My boss has cancelled our weekly team meeting because he received a short-term invitation to an important meeting (with his boss).

While this is a valid reason not to attend a meeting, I don’t think it’s a good reason to cancel the meeting. It implies that the only reason the team meeting exists is to inform the boss about what’s going on – and even more that team without the boss isn’t a team at all. Delegating the meeting chair to a team member and encourage the flow of information despite obvious absences is what I call empowerment.

What do you think? Does it make sense to have a weekly team meeting if the boss is missing?

Cognitive Edge (i.e. Dave Snowden’s blog) just published a good post on the importance of context information to solve problems and learn from other people’s experiences. His point: Too often people try to establish best practices out of other people’s actions by dismissing the circumstances under which these actions were taken. He calls it the “let’s all ignore the context approach”.

His remedy: Instead of prescribing best practices, analyze and report only context, along with the trends that emerge from it, and let the great pattern recognizers we all are do the problem-solving.

This reminds me of my own Masters Thesis, which dealt with learning from failure. One of the findings was that the very act of collecting those learnings might actually harm an organization.

[Link]

If you are interested in intranet design and usability, check out this summary of the latest Nielsen report on The 10 Best Intranets of 2008. My take-aways:

• Good intranets are found in big companies that have historically been interested in usability (e.g. banks, who need to provide good interfaces for e-banking clients)
• More integration via CMS (content management systems), which usually are designed to increase usability for content providers
• There are ways of keeping intranet brand autonomy while integrating content management
• More focus on centralized employee self-service, but small tools can boost productivity as well
• Single sign-on is a major factor in increasing user satisfaction
• The best intranets are created by teams which are dedicated to produce quality content – not by those who are focusing on ROI measurements

[Link] via the Melcrum CommsNetwork mailing list