CASE STUDY
Working in the Virtual Future: An Optimistic View
by
Charles Lamson
As her train picked up speed on its trip from Philadelphia and Boston, Tara Rodgers linked her personal digital assistant to the onboard computer via the connection in the armrest of her seat. Tara was on her way to Boston to facilitate a meeting for a scientific team that Worldwide Consulting Group was organizing for IntuitAid International. IntuitAid International (IAI) was a network organization of social service and health agencies that was being developed to address a health crisis among the Innuit peoples of Northern Canada. For the past three years, starting in 2008, Innuit children and elders had been contracting respiratory infections at three times the rate of 2007. Deaths in both groups had increased sharply, and a number of native American tribes and organizations had urged the governments of Canada and the United States and the United Nations for help with this crisis.
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Tara had a degree in communication, with a specialization in intercultural and group communication and seven years experience working with international scientific teams. She had started with a major accounting firm, but soon left to set up her own private agency with two of her colleagues. They had begun working with medical research teams in Boston and later expanded to include the entire East Coast. They developed expertise in helping teams whose members worked in several locations develop virtual organizations. Tara specialized in teamwork and facilitation, and her partners were experts in contract law and information technology. The partners learned from each other, and each pitched in to help with all sides of the business. However, having these three deep specialties enabled the partners to cover most of the important aspects of scientific collaboration. Tara's firm affiliated with Worldwide's group of consulting agencies three years ago, and had worked on several contracts for Worldwide. Tara and her colleagues liked having their own independent firm because it gave them flexibility to work on projects they believed in, like this one. Being one of Worldwide's affiliated partners had brought their firm a great deal of business.
Tara's immediate job was to facilitate the organizing meetings of the diagnostic group of IAI. She envisioned that the first set of meetings for this group would take about two months. Following this, Tara (and her associates, if they were needed) would continue to work with the IAI to facilitate meetings, assist with problems, and help manage conflicts, and help to keep project teams on schedule for the remainder of the project.
The IAI had been quickly assembled by Posi Sistrunk, the broker from the UN Agency for International Relief. She succeeded in getting commitments from the Centers for Disease Control, the UN Health Service, the Canadian Health System and the Novosibirsk Hospital in Russia. The Center for Disease Control; and the Canadian Health System first docomented the problem that would be in the frontline of care provision. The Novosibirsk Hospital had dealt with a similar incident among native peoples in Siberia four years before. In that case, the cause had been found to be heavy metals from industrial sites in southern Siberia. Two major drug companies had agreed to provide medicines for the network, if any were needed. As with all network organizations it was important that all partners commit themselves fully and develop good working relationships and clear ground rules from the beginning.
Using the onboard computer, which had a larger and brighter display screen than her personal digital assistant, Tara downloaded her e-mail and found that she had received biographies of the seventeen people who would attend the workshop. This was a diverse group, and Tara knew that their different nationalities and scientific backgrounds would make coordinating the group a challenge. From hard-won experience, Tara knew that it was particularly important that everyone agree on definitions of key concepts, such as quality control. Scientists from different disciplines often assume that others assigned the same meanings that they did to terms. As a result, needless disputes could arise; one scientist might disagree with another's quality, for example, because the two had different definitions of the type of data needed to measure quality. Tara knew that it was important to spend several meetings establishing agreement on definitions and standards, even though the scientists might grumble that all they were doing was talking about words.
Tara knew three of the scientists well, and had heard of several others. She patched through a video call to Stanley Marsh, an epidemiologist with another firm in Worldwide's network, who knew most of the scientists. After inquiring about each other's families. Tara and Stanley dismissed the members of the group. Tara realized that Stanley was getting more and more interested in the project, so she asked him if he would like to come on board as a cofacilitator. His scientific expertise and evident trust in Tara would give extra weight to Tara's attempts to guide this group. Tara then put in a video call to Scientific Associates International, a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting scientific cooperation among nations, and downloaded case studies of effective scientific health teams and statistics on how long start-up periods for multidisciplinary scientific groups typically were. These would help her make her case for a slow but thorough start-up period for IAI.
In Boston Tara walked from the train station to Worldwide's telecommunication station. Participants would be linked into a virtual meeting tomorrow and Tara wanted to familiarize herself with the meeting room. On one side of the room was a video screen that could hold pictures of up to eighteen separate meeting sites; the three dimensional holographic technology made them seem as though they were just different parts of the same room. She knew that not all sites had this technology; the Russians in particular had two dimensional video conferencing walls with a capacity for four meeting sites. She knew she would have to make sure to indicate carefully who wanted to be recognized to speak in the meeting so that the Russians could switch to that site if it was not up on their screen already. Tara also spent some time setting up the conferencing software that would link the group's work over the next year. It allowed textual and data transfer, online data analysis, and video links for impromptu meetings of a few of the scientists in the network. This conference environment would be the team's virtual home for the next year. Finally Tara arranged for a direct video interview of several Inuit leaders. She planned to lead off the meeting this way to highlight the plight of the Inuit, thus providing a common ground for fast and cooperative action in IAI.
Tara walked out of Worldwide a happy woman, looking forward to the meeting tomorrow. Sure there would be some problems and unpleasant arguments, but she was eager to tackle them. Making IAI work was a challenge, but it would help so many people.
*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 9TH ED BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE; PGS. 52-55*
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