So now let’s set the scene.  It’s sometime during the second half of the semester, and all of your group projects have kicked into gear.  For each class you’re looking through secondary sources, maybe sending out some surveys, maybe putting together a mockup of whatever it is the project is about.  You’re probably starting to write the final report.  You’re definitely putting together some kind of presentation.  It’s also probably a good idea to actually go to all of your classes, not to mention your internship or job, and also try to have some kind of social life (wait, what’s that again?).

This is all generally doable.  Right up until someone says during class “We should probably meet to discuss [insert some part of the project here].”  Because now you’re not just juggling your schedule but also everyone else’s.  If you’re lucky, the professor has cancelled a few classes and you’ve got your meeting time.  But chances are, he or she hasn’t, as that would decrease the amount of time they had to “impart their wisdom upon you” – plus part of the corporate world is working out scheduling conflicts and consulting with colleagues while getting the rest of your work done.  So now you’re all standing around after the lecture as the next class files into the room, smartphones and/or planners out, trying to figure out a meeting time (it’s actually worse if you’re trying to do this over e-mail or text message).

My Management and Organization Analysis professor called the difficulties associated with scheduling coordination costs.  As more people are involved, coordination costs increase.  In other words, it’s harder to schedule a ten person group than a three person group – and trust me, I’ve had to do both.  This could be related to individuals rearranging their schedule, or it could be because of the costs associated with communicating information to group members who couldn’t be there.  If you search Wikipedia for coordination costs, you’ll actually end up at the entry for “transaction costs” instead.  While the entry doesn’t actually define coordination costs (it just links to a blank page instead while using a completely different definition), it started me thinking.  Given the ways that technological developments have changed the way we communicate, what can they do for future classes of students faced with the same tasks I was?

• The most obvious role that technology can play is to make it easier to schedule meetings.  There’s at least one website that can do that – Doodle (I actually really started using this during my last semester).  Doodle lets you create a poll with dates and times, users check off when they can attend, and you end up with a nice chart showing which times work for which people.  Finding a place to meet is considerably harder……but that’s what you get for going to school in the middle of Manhattan.
• Technology can help there too though.  We can video conference instead of sit in the same room, or meet in Second Life instead of real life (never actually tried this), or substitute our physical presence with telepresence.  This doesn’t do much to address scheduling issues, but it can reduce the time and energy costs associated with getting to a physical meeting, not to mention the monetary costs if travel are involved.
• What new media and Internet services can also do is change the way we expect to work together.  I’m thinking specifically of cloud computing here, but there are a lot of potential sources of change.  Collaborative services like Google Apps could allow us to timeshift group work like TiVo did for television.  Students won’t be using their Blackberrys and iPhones to check their calendars when someone proposes meeting – they’ll just jump online instead and use any number of digital collaboration tools.  Maybe they’ll post links to research or work on a draft of their report or annotate a completed presentation.  Maybe they’ll collaboratively create surveys and send them to their social networks.  Or maybe they’ll synthesize trending topics and comments into a market research report for use in their project.

These are just a few ideas I’m throwing out.  I’m sure I’ve read some of these elsewhere, not that I know where right now.  What is perhaps most important out of all of this is that students are going to be able to explore these collaborative technologies and take them beyond the hallowed halls of their academic institutions.  And maybe then they’ll make their way into the hallowed boardrooms of the corporate world.

Of course, none of these tools will keep you from doing most of the work for your group – but that’s another post entirely (you’ll just have to check back for that one).

What Org Comm does seem to lead to is a bunch of bland looking and sounding presentations, often times featuring the following elements:

• A slide dedicated to the agenda – do you really need to tell me what you’re going to talk about in such great detail?  I’ve seen agenda slides with multiple levels of bullet points.  Not a particularly fun way to begin a talk.
• Slide trackers – Thanks for the fancy diagram at the bottom of every slide telling me what part of the presentation we’re in, but I’d much rather listen to you speak than find out where we are in your story.
• Three levels of bullet points per slide (aka way too much text) – While I respect that you want to put as much information out there as possible, if you put 300 words on a slide (which is just about all of the words in this entry), I’m much more likely to either 1) read your slides instead of listening to you or 2) start checking my Twitter on my phone because I’ve tuned you out entirely (shame on me, I know)

Now I’m not saying I’m perfect – if anything, I’m more likely to throw in an extra transition or two when it isn’t necessary just because I find it cool (what it ends up being is distracting instead).

So what’s the solution?

Well, I don’t have one, but Nancy Duarte does.  In addition to being the Principal and CEO of Duarte Communications, She’s the author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, which is a great book that looks at using visual aids to complement a presentation, instead of letting them overrun it (I particularly enjoyed the case studies).  Rather than rehash her book here, I’m just going to recommend that you real her blog (linked to her name) or check out her book (or for that matter any number of the interviews she’s given).  Meanwhile, I think I’m going to get back to designing the slides for my final presentation in one of my classes.