Hi, my name is Kapil and I'm a PhD student at Northwestern University.
Today I'm going to talk about complex
work, how workplaces support it, and why it's made work so much harder.
So work has become more complex as we have tried to solve harder problems.
As an oversimplified model,
routine work has historically involved us being assigned tasks to complete.
Whereas in complex work such as research, people start with broad goals that have
many tasks and needs to be done to meet it, with some requiring external support.
This requires workplaces to be flexible enough to coordinate resources from across
the organization to resolve the work needs.
This has led to workplaces becoming
increasingly networked in their organization through the adoption of agile processes,
effective social structures for collaboration,
and tools that support work activities such as planning and finding support.
As organizations become more networked, people's effectiveness in them depends
on how well they can access the available support for their work needs.
However, we currently have a limited understanding of how it's actually done.
While prior work in CSCW has studied how
people learn about and create mental models of expertise
and how people create ad-hoc infrastructures of tools and others
for their goals, we have not studied the experience
of people working in network organizations with established, complex support networks.
And so our paper asks how do people actually use established networks
of support and what do they struggle with in doing so?
So we conducted a qualitative study of an Agile Research Studio,
which is a network learning community that supports academic research training
through venues where students access their peers and mentors, and work
in collaboration tools that support interactions in those venues.
Our study involved a total of 19 people
across undergrad researchers, Ph.D. Students and faculty mentors over two terms.
We did field observations during planning
meetings and semi-structured interviews to understand how work needs were
identified and strategies planned to address them.
We analyzed our data using a thematic
analysis approach to understand the complexities of the working
and coaching process in a networked organization and any challenges.
Our analysis showed that working in a network organization is difficult
because people are continually engaging with an entire network of support
to identify, clarify, and resolve their needs.
This starts by breaking down needs
into smaller needs that can be addressed through support interactions.
As an example, consider Charlie, a student from our study who is preparing
a Status Update activity on his work that will be resented to the entire community.
He begins working towards the Status Update goal by breaking it down into three
needs: brainstorming for the activity; getting feedback on those ideas;
and getting feedback on the planned activity itself.
As broken down needs are known,
people now think about who or what can support the need.
This involves understanding what kinds of support different venues,
tools, and people can provide, which we found students build up over time
across repeated interactions with the community.
For example, Charlie could get feedback on his Status Update ideas from his mentor
or from a peer, depending on who is available to help.
Now they can start planning how to complete their needs.
This process is surprisingly complicated though, since attempting to resolve a need
often brings out a new refined need that takes precedence over others.
For example, Charlie first brainstormed
ideas on his own and then reached out for a meeting with his mentor to discuss them.
However, his mentor actually pointed out
that he should be thinking about the gaps in his research understanding first,
and then plan his Status Update activity to target one of those gaps.
This new need then required him to repeat the process of identifying support
opportunities and continuing the sequencing process.
In this way, we start to see how working in these communities is a continual
process of evaluating one's needs, trying to resolve them,
and then trying to identify new needs to work through
challenges did pop up along the process, with a notable one being how people dealt
with support opportunities no longer being accessible.
One way this happened, as David explained,
was when people who had accumulated a lot of experience left the community,
requiring him to find others who could help.
So, in short, working in a network workplace is quite
complicated and people don't know how to do this automatically.
And so extensive coaching has to be
provided for people to learn effective ways to access support.
But even here, as we'll see, the coaching process is much, much,
much harder than what mentors go through for routine work, where really all they're
doing is helping a student learn about the task itself and how to do it.
For complex work, you're not only doing
that, but you're also helping people think about
the different ways they can use the network to support them.
So let's take a look at what this looks like.
First, mentors help their students in breaking down their needs by suggesting
other relevant needs or helping refine the existing ones students have.
Then they help them think about what
venues are appropriate for different needs and to use a broad network for support,
such as going to a peer rather than a mentor.
In this way, mentors are not only coaching students on how to actually do the project
work, but they're also helping them be effective workers in a networked workplace.
However, mentors also have very little visibility into how people actually
accessed and sequenced support across the network.
Mentors only saw a tiny slice of interactions their students were having
because they don't attend all the venues in which students work.
This prevents them from understanding if
their students are doing the strategies that they suggested and if they are
sequencing them like they discussed, as Nancy described.
And that's not all.
Mentors are often doing this from multiple students who each have different needs
and are strategizing on how to use the network to resolve them.
This results in an immense amount
of information that mentors have to keep track of and monitor for.
And in our study, we found that mentors really, really struggled with this.
And as a result, needs and practices that students
could adopt them and make them more effective and mentors may want to discuss
could go undiscussed because there's simply no way to track them.
And so, in summary,
we see that the incredible amount of additional work it takes to be
an effective member and coach of these kind of network communities.
And given this,
we believe that technology is probably necessary to support network workplaces.
But our current approach to designing
workplace technologies has really been to keep adding individual systems
that support work activities, and just installing them into our ecosystems.
That's not enough though,
for us to manage the complexity of network work because individual tools cannot help
us understand interactions across the entire network.
Instead, we really need to take
an ecosystem's view of technology design that can understand and support
interactions that occur across an entire network.
Kind of like the orange arrows here in this diagram that show how Charlie
worked through his Status Update preparation.
And so in future work,
we envision doing this by creating an orchestration scripting system that is
able to instrument the venues and tools in a network community so that we can
collect observable data about how people are interacting with the network.
Through this instrumentation,
we can even go and write strategies about what ways of working are effective
and allow those to be enacted in the situations where support could be
provided, such as providing a student with resources to prepare a status update.
This would allow us to move towards
a future where we can actually design tools that help us manage the complexity
created by having network workplaces and thus make us more effective in them.
And so, to summarize, we showed that working in network
communities involves a continual engagement between one's own needs, and all the people, venues, and tools found in the organization.
And that providing coaching support involves scaffolding the process of breaking down
needs and learning how to select relevant support opportunities in the network.
Together, this shows an incredible amount
of additional work involved in being successful in network communities beyond
what people and coaches would already do for the work.
And finally, we argue that for technology to help manage the complexity of working
in networked workplaces, it needs an ecosystem level view
of the interactions occurring across the entire organization.
Thank you for listening.