Teams – Nurture your Inner Geek!

Good article this month in Wired about schools needing to protect their geeky kids. Having one, I know what that means. I also know that many of the teams and facilitators I get to work with could sure use a geek or two. To be honest, most still collaborate, if that’s what you want to call it, by using Outlook, email and a shared drive.

Electronic brainstorming, pre-loading meetings, Acrobat 9, interactive websites, blogs, net based project management are not part of their world yet. And yet, collaboration is really coming of age. We can work with each other apart (time and distance) so much more easily that we could even two years ago. And it’s even getting cheaper. Netbooks are starting to proliferate, tablets are getting smaller, and even Apple may join the fray with an extra large tablet / pod?

From my point of view, cloud teaming is great teaming. Nothing to remember, store all the work, access it from anywhere and have the ability to see my progress, your progress and the team’s progress instantly. It’s a recipe for incredible performance gains.

My thought would be to use a kaizen approach, start small, get comfortable, but go at it relentlessly. Team geeks are fun folk. We need them, and we probably need to become one!