BlueBluntTalk

page owner: -- SolomonThompson - 16 Jan 2010

The purpose of this topic is to suggest, contrary to popular belief, that introducing stress to meetings via strict adherence to timeboxes and blunt talk, allowing if not encouraging heated conflict to play itself out, and engaging in occasional personal attacks, in an environment where there is no adverse consequences for speaking the truth, provides an environment which we seek... one where we can act as a distributed/decentralized Brain. This is by no means a scholarly, researched assertion... merely a quick brain dump based upon experience and beliefs. This is opinion not policy. Desire is to encourage debate to iterate to something better.

Table of Contents

Single Brain (at least my single brain)

• Political Correctness does not exist in the thinking portion of my reasoning. I entertain all kinds of strange opinions, desires, judgments... which I don't share with the public. By the time my conflicting, intense, TRULY HONEST, opinions have fought, struggled, and pummelled each other in an "idea-Darwinian" fight to the death (happening often in micro-seconds but certainly really fast) reach my lips, they happen to come out, often with compassion and respect, though not always. The point is that the rapid internal processing occurs minus compassion or respect or decorum or fear etc. The slower processing of considering the environment that the written word, or spoken word will enter happens later, at least in my mind.
• Also, stereotypes are often employed to aid in the speed of decision-making internally... happens to be a fact. It's faster to leverage patterns learned over a lifetime than to treat each new situation as brand new. The use of stereotypes is not conscious, but high-speed and unconscious... our brains are pattern-recognizing machines. Our learned political correctness, desire to be liked, respect for others cause us to wrap this raw decision making with a more palatable output.
• Though not often admitted to, my (trying to just speak for myself though I often slip) mind heavily leverages instinct and intuition in the rapid decision making process that has not been contaminated with caring about how an utterance will be received.
• Emotion ALWAYS fuels my decision-making, whether fear, anger, humiliation... it is always adding energy to the decision-making process. Additionally, when there is a timebox and/or high negaitive emotion, like anger, my mind works really fast and sometimes thoughts burst out of my mouth and my vocabulary can't keep up with what I want to say... point being that emotion, illogical and explosive, is a key ingredient to the high-speed processing in my single brain.

It's my contention that in this Single Brain model, I do high-speed thinking/decision making naturally and the more negative emotion involved, the more unconscious and faster the process takes place and it's more reliant on instinct and intuition (adrenaline based, fight-flight speed of thinking). However, due to my nature and desire to respect others etc. I'll do another level of processing to make the info that leaves me less offensive or more accommodating of the knowledge that I have of the audience of the decision or info.

Single Brain pros

• fast processing when driven by emotion and devoid of compassion and political correctness etc
• in some cases better decisions can be reached (Blink) when the thinking is more based upon intuition and instinct vs. reasoning

Single Brain cons

• if appropriate filtering isn't done before thoughts leave the single human, enemies can be made which may be detrimental to the survival of the human
• the is some research that shows that when a human is in a triggered-state (high adrenaline, heightened heart-rate, unconscious negative interpretations ...) the humans perspective becomes highly focused and vulnerable to huge blind-spots. Often times the receict of information is impaired because of this narrowed focus/perspective and so the decisions are based upon less information

Distributed Brain (vision for Blue Collar)

Ultimately, we want Blue Collar to be an environment where the borders between employees, customers, suppliers, and community are blurred such that all of these parties appear to be in a single organization where the self-interest of each component is being addressed in win/win/win/win fashion. Furthermore, each party in this model will have access to the same platform(s) (BlueJean? Time and wiki's) to enable participation of all parties in the evolution of an idea from Concept to Cash (or Service) in a way that all parties are fairly rewarded.

There is research which shows that an approach leveraging the "Wisdom of Crowds" (phrase coined in the title of the book by James Surowiecki) could lead to decisions by a "wise" crowd which on balance, are better than those reached by individual experts... provided that the crowd fits the appropriate characteristics. We have designed our organization and processes around these characteristics including

• Diversity (egs. cultural, ideological, experience) of inputs
• Decentralization (member of the crowd are geographically dispersed)
• Self-interest
• Independent judgment (eg. voting on ideas without knowledge of input or title of other voters providing the input before the vote)

There are those that feel like in this environment we should communicate in a manner that is polite vs. blunt, impersonal and fact based vs. emotional and sometimes unfairly inaccurate. Before responding to this, I believe the following challenges face the vision of a decentralized environment for getting work done in a competitive way:

Challenges with the Distributed Brain approach

• research shows that the complexity of communication grows REALLY fast (scientific metric) with each individual added to a team
• without face to face interactions, communication is thought to be more difficult because the bandwidth of communication is less given the commonly used technology doesn't allow for the non-verbal cues, smells etc to be included as part of the info shared
• seeing evidence of contribution of individuals or organizations as well as tracking of progress of overall effort thought to be more difficult

The objective is not to create a utopian environment which works on paper but which can not survive in a competitive, cut-throat environment. The objective is to realize a dream of evolving a high-performance, ethical, exciting environment where members are inspired to achieve objectives beyond anyone's expectations. An environment devoid of hierarchy (or at least to the maximum extent possible) that can scale to whatever size necessary to do good on a MASSIVE scale. So, given this vision, in order to survive, we must discover and leverage some techniques leading to advantages that will reduce the cost of getting work done, increase the speed of getting work done, increase the quality of the work produced. Additionally, we need an environment which encourages bursts of creativity and unexpected innovation. The following section will focus on increasing the speed of the Distributed Brain

How to Increase the Speed of the Distributed Brain

Given that I believe the comments I made above regarding the Single Brain model, I will assert the next statements as facts (to save words... this is not scientific)

• have agile teams which, by definition, will be no larger than 9 humans to put a bound on the communication complexity of teams vs. individuals
• Introduce stress to the team to allow the brain to function more frequently in the emotional, unconscious, and high speed mode vs. conscious, logical and slow mode via the following approaches
  • use timeboxes for all meetings, have facilitation which keeps the team aware of the timebox
  • allow profanity use in meetings to allow for some team members to enter a triggered state or to be taken out of their comfort zone so that the emotion level in the virtual room can increase
  • allow insulting conversations to occur to allow for some team members to enter a triggered state or to be taken out of their comfort zone so that the emotion level in the virtual room can increase
  • allow for conflicts to play themselves out fhrough highly skilled facilitation which manages time while not managing the emotion content in the virtual room. The facilitation challenge is to resist the urge to diffuse argument, acrimony and intensity. Rather, focus on managing time and making sure that the opinions of the complete team are drawn out... trust the team to self-organize and to produce an output functioning as one distributed brain with 9 or less competing thoughts, vs focusing on any particular thought that is offensive and seek to silence/suppress it.
  • embrace the chaos that occurs in the discovery phase of problem solving vs. seeking premature summary or ordering of ideas.
  • encourage an environment where every team member feels they can say ANYTHING without fear of negative repercussions

Quality Bonus with Distributed Brain Approach

In the Single Brain cons section of this topic the second bullet refers to the "blind spot" issue when individuals are unconsciously reacting while in a triggered or emotional state. The beauty of the Distributed Model as we've implemented is that it benefits from the Wisdom of Crowds of diversity of inputs and our facilitation approach of drawing out the opinions of all participants. By doing this, we get different sides of the argument which often doesn't happen in a Single Brain. So what happens is that we get multiple perspectives from the crowd executing at a speed closer to the Single Brain model because of ignoring social graces and operating in the emotional region of the brain.

Summary

To summarize, I believe to have high-performance teams in an environment which facilitates innovation and creativity we not only should tolerate but encourage blunt talk, conflict and sometimes personal attacks in the context of meetings. We seek to model the behavior of the internal brain which processes unfettered by political correctness. The brain leverages emotions, stereotypes and unfair opinions in coming to opinions and decisions.

All thinking is not devoid of compassion and political correctness, especially thinking which occurs when one is not under high stress or emotion. But, a lot of the thinking (in triggered state) is partially because of the state but, also because our thoughts are safe from eaves dropping so they are free to consider taboo approaches or topics or stereotypes in racing towards reactions to events or scenarios. We want to have VIRTUAL TEAM ROOMS which also provide this safety to explore taboo subjects, utter insulting comments, test dumb ideas, to unleash speed and creativity.

We need to operate in our virtual team room in that manner. However, at the end of the day, Blue Collar loves humans and want humans to feel inspired and as such we depend upon the crowd to provide compassionate humans who will make sure that after the team exits the meeting room (where wars occur) a family atmosphere of compassion love and fellowship is engendered... classical music plays in the background... children can be heard playing in the distance... yeah that's it.

Your thoughts?

I've received a confidential post which has shocked me out of my current state of consciousness. It has become clear that the distinction between personal attacks and blunt talk needs to be stressed where blunt talk is allowed but, personal attacks are NOT. We have an objective of maximum openness and a war of ideas where best ideas win but, we don't want an environment where personal attacks are ignored, glossed over or accepted as part of the war. Everyone should be respected and if one feels disrespected, the environment should encourage resolution so that all parties feel as whole as possible. Any thoughts?	SolomonThompson	16 Apr 2010 - 15:03
Three more scenarios for the enemies of a Blunt Talk approach. All scenarios have the common theme of survival dependent upon fast reaction. 1) Your child is in the middle of the street and talking to a friend on the phone. There is a car moving fast, seconds away from hitting your child. How do you address your child? Do you try to think of communication that would not offend your child in order to get them to move or do you say the first thing that comes to your head to get the child to jump out of the way... shock them out of their current state of consciousness to be receptive to acting to survive. My contention is that what will be said will differ from individual to individual, but in all cases will not be mitigated, nor polite... it will be an unconsciously triggered response with a focus on results. 2) Same scenario but, instead of your child, it is a team mate, someone on your Scrum team... about to be hit by a car. Same set of questions. 3) Your scrum team is in the middle of a Sprint and working on an objective where not only the survival of the project is at stake, but the jobs of everyone on the team is at stake and the existence of the company is at stake. How would you communicate with a team mate that continues to not display behavior needed for team SURVIVAL. Would you constantly seek polite ways to express the error in his/her ways? Would you take the time to think about how to not offend this person in communicating opinions? Or would you try to shock them out of their paradigm, or do whatever is necessary so that they can receive what is being communicated? The piece missing is that removing them from the team is not an option because they have knowledge critical to the success of the Sprint. Issues of individual, team, company, community, global survival don't emerge daily. But, it would be very dangerous to take survival in this competitive environment lightly. We face global competition and software development is rapidly becoming a commodity. Innovation in design alone won't do it. We need innovation in human interactions as well... I think.	SolomonThompson	24 Jan 2010 - 14:34
Many, many great points made, attacking the assertion above. I think the responses are blunt and I'm hurt... just jokes. Anyway, to add a little more fuel to the fire, let me pose an additional question/scenario. This is an environment where much of the management authority lies in each team vs. an organizational hierarchy. No one tells anyone what to do (when we are operating in accordance with Blue Collar beliefs and principles and structures) and individual evaluation occurs as feedback amongst peers vs. from a power holding human in a hierarchy. With this set up, how do people, who believe that discussions shouldn't be/get personal, propose holding individuals accountable for causing the team to be unsuccessful due to laziness in adhering to team rules, lack of attention to quality due to resistance to changing habits, unreliability to meeting commitments etc? Should the team mates be polite as the company slowly loses business and jobs are lost because teams are not competitive. Does being polite work? Does it get individuals attention when we say, "great try, we'll do better next time"? The proposal above is not that we create a Virtual Room where when one enters, one should expect profanity, personal attacks and constant debate? On the contrary, what is being discussed is an environment of honesty and respect where team mates can be honest with each other even when, at times the honesty may be unpleasant and respectful to each other where respect is about telling a person what you REALLY think vs. putting on a pleasant face and whispering behind their back the truth in an environment where the team doesn't benefit. The purpose of this discussion is to fuel debate about a topic that is important and which over time may help us to bridge the gap of the beautiful theories of self-organizing teams and the reality of sausage making .	SolomonThompson	24 Jan 2010 - 11:03
Don't laugh, this came to me last night in a dream, but it makes perfect sense We are probably already curtailing our speech, hell, I know I am. And I know I try to curtail others too. I tell people if what they are saying is unnecessary, or is getting off topic, Natalie does too because we often have the same opinion, sometime we force laughter to blow off steam, etc, etc, etc In other words I think it is a false assumption that we are already communicating in a blunt environment, I don't think we are Furthermore, we probably curtail ourselves and others because we know being truly blunt might be highly negative, In conclusion, once again Candid, might be better than blunt, Blunt is a Distopia	DavidLindsay	20 Jan 2010 - 10:55
• After reading the topic and the discussions posted and considering the Servant Leadership training many of us just completed, I have many thoughts and responses, but will try to be brief and concise. • Regarding timeboxing: while I agree with the practice that many of our meetings need to be timeboxed to save time and allow time for actual work to be done; imo, often in the name of that timeboxing, we are not communicating effectively. We state the bare minimum ‘facts’ in order to hurry through and be 'finished'. This is not effective communication. This is essentially a group monolog. We need to allow ourselves time, on occasion to have discussions that may take longer than 15 minutes. This does not need to happen daily, but should be on a regular basis. A distributed workforce does not have the benefit of face-to-face time and needs to have enhanced communication skills in order to be productive and to thrive. If we are always in a rush to complete our conversations, important brain-storming and creativity may not be expressed. • Profanity: I despise profanity. I do not speak it and I am repulsed when someone uses profanity. I find it unnecessary and unprofessional. There are other ways to get your message or mood across without using vulgar language. In addition, some of our customers (present and future) may not appreciate profanity and may be put-off by it. • Insulting conversations as a necessity: This goes against everything I believe. I do not feel that it is ever appropriate to insult anyone. You can have a difference of opinion with someone and discuss those differences in a calm and rational manner, but insulting them or their opinion is unnecessary and unprofessional. It does not build a team. What about valuing everyone’s opinion as in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ ? Are we saying that only some of us are wise and others we can just insult ? (BTW, the Wikipedia lists synonyms for insulting as: ‘abusive; offensive; rude wounding.’) When someone is insulted, is their input being valued or diminished ? Imo, when someone is insulted, it is human nature to get their back up and they will withdraw either emotionally or physically from the conversation. It is not inclusive behavior. • One of the main components of The Servant Leadership training was to ‘listen care-fully’. It wasn’t to ‘talk care-fully’. People feel valued when they are listened too. This applies to our customers as well. It is all well and good for us to say that we want to behave in such and such a manner, but how will the customer accept this behavior ? Is this the correct behavior for growing a business ? What if we have a customer who does not appreciate profanity or insulting behavior ? Will that customer, either existing or proposed, want to do business with us ? That is not to say that we should become cookie-cutters or yes-people. Just to say that we should be respectful of all people and treat each other as we would like to be treated. I for one, do not appreciate being insulted- neither creatively nor constructively. • If one of our mottos is to provide the answers our customers ask, shouldn’t we also be the solutions our customers seek ? People want to surround themselves with people that are positive, that they want to be like and with. ( A version of their better selves.) They are looking to improve their processes and businesses with that positive influence. • Yes, we do want to differentiate ourselves from the competition, but I feel it would be more dynamic and distinguishing to differentiate ourselves in a more creative and positive way.	LaurenMerriken	20 Jan 2010 - 10:39
The possible communication channels between N people is a simple mathematical issue. N!/(N-2)!2! If we have 4 persons, there are 4!/2!2! = 6 communication paths if we have 10 persons, there are 10!/8!2! = 45 communication paths if we have 20 persons, there are 20!/18!2! = 190 communication paths So the size of meeting is very critical, the more persons involved in the meeting, the more communication paths will be involved. It is impossible to cover every path in a time-box meeting and it is also impractical to have long-haul meeting to cover every paths. So what are the major purposes of a meeting? a. Hear what people try to say first. b. Understand the obstacles. c. Brainstorming a solution. A well-planned meeting with controlled time-box is needed for sure. The major principles for a good communication A. Blunt on the fact instead of individual, you can be blunt but polite, I don't see any conflict between these two. There is no excuse on having profanity, offensive, insulting conversations in order to create a high-performance, ethical and inspiring environment. It's a joke to me and it's just an excuse on our inability of providing better, effective communication. The attitude -"I still respect your opinion even though I disagree" is very important in a meeting. B. Bring and trigger distributed /aggregated talents. Vulgarity presents destructive force on this goal. C. If you think you are the boss or want to be a leader in the future, then please remember the following things: a. No micro management, especially in professional fields. b. Respect folks' talent and professional training/skills. c. Be humble, the more you are humble, the more constructive, creative ideas and suggestions will flow to you. d. Make every one a real key person instead of the key person who keys in your idea. If you dare to do it in opposite way, then God bless you, you will become definitely the only "wise", smart" person in the team or company, others will be forced to act like a dummy regardless of on-purpose, finally the company will eat the consequence. e. State the goal to be achieved clearly, and then provide full supports to your folks especially from resource perspectives not technique perspectives. You should assume people working for you are smarter than you in their profession field, otherwise, why you should hire them, just do it by yourself. There will more to come, but basically, I totally disagree with profanity, offensive and insulting conversations no matter whatever the noble reasons or goals you try to bring in. The outcome is just opposite.	ThomasLee	18 Jan 2010 - 16:14
Let's review the objectives: 1 to create a high-performance, ethical and inspiring environment; 2 to create an environment where thinking is more based upon intuition and instinct vs. reasoning; 3 reduce the cost of getting work done; 4 increase the speed of getting work done or 5 increase the quality of the work produced. As a team, we should review the objectives, retrospect and come up with ways to achieve them. Why do we perform sprint retrospectives but not annual company performance retrospectives? Let's answer the question: "What can we do as a company to perform better and achieve the above objectives?". Perhaps using profanity, offensive and insulting conversations will have nothing to do with the solution. I have noticed when two people communicate unclearly, the conversation takes longer to come to a point where both parties understand each another. Timeboxing will not allow this, in which case individuals could often leave the room without being 'understood' creating further negative reactions / communications down the road. There is nothing wrong with being direct and respectfully blunt; criticizing the quality of the job or work being done, not the individual; and allowing conflict to facilitate better decisions and solutions. I think Blue Collar Objects already 'has this down'. Shonna says it well when she says: "I also believe that blunt doesn't have to be the opposite of polite.". Often when people raise their voices, all one hears is the volume and the content is LOST.	HelgaSchoeman	18 Jan 2010 - 13:04
Being "blunt" in a non-abusive environment and without using profanity I think is the best approach. One does not have to lower themselves to street talk in order to be heard or voice a strong point or counter-point. Some people neglect to realize that much of the team is not culturally from the United States and to many this is not something they can override even with instincts.. Being a distributed brain can have brief moments or slips into vulgarity when one can not express themselves any other way however this should not be the norm nor should be condoned because it does conflict with many human's upbringing and beliefs and this will shut them out. To me, when I hear someone thrashing out vulgarity I shutdown, become defensive and immediately start to react in a negative, non-constructive way. Instead of this, I feel we as a team should feel free to express anything but never to attack an individual person but just "their" facts or ideas. There is a large difference between attacking a person versus their ideals or thoughts. I can be called stupid, a bozo, an idiot for thinking in a narrow minded fashion and I can accept this but when I as a human am attacked personally this is not a team building approach but one that isolates specific types of people. There are many different types of individuals - introverted, extroverted, and those that flow in between the two. As a team we need to welcome all and allow each person to interact as they can best contribute. Alienating certain people will not make a stronger team but rather just form a homogeneous group of people forcing the "weaker" of the group in some peoples mind out of the company. You will lose great talent this way This is a bad approach in my opinion. Instead maintain a culture of bluntness but with respect to everyone. I like being able to say anything I think and feel without retribution but the fact is there are always some affect for ones actions even if not immediately seen. If you want a distributed and composite brain to work well and have all of the components interacting the environment you setup must be fertile for all types of people and personalities to participate equally. You do not just want a dual or quad processor running the show... but rather every cpu online and functioning contributing to the overall performance of the team and project. The team needs to appear seamless as one entity and only after taking off the case do you really see each person contributing in a constructive way. Blue Collar Objects is suppose to be like a family and in many ways I feel already is -- as dysfunctional as some of us are! We will have disagreements and not see things eye to eye. Instead of promoting or accepting vulgarity and isolating or shutting down certain cpu's from contributing promote a verbally honest and open forum where all can participate and contribute. There is an old saying... It's Easier to Catch Flies with Honey, Than with Vinegar To summarize I feel like we as a team can criticize the ideas and thoughts of individuals but not the individuals themselves. The moment it becomes personal the team as a whole loses, its counter productive and starts to become polarized and then our composite/distributed brain starts to either become paranoid or bi-polar - in either case not functioning to its optimal capability. Just my two cents (it was $1.50 before taxes and carry on baggage fees!) And for those who believe profanity is a necessary component to expression just ask the alcoholic if he needs a drink before driving.	KeithWancowicz	18 Jan 2010 - 10:54
... if you have a chance, read the entire chapter of The Ethnic Theory Of Plane Crashes, p177 in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Here is a snippet, but it is only a small part of the information in this chapter, easy to inadvertendly misrepresent it but it provides a clear explanation of: "The term used by linguists to describe where Klotz was engaging in in that moment is "mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what was being said. We mitigate when we are being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when were being deferential to authority. .... Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes ... Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years ... " Once again, I am recommending that anyone interested in this aspect read the entire chapter referenced. There are some studies of a lot of "disasters" like Three Mile Island, Space Shuttle, with clever summaries like "politeness kills" ... but nothing is "provable". Anyways, does anyone have any opinions about whether mitigation has any impact (positive or negative) in a company that is part of a competitive, disruptive business environment like the computer software industry? Also, are there any antidotes to mitigation & would they be valuable as part of a company culture? (Especially in a diverse environment), does anyone have any opinions about whether a diverse team of strangers, by its very nature encourages mitigation in almost all individuals on the team. Does company culture provide part of a solution (if there is a problem)? If so, what should be in that culture.) Anyways, the stuff I mentioned here should be in the mix ... but there are many overloaded terms, politeness (does it always mean tolerance and is it the only way to nurture tolerance?), mitigation (is it something to avoid? does it matter?), bluntness (is it always bad or something that "folks" must find intolerant?), if you only get mitigated opinions expressed, does it mean the diversity of the crowd is disabled because controversial, unpopular, unpleasant opinions are prevented? or if presented, they are expressed so politely that humans can easily ignore them. does it matter? If this is important, how should we do something. We have to morph this stuff into something coherent that works for us ... but it has to be understandable by folks not familiar with our work culture ... anyways, this stuff should be somewhere in the mix ... the chapter mentioned has a really crispy description of one of the aspects of this imo. We have iteration-zero of a culture out there now, I'm actually warming up to this approach of trying to move it along to iteration-beautiful (eventually), especially since we just all got together for the Servant-Leader class ... anyways, where does politeness, mitigation, bluntness, unpleasant opinions fit in our culture (if at all)? Also, once we sort out all of that, how do we make sure this is a tolerant culture? (Seems like Sol is also bringing up these "big questions" & they are somewhere in the mix too.)	EricSedor	17 Jan 2010 - 17:50
This is a long term issue too, Blunt may not be entirely scalable. The pool of employable talent is finite, but as Blue Collar is currently not large, there is no danger of losing out on available talent because employees may not like this particular culture. But as blue collar grows the available pool of talent could become slim to the point that having a potentially objectionable culture may affect blue collars ability to obtain and retain employees Of course this is a long way off.	DavidLindsay	17 Jan 2010 - 16:14
Candid may be better than blunt. Remember also too that your brain is a learning machine, and habits you create in some settings may carry over into other settings Candid might be a better environment to engender. It would obviously entail some more control over one's mouth, but would still value being honest about one's feelings. It would hopefully still allow brutal truth, but minus some of the yelling, insulting, insinuating, that comes with being blunt that might derail some communication.	DavidLindsay	17 Jan 2010 - 15:57
I'm done laughing. In short, I'm for it. I'm a believer in blunt talk. However, this blunt practice requires stupendous facilitation skills on the team - in everyone or in at least one person. I say this because sometimes a person's bluntness can be either imprecise, unfocused, inaccurate, and/or just plain unproductive...meaning, a total waste of the team's time. A top-notch facilitator will be able to exercise the necessary judgment to detect when this is occurring AND be able to steer the discussion towards something productive. Having this skill in several teammates is a built in backup system in my opinion. It's not just one person's responsibility to ensure the team is doing the right thing in real-time discussions or even offline discussions. This is a collective responsibility. I also believe that blunt doesn't have to be the opposite of polite. In many cases, it can be. But its possible to be direct with someone without being offensive. Put another way, I believe you can be respectfully blunt. Its good though that we set expectations with current and new team members that blunt talk of many sorts could happen at any time.	ShashonnaRaines	17 Jan 2010 - 14:57
Based upon feedback I've received via email from a party to remain unnamed, I want to add the following which I neglected to mention in the ideas above. To provide context, the person did not want to enter inputs onto this medium if they would be subject to personal attacks as the above implies is the environment being envisioned. They also noted the humorous irony that I stated that a certain code of conduct had to be adhered to in participating on this wiki. I responded with the following: Just saw the second part Re: objectionable feedback. I mentioned something called "the virtual meeting room" where all the "violence" occurs. The idea is that when that room is exited, everything kind and loving... those who enter the room face the threat of personal attack. Two things. One, I would not include the wiki as being in the virtual meeting room as the feedback is longer lasting and can be viewed by an audience broader than required for the fast-thinking distributed brain objective. Two, there are legal risks (I know there are legal risks both ways) to having a public web site associated with our company containing objectionable material. So, in this space, a personal attack would be removed if observed because it would be deemed objectionable. I believe the virtual room is restricted to synchronous meetings (like phone conference) where lively brainstorming activities occur and timeboxed decisions are made. Any emotional baggage (in a perfect world) will be left in the room and outside of the room, appropriate decorum should abound (a really perfect world).	SolomonThompson	16 Jan 2010 - 17:02
LOL.	SolomonThompson	16 Jan 2010 - 16:37
I just can't read beyond this line due to unstoppable laughter: "without face to face interactions, communication is thought to be more difficult because the bandwidth of communication is less given the commonly used technology doesn't allow for the non-verbal cues, smells etc to be included as part of the info shared" Smells? Really? That's the first example of non-verbal cues that comes to your mind?	ShashonnaRaines	16 Jan 2010 - 16:28
Unfortunately, if you do provide feedback on this topic, you must refrain from providing profanity, offensive or pornographic content (see usage)... there's that.	SolomonThompson	16 Jan 2010 - 12:35
You must register to the site in order to provide comments. We welcome feedback on all of our ideas, and we especially enjoy feedback that disagree with ours .	SolomonThompson	16 Jan 2010 - 12:32