Many of the ways we communicate are 1-1 instead of many-to-many and thus, accidentally, obscure important information from the group (or rely on the memory of individuals to share important information - never wise).
For example, many of us still email key information as attachments (an attached document, for example) - particularly when sharing with people outside our own organisations (within an organisation, hopefully most people understand to email a link to a document on a shared central location; but from my own experience I know this isn't always the case). For example, a document author may send their document to multiple reviewers. The problem with this approach is that it only supports 1-1 communication; the actions and thoughts of each reviewer is hidden from the others, resulting in confusion and also replication of work and effort. It also opens up the pain of having to amalgamate comments and changes from multiple documents into a new 'master' document. Finally, it opens up the chance of document versions getting mixed up. The simple solution is to have one master document available in one location for all. Fortunately, there are many online tools that support this, a well-known example being GoogleDocs. Many of these offer fantastic features to track changes across multiple authors and can even notify group members when parts of a document has been changed (another great example of making things visible). Many of these are even free. So, a good starting point for all of us it to keep asking ourselves how we can move from the relative invisibility of 1-1 sharing to group-sharing (making things visible to the group).
I've also found that traditional documents seem to have an inertia to being changed; they quickly become 'dead'. I.e. the effort of updating them and then sending the updates by email to multiple recipients quickly becomes 'not worth the effort', so people stop doing it. However, changing an online document is relatively easy and also opens the possibility of other users being automatically notified that the change has been made (thus inviting comments/responses, without the author of the change always having to explicitly ask for this).
Of course, this doesn't just have to be about document sharing. Anywhere we traditionally share information by paper or by 1-1 email we have an opportunity to make things more clear and visible. E.g. online project management tools that allow everyone to see shared deadlines, tasks, documents and information.
Another good example is email. Often you respond to a question by someone with information that would be useful to others. When you only respond to one person, this useful information is lost. However, it is not helpful to constantly CC: people into every email. Two possible solutions:
1) Favour online collaboration tools that allow you to attach emails to projects or areas of interest, so that anyone can view them when they choose.
2) copy all emails (as a default setting) to a shared repository area so people can browse/search this when they choose.
The benefits of this approach are so big, I'm tempted to say that we should perhaps abandon ANY simple information creating application that is on our Desktop (e.g. a word processor) and ALWAYS use online versions who have a default setting of public to the group. This wouldn't work for everything (some power applications don't currently have good online alternatives), but might be incredibly helpful for 90% of what we do.
