Sometimes the ‘right tools’ aren’t 100% perfect, but they’re better for the conversation than email. Generally speaking, this initiative is to find the right tool for the conversation… sometimes that will indeed be email. Most of the time, however, there are better tools to use which foster deeper collaboration and more transparency. Tools like forums, wikis, and blogs to name a few. We also rely heavily on instant messaging (via SameTime) for those quick 15 second one-off conversations since most of us aren’t ‘nearby’.

Without sounding like a total shill, I am 100% sold on our own product: IBM Lotus Connections, which provides community tools like the above, as well as file repositories, Activities (to-dos), bookmarks, and a host of other features to really make transparent collaboration and knowledge sharing much more effective.

And yes, sometimes email is necessary for confidential 1-1 conversations. Our intent here is to transform email from being a Q&A or task based tool which hoards and privatizes knowledge into a notification system which updates you when new knowledge is available in the right tools.

Initially, we’ve defined a few categories of emails, and broken them up into good/bad. Good being the Auto-notifications, calendar scheduling notices, and personal/confidential messages. Bad being the Q&A, status updates, and CorpComms/Announcements all of which would be better suited to sharing via channels like blogs, wikis and forums.

Mind you, our direct intent isn’t immediate organization change (that comes later), but rather to do what we can for our own inboxes and help others see that there are better channels for communication and knowledge sharing which really have a direct effect of improving effectiveness and efficiency.

If you can, I’d recommend watching this recent quick 4 minute documentary on why Luis did this back in 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnv6K5JmpTM

As a consequence, I have a zero tolerance policy for folks who use social media exclusively to bitch. Also the acronym “FML.” I hide folks who have nothing useful, interesting, or happy to contribute to my reading–not that I silence everyone the first time they say something negative, but if that’s all they’re saying? Yeah, gone.

Weirdly, I’ve never felt even the slightest urge to hide your stuff on any of my social media–maybe I’m biased, but maybe your posts aren’t as negative as you think they are.

There’s a saying that I totally don’t believe in: “Happiness is a choice.” I have a mood disorder, okay? Sometimes I can’t just choose to be happy. What I can choose to do is to be hopeful, optimistic, and try to put my best foot forward, emotionally speaking. I wish you luck doing the same. I think it’ll help people other than just you.