August 19, 1990

IT MUST cross the mind of anyone who sits through fruitless hours in endless meetings, inside conference rooms surrounded by expensive computer gear (supposedly designed to make them more efficient), that something very basic is awry in the way we “do” this thing called communication.

Instead of walking out feeling as if something — anything! — got accomplished (other than ego gratification for the truly few), the vast majority feel as though they just suffered through yet another exercise in futility and frustration.

But for those willing to scrap an old paradigm for something new, there may be a way to make working together fruitful after all. A just-released book by the syndicated Los Angeles Times “Innovation” columnist Michael Schrage says the problem with meetings is that we keep using them to propagate the cult of the individual achiever, instead of pooling our mental resources, and it just doesn’t work.

Schrage’s compelling book, published by Random House, is called “Shared Minds: the New Technologies of Collaboration,” and it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone address — in a public forum, anyway — why we need to leave behind today’s ineffective ways of working together.

Schrage spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and there became fascinated by the great collaborators in history.

He discovered that all successful collaborators had in common a “shared space” where they worked. For example, James Watson and Francis Crick welded together metal models as they compared results of their separate DNA experiments.

Shared space creates a kind of visual language where people trying to solve a common problem can not only contribute, but see their contributions shape the final product. The regular old whiteboard, a staple in almost every company in the world, is an effective collaborative technology that hasn’t changed in 500 years, but Schrage believes that computer technology can go the whiteboard exponentially better.

“The shared space is actually a medium,” Schrage says. “And what you find out is that if you alter the properties of the medium, you alter the properties of the collaboration.”

Some technology companies are already catching on to the benefits of collaborative computing. One method is the electronic whiteboard, which allows many people to simultaneously access a computer screen using network software and an electronic graphics pad to sketch on. My colleague at Media Letter, Christine Hughes, says this work is already going on in research labs at Hewlett-Packard, where a research project called CoMedian (for Cooperative Multimedia) is using electronic whiteboards — accessed by telephone lines or local-area network — for collaborators to map out projects or solve problems in a shared space that transcends problems of distance.

Schrage calls such computer-based collaborative media and environments “documedia,” because they’re more than a document that’s shared, they’re a media hybrid of information, communication and results.

One of the more mundane but extremely useful examples of documedia is network-based software templates for scheduling (ironically used to schedule none other than the dreaded meeting) that allows workers to choose the best time for everyone to get together.

Other more dazzling applications center around the use of computer simulations. Doctors can computer-model their patients and work together on strategies before a surgery. Watson and Crick would have loved a Sun workstation on their shared desk, to whip up new permutations of the double helix without having to rip apart and re-weld their metal models. When everyone has access to the computer, says Schrage, the shared space of the screen becomes the discussion, making the group’s collective memory and expertise available to everyone.

Despite its seeming emphasis on visual communication, language is an integral part of this process. Schrage calls all media — sketches, words, video images, telephone conversations — mere vessels for language. And he believes the emerging technologies of collaboration will transform the power and potency of all our languages.

I like this idea because it flies in the face of what many believe — that the growing use of visual media will turn us into a nation of functional illiterates (even more than we are now). In fact, Schrage’s concept of collaboration tacitly supports the idea that we should devote even more energy to getting everyone up to speed on the nuts and bolts of language. Illiteracy is certainly a problem in need of a new paradigm to solve it. So let’s fire up the electronic whiteboard and work it out.