Often quoted, often misunderstood. Bruce Tuckman's classic description of the stages of group development is easy to understand and remember, but it helps to go back and look at what's behind each stage.

Bruce W Tuckman is a respected educational psychologist who first described the (then) four stages of group development in 1965, soon after leaving Princeton. Looking at the behavior of small groups in a variety of environments, he recognised the distinct phases they go through, and suggested they need to experience all four stages before they achieve maximum effectiveness.

He refined and developed the model in 1977 (in conjunction with Mary Ann Jensen) with the addition of a fifth stage. Since then, others have attempted to adapt and extend the model--although sometimes with more of an eye on rhyme than reason.

A powerful trend taking form in the world of collaborative communication is "social curation," which is where individuals collaboratively contribute to edit, refine, and compile valuable information resources. A prime example of this trend is a newly launched service called Pearltrees.

You can use Pearltrees to keep handy the contents you find everyday on the web, to discover new contents from people who have similar interests, and to share your contents with people who have your interests.

Southwest Airlines uses Myers-Briggs Assessment test to help teams build their communication skills.

Users behave and interact differently in virtual experiences than in standard social networking environments. In this informative video, 6Connex CEO, Kevin Carbone, and CTO, Leon Papkoff, examine why and how group dynamics are affected by the unique experience of virtual environments.

Stasser and Titus published the best sort of psychology study. Not only does it shine a new light on how groups communicate and make decisions, it also surprises, confuses and intrigues. Oddly, the results first look as if they can't be right, then later it seems obvious they are right, then attention turns to what can be done about it.

The findings were relatively straightforward and, as is often the case with decision-making research, another blow for the fragile human ego. They found that people trying to make decisions in groups spend most of their time telling each other things that everyone already knows. In comparison people are unlikely to bring up new information known only to themselves. The result: poor decisions.

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness.

The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas.

Technology and workflow processes support knowledge worker success and are increasingly sources of comparative differentiation. Those able to use new technologies to reshape how they work are finding significant productivity gains. This article shares our research on how technology can improve the quality and output of knowledge workers.

1. How do you motivate yourself to get work done after trying many things and failing over and over again?

Motivation is first just about taking that first step — just getting excited about something enough to get started. Then it’s about focusing on enjoying what you’re doing, right now, instead of worrying about how you’re going to get to a destination.

You also need to forget about your failures, or at least the part of them that gets you discouraged. Take away from your failures a lesson about what obstacles stand in your way, and leave behind any bad feelings. Those are in the past. Focus on right now, and how fun the activity is, right now.

The Google Wave invite rollout extravaganza started more than a month ago. While in some respects the buzz around Google Wave has started to subside, the term is still constantly one of the top trending topics on Twitter, and new gadgets, extensions, and applications are now starting to appear on a daily basis.

Each day more and more people are opening up their email inbox to find an invite to Google Wave. With that shiny new invite comes the inevitable quest for ideas about to how to put the medium to good use.

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Like a cross between email, instant messaging and social networking, Google Wave has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate over the internet - and that's why it's so thrilling that we've got an invite to see how it works.

We've found it very easy to use, especially because it features the same interface whether you're communicating instantaneously with someone else online, or sending a message for someone to pick up later.

Larry Winget, an 'irritational' speaker and host of Big Spender on A&E, talks about why Americans aren't getting as much done as they can. Quit whining, he says, and get to work.