Global Learning Organization LO14820

Ian Saunders (tpians@cix.compulink.co.uk)
Tue, 2 Sep 97 08:42 BST-1

Replying to LO14686 --

In-Reply-To: <01BCA82A.6AAAC300@d163.pm5.sonic.net>

Scott,

I work in an organisation that is like yours only much smaller. 7 people
and all within the UK.

When we set up we spent a long time creating some guiding principles
around which we were all prepared to operate.

We set up email (very new at the time) and found this absolutely
invaluable for maintaining contact. It was important, for email to work
successfully, to have some agreed expectations about frequency of access.
(We agreed that we would check in every 24 hours. )

We also meet every 2 months. In your case this would be impossible.
However I suspect that meeting on a regular basis, it might only be once a
year is important. It puts faces to people, enables a different type of
dialogue to take place.

You may need to find ways to find out what everyone else does, is expert
at and how they can help each other. THe benefits of a virtual
organsiation is that there is all this available talent to help me.... And
I need to know where and what it is and how I can access it.

People have to be willing to exchange successes, ideas, difficulties. You
need ways of ensuring that 2 or more people from your 'organisation'
contact the same person at the same client!!

We found that we needed to spend time agreeing what things went out from
us as individuals that needed to be the same from all of us and those
things that could be individual to each of us. THis was much more
difficult to agree than we had anticipated. (I am assuming, possibly
incorrectly, that you all work under the same organisational heading.)

Hope this helps and I shall be interested to see what other responses you
receive.

Best wishes

Ian Saunders
Transition Partnerships - Harnessing change for business advantage
tpians@cix.compulink.co.uk

-- 

tpians@cix.compulink.co.uk (Ian Saunders)

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>