Building Common Ground on Jelly

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of face to face meetings to build trust and the ability to interpret each other. Today I noticed this post by Chandni over at Anecdote telling a really nice story of Google and Procter & Gamble and how they mooched around on each other’s territory and came up with some great learning as well as a better working relationship.

Also at Anecdote (and it seems to me there’s a connection here), Shawn has referenced jelly-working a couple of times recently. Jelly is casual co-working where members take turns to host each other for a day’s work in the same space – you bring your own work, but for a day it’s like you are sharing your workspace with a whole new set of colleagues.

Jelly looks ideal for independents and small firms, where you miss the interactions, diversity, ideas and conversations of working in a larger organisation. So far, it seems to assume everybody comes from different firms. But what if a large organisation adopted jelly-working internally? If different departments hosted people from other parts of the company once a month or so? No special facilitation needed, just provide space, electricity and inter/intranet so people can do their work, and let things evolve? Would that help break down silos and build mutual familiarity and common ground as a basis for better knowledge sharing and collaboration? Would the sharp learnings of the Google and P&G experiment also emerge there?

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1 Comment so far

Patrick Lambe

By sheer synchronicity, Nancy Dixon has a post on how and why people don’t share or participate in meetings if they have not already built familiarity and relationship.
http://web.mac.com/nancymdixon/iWeb/conversation-matters.com/Conversation%20Matters/DAB94F9D-709A-46E1-8D33-7D0C9E1B994B.html

Posted on January 23, 2009 at 06:36 PM | Comment permalink

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