Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects
On August 13, I successfully defended my dissertation. Today, I submitted my final, approved version to University of Michigan's institutional repository. That version won't be available until after I receive my degree in December, but you're welcome to read a nearly identical version of my complete dissertation.
Dissertation Abstract
In our efforts to understand how collaborative work can be accomplished, we often turn to discussions of “coordination” for help. However, the concept of coordination is inadequate for explaining the many interdependent processes at work within successful collaborations. In this dissertation, I examined a collaborative construction project – the Woods Avenue Bridge (WAB) Project – with many coordination demands. I used data from this project to develop the concept of adaptive capacity – the set of capabilities a team develops that enable them to adjust to internal and external stresses.
Through analyzing meeting minutes, interview transcripts, and documents the project team developed, I was able to identify behaviors and approaches the team took that may have enabled them to better respond to changes in their environment. I use a specific example of a time when the team successfully redesigned the structure they were building in the field to illustrate the kind of coordination work adaptive capacity enables.
From data about the WAB Project, I identified components of adaptive capacity including perspective taking, multimembership, affect, and social capital. Understanding these components and the adaptive capacity they can develop helps us understand what about a team enables them to accomplish coordination work. Without adaptive capacity, we lack an integrated explanation of the ways in which different components interact and how those components address coordination.
This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how collaborative teams accomplish coordination by refining the concept of adaptive capacity and integrating earlier literatures on coordination, collaboration, and adaptation. The concept of adaptive capacity helps us understand the resources collaborative teams develop that make it possible for them to find flexible and creative solutions to their coordination problems.
The Wrongheadedness of Best Practice Thinking
I’ve come across a gem of a book introduction, and I’m writing to recommend that you read it. Yes, all of you. The introduction is from the book Strategic Procurement in Construction
Cox and Townsend argue in their introduction, and throughout the book, that best practice thinking is wrong-headed and leaves us playing catch up. One of my favorite bits of the introduction reads:
They will be searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of best practice. By this one means practitioners are looking for the answer that provides the solution to all of the problems which they face managerially. Unfortunately, this desire to discover the single solution (best practice), that will allow the practitioner to avoid the need for thought and risk taking, is an illusion.
They go on to discuss concepts such as appropriateness and leverage and recognize that many practitioners would call their discussions “common sense.” Their response?
Some of the practitioners who read these pages may accept what has been said, and argue that this is just common sense (which it is), and that they already know this. If that is the case then this book may have little to teach them, however, because experience leads the authors to conclude that such a form of sense (in a business context) does not appear to be all that common.
I wish I’d written something like that in the paper Andy and I submitted recently that was rejected for having results that were not surprising enough. The results we found in our onboarding study were surprising because we found them and not necessarily in their content. For instance, it’s surprising that teams still behave as though new employees will be immediately productive even though the sense that onboarding takes time is apparently common. Much like Cox and Townsend find that strategic procurement is not all that common, neither are teams who smoothly onboard their new members.
My questions as I continue to read Cox and Townsend’s book are really about how one encourages strategic, reflective thinking over best practice thinking and how one should present research results that show just how uncommon common sense can be. See, one can learn things by studying construction projects. This message brought to you by my dissertation, a work in progress.
Relational Engagement in Project Teams
I participated in the ICOS dissertation poster session today, and while there had a number of helpful conversations about my dissertation. One of the preliminary findings I included on my poster discussed the perspective-taking and social language use I've noticed in interviews with members of the bridge project. Perspective-taking is a concept found in psychology literature, and it usually refers to our developed abilities to understand that other people have experiences different from our own. Some education researchers such as Hunter Gehlbach at Harvard use the idea of social perspective taking as a way to help students develop social skills. Linguists such as James Pennebaker at UT-Austin use the term social thinking to refer to language that indicates an awareness of other people.
In my data, members of the bridge building project indicate their perspective taking abilities and social thinking when they make comments such as
I would think that if you guys got involved with maybe [a community college], they have a concrete technology program up there. You could get a lot of free help with a lot of experiments up there, and they’re more than willing to work with concrete and do labs and anything you guys don’t like doing.
By saying, "I would think...," the interviewee indicates awareness that someone else might think something else. The speaker implies that there is more than one idea about what the listener ("you guys") might want to do. In other interviews, my participants express concern about the goals other members of the project have when they make statements such as, "Well, I know he's more concerned about cost." Here, the speaker explicitly tells us that he understand another person's concerns and knows their relative importance.
Why does it matter that my participants demonstrate perspective taking and use social language? Project teams that include people who respect and understand perspectives that differ from their own are more successful. By "more successful" I mean those teams are more likely to accomplish their goals, have positive affect and impressions of their work, and maybe even to work together again. The social aspects of the relational engagement that perspective taking produces eases tension and builds commitment among project team members, making it easier for project teams to work together smoothly. It may be that positive relational engagement - interactions among team members characterized by perspective taking and social thinking - is more important than project structure or timing. When we talk about projects, especially engineering projects, we often focus on how they should be managed at the project level; when should what get done, who should do it, to whom should that guy report. It may make more sense for us to focus on managing interpersonal relationships on the project team, developing trust and concern for one another. The way we relate to our project teammates is likely to have a huge impact on our ability to work together successfully.
Dissertation Abstract and Update
A number of wonderful, attentive, concerned friends and family members have asked for a dissertation update, and here it is. Thank you for thinking of me! Now all of you who wanted to know but were afraid to ask can know too. The latest short abstract is:
In the fall of 2005, drivers in a small midwestern city began crossing over an interstate on a new kind of bridge. The bridge beneath them looked like other bridges carrying city streets over the interstate, but this bridge could bend. It couldn't bend like Gumby, but it could bend like steel. Building the deck of this bendable bridge involved a state transportation department, a university research lab, and several private contractors. Given the complexity of construction projects, the challenges in doing innovative construction work, and the potential pitfalls of collaboration projects, the success of the bridge is surprising. This dissertation explores how the team managed to build a bridge with a remarkable new kind of deck.
Existing scholarship provides insight on the problems that plague projects and collaborations and identifies many mechanisms to help meet these challenges. My analysis suggests that the bridge project avoided possible problems common in projects such as (1) loose coupling among actors in a project limiting the information sharing that occurs and (2) procurement processes that encourage builders and clients to see one another as adversaries through (a) social language and its associated attention to others, (b) the flexibility and localized control loose coupling affords, and (c) the motivating influences of affect. This study will combine and extend theories about social capital, creative projects, and loose coupling in order to better understand the nature of collaborative projects involving multiple communities of practice and how those projects can be successful.
I've written at least 68 good pages and probably about 50 not-so-good ones that will eventually work their way, in part, into the good stuff. I have a few (< 10) interviews remaining, and that means more time in analysis. I'm on target for my personal deadline of a spring/summer defense and am actively seeking new opportunities beginning summer or fall of 2009.
Talking Shop
I had the great fortune to spend my afternoon at Sweetwaters with Jude and Ingrid. While working diligently on my dissertation, I have been somewhat of a recluse. I've been too tired to socialize at night and too dogged to interact much during the day. Today, I took a break from writing and analyzing data to reconnect with friends, and I find myself greatly rewarded.
Ingrid, Jude, and I are all young scholars in related fields. Today we talked about the challenges of finding an audience for our work and how audience might determine, in large part, who we are as researchers. We shared horror stories of meeting conference deadlines and the loneliness of dissertation writing. We compared notes on job hunts and what to do with dissertations once they're written. We traded citations and names of interesting researchers. We even talked about how facts on the internet are sometimes wrong. This all may sound boring or typical for academics, but remember that writing one's dissertation is a lonely, remarkably individual endeavor. Sure, committee members, student friends, understanding non-academics, etc. are essential to the process, but the bottom line is that a lone scholar spends a great portion of each day alone, silent, writing.
In answering Ingrid's question about who I interviewed this morning, I found myself remembering why I care about the bridge project I study (because it worked!) and why I'm interested in collaboration in the first place (because we change the world when we work together). When we talked about the differences between departments that focus on the ACM and those that focus on the AoM, I remembered why Michigan was the right place for me (I care deeply about what people are able to accomplish when they work together and the technologies that enable them to do so.).
I recommend getting out of your office, finding a couple colleagues you haven't talked to in a while, and making a break for a nice coffee/tea shop. Maybe you already knew that was a good idea, but I'd forgotten how satisfying such an afternoon can be.
Dissertation proposal defense, check
I passed my official dissertation proposal defense on Sept. 19. My committee and I are confident I can complete my dissertation next spring or summer. I'm scheduling my third round of interviews, pouring over construction agreements and design documents, and reviewing literature I haven't read since my field prelim. Preparing for my proposal defense helped me renew my dissertation energy, and I'm excited about being back to work on this project. My dissertation is qualitative, and my analyses are iterative. So, to avoid getting myself into jams while writing and job hunting, I won't be blogging much about my progress. I find that my theories, while in progress, are best kept within my lab group and research workshop.
What is an actor?
Some colleagues and I recently submitted a paper to a conference, and last week I sent in our rebuttals to the reviewers' comments. Our paper introduces some terms from actor-network theory (ANT) to an audience that isn't terribly familiar with ANT. I like ANT as a method, not really a theory, for helping sort through really dense, unfamiliar data. For instance, you can use ANT to help you figure out where to focus. If you enter a scenario as an ignorant sponge (as many qualitative methods ask that you do), it can be difficult to figure out what's important. It's also impossible to pay attention to everything all the time. ANT can help you find some important actors on which to focus your attention. Actors seems like a familiar term - we know of many in Hollywood, we understand what it means to act even off screen. That's not what ANT means though. For ANT, actors are something like things that cause change, or things that other actors say are actors. You can probably see why some of our reviewers got a bit confused.
I use ANT in my dissertation to talk about what had to happen for a specific bridge to be built. I couch the study in terms of actors who did work to produce the bridge. I borrow actors from ANT in that I consider non-human actors (e.g. bendable concrete) symmetrical with human actors. Objects and ideas can do work even though they're not human. They're identified as important by other actors. For instance, using bendable concrete in the bridge deck required changes in how the sidewalk was connected, how the deck connected to the regular concrete deck on either side. The bendable concrete was acting in that it was creating change. Other actors, such as a construction consultant, identified it as an actor by saying things like, "If we use that bendable concrete, then we can't use rebar there. We'll have to use something else." In that excerpt, he identified bendable concrete as the thing that caused a change. Bendable concrete has some agency. Had we entered the construction project without knowing anything, we'd know from the way the consultant talks about the bendable concrete that it is something important, that determines what other actors may or may not do (e.g. use rebar).
I think our paper does a good job of describing how ANT can help identify the important things in a set of data. When I find out if it got accepted, I'll blog about the conference itself. I have pretty strong feelings about the conference to which we submitted, and they will either grow stronger or remain in check, depending on the outcome of our submission. Oh, that drama! The intrigue! Stay tuned.
“I prefer to break [the rules] and follow my actors…”
Today I'm getting up my courage to do a truly descriptive study for my dissertation. I had a bit of practice writing good descriptions in a class last term with Curtis LeBaron, but I'm often encouraged to explain or posit causes and effects. My inner philosopher has always been troubled with that approach. I find myself getting defensive in meetings where people push me to think about what my work will mean for systems design. How can I know until I really know what's going on in the little bit of the world I study? I'm not alone in wanting more description. I'll always have Bruno Latour. In fact, the title of this post is a line from On Using ANT: a dialogue by Latour. It's a chapter in The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology (C. Avgerou, C. Ciborra, and F. Land, eds).
I've read that dialogue a number of times in the last few years, and every time I read it, I am met with a disgruntling mix of emotions. I find the dialogue quite motivating. Latour's professor encourages his student to go into the world and write his dissertation. Not to explain but to describe. And in describing to write and write and write. Not to dwell on frameworks or to think his dissertation will enlighten his subjects or even change the world. I like to describe; I'm game. Latour's professor is also frustrating though. The (near) end of the dialogue sums it up (S = student, P = professor):
S: But, your sort of "science", it seems to me, means breaking all the rules of social science training.
P: I prefer to break them and follow my actors . . . As you said, I am, in the end, a naive realist.
S: But see, I'm just a Ph.D. student. You're a professor. You have published, you can afford to do things that I can't. I have to listen to my supervisor. I simply can't follow your advice too far.
The student nailed my concern. How can I afford to do actor-network theory (yes, Latour describes it as Doing ANT) when nearly all of social science is asking me to build a framework or build on a framework and then to explain? Sigh.
Research is messy
Last week I participated in a mixed methods workshop with John Creswell. The workshop was quite valuable; we worked through designing a proposal for a real research project. I forget the name of the student whose project we outlined, but he was proposing to study biodiversity sustainability programs in Vietnam and Cambodia. We worked through various stages of his proposal including writing a problem statement, asking research questions, titling the project, etc. But, we didn't do those things in that order. In fact, we started with the title and ended with the problem statement 4 hours later. That exercise served as a reminder that no matter how straightforward work seems when it's written for publication, or even in a methods textbook, the actual moment-to-moment work is unlikely to be so linear.
I've tried to keep in mind that work is not linear, but I often get tripped up trying to follow outlines or to make my research fit into a step-by-step program that gets me to graduation next year. That's not how the world works though. I've been hunting for the right methods approach to studying the ECC story, and I've finally figured out that my study is probably best structured as a case study. And so, I've been re-reading Robert K. Yin's case study books from Sage Publications.
Yin is careful and persistent when discussing the role of theory in designing case studies, and that's the point where I'm currently stuck. My instincts (pretty well-honed by this point) tell me that communities of practice, social capital, actor-network theory, activity theory, and organizational learning have something to contribute to the theoretical framework I should use to address the ECC case. What I haven't been able to do to this point is to make them all fit together in a way that would provide a set of patterns against which I will be able to check my case study data.
My dissertation proposal has morphed into two different documents - the proposal itself and a case study protocol document. I'm even still working in both Word and LaTeX. I just received helpful feedback on the proposal document (that one's in LaTeX) from one of my committee members. He recognized that my current struggle is about clarifying the questions I want my project to answer. He says, "You need a statement of what you'd like to accomplish..." Yeah, he's right.
Part of the problem relates to the negotiated nature of this dissertation project, I think. It took me a year, but I've finally given in. I will do a study that relates to the grant that feeds me because it involves collaboration, and collaboration is definitely interesting and significant to me. Now my task is to find a set of questions that are clear, answerable, and related to the CI-TEAM grant in some way.
I blogged this because I thought it was important for me to write a stream-of-consciousness piece in case another struggling A.B.D. happens to be searching the internet for others in her boat. Sister, I'm in it. Dissertation-writing is messy. It's takes a great deal of humility, negotiation, compromise, and patience. It's not linear. It requires one to go back and forth between literature, data collection, and analysis repeatedly and in different orders. I'm pretty sure I'll have written about 10x as much content as actually ends up in the final version of my dissertation, and all of that writing is necessary and important work. Plenty of people and dissertation books talk about how dissertation writing is hard, but very few admit that it's also incredibly messy. Just when I start to feel like I've made some progress, I get thrown a curveball by some theory or data, and I'm in a whole new spot. Frustrating, yes, but I think that's just the way it is.