools

1. Transmitting ideas — In a remote, virtual environment, transmitting ideas is perhaps the easiest since it can easily be done using any web or video conference tool such as Zoom or WebEx and using PowerPoint or Keynote to convey words and images. Two principles to bear in mind are — a) Less is more — Don’t use too many words or images, and b) Look at the camera — In person, we are advised to maintain eye contact. Remotely, we need to look at the camera rather than where the slides are. Yes, it does need some practice.
2. Transmitting emotions — On March 19, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on Indian citizens to clap for 5 minutes at 5 pm on March 22 to show gratitude to those providing emergency services. The response was overwhelming. It demonstrated that if you can inspire people to participate in a cause, it will move them. I learnt the other technique from Indranil Chakraborty (IC). Read this — “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” What feelings do these words evoke? IC is the Founder of StoryWorks and in a workshop I learnt from him the power of using a story to transmit emotions. IC’s book, “Stories at Work” is a delightful read to enjoy and learn from. For transmitting emotions, technology tools are secondary. A well-designed audiovisual can of course help.
3. Receiving feedback — For receiving feedback to be effective, it should be real-time. So also, the response to it. While with physical presence, you can gauge the non-verbal cues such as body language, how do you do it remotely? It is difficult to look at a number of tiny windows on your screen and peer into them to assess reactions. Also, you are supposed to look at the camera. So, one needs to collect feedback in a more structured manner using polls. Be prepared with questions on which you want people to vote. Many web conference tools will have this feature. Another important aspect is to immediately react to the audience’s feedback. One effective tool to do so is by using screen sharing. Then, you can be flexible to open up a different document, open your notepad to write or sketch and answer the question which has been posed.
4. Receiving inputs — The true power of collaboration comes from a two-way interaction, not limited to only feedback. For example, if you are a financial adviser, you need some inputs from the customer to suggest the right plan and products to them. Similarly, if you are a product manager, you need some data points from the subject matter expert to list the potential set of features for your next sprint. So, we need interaction features. One option is to use messaging /chat service. Another is to use a shared notebook, such as Zoho Notebook or Evernote.
5. Managing group participation — A design sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with customers. It involves a cross-functional team of 7 or 8 people working together in the same space for 5 days. They need to whiteboard processes, capture ideas on sticky notes, paste them on flip charts and vote on ideas using dot stickers or markers. You can read more on the design sprint at https://www.gv.com/sprint/. The question is how do you effectively do this or a similar group collaboration remotely and effectively. Based on the experience of running such group sessions remotely, we need to first divide the work and the team. One useful tool is breakout rooms in a web conference. The other is to use team collaboration tools such as MS Teams or Slack. The tools can also help in bringing together the ideas to integrate them through note taking and whiteboard tools to them. After integrating the ideas, they can also be voted upon in the same tool through shared digital notebooks.

I and my team had one more important learning in doing these remote collaboration sessions. That is, while touchscreen devices with styluses can enable you to sketch, nothing beats pen and paper in fostering creativity through a free flow of ideas. There is no reason to stop using them while using the digital tools mentioned in this article. Go ahead and sketch your ideas using pen and paper. You need to only take a picture using your phone camera and upload to one of the note-taking or team collaboration apps.

Let me use the beginning quote in a different context to end this article. Life has obliged us over and over again to give birth to ourselves. We can surely learn again to collaborate effectively in a remote, virtual environment.