Microsoft Teams Visualizing Complexity to Coordinate Action

It’s 3 AM EDT
Managers and stakeholders flood into Microsoft Teams from a range of time zones. The latest critical business situation threatens to tank the quarter, if not the company. Each person responsible for a set of operations, a process, or a piece of infrastructure is present. In turn, they express their allusions and speculations to the status of systems, business states, and flows of transactions.

The quest to share, connect, and communicate what is happening is like a professional juggling team with one ball as the majority listen and wait for their gap to share. Does this dialog favor a sequence such as a first good idea or last voice? The clock is ticking.

Let’s consider three perspectives that will help you coordinate better

From Growth of Microsoft Teams to Continuous Collaboration

According to the Verge, use of Microsoft Teams jumped from 34 million to 145 million daily active users (DAU) in the space of one year.

Gone are the prior metrics that focused on licenses sold, messages sent, or how many participants attended a meeting. The latest direction focuses on active engagement – topical workspaces that compel groups of people to continuously collaborate, quickly meeting across distance – all without having to play the email game of address book, subject, attach the file, send, repeat.

Collaboration is King in the Land of Hub and Spokes

World-renowned technology and collaboration authority, Paul Simon, shares his expertise and experience of the collaboration movement in his latest book Reimagining Collaboration. For the type-A leaders, Chapter 16 puts all the concepts into immediate perspective with important warnings and steps. For others, the book is a good read and is chocked-full of stories that make what is possible real and actionable.

Mr. Simon states that COVID ignited an already current movement. From my own perspective, we have been through several waves that began with the appearance of instant messaging and continued into a corporate instant messenger with the likes of Chatter (SalesForce), Yammer (Microsoft), Jive, and others. While capabilities have become richer, the great change is the centricity of solutions as hubs and the spokes and activity feeds that can be combined. Yet, more is needed to establish context and sensemaking.

Building Context amidst Chaos, Complexity, and Disorder

In the pressure of a crisis and needing to respond quickly with the best action, seeing the relationships and multiple layers of systems, applications, and data are essential. Is there an easier way to get everyone on the same page? Enter real-time analytics and complexity science. Understanding what matters, making sense of what connects to what, knowing what is coincidental versus what is causal are critical capabilities in the new speed of operations and humanity.

Yet even these traditional concepts may not be as finite as they once seemed. Entanglement is one of the new popular phrases that suggest causality is not a one-way street of this thing caused this outcome. In fact, outcomes are often bidirectional and extend outwards like a ripple on a pond. One framework that has distinguished itself in sense-making is Cynefin® created and evolved by David Snowden of Cognitive Edge.

What Cynefin has done better than anything else is to create a basis for describing situations and establishing a “Now What?” dialog for action. For example: in the case of Complex situations where there is no clear solution, being able to probe in parallel to rapidly test what is happening is a great key step towards refining What’s Next. There are some great videos with David Snowden on Cynefin and “Rich Data” at Cognitive Edge that will help you to understand this framework and the future ahead.

So, what can you do right now?

Visualize and Probe the Complexity and Chaos in Microsoft Teams

Without building a supermassive data lake. The edgeCore™ platform can connect the important systems and telemetry data that drive your enterprise and surface these cogently on one screen with the ability to drill all the way to native systems and correlate between systems with a single sign-on. In one click, multiple actions can test and probe to reveal deeper understanding. All of this can be visualized in one place, inside Microsoft Teams – immediate situational awareness.

Join us in our short 25-minute webinar as we demonstrate the future of collaboration today.