CAN TRUST & TRANSACTIVE MEMORY BE THIS SIMPLE?
/We are into Sprint #5 of the Management 2.0 Hackathon. Our task is to explore and then develop "mini-hacks" that could support one of these six principles:
- Collaboration
- Community
- Experimentation and Serendipity
- Openness
- Autonomy
- Trust
Building on my last post about trust, I've added transactive memory to the discussion.
Transactive Memory
Quick overview of transactive memory: TM is how teams know who knows what, know who needs what information, and know how to coordinate given this information. We have pretty solid data showing that teams that have strong transactive memory have higher performance than teams with lower transactive memory. Transactive memory is formed by people working together on a work related task. My connection of trust to transactive memory - trust is created by people have the chance to be untrustworthy but come through all the same. Transactive memory is created by working together on the task and learning from that dynamic. To the extent that people are consistent (i.e., trustworthy in their behaviors), transactive memory will form quicker and be stronger.
Mini-Hack Draft
My "mini-hack" suggestion is that we can kill two birds with one stone if we offer team members the opportunity to work on one of their related tasks, ideally face-to-face, and then ask them to to highlight who knows what, who needs what information, and how they will coordinate on future tasks (basically a mindfulness activity focused on TM). Next, ask them to talk through how much trust they have in the particular specialization they have agreed upon. For different tasks & information flow, facilitate a discussion around "What does trust mean here, how will we know if trust is being broken? What signals will we look for positively & negatively?"
Guessing that someone in this community has worked on similar tasks/facilitations before. Anything we can build on? I have until late tonight to make improvements.
Paper describing the validation and measurement of transactive memory (pdf of Kyle Lewis paper)
