Telling but not listening

We're seeing that smaller organisations are much further forward in truly adopting collaboration technologies and approaches for delivering business projects than the larger organisations – why? Because they appear to be worth it. Particularly if you are also adopting more flexible working patterns which seem to come with the smaller company ethos and you are working sometimes synchronously and sometimes asynchronously. But beware - this doesn’t always align with the big company culture. I’m running two cross-geography multi-enterprise business change projects at the moment and I’m finding that the breadth and variety of additional tools to support the distributed communication process is being whittled down to some core basics (ordered by traffic volume): - email through multiple access methods - mobile telephony - SMS (still a high traffic channel) - Cheap / free telephony - Instant Messaging (within sub-groups in the project) - an easily accessible form of collaboration tool for developing and storing digital content - conference calling However – the key message that seems to arrive each time is that in larger organisations there is more telling than listening. Don’t make the assumption that your target in the big enterprise has read / understood / internalized. Understanding seems only to genuinely be achieved in synchronous communication. Meetings and conference calls and good old fashioned talking to people is where you will make the difference.