ICT Challenges for 2010 and beyond, challenge 1: coping with context

For the coming years, I forsee some challenges in ICT. In my blog I will share some thoughts on these with you.

Challenge 1) The context in which people work, communicate and collaborate will continue to grow more rich and flexible.

You can see the context of people communicating and collaborating with eachother as the circumstances in which the try to reach goals, personal goals but also shared goals. Examples of elements that make a context are roles, available tools, timezone, connectivity (online/offline scenario), et cetera.

Decades ago, context was simple; at the office, you generally worked with the same collegues, in the same officebuilding, and perhaps even within the same room. Furthermore, people did not change job that often as nowadays and reorganization, mergers et cetera did not take place that often. Apart from having less elements, the context in which people have to perform their tasks is also less dynamic than nowadays. The concept of "the new way of working" (working any time, any place, smarter etc.) increases the richness and dynamics of the working context even more.

A rich and dynamic context may be inspiring and even be less boring than a simple and static one, it also poses challenges when trying to achieve personal and common goals.

A simple case of collaboration as an example
To illustrate what's needed for collaboration, let's consider a simple collaboration case and see what is needed for success.

Collaboration is all about trying to understand eachother and achieving the same goal. Let's consider a simple scenario of two hungry people in the same room, and a banana, hanging from the ceiling. Eating the banana is the personal goal for both, but they need to communicate and collaborate effectively to reach this. They first need to establish a common goal, then determine an approach, coordinate the steps they take, and after grabbing the banana, sharing it equally. And during the whole process, they need to trust each other enough to keep on going.

In the case above, the goal is simple, the context is simple and static.

It is easy to understand that enriching the context, the challenge becomes greater. Consider a complex goal, an multi level organisation with more personal and opposite goals, teammembers in different locations, perhaps even different timezones (which forces communication to be asynchronous), regularily chaning team arrangements and you're getting the picture.

And that is not the only challenge, the demands to organisations and individuals changed as well in the past decades...
I'll elaborate on that challenge in my next post.