Virtual Cooperation

 

Whenever the topic of virtual management comes up, it’s almost inevitable that its near-cousin, distance management, also presents itself for analysis. I can understand why – as anyone who has read The World is Flat knows, far-flung team members, formed spontaneously into purpose-driven groups, are increasingly edging out the traditional organizational models of people occupying the same real estate as the most desired structure for high-performing projects. And, with the recent and dramatic improvements in long-range communications, equivalent advances in distance management would seem to be the perfect counterpart to giving direction to these virtual teams, right? Right?

Well, not so fast. There were some very good reasons why organizations tended to want to insist on their project teams being co-located, even if these organizations couldn’t clearly articulate why that was so. It may have been simply experience, or a sense that legitimate management just couldn’t be performed via cell phone, e-mail, and the occasional video conference. I believe that this reluctance to embrace distance management had, at its core, a valid concern, one that has wrecked projects and teams since, no doubt, before the pyramids were built (assuming, of course, that they weren’t built by aliens; or, if they were, that these aliens suffer from the same organizational behavior and performance pathologies that afflict us humans). This issue has to do with cooperation within the project team, and can be analyzed to reveal some valuable truisms using (what else?) game theory.

Let’s use the old game-theory standard, the Hawk-Dove Game. Imagine an environment with 100 generic birds, who can either act passively, going about foraging for food and consuming/storing everything they gather; or else they can act aggressively, either preventing other birds from foraging for the available foodstuffs, or else actively taking the passive birds’ food from them. When all of the birds act passively, like doves, the population’s payoff is maximized. However, introduce just one aggressive bird, a hawk, and the behavior of the entire population will change until it reaches what’s called a Nash Equilibrium (named after Thomas Nash, the central figure from the movie A Beautiful Mind). The Nash Equilibrium for the 100-bird Hawk-Dove game is 75/25, meaning that either 75% of the birds will act as dove all the time, or else each bird will act dovish 75% of the time, and hawkish the other 25%. For far-flung virtual project team purposes, the take-away assertion here is this: when all of your team members are exerting optimal effort in pursuing your project’s objectives, your performance payoff is maximized. However, introduce just one member who’s not exerting very much, or even working at cross-purposes to the project’s objectives in order to pursue a personal agenda, and the entire team will tend towards a Nash Equilibrium behavior set that can easily spell doom for your project.

And here’s where the value of the co-located team comes in: the moment any team member exhibits sub-optimal effort or talent, the attentive manager can respond immediately, either by removing the Jungle Fighter / inept team member, or else by influencing them to abandon their selected project-deviant strategy. The distance project manager rarely has access to this sort of insight: the Jungle Fighters in your project team don’t wear signs on their foreheads declaring their uncooperative proclivities, and are usually smart enough to not allow their masks to slip in telephone conversations, e-mails, and the occasional video conference.

So what I’m saying here is that the primary obstacle to effective distance project management is the tendency in some of your team members to either slack off, or else work to advance their own personal agendas instead of pursuing your project’s scope completion. Essentially, change human nature, and your distance management should come off just fine.