Lesson 2 | Changes in Collaboration (3:56 minutes)

Changes in Collaboration

Let's talk about collaboration in its kind of traditional sense and how it was thought of, about how collaboration needs to come about, how it needs to take place and occur, because the reality is today technology advancements and how people think about collaboration has actually evolved quite a bit.

Back, going back 20, 30 years ago, maybe even before that period of time when we were thinking about collaboration, collaboration was always thought of as this thing where we actually have to be together, we have to be in one space, one location, face-to-face sitting around a table. The thing that we've come to realize over time is that, as I said, technology advancements have made it possible for people to be wherever they need to be that's convenient for them, but to still be able to engage and be a part of this conversation. Virtually almost everybody has a means of creating a conference call where people can dial into at this point in time, which creates an opportunity for you to be in conversation with a group of people while you might be driving from one location to another.

Today, people are working with people in the same communities and things a lot of the time but sometimes we're dealing with people that are out of state. Communication through conference calling centers can be amazing to be able to bring people together to have these important discussions.

One of the other things that I will really urge you to consider and think about is getting comfortable is being in virtual conversations. There's a number of amazing technologies out there, whether it's WebEx or GoToMeeting, or we use a technology called Zoom in our business that allows us to do video conferencing from our own computers, from wherever we might be, whether it's a hotel room, from our home office, from our place of work. You can really dial in and do these things anywhere. You can do them on phones, you can do it on computers. It creates a whole other level of opportunity, and the thing I will tell you about virtual conversations is you almost feel like you're in the room with the person.

We do this a lot in my business because I have an office up in Canada and so we live in a virtual world. We have to know how to work this way, and it's amazing when you can see peoples' facial reactions, when you can engage when they're sharing something compelling and important, you can see that. You can feel that. You can see their body language.These technologies have created opportunities for us to collaborate that didn't exist before, and so I want to expand your thinking in the fact that this doesn't require us to all be in the room and taking time to travel to and from meetings. There's ways to do this efficiently and effectively; that doesn't mean we're all sitting around the same table.

One last piece that I want to talk about is the cloud based technologies, whether you're talking about DropBox or Box.com. I'm sure you're all familiar with those applications. There's a number of other applications that allow us to share information, documents, they track latest versions, things of that nature. There's also a whole other level of us being able to collaborate and share documents and information with one another about these important things on behalf of the client that exist today.

So hopefully this helps you expand your thinking about what's possible, how you can collaborate where you don't have to be sitting in the same room, in the same city, in that same location. So think about how you can expand your opportunities to collaborate in a more effective manner for yourselves and for the rest of the team.