What has dispersion off the tee got to do with working remotely?

Hitting a golf ball dead straight off the tee looks easy, right? So why is it so hard to do? And what has it got to do with working remotely?

When your partner is a pro golfer, and you are learning to be a caddy, you find that a lot of your conversations about the things that matter in our world end up in a golfing analogy.

This week our conversation had turned to the challenges of working remotely when part of a team, particularly in terms of keeping everyone on the same page to deliver a coherent outcome in a group task. Since we all started working remotely there seems to have been a great deal of energy spent in realigning individual efforts into coherent group outcomes after months of hard work by individuals, where they have started on the same page but somehow, unintentionally, ended up all over the place. I would argue that going to greater lengths to confirm alignment in the first place, is a much better way to work effectively than remediating at the end of the process. The issue is that we haven't yet really factored in the impact of losing our connection with colleagues by working in our little corner of the world, and the random, helpful conversations we have enjoyed when we are together in the office.

In the last ten years of my career as an education lead in the corporate sector, working remotely with team members across the world has been a given. I know well that the joys of any video conferencing application have their limitations. After the first blush of excitement about seeing everybody at once, watching animals doing cute things in the background, and the fun of wearing your trademark silk shirt with your track pants and ugg boots, it becomes clear that there are many, many advantages to being together in room when you plan, and deliver your work in collegiate teams. These advantages relate to efficiency, accuracy and coherence of given tasks.

One clear advantage is the constant checking in with each other as you rub shoulders with colleagues in your office - up to hundreds of times a day - which you cannot do when you are all online, all the time. This helps a team to stay on the same page, to navigate smaller steps together and ensure that when the product is complete, it is consistent, whole and logical. We try, but I would argue we don't often succeed, in replicating this very human communication process by working via shared documents in the cloud.

The limitations and conventions of attending web conferences include the awkwardness of all trying to talk at once, or even worse, no-one talking so that they don't appear to be trying to dominate the discussion. Ideas requiring "think time" can be lost, which rules out the possibility of building on each others ideas in a constructive way, thus losing the advantage of team brainstorming. I have been in meetings where the chat discussion between participants is where the action is really at, especially when all participants bar the speaker, are muted. On the other hand, I know that many teachers have switched off the chat between students because it is distracting! And at the end of the day, it's just really hard to stay connected for the whole hour or so, when you are watching a small screen.... or perhaps a small person dancing in the background.

Add to that the strain of audio issues, internet outages, and the relentless march of a day of such meetings where you don't have the time to consolidate your understanding before you move on to the next item.... and you see where potential confusion occurs in everyone's individual understanding of the job to be done.

"What on earth does that have to do with golf?" you may ask. Well, in golf, success in your alignment or course navigation starts with how you hit off the tee. The impact of one, two or more degrees of dispersion when you strike the ball can make a world of difference when you are aiming for a single blade of grass a few hundred metres ahead of you. The best shots have little or no dispersion and soar beautifully through the air to stop in the middle of the fairway.

It is depressingly clear on the golf course that some people (especially learners, ask me how I know) can literally hit their balls up trees, into swamps, rivers and lakes (multiple times in a row), into groups of kangaroos lying between adjacent fairways and even just a few feet in front of you on the same tee. Some people have been known to search high in the sky for a ball that has actually not yet made it off the tee.

The golfer who hits the ball straight off the tee generally has zero dispersion. He or she has an easier task of both finding the ball and sending it on its way for the next flight toward the green. But the novice player foraging around in the shrubbery, backside in the air, has a much harder job to get back into the centre of the fairway, which is everybody's aim. A one or two degree dispersion over a few hundred meters makes a small misalignment become a major directional issue. Clearly, the balls end up being at very different points on the fairway.

This dispersion can happen just as obviously when team members set out confidently to deliver a team assignment but miss a key direction or parameter from the get go.

When you kick off a project in an online environment, there is an assumption that you will all hit straight off the tee and walk in the same direction to your next stage of the game. But if you start with a less than perfect understanding of the job to be done, the tendency is to keep going on your own path, until you come together again...if you haven't gone so far sideways from the same plan that you can't come together again, that is. It is here than a two degree dispersion in your understanding will lead to arrival at a different point in the project in a way that would probably not have occurred in an office environment where small adjustments often can lead to greater alignment.

The good news is that it may be easier to adjust the way a team works on line than it is to adjust an errant tee shot.

Being specific about the task and each person's role needs to be exaggerated when working remotely. Another suggestion is to check-in for clarity and alignment in each successive web session so that we don't waste precious work time bring our ducks back into line after they have wandered off in all directions, with various degrees of dispersion.

Every good golf analogy needs to conclude with a comment about birdies...