This is a special #OEB19 post (cross-posted here) sharing our conference session: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice. In the session the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.
As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led innovation, develop an open approach to leadership and to lead our virtual team, both digitally and geographically distributed.
In our session we discussed why this kind of practice should happen in the open and why it is important; why and how you, as a learning professional/educator, can try to adopt this approach; and what the barriers you may encounter are.
Do you have your own approaches to open leadership or working in or leading virtual teams you would like to share? If so we’d love to hear from you. Comments on Martin’s blog are open or you can reach us on Twitter @mhawksey and @marendeepwell.
Creating strategies is a big part of my work. Some are small and fit a particular purpose, others span an entire organisation and many years. It’s the second kind that I am currently working on as ALT is half way through setting out a new strategy for 2020-2025.
Our process involves many people, with their own views, ideas and voices and it’s all the richer for it. ALT’s Chair, Sheila, and I, blog about our progress regularly and if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to engage and make your voice heard.
For me, this new strategy will be a living, breathing, practical framework for pretty much everything I work on for the next five years, just as the last one has been. So every ounce of effort, every speck of gold dust that I can help channel into it now, is going to make a big difference further down the line.
A lot of my thinking as ALT’s chief executive develops alongside and through the wider consultation process with our Board of Trustees, staff, Members and the wider network. But there are some things I think through on an individual basis.
For example, when I applied for my job in 2012, part of the interview process involved giving a presentation about my vision for ALT. I still have that slide deck…
Since then, ever few years when we start to write a new strategy, I sit down, and I prepare another presentation pretending to be applying for my job all over again. It’s a useful tool I find. It helps me to step outside of what I think I already know about the organisation and try to see it with fresh eyes. It prompts me to ignore all practicalities and focus on vision instead. As a new ceo you never quite know what you are going to inherit. How many skeletons in the closet.. how much willingness to change.. what kind of internal agendas that dictate what can and cannot happen. You have an excuse to clean house, to start from a blank slate. A new strategy has a similar power… it can help reset the board. It gives you the freedom to start afresh. It’s an exciting moment.
As we began working on the strategy, one of my colleagues asked me whether a strategy is all about the future. That’s a very useful question. I suppose, in a practical sense, much of the strategy itself will focus on what’s ahead. But in many ways I don’t think creating a strategy is all about the future because you also want to understand, learn from and build on where you have already been. Making meaningful progress and change depends on not ignoring what you already know, problems you have already identified. In many ways it’s the opposite of what Sir Humphries does in Yes, Minister in order to manage his Ministers. Dusting off the same old idea and repackaging it in brand new marketing is a successful way of avoiding change whilst always hailing the next big thing. It doesn’t challenge the status quo.
Change is good to think about in the context of strategies. The more radical your vision, the more work it takes to bring everyone with you. The more things change, the more effort it takes to communicate that change and make everyone notice. Here’s where working closely with the tech sector is not always an easy thing because the narratives of change in technology tend to be about shininess, all about seamless transitions and problem solving. Often I come across sexy must have solutions to problems I didn’t know existed. That’s the kind of change that’s easy to buy in to, literally. Change that takes years to plan and longer to bed in and real effort to implement for years and at scale is far less sexy and so much more meaningful for an organisation like mine. That’s why looking at the landscape, listening to what’s at the heart of the community, taking time to step back and really look at where we’ve come from is so valuable.
I like to dabble in doing some development work. I can’t do the really tech heavy bits, but I like doing design, documentation and bug testing. Sometimes I get too ambitious about how many things can be improved or changed in one iteration, and getting others to test the workflow is a good way of identifying those things and improving the design in response. Strategies are quite similar for me. I start from a point of where I can see we will be in 5 years time and then work backwards until my ideas converge with everyone else’s. Sticking with my tech metaphor, the strategy becomes like a user interface for where we are headed.
The last time we created a strategy the process taught me much about the value of listening and collaborating, of what can be achieved when you work together, share power and responsibility. It was an rewarding experience for me on a personal basis as well as greatly beneficial for the organisation. It also taught me the value of setting aside time to dream about the future.
Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.
How is the way we work and communicate changing as we work in ever-more-distributed ways? In this special #OEB19 post we give you a preview of the work we will share at the conference and the conversation we hope our session will prompt.
As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led innovation, develop an open approach to leadership and to lead our virtual team, both digitally and geographically distributed.
In our session, we’ll be discussing why this kind of practice should happen in the open and why it is important; why and how you, as a learning professional/educator, can try to adopt this approach; and what the barriers you may encounter are.
Maren Deepwell: Let’s start at the beginning: For nearly two years now we have led an open online conversation of blog posts and podcasts, talking about our organisation’s transition from an office based model to a virtual team. It was your idea initially to write about our organisation changing, and we both imagined that the lessons we’d share would be more practical, wouldn’t you agree? However, over the two years we have been writing these posts, our topics have focused much more on strategy and leadership than practicalities. Taking time to step back and reflect together has become an important element of the way we work and lead our team. One of the questions we get asked is how the conversation itself is created and that is something our #OEB19 session will explore. In summary, we use a shared Google doc to have a written conversation, usually over the space of a few days or a week. I often start to write the first paragraph (as I have done here) and the dialogue starts from there. Martin, thinking about how we write, how would you explain our “rules of engagement”? One characteristic that’s important to me is that there is no judgement, i.e. we can share what has worked well or what went badly wrong without prejudice.
Martin Hawksey: When we started I did indeed think we’d focus on the nuts and bolts of managing virtual teams, which still does feature to a degree, our conversations have however often focused on some of the bigger questions, and at times very personal challenges of working remotely. In terms of rules of engagement our main one is to protect the privacy of our team and ALT Trustees. As part of our conversations we’ve been happy to write and talk about some of the personal challenges we have encountered, such as health and wellbeing in a remote context. Over the last 2 years it’s not just the both of us who have had to deal with the practicalities of being a distributed organisation, it’s also something all our whole team has had to adjust to as well. While we have respected the privacy of those around us our monthly posts are however an important opportunity to discuss all aspects of the organisation. In practical terms how this often works out is one of us will write something in the Google Doc and then this is picked up for further discussion either in one of our regular online catch-ups or in the video call we always have before the post is published. Personally I find this semi-structured approach incredibly powerful as it encourages both personal reflection and dialogue. The fact this is also multi-modal and combines synchronous and asynchronous communication means there is a constant exchange between us even during busy times. Are there any rules of engagement I’ve forgotten? Are there other benefits you find with our approach?
Maren: How you describe our approach really resonates with me and I look forward to discussing the ground rules we set for our conversation more fully in our session at the conference. I also agree with you that this conversational approach has many benefits, including prompting the personal reflection and dialogue you mention, improving our way of working through communication.
Leading a team through open practice however also puts us in a vulnerable position: one example of this is giving our audience a glimpse behind the scenes. Traditional approaches to leadership and authority are often grounded in a sense of infallibility, creating a perception in others that those in the lead have all the answers. When we started this project we were in the midst of a transformational change programme which affected all parts of our organisation and our job was to lead by example, to build confidence in all the new ways of doing things and to project faith that everything would work out. Doing that through being open is quite a departure from more traditional models and can take adjusting to, not just for those in our shoes, but our colleagues and everyone in the organisation. This is where things like seeking consent for example became so important. It’s interesting to consider how our own perception of this has changed. Sharing practice as a senior staff team can bring shared recognition but potentially also shared criticism. Another risk to what we do is that we blog about our work as it happens, rather than from the relative safety of hindsight. We often write about work in progress or recent events and things don’t always work out the way we anticipate. In fact I would go as far as saying that most of the time things take surprising turns and whilst operations may seem seamless on the surface, obviously that is not always the case. Sharing openly how things don’t work out, how situations have changed or what we would do differently next time takes a lot of confidence and discipline. I find it valuable to share what didn’t work, but at the same time not everyone is comfortable with that approach – some people read it as weakness, as too informal or as lack of leadership. You have talked before about how your attitude towards open practice has changed over the years. What are your thoughts on the risks and barriers?
Martin: I would say my approach to open practice has matured and my view has changed from everything should be open to a more nuanced view of what is and isn’t shared openly. This change stems from a recognition in areas like open education the process of learning can be very exposing and the feelings of vulnerability can negatively impact the learner experience. Within our posts we have the safety net that everything we write or discuss isn’t published so our conversations can remain frank and honest. In terms of what is published, I feel I have a personal advantage of not being the CEO which means if I do say anything inappropriate you can flag in the edit. Whilst I feel like I have more freedom in our conversations one of the challenges is still how will what we say be perceived. Having blogged about my work for a number of years it’s interesting that I’m still surprised when someone else references them or mentions something I’ve written in conversation. This particular self edit is rarely at the forefront of my mind when we publish posts but I think it’s still sits there and perhaps over time it has slowly moved forward. Where it became particularly apparent that there was a wider audience to our conversation was our last recruitment round and it was clear that a number of our candidates had done some background reading. On the plus side our posts hopefully convey some of the culture and values of ALT, also giving a sense of what working within our particular virtual team is like, but as an interviewer slightly unnerving to have what we have said referenced. One question I often ask myself is if the model we’ve adopted would work in other scenarios or contexts? Do you think our organisational structure or sizes helps this conversational model work? Do you think that because we work in the education sector where there is a long history of contributing to the commons that we are more comfortable sharing our thoughts and experiences in this way?
Maren: I suppose we borrow elements from both open education and open source ways of working (although most of what we do is leadership) and in previous posts we’ve talked about other blogs and podcasts that inspire us. Our approach could definitely be translated into different contexts and I’m excited that we’ll be sharing some examples and exercises for participants who want to have a go at the conference. For now though, I’ll try to articulate my answers to your questions: as I said, in my view conversational digital practice could work in any context and I don’t see why the organisation’s size or structure would make a difference – indeed whilst it does shape our conversation I don’t think what we do is limited to individuals in senior roles or even managerial roles. Regardless of role or context, much of the power of the approach lies in making regular time to reflect and engage in a critical dialogue. It could be harder or at least different to start this conversation with someone new. Like you mentioned above, we act as each other’s sense checkers and editors and we are comfortable with making or suggesting changes to what the other has written, without fear of implying criticism or causing concern. It takes time to establish that kind of collaboration. What is unusual (and indeed a result of the structure and size of our organisation) is that our roles make up the entire senior staff team and thus our open practice provides a particular kind of perspective, one which mirrors our responsibilities and strategic roles. We have the privilege to blog from a position that enables us to contribute ‘thought leadership’ (I dislike that term, but it best describes what I want to convey). One last thought I have is why it is important for our conversation to be in the open. There’s a lot to unpack here, and in some ways you could take this approach and adapt it as a closed project or an internal company blog or even publish it anonymously and much of it would work just as well. And yet, one reason why it’s important to me to be visible, for our voices to be identified, is that when I started this job I was desperately looking for examples I could relate to – and I didn’t find any. I hope that our posts might end up on the screen of other reluctant leaders, who may find that their desire to make a difference and do interesting things wins over their reluctance to have a ‘senior’ role and all that entails. To me, this conversation is about forging our own path leading a virtual team and leaving sign posts for others who are headed in a similar direction.
Martin: This seems a good point to end this particular conversations but I wonder if in preparation for our OEB session that we extend the conversation to our readers. So dear reader are there any aspects of the model we use for open conversational practice you would like to learn more about? Do you have your own approaches to open leadership or working in or leading virtual teams you would like to share? If so we’d love to hear from you. Comments on my blog are open or you can reach us on Twitter @mhawksey and @marendeepwell or via LinkedIn.
Curious to read more? We’ll be publishing the slides from our #OEB19 session and you can also catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for.
I have been watching a documentary series recently on the art of design, and one episode about Jonathan Hoefler: Typeface Design in particular captured my imagination. It’s an amazing glimpse into a professional and creative practice that combines material and digital elements effortlessly. Anything from maps in museum collections to books and wooden blocks to visualisation tools and digital pens is part of the process of creating a new typeface, which then is used both in the virtual and physical world. I love watching the series partly because I get to see some of the most beautiful work spaces, kitted out with everything you can possibly imagine and also because the production values of the series are high. It’s a glossy glimpse into the cult of contemporary design. It’s also a refreshing change of perspective coming from a context in which we revisit the tension between digital and more traditional ways of working all the time.
From the book “Envelopes” by Harriett Russel
Learning more about typeface design fits in well with two discoveries I recently made: first, a charity shop book find, a volume called Envelopes. This book documents a project, a postal art project, of letters sent via the Royal Mail with extraordinary envelopes. Some of the envelopes are more cryptic than others, and all of them were delivered by the postal service.
Another recent discovery, and an absolute joy, has been a blog of weekly letters written between two women called ROG & SHINCH A CREATIVE SPACE FOR TWO. I really love the project, which is described as “an exploration of writing, conversation, collaboration and curation” and I have enjoyed exploring the archive of now over a year’s worth of weekly letters.
The letters share glimpses of daily life, work, seasons and events, thoughts and ideas explored, shared and reflected on. It makes for amazing reading and it also speaks eloquently of the value of conversation and reflection – of making a connection across geographical distance, of setting aside time and space for writing and sharing.
I’ve written before about my love of letters, postcards and stationary, and setting aside time for writing… and this project has been a wonderful discovery that has inspired me anew to think more about the role writing, conversations and blogging have for me. Significance that is both personal and professional and a reflection of how distributed many of the people who are important to me have been since childhood, from school-sponsored pen pals that grew into long term friendships, to family relationships maintained over great distances to working in a distributed team resulting in a huge volume of letters, voicemails, video calls, emails, blog posts, postcards, parcels… that has steadily grown over the decades.
The complete mix of different media of communication practice is one of the things I relate to from the documentary series. When I first started writing letters as a child some of the options I have now, such as recording voice messages or sending a DM were not available to me. But even though there is more choice now, what is of primary importance is not the way I write, communicate or reflect but when, how and with whom.
I am inspired by the work of the creative people who have designed the typeface which renders these words. I am inspired by artists who create envelopes as an art form celebrating the journeys words go on between people. I am inspired by the sharing of conversations such as these two women who write letters to each other. These sources of inspiration form part of the space that my words are part of, where my voice finds room to sound. They remind me that it is important to practice communicating, reflecting, articulating my experience of the world. To keep making letters and to share, contribute, value my thoughts, my voice.
This post, which is an ‘outtake’ from my regular series of Virtual Teams posts with Martin Hawksey, is me thinking out loud about how working from home can lead to doing a lot of housework. I reflect on how to avoid being landed with all the chores because you are based at home and how maybe you can make housework work for you for reclaiming some balance.
Working from home = doing the work of the home When I started working from home full-time, I suddenly started doing lots more chores. I didn’t mean to or plan to and it look a couple of weeks before I even noticed. I was fast turning from a home-worker to a house-worker….! Although I have a dedicated work space, it is also where we dry laundry. So part of my day to day routine from day 1 involved sorting out the laundry in order to clear my work space. Then, when I go to make tea in the kitchen, I see mess. Last night’s dishes. Bins that need emptying. The coffee maker that needs to be descaled. Every time I went anywhere in the house, I saw chores that needed doing. I seriously envy people who don’t see those things. Maybe it is a gendered perspective, too. In any case, being at home also meant I was able to accept deliveries, sort out meter reading visits, engineers, plumbers etc. It became quickly normal for me to do things at home because I was at home. And it sucked up time and energy that I wouldn’t have spent on chores and housework before I was working from home… . It made me realise that in order to find a better way to work from home for myself, I needed to adjust my idea of what my own professionalism means to me.
Avoiding the trap… Now, other home workers may not have encountered this issue or indeed welcomed the opportunity to sort things out around their homes. I did not. So as well as building new habits myself (setting aside time to do chores rather than doing them as I saw them, learning to ignore things that weren’t urgent, reminding myself of sticking to my working hours…) I also had to communicate that to everyone around me (no, mum, you can’t come over this morning, I am at work… or no, I can’t do this on Wednesday afternoon, I am working…). It took a while, but eventually I developed the awareness to build new habits and norms of behaviour that supported my professional work, stopped me from doing more chores than I need to and helped my family to acclimatise to me being home-based on a full-time basis.
Upsides 🙂 That said, there are many upsides I discovered once I felt I had achieved a better sense of balance. For example, going to the post office or popping to the shop to buy milk is a welcome bit of exercise that fits well into my working days. I like getting outside, getting some fresh air and seeing something other than the fours walls inside my office. Also, doing laundry and drying laundry gets me up and down the stairs every few hours, and also prompts me to take breaks from staring at my screen – so that’s a win. My cat, who doesn’t usually fall into the “chores” category, but who still needs caring, is always good for an unpredictable break and we often end up sitting outside the back door for 5 min and watch the world go by (me) or the birds in the garden (him). The fact that food and water bowls get replenished on the way is a nice side effect of a short break away from my desk. What’s also helped over the last two years is learning from colleagues, who have built similar routines and found their own rhythms to their days… so some days there is a flurry of “going to go walk the dog…”, “going to lunchtime gym class…”, “popping to the shops…”, “going for a walk” messages in the middle of the day, when each of us departs for lunch. Walking through the kitchen, I am now perfectly happy to ignore any chores that may need doing. They can wait.
Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.
This time we talk about how much strategic progress we have made in the last few years and how being a virtual team has contributed to that. We also discuss our values as an organisation, how we have tried to reduce our impact on the environment and the upsides of being geographically distributed.
New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT.
September
Maren: in our last podcast we talked about approaching our second anniversary of becoming a distributed team. Given that it took a year to execute the transition it was about this time three years ago that the strategy for this organisational change was set out. We are currently in the process of reviewing our strategy so this seems like a good time to take stock: let’s start with money. Financial efficiency was not a key driver for becoming a digitally and geographically distributed organisation but it was part of our strategy to spend less of our resources on renting under-utilised office space and all the costs associated with it, and instead increase resources for the services we provide to our members. Even taking into account one off transition costs, we have been able to redistribute between 5-10% of our annual turnover and that has begun to make a real positive difference to our budget each year. In this series we often focus on our experience of leading a distributed team day to day and in our last podcast we discussed how the distributed nature of our work has become a benefit to how we deliver events. It’s interesting for me to take a step back and see what other benefits it has delivered. Another example is our aim to recruit staff located in many different parts of the UK in order to better collaborate with our national community. We have previously talked about the positive experience of recruiting for our virtual team and how being independent of location has enabled us to attract a much wider pool of high calibre applicants.
Image credit: Voronoi by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Whilst a charity with a staff team of six can’t cover all parts of the country, we are now far more geographically distributed and able to travel to local events and meetings than before. In contrast to only two years ago when nearly the whole team was Oxford based and our ability to support remote working was limited, our reach has significantly increased! That’s two big wins: more financial resources for what matters most and more people power where it makes a difference.
Martin: It’s interesting to reflect on the bigger picture and the differences from 2-3 years ago. Something I’ve not analysed but is at the back of my mind is differences in travel and in particular air travel. With a team located across the country more travel is required for us all to come together. We try to be efficient in terms using other commitments like the face-to-face events we run our our Board meetings to minimise additional travel. In terms of whether we are generating more carbon emissions the calculation is complicated because when our office was located in Oxford I would fly down approximately once a month. In a distributed team my need to meet face-to-face is less frequent, but there are more of us to move around the country. In terms of carbon cost none of us need to commute to work. As a distributed team we’ve also greatly reduced our print requirements moving to a virtual filing system. Even our expenses are entirely electronic and we’ve no need to print or post receipts. Some of our changes are by design, others are born from practicalities. For example, I know that you will often take the train for events in Scotland because it is impractical for you to get to an airport. For this year’s Annual Conference it was fortunately on my doorstep making it easier to transport the equipment we require. How much equipment we need varies from event to event, but with the environmental impact or air travel I’m rethinking how our get to our events and meetups.
Maren: I suppose it’s all relative.. and there is always more we can do – but having reviewed our operations over the past 3 years, we can see that we have definitely reduced our impact on the environment overall. A different kind of strategic change I’ve been thinking about and which relates directly to our organisational values is creating and using openly licenced content, anything from our strategy documents, call for proposals, photos from events, artworks, member badges and more. The call for proposals and guidance for reviewers have been adopted by other conferences and remixed to fit their purpose, whilst some of our policies, such as our privacy policy, and governance documents have likewise been used by other organisations and referenced back to us. We have also been working with Visual Thinkery to create a number of remixes and those often take on a life of their own in the wider community. For me, these are examples of how our values shape our operations and a contrast to how ALT operated when I first joined. In a recent blog post Frances Bell wrote about her sense of the Association being a generous organisation and that made me reflect on how generosity is a big part of our approach to leadership and one of the motivations behind our open practice.
Martin: I’d also read Frances’ post and it was interesting to reflect on whether having a virtual team with an inclination towards “generalised reciprocity” makes things easier. In terms of qualities I think it does make a difference to have people willing to support others particularly when contact time in a distributed team can reduce those serendipitous ‘watercooler’ moments – this is not so say those opportunities don’t happen instead they take place in other spaces, there however has to be a willingness and culture that values sharing and values supporting others.
Just coming back to the environmental factors for homeworkers. We’ve previously talked about the advantages of working from and having more control on your working environment. At the recent Labour Conference shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler announced a proposed policy which is designed to consider the specific needs of menopausal women in the workplace. As part of this “adjustments that employers could be required to make could include the provision of ventilation facilities”. There are a number of factors that can affect your personal thermal comfort level and research has shown there can be biological gender differences. As the colder weather arrives, so does the annual team chat about our individual workplace temperatures, which can bring its own challenges. These are not just limited to personal comfort levels. From the Wikipedia page on thermal comfort:
Residential buildings in particular can vary much more in thermal comfort than public and commercial buildings. This is due to their smaller size, the variations in clothing worn, and different uses of each room.
So as our team starts the ‘discussions’ with partners over the thermostat there are plenty of opportunities for us to show some generosity towards each other … and pictures of snuggly pets.
Maren: I have lots of thoughts about how the seasons impact on homeworkers and on balance I much prefer a working environment in which you can feel the changes in the weather and adjust accordingly instead of being at the mercy of a centrally controlled heating system or indeed working in a building where you can’t open the windows.
What really struck me however is you talking about an organisational culture that values sharing and values supporting others. I recently had a conversation with the Chair of our Board of Trustees, Sheila MacNeill, where this came up strongly and it resonates, too, with what Martin Weller wrote recently in a post on ‘meticulous informality’. The point I am getting at is that our values, as an organisation, are very practical, day to day elements of how we lead our team and how we operate and leverage them to achieve our strategic aims. And more than that, our values as an organisation and the core principle of our professional accreditation scheme are closely aligned:
When we set out to define our shared values in 2016 I didn’t fully consider how these elements connect with each other. Now I think that this is one of the most interesting areas to think about and there’s a lot we could unpack here, for example how openness enables us to critically examine the interplay between technology & learning or how ALT being independent of government and industry supports effective (and less biased) sharing of practice. You recently achieved your accreditation (and blogged about it) and I wonder whether you have any thoughts on this, as you work as a Learning Technologist in a senior role?
Martin: It’s really interesting to consider how our values and core principles interact with each other and influence what we do, including as a virtual team. In terms of openness for me I can’t see a direct link to critically examining the interplay of learning and technology … just because you value openness doesn’t mean you have a more critical eye. Generally I do however believe those who value openness are more considered in what they do. As someone who has been blogging for over a decade I developed a level of comfort in publishing things in the open. I’ve published a variety of content from thought pieces to practical tutorials and there is still always an aspect of how it will be judged by my peers but at the same time the consequences of publishing something that is wrong are fairly low. In the case of my peer reviewed portfolio for CMALT the stakes are higher, you are seeking accreditation of your knowledge and skills. In my case I deliberately chose to do my portfolio privately, only publishing it once I knew I had passed. I know others who have very successfully developed their portfolios in the open getting feedback, encouragement and contributions as they produce it. For a number of years my philosophy was that everything should be done in the open, but more recently this has become more nuanced and I now recognise that learning can be a very vulnerable process often referring to Alec Couros’ ‘thinning of the walls’ in my presentations on this topic. In the context of virtual teams it is perhaps useful to think in a similar way. Aspects of virtual teams can for some expose vulnerabilities and discomfort, for example, most video conferencing applications include a preview of your webcam which some people might find discomforting – when you meet face-to-face it is very unlikely that the person you are speaking to will hold up a mirror so you see yourself.
