Building virtual environments for collaboration

Sometimes when you have a hard problem to solve, what you need is a bit of magic. And magic can come in the form of sticking a bunch of smart, capable people in a room and closing the door until they solve the problem.

That’s the kind of magic NASA has used for the past 25 years to launch rockets into orbit on time and on budget.

Things used to be slower and less magical, but then in 1995, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory began testing the practice of what’s been called “extreme collaboration”. A group of sixteen engineers with all the different areas of expertise needed to design a space mission—propulsion, telecommunications systems, ground command, mission cost, etc.—came together to form Team X. The goal was to design space missions in detail, from launch, to landing, following NASA’s new philosophy: “faster, better, cheaper”.

Designing a mission is no small feat. All the details have to be decided: how mission requirements will be fulfilled, what kind of telecommunication devices will be used and what kind of information will be transmitted back to Earth, how much power and propulsion will be needed. Multimillion-dollar budgets need to be made and need to be accurate.

Before Team X’s extreme collaboration experiment, designing a mission used to take 3-9 months. Which sounds reasonable to a lay person thinking about all the specifics that need to get calculated and decided. You know, the rocket science. But, Team X, sequestered in a special collaborative room they named the Project Design Center for three hours at a time, was able to get the process down to days. And since then, Team X has designed hundreds of space missions in full detail in one to three days, using teams of only around 20 people.

So, what is special about Team X’s project room and work routines that makes it possible for them to move so fast? And how might we apply what they’ve learned to help virtual teams, who can’t gather together to collaborate in real life (i.e., basically all knowledge workers for the moment)?

Team X in their project room in the 1990s or early 2000s. Image source.

Team X in their project room in 2018, still going strong. Most room elements are upgraded but offer the same functionality, except that now everyone also has a laptop. Image source.

Space design

Along with the different domain experts on the team, Team X’s project room acts as a vital team member, supporting the team’s thinking, discussions, and planning. The space has a number of elements that make it ideal for fast-paced, collaborative work.

As you can see in the images above, the project room has large shared displays for visualizations, whiteboards for diagrams and calculations, and workstations for individual work. The tables and chairs are movable and can be gathered around if everyone needs to talk about an idea or if a crisis arises, or spread out, to form small “sidebar” conversations about specific issues.

Everyone has access to specialized spreadsheets that NASA has built to track the calculations and projections of the different team subsystems. For example, if the telecommunications team member selects a different type of hardware for the mission, this would automatically push pricing changes to the budget or place constraints on the features needed on the spacecraft, etc. Everything is updated in real time.

The environment is loud and chaotic. People are constantly in motion, moving from one sidebar conversation to another. Importantly, each subsystem (e.g., telecommunications systems) is assigned a set spot in the room – you can see these marked on the workstations in the image above if you look closely. This means that by looking around the room, each participant gets instant information about the state of the group. For example, if you see that the telecom systems person is at the instruments workstation with the budget person, you instantly get information about what is likely under discussion and what state the project is in.

Discussions can result in drastic, rapid changes to plans, and so individuals are continually hunkering down to quickly recalculate something or update a model. Each calculation could be based on dozens or hundreds of parameters, and thousands of supporting calculations under the hood. Mistakes happen and are visible to everybody. The team points them out and moves on. People talk bluntly and don’t let beliefs go unquestioned. As one engineer put it, “We don’t get any advantage out of one idea over another, personally. So you get a pretty frank discussion here, with people who don’t have a stake in the proposal’s success. They’re going to tell you what’s really going on.”

While withstanding the stress of noise and time pressure, every team member needs to remain vigilant to monitor for visual and auditory information that might be relevant. People jump from one conversation to another, overhearing someone who needs a piece of information and shouting it across the room if they have it. “Hearing someone cite a subsystem by name, like power or propulsion, also gets other members’ attention, suggesting the extreme seriousness and focus with which Team X members approach their roles.” The speed of information exchange is one reason why Team X is able to move so quickly in a shared space. A request for information that might have otherwise taken a few days can be answered in less than a minute. And because all the experts needed to make informed decisions are in the room, the team doesn’t need to seek external feedback or approval.

The team’s leader also plays a vital role in keeping things moving. This person needs to have a great understanding of how different subsystems work together – who is likely to need information from whom and when. As decisions are considered or made, the leader changes what’s on the large visual displays to update the team without needing to make announcements. And if a large enough problem arises, the leader calls the group to gather as a whole and make a decision. It can sometimes take several tries to get the whole team’s attention, since every individual is screening for directly relevant information.

As you can likely imagine from reading this description, this type of work pushes team members to the limits of their abilities and is mentally exhausting. This is an important consideration, since the team limits the length of work sessions to three hours. Trying to stretch this kind of work for any longer would likely cause more harm than good.

For those who can handle it, this kind of intense collaborative work is really satisfying. Team members report high work satisfaction in the project room—9.4/10. One engineer described it as “exhausting but thrilling, like riding a rollercoaster.”

That’s probably as good as work can get.

Like this example from Team X, shared project rooms haven been shown to be supportive of collaborative work for other teams. Of course, these kinds of spaces are not for everybody. They’re best-suited for teams working on shared projects and with interdependent tasks. (We’ve seen that term before – in general, people with high-interdependence jobs are less satisfied with remote work. We’ll get to the connection between interdependence and remote work below.).

How does collaborative space help us think? Some cognitive science.

Since we, humans, generally like to make things easier for ourselves, we use our environment and our actions to lighten our cognitive load. One view from cognitive science is that in these cases, our “mind” extends beyond our body to include our environment.

This view distinguishes two types of actions:

• Pragmatic actions are actions that we take to create a physical change in the world. An example could be mopping your bathroom floor or digging a hole.

• Epistemic actions are actions that we take to help us think. There are endless examples of this. When looking at your bookshelf, you tilt your head to read a book title, rather than mentally rotating the title. When playing scrabble, you rearrange the tile letters on the tray to come up with more words. You draw a diagram to figure out how a process works. You use the internet to look up a piece of information you forgot. You read a book. You write down a grocery list before you leave the house. You use your fingers to multiply by 9. You create a quipu (not to be confused with quibi) to collect tax records. You use a spreadsheet to calculate the likely cost of a space mission. You work out an equation on a whiteboard.

Epistemic actions are part of our thinking process and increase what we would otherwise be able to achieve. For example, the amount of information we can keep in working memory is limited. By offloading information onto something like a whiteboard, we’re able to access and manipulate much larger amounts of information than we would otherwise be able to do and support our deliberate mode of creativity.

In addition to spaces and tools, access to other people can help extend our minds, too. By using language, we can access thoughts in other people’s minds, expanding what each individual knows to what the group as a whole knows.

Applying this idea to NASA’s Team X, all of its parts—people with different types of expertise, computers, spreadsheets, whiteboards, whiteboard pens, visual displays, etc., etc. form a cohesive “mind” that allows the team to achieve bigger cognitive feats, faster. Twenty people designing a detailed space mission within a 5% margin of error in 9 hours (3 days X 3 hours per work session) is astonishing.

But, achieving this result requires a special combination of mind-expanding practices and tools that, I’d argue, are not currently available for virtual teams.

What’s missing for virtual teams?  

Two key problems for collaboration in virtual teams are available technology and geographic dispersion. Imagine taking Team X’s work sessions and making the following changes: instead of communicating by talking, everyone has to type out what they think. You type something, hoping for a quick response. And, sometimes, crickets. Sometimes someone writes something back that you can’t even tell is positive or negative. Or, at best, everyone gathers on a video call, with one person’s voice audible at a time. People’s body language and expressions are hard to see and interpret. Your shared display? Google Slides. Great, more typing and bulleted lists. Your work is in a web browser, full of beckoning distractions. You try to coordinate with what your teammate is working on but have to keep switching tabs back and forth, forgetting what you were looking for between each switch. Your teammates feel far away. Because they are. If they’re in a different time zone, they sometimes can’t communicate when you’re available, and vice versa.

The technology we use to communicate, which provides us less information than is transmitted than real-life interactions (e.g., body posture), makes it difficult to pay attention, to understand each other, and to built trust. Communicating asynchronously (e.g., through Slack messages) can increase uncertainty (e.g., is someone not answering my message because they’re doing something else, because they’re mad, or because they think I don’t know what I’m doing?) and can make it difficult to coordinate actions.

In addition, synchronous and asynchronous communication are better-suited for different things. In general, asynchronous communication is better at transmitting information (e.g., a textbook can communicate how to do something), while synchronous communication is better for arriving at a common understanding (e.g., two people working through options on a whiteboard to come up with a new process of doing something).

A collaborative project like designing a space mission requires quickly pooling knowledge, clearly communicating new information and needs, developing coordinated action, and building trust. If project rooms with an entire team present are ideal for this kind of interdependent work, then you could see how virtual teams who are spread across time zones and who communicate asynchronously might be in trouble.

What might an ideal virtual environment for collaboration look like?  

Based on what we’ve discussed so far, here’s what I would propose if someone were to build a collaboration tool and practices for virtual teams. I’ve looked around at the available options and none seem to have these features, but if you know of something like this, I’d love to know!

• First, VR. Or something similar. I think a virtual collaborative environment needs to be immersive. When something’s displayed on a screen in front of you, it’s too easy to fall into bad habits and zone out, check the news, or whatever your typical distraction activity is. In order to recreate the project room experience, all activities not related to collaboration should be pushed into the background, and a VR experience is one way to do that.

• Work priority. If the collaborative work is important (and it probably is since you wouldn’t devote significant resources to work on a non-essential problem) then all external distractions, like Slack messages, emails, notifications, chats, etc. should be blocked.

• All the needed collaboration tools should be visible and connected to each other. The same way that a project room has shared visual displays, displays around the virtual collaboration environment should show the software screens that the team needs – e.g., a project management scheduling tool, visualization of relevant data, inventory projections, similar past successful projects. This would prevent people from having to “leave” the environment to access needed information and also allow people to offload their thinking onto available tools as they talk to each other. The tools should also be connected. If something is changed in one piece of software but needs to be manually changed in another, then this will slow down the process immensely and introduce sources of mistakes.

• New non-text-based collaborative tools. A digital whiteboard where you can draw diagrams or plans without wasting time drawing boxes with a computer cursor would be ideal.

• Set locations and avatars for different team functions. Bear with me, this could be fun. Maybe in a particular company’s virtual environment the sales work area (with associated software displays) is a mountain and the sales team representative is a bear, while the quality assurance work area is an ocean and the quality assurance representative is a dolphin, and the engineering work area is a meadow and the engineering team representative is a deer. I don’t know, the only limits are our imagination. Anyway, if you’re the bear (a salesperson) and see a deer on a wave meeting with a dolphin and gesturing at a display screen, you will probably have a good idea of what they’re talking about and whether it might be relevant to your role and issues. If a company keeps the same environment and avatars across projects, the mapping would quickly become second nature.

• Visible work. If you’re working on a request from another team member, your computer screen should be visible to others in the environment. Yes, it’s more comfortable to work without having the details of your work seen, but this would keep people on track and let others spot mistakes or start conversations if they see something relevant.

• Everyone should be heard. With current-day video calls, only one participant is unmuted by the system at a time. This makes it easier to hear who is talking, but for the purpose of collaborative work, background noise from all conversations should be audible to let people tune in and out of conversations as needed. Perhaps the loudness of the sound could be scaled with distance in the environment to make it easy to focus on the conversation you’re in while still keeping an ear out for relevant information.

• An omnipresent leader. This would be one hard job! Tuning in and out of conversations, displaying relevant information to the group, noticing when there’s a crisis. Perhaps some automated tools for monitoring people’s tone of voice or for certain phrases (even business-speak: “flag an issue”, “challenge you on that”, etc.) to detect rising conflict that might need to be addressed as a group.

• No redundancy in roles. If NASA can design an entire space mission with one person representing each functional role, then what excuse does anyone else have? Keeping collaborative teams small could minimize social loafing, politicking, and free up people who could be concurrently working on other projects.

• A set, limited time for the work session, and a short workday. This kind of collaborative work would be exhausting! Especially if bringing together team members from different time zones, three hours should be set for this activity and apart from that, people should be given time off to recoup energy for the next session.

• Advance planning. One reason that Team X is able to work so efficiently is because objectives are determined ahead of time and each team member prepares for collaborative sessions with models, calculations, and plans. Preparing ahead of time would allow time in the virtual collaborative environment to be spent actually collaborating.

So that’s my virtual collaboration dream. I hope that the current necessity of working remotely motivates a virtual team out there to bring the kind of mind-expanding physical tools we’ve already created to virtual environments.

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