for W3c validation

Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

Driving Remote Innovation Through Conflict and Collaboration

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Anne says: I think we’re all familiar with these commonly heard laments over the last year of pandemic disruptions: “When we’re all working remotely, we can’t innovate”. “You can’t be spontaneous”. “We’ve lost the serendipity of bumping into people”. The authors of this article set out to investigate how some organisations were achieving innovation, remotely.

Their findings revealed two complementary principles for remote innovation:

• Connecting for collaboration
  ”One-on-one connections and conversations are essential for building the collaborative trust that underpins innovation in remote teams“.

• Connecting for contradiction
  ”To achieve the tension and debate necessary for innovation in remote workplaces, leaders must deliberately polarize perspectives, juxtaposing and exaggerating different or opposing views, and enable individuals to see the bigger picture”.

The article describes some activities practised by the organisations interviewed for the study. The examples go far beyond Zoom fatigue, back-to-back scheduled video meetings. When you consider the simplicity of their strategies, you wonder why everyone isn’t doing this? The article doesn’t attempt to answer that question, and it’s a bigger discussion topic than can be presented here – but I found it challenged me to consider the effectiveness of current meetings. Perhaps it’s a simple framework to guide meeting purpose – if we’re wanting to innovate, then are we wanting to collaborate, have we built relationships? Have we looked at different perspectives? Have we explored the contradiction?

If you’ve been innovating effectively recently, we’d be keen to hear your strategies and perspectives on what makes them successful.

Read: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/driving-remote-innovation-through-conflict-and-collaboration/

Loneliness

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Jakkii says: I’m going really left field today because… well, because I can! I do think it’s an important issue, though, and something that can affect any of us.

Loneliness has been a growing health concern in western societies, particularly for the elderly, and the pandemic has only heightened this disquiet through increased isolation for far greater numbers of people during quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions and social distancing. There are a lot of people thinking and talking about this subject, as any Google search will show, from WIRED taking a look at The weird science of loneliness and our brains, through to the ABC’s The Signal podcast exploring whether we need a Minister for Loneliness. In Denmark, organisations are banding together to launch a collective fight against loneliness.

The article I’m sharing this week, Why is making friends so hard?, looks at the roots of loneliness and considers what solutions there might be. It’s a long piece that ultimately focuses in on friendship. It offers more a collection of short pieces of information and stories than it does a cohesive argument or real answers, but there’s quite a bit of food for thought here for mine.

This piece may not have all the answers, but I think it’s more important than ever that we be aware of loneliness and its effects, and make efforts when we can to reach out to and connect with others, from small interactions through to nurturing our strong friendships. That benefits us, of course, but it also benefits others, which includes not just people in our personal lives but in our work lives, as well.

Read: https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/why-is-making-friends-so-hard/428214/

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace

• It’s time for an adult conversation about the hybrid workplace

• Where hybrid work can’t work

• Why CIOs are key to the new hybrid workplace

• Work’s new normal takes shape and some companies will botch it

• Asia: Leading the world to shape the future of hybrid work

Remote work and the digital workplace

• Why remote working will not become the new work model

• Nearly half of workers will quit their job if their workplace technology is not up to scratch

• Future of work: how to fix the digital employee experience blind spot

• Three popular remote work myths to leave behind in 2021

• How remote work has led to a surge in the number of connected devices

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• The surprising usefulness of vaccine bots

• Without his Twitter account, Trump’s conspiracy theories find little traction

• You can finally ask Facebook’s oversight board to remove bad posts. Here’s how.

• What is ‘community’ when everyone is isolated?

• The Lurker, Collaborator, Contributor or Creator

Privacy and data

• Clubhouse CEO says user data was not leaked, contrary to reports

• Apple shares more details about its imminent App TrackingTransparency feature

• ‘This must not be permanent’: Privacy experts sound alarm over QR codes

• Facebook faces formal Irish privacy probe into data leak

• Your WhatsApp account is very easy for strangers to disable

Big tech

• Google blocks advertisers from targeting black lives matter YouTube videos

• As Apple and Facebook clash over ads, mom-and-pop shops fear they’ll be the victims

• Microsoft takes advantage of antitrust spotlight on rivals to go hunting for large acquisitions, buys AI speech tech company Nuance for $19.7 billion

• Apple says iMessage on Android ‘will hurt us more than help us’

• Why Microsoft wants Discord

Facebook

• How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower’s account

• Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

• ‘Facebook isn’t interested in countries like ours’: Azerbaijan troll network returns months after ban

• Facebook says it’s not responsible for Australian media’s diversity problems, won’t rule out blocking news again

• New study shows that Facebook’s job ad algorithm still discriminates based on gender

Social media

• How can social media and influencers contribute toward societal good?

• One Direction and growing up within an online community

• The anatomy of a Chinese online hate campaign

• Clubhouse clones: Reddit explores voice chat feature while Facebook tests Hotline, a Q&A product that’s a mashup of Clubhouse and Instagram Live

• Pinterest adds influencer guidelines to encourage positivity and launches its first-ever creator fund

Extras

How do you do, fellow trees? pic.twitter.com/ip7tLPRzV1

— Goats? (@Gooooats) April 8, 2021

This is interesting: 20 Nintendo games that changed history

Things that make you go hmmm: NYPD stirs cyberpunk fears with robot dog

Space: The most intimate portrait yet of a black hole

Podcast: Tech Won’t Save Us: Bursting the NFT bubble with Jacob Silverman

Friday playlist: Happy Beats

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: as the world sets out to regulate gig work, we look at its surprising consequences and wider impact.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

09:44 – A new deal for Uber drivers in UK renews debates about gig work

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/unpacking-the-gig-economy-impact-on-the-future-this-week/