I demonstrated Second Life a few days back to an MBA class on e-business. There seemed to be some confusion about what something like Second Life is for or what people can do there, and for that matter, why they would want to. This confusion seems to exist even among businesses that are building a presence in Second Life.

Some early adopters of the virtual world technology have already left, wondering why their attempts at establishing a virtual presence were unsuccessful. According to an article in Wired magazine, many companies have spent a lot of money to set up a presence in Second Life but don’t have much to show for their investment. These companies have generally taken an easy way out by “copying and pasting” their real world establishments into a virtual context. Their thinking goes something like this: We have a store in the real world; we can have an exact replica in Second Life. This thinking even extends to virtual team collaboration: We can have virtual team meetings in Second Life complete with an oak conference table, office chairs and avatars that resemble the real-world participants. This view of “easy” establishment of a virtual presence misses out on the innovative possibilities for the use of virtual worlds for virtual team collaboration. It assumes that virtual worlds should mimic reality and that they will work in roughly the same way as meeting face to face.

I would like to encourage leaders of virtual teams to think beyond trying to mimic reality in their use of virtual worlds for collaboration. In our recent paper on “Team Collaboration in Virtual Worlds“, my colleagues Elizabeth Carroll and Surinder Kahai and I suggest that virtual worlds offer unique possibilities for a virtual team leader to think differently. What if the avatars of all team members appeared the same? Making all avatars appear the same may help a multi-cultural team build cohesion and trust more easily by reducing perceptions of interpersonal differences. After some initial bonding has taken place, the avatars of team members could “fly together” on a multi-cultural tour to introduce team members to the artifacts and peculiarities associated with the different cultures represented in the team. When the team has to generate new ideas, the team leader could place the team in a fantastical environment to stimulate creativity. The bottom line: there are many possibilities for interacting and working in virtual worlds that are not possible in face-to-face meetings. To address the challenges faced by virtual teams, their leaders need to think creatively about how they can use virtual worlds instead of trying to replicate face-to-face meetings.

I think that the use of virtual worlds for virtual team collaboration should not be passed over as a fad. After all, wasn’t the demise of email as a communication tool predicted in the early 90’s?