I’ve already writen someting about blogs as a self development tool, now this is wiki as a coaching tool [fr]. You can also find things in English here.

It’s a very interesting concept because it :

- it favors the adoption of a new tool

- it suggests the idea that there people can find a new way for an easy collaboration

- it allows concerned people to organize their collaboration by themselves.

- it allwos a quick evaluation by the particpants who can easily see they quickly came to an interesting result.

- it favors the emergence of a culture of exchange in the organization.

We now have feed back[fr] on a coaching session based on “wikipedia raid”.

So what happened (translation of the post in short)

• Context :
• a group of people who’ve been working together for 3 days, who are easy the ones whith the others
• they know and they are used to goup efficiency techniques and tools
• The exercise :
• You have 2H30 to organize yourselves in groups
• You have tho produce and publish on Wikipedia a “quite perfect” article on a defined subject.

At the beginning the group was hesitating :

• Emergence of subgroups
• Discussions, disagreements
• Isolated initiatives

Then the group started producing

• a series of short posts
• that were independant but linkable
• and that he aggregated in a 3 web pages document

At the end they provided quite a good entry on wikipedia on a subject that have nearly been treated before.

The group was satisfied because they successed in the allowed time and the result is public and published on wikipedia.

The observation of group member’s behaviours, attitudes and discussions about regulation was also very interesting.

I see two interesting points:

- evolution of team practices

- getting used with a new kind of tools.

I also had a comment from the consultant that made this session : people didn’t know anything about wikis before, they liked it and they suggested to use it at work. But IT department doesn’t like this kind of proposal at all