The key capacity for using tools

My friend Rowan was exploring some online tools and asking the question, how do we make these tools useful and relevant.   My response, which I posted at his blog, goes like this:

In my experience what is most important is to first understand what your community needs.   For example, a small group in the organization I am currently working with wanted a tool that allowed people to work on a document, but to only have access to the most recent draft.   They set up an experimental wiki to do it, but that entailed them all learning wiki technology, which is not what they wanted to do.   I showed the Google docs, which allows people to collaborate on one version of a document and which saves revisions and everything else.   It looks and acts like a word processor.   There was no learning curve, other than just figuring out how to get in and share documents, and they were able to get right down to the work they were doing.

In English we have an expression: “If all you have is a hammer, then everything you see is a nail.”   In other words, we get so taken with our tools that we don’t see the underlying needs of the people we are working with.   In both the worlds of online collaboration and face to face collaboration I think the most important role of the facilitator is to be fluent in a vast variety of tools and to only use what is essential to the task.

Therefore, I’m fond of my own library of facilitation tools, and sites like this one, that show all the kinds of Web 2.0 tools that are available to help collaboration.   Play with them yourself so that you can discover what they can all do and then when the need arises, you’ll be familiar enough with them to propose just what is needed and not any more than necessary.