Recent experiences have fulminated and come to a point where I’ve crystallized some seat-of-the-pants operating rules for group work and projects. It sure would be nice to know the “real” way things should work, but until then. Robert’s Rules don’t count, either. As a result, I volunteered this as the background/subtext for a presentation I, in a moment of desperation, proposed concerning some tools to smooth these processes out – as tools, mind you. They don’t whip you; you use them as the whip 
Anyway. Link’s on the right if you come to the site directly, or the presentation link is here.
Back to my stump: The point of group work is that it is a gestalt both in scope and process – it is assumed that the sum of the project is worth more than the individual tasks within it and that those who work on it are worth more together than individually. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a group project, much less a group? Correspondingly, it’s a lot harder to handle than you’d think if just based the legwork and all on the individual tasks and collaborators. To handle that stuff, I think it’s best to be able to make the group, well, agile – can attack problems from many directions due to past experiences and personal strengths to come up the best solution. In other words, in order to really unleash this group gestalt goodness, it’s like hearding cats. Wet angry ones who somehow have decided it’s your fault they’re wet.
Many projects and groups, I think, fail to deliver their potential due to energy being wasted elsewhere. Most times, it’s because of things like inefficiencies, egos, feet-dragging, or whatever. And I think a lot of this, in turn, is due to the adverse feelings people often have about how to go about working together. I think everyone needs to know where everyone else is coming from. I think people should agree on how to progress structurally – timelines for general parts, deliverables, and what not. And then the sticking point – actually enforcing those rules and that respect. Or agreeing, if you prefer to use the iron hand/velvet glove conceit. Somewhere, the buck has to stop. It would be nice to have it happen by consensus, but sometimes a person emerges from the group as the enforcer of sorts. Ideally, this person would be semi-official, as in, everyone agrees the person will be the manager of the group, so as to minimize resentments and ‘you’re not the boss of me!’-type reactions. Tired now, though, so check out the link for more about this and the tools that, erm, help.
Tags: DIY, praxis
Nice to see everyone’s got a bit of bigot in em…interesting to also see that it isn’t widely broadcast yet – not on yahoo or nytimes yet, but I saw it first on…wikipedia. Weird. 
