Social Interaction
People are not unwilling to interact or collaborate but many of the tools they use prevent them from doing something simple and human: having intelligent, purposeful conversations! Collaboration is another way of saying social interaction. To collaborate, people need to interact. Yet, for much of their time they are dumping ideas, documents, and code into repositories that they access through a display. How do we foster more conversations?
Visualisation
In order to promote better, intelligent conversations more often, we use visualisation of work processes. These are usually large scale visualisations on the walls of the office. We have portfolio walls, customer walls, thank you walls, cool walls. Risks and issue walls and so on. The idea behind the walls is to create venues that promote more social interaction.
Collective Intelligence
The outcome of creating venues for social interaction is the ability to harness the collective intelligence of teams. The French philosopher Pierre Levy, who coined this term, believed that collective intelligence was the only way that we can organise and shape the overabundant information around us. No single person can be the expert any longer, but together we can. By bringing out collective intelligence, we can make better decisions. Bringing people together at social venues creates an opportunity to bring out purpose and intelligence.