What happens in a Technographed meeting (see "Technography Defined") is as different from a conventional meeting as writing on a computer is as different from a typewriter.
On a typewriter, you have to get everything more or less organized before you type the first letter. And from then on it's pretty much no-take-backs. You have to start with the whole picture and then fit the pieces in, one-at-a-time, in order, from first to last. This is how most meetings are run, except usually no one has the whole picture from the start.
When you're writing on a computer, you can record whatever comes to mind - facts, notes, observations - in whatever order they happen. Then you can simply cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop until everything falls into a cohesive, logical, grammatical, spell-checked and formatted whole.
Writing on the computer is like doing a jigsaw puzzle - first you get all the pieces in one place, then you look for the fit, until cluster by cluster you create the whole picture.
A Technographed meeting is like doing jigsaw puzzle with others. Use a computer to offer a space where group thoughts come together, and use a Technographer to help weave them into a shared vision.
The technologies that enable groups to piece together a shared vision are technologies that enable people to see the same thing. A movie screen, TV screen, computer screen, data projectors and large monitors all create a shared space, a place that all participants can share thoughts and ideas.
A Technographer helps the team by guiding them through the "C-Cycle":
Collect the pieces
Connect the edges
Correct, fill-in, and finalize the picture, piece by piece, cluster by cluster.
WEB CONFERENCING SERVICES
For the people who can't attend the meeting in-person, remote screen sharing is an option.
Internet-based web conferencing services like PlaceWare and WebEx, and Astound each has a little known and profoundly underused tool called "live demo" or "application-showing" or "document conferencing." It broadcasts whatever is on one person's computer to everyone connected to the same URL. Real time.
If some participants are in the same room together while others are distributed, then a PC and a data projector will project the same shared space that the others see online.
If all the participants are in one room together, and you're in your office (the one next to your bedroom) you can still play Technographer. Using your people and computer skills, document conferencing and teleconferencing to help your team get it together.
SOFTWARE
If you're playing Technographer, the software that's best for supporting the team throughout the "C-Cycle" is whichever you most often use when you compose a note, create a plan or develop a presentation.
Any application that can drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste can be used to support a group process. Software that features an "outline view" (such as most Microsoft Office applications) let's you see more, and do more. By "collapsing" the outline you can view the highest level items and hide the subordinates. This feature allows you to reveal, review and reassign priorities whenever needed, at the click of a virtual button. You can expand any agenda item to add discussion items, hyperlinks and related documents -- add level after level, get deeper and deeper until the group agrees it is time to collapse the outline and see what agenda items remain.
One of my favorite Technography tool is a knowledge management utility from Correlate that combines outlining with whiteboarding to give a full range of information design and display options.
But Technography can also be done with Word, PowerPoint, and even Excel - all provide an outline view. Even software that doesn't have an outliner can become a tool you can use to help your team get it together, together. As long as your software has drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, you can use it to help your team collect ideas, organize them, and build them together into a finished "deliverable" - all in one meeting, regardless of where, or how, you meet.
With a data projector and / or document conferencing technologies, in the same room or around the world, your desktop becomes a collaborative environment, your personal productivity software becomes groupware, and your personal proficiencies become the group's proficiencies.
Article copyright 2001 Bernard DeKoven.
About the Author Bernard DeKoven has spent more than thirty
years as a leader in the development of methods for teaching collaborative
skills. He is the author of Connected Executives, a book that has been received
with praise from noted industry experts. He also developed and produced the
Meeting Meter(tm), a software "taxi meter for meetings" that was written up in
Business Week, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Working Woman,
US News and World Reports, NPR's Marketplace, the Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times and the San Francisco Examiner.
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