James L. Creighton, Ph.D.
Facilitation, Public Participation, Dispute Resolution, and Remote Collaboration
Visit jameslcreighton.com to learn about Creighton’s new book Loving Through Your Differences: Building Strong Relationships from Separate Realities and discover how his mastery of conflict resolution can be applied to saving your relationship!
Remote Collaboration
In the past decade technology has radically changed how meetings are held, how teams work together, how projects are managed. The new theme is Any Place, Any Time, and Any Platform. People can participate from wherever they are, using any device, desktop, laptop, pad, phone or even wrist watch.
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Creighton's interest in remote collaboration grew out of a contract managing support services for a US Department of Labor policy center, known as a "skunkworks." Teams developing new policies could reside for short periods of time while hammering out policy details and implementation plans.
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The Department of Labor skunkworks died with a change in the political winds, but Creighton became determined to understand what the meeting of the future would look like, and what role collaborative technology would play in them. Ultimately Creighton and Jim Adams, a senior executive responsible for the use of collaborative technology at Madison Square Garden, wrote CyberMeeting: How to Link People and Technology in Your Organization (American Management Association, 1998).
[The years have been kind to much of the material in CyberMeeting, but in some areas -- particularly in workspace design -- innovation has outstripped the book.]
Creighton and partner Joe Ouye, an architect involved in design of workplace systems, then established the New Ways of Working Network (NewWOW). NewWOW was a membership-based, interactive network of organizational innovators – people who were transforming their work environment—or preparing to do so. NewWOW combined insights from corporate real estate, human resources, and information technology. Members were experts from the fields of workspace design, technology and real estate/facilities. During the 10 years of NewWOW's existence Creighton and Ouye oversaw preparation of numerous white papers and faciliated bi-annual symposia in the US and Europe. Creighton also performed two major studies on working in remote virtual teams with the sponsorship of VTT, the Finnish National Laboratory.
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More recently Creighton completed a white paper for SMART Technologies Inc. on the use of collaboration technology in companies with mature collaboration programs. He also completed a study of the use of digital technology in muncipal public participation programs for CiviCiti, a Spanish company.
