The old adages: "It's not what you know, but who you know" and "High Tech, High Touch" could be the mottos of knowledge workers in the 21st Century.

Never before in the history of the world has both networking and interpersonal communication been potentially easier, broader, more wide-spread and paradoxically, more difficult.

The access to people and information in the information age is without parallel in history. The same technology which has enabled this to happen, has also reduced the time between communications from weeks to seconds.

There is simply no officially available time within which to conduct the communications on which networking and interpersonal contacts depend. The time that people used to spend thinking and crafting their communications and interacting is now at a premium. While the volume of communications has expanded exponentially so too has, what I can only refer to as 'noise'. Noise, being communications whose content is usually less than useful and in many nstances banal and not useful at all.

Most of what appears in the journals, in public forums and in discussions describes new forms of work place organisation that assume solid support from the institution in which they form.

Coherent groups which used to be called "self interest" groups and are now re-badged and called "communities of interest" or "expert groups" or 'learning communities" or 'quality circles" or "virtual teams" or "communities of practice".

Groups which do receive official encouragement and institutional support are usually not only unsuccessful, but in many instances, actively resented by the participants who are often "selected" by their senior management colleagues to attend.

The resentment appears to be based on the fact that the individual has not self selected the people with whom he/she would like to communicate, this choice is made for him/her by management. Generally there is:

• no assessment about whether the person is the 'right person' for the discussion and/or topic under discussion;

• no attempt to undertake any ice breaker exercises when the groups first meet to try and ensure that there is a sufficient and necessary breakdown of the interpersonal barriers to communication; and

• no attempt to realise or rationalise the differing political agendas that each individual has been sent to present to the meeting by his/her administrative supervisor.

The means by which these groups are set up and managed, presents a barrier to its success. This is generally not acknowledged by the management that keeps on setting up these groups, usually because they have read a little in the literature and skimmed the information, found a good idea and then without in depth knowledge about what they are doing, launched their next management 'fad'.

It is interesting to observe, by way of contrast, that those groups that self create and self moderate and do NOT include the management layer at all within their constructs, seem to do very well and achieve a lot. There is however a downside which is a period during which the original purpose of the gathering has been achieved and the group struggles to find a new 'raison d'