A shared space ?

[Via design_at_the_edge]

Michael Schrage sums it up when he said “I wrote a book on collaboration about a decade ago. I thought that I was going to discover issues regarding the collaborative temperament and find personality traits that make collaborators effective. But my key finding was that the real necessity for effective collaboration is the existence of a shared space.
Shared space is the dominant medium for collaboration; it takes shared space to create shared understandings. Indeed, the properties of the shared space shape the quality of that understanding. And models, prototypes, and simulations are shared spaces.”
So the drawing board is a effective shared space but a screen is not much use for more than a couple or three people.

I encountered this lots of times in team-efficiency seminars. The wildest memory I have was a group whose members had to draw common proposals for improvement; & they ended up showing -each in turn- a .ppt slide on the screen…so I turned off the videoprojector, & asked them to get all around a flipchart with markers… & all of a sudden, cooperation/collaboration was there!

:-))