A Journey from Islands of Knowledge to Mutual Understanding in Global Business Meetings

From The Theme
KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY

WHAT IF
What if we could use technology to make meetings in a global business environment more effective?

WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO
We set out to develop a model and tool to promote mutual understanding among global teams, and improve knowledge worker productivity during distributed team meetings. Towards that end, we prototyped a system that would enable teams to share their local conditions, including their use of collaboration technologies, and levels of engagement.

WHAT WE FOUND
We identified the requirements and developed an engagement Matrix of Choices (eMOC) prototype to assist cross-disciplinary, global teams to make explicit choices with an understanding of the level of collaboration and engagement they can achieve, as well as the respective enablers and hindrances. This prototype was deployed as a working model in the 2013 AEC Global Teamwork testbed to collect data on its use from five global teams. We found that our methods help build shared awareness, nudge team members towards higher levels of engagement, and lead to alignments of expectations and synchrony of engagement levels.

LEARN MORE
mediaX Research Project Update, Fall 2013

mediaX Research Theme Update, Spring 2013

Watch Videos About This Project

Freuchter, R., Medlock, L. “A Journey from Islands of Knowledge to Mutual Understand in Global Business Meetings“, Shikakeology: Designing Triggers for Behavior Change: Papers from the 2013 AAAI Spring Symposium

PBL Lab

PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT
Renate Fruchter is the founding director of the Project Based Learning Laboratory (PBL Lab), lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Senior Research Engineer thrust leader of “Collaboration Technologies” at the Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE), at Stanford. She leads a research effort to develop collaboration technologies for multidisciplinary, geographically distributed teamwork, and e-Learning.

Kincho Law is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Structural Engineering and Engineering Informatics. Professor Law’s professional and research interests focus on the applications of computational and information science in engineering. His work has dealt with various aspects of computational science and engineering, computer aided design, legal and engineering informatics, engineering enterprise integration, web services and Internet computing.

Leonard Medlock is CEO of Playback Worldwide, an ed tech company that he co-founded in 2017, and an Adjust Professor at Claremont Lincoln University. Previously, he served as a Director at EdSurge. Medlock received his MA in Education (Learning, Design, and Technology) from Stanford University in 2011.