The Tacit Knowledge of Team Leadership

Don't let the title of
Towards an Ecological Theory of Sustainable Knowledge Networksby Conklin et al put you off. Its full of insight about project teams (rather than knowledge networks in general). One thing caught my eye:

"The process of team formation is complex. Leaders have tacit knowledge about how to move a team through a process, and they access that knowledge in face to face meetings. When in virtual collaborations, they don't have that, e.g. they may not recognize that they don't have alignment about team goals"

Note that the barrier isn’t lack of knowledge, but the absence of the stimulus needed to retrieve it. The dynamic of the face-to-face interaction is what triggers the intuitive manager to take the right course. He may only sense subliminally the lack of alignment, but he'll intuitively do what it takes to correct that. Few managers would explicitly have a process with a "check alignment" gate, but they all know it must be done. Even bumping into a team member and subsequent chit chat can lead to an explicit awareness that they need information you hadn't thought to pass on.
Face-to-face we react as social animals - we meet, we chat. With email you don't 'meet' and chat is far less common. How often when you meet in person do begin with smalltalk? Whereas in email its acceptable – even encouraged – to get straight to the point. Yet without this social wavelength, few managers can access all the knowledge they need to implement a team formation process.