Event design

Do they want to be here?

Monday, August 2nd, 2021 by Adrian Segar

We’re at a workshop, conference, or session. Do I want to be here? Do they want to be here?

Sometimes we simply don’t.

Swap the perspective

Now, you are leading a workshop, conference, or session. It’s very likely there are people present (perhaps a majority, perhaps all of them) who don’t want to be there.

How can you best serve them?

Here’s a simple answer.

A helpful exchange

A month ago, experiential trainer Shannon Hughes asked members of Facebook’s Applied Improvisation Network private group for thoughts about her frustrating experience running a workshop.

Do they want to be here? Screenshot of Facebook post by Shannon HughesShannon Hughes asked a question. "Just finished a 90-min workshop that was like pulling teeth from start to finish. Visibly distracted, clearly checking emails, no engagement or dialogue during debrief. I’m exhausted! I know it’s no reflection on me, but I can’t help wondering if this is at all “telling” of the way the session was marketed to participants beforehand and/or whether it’s a sign these are not my ideal client. Am I naive or acting a martyr for asking these questions? I’d love to get a convo going around how we manage our own expectations and energy when our sessions fall flat. Thoughts? Yours truly. Shannon Hughes"
June 30, 2021 post on Facebook’s Applied Improvisation Network private grou

Here’s what she wrote:

“Just finished a 90-min workshop that was like pulling teeth from start to finish. Visibly distracted, clearly checking emails, no engagement or dialogue during debrief. I’m exhausted!
I know it’s no reflection on me, but I can’t help wondering if this is at all “telling” of the way the session was marketed to participants beforehand and/or whether it’s a sign these are not my ideal client.
Am I naive or acting a martyr for asking these questions? I’d love to get a convo going around how we manage our own expectations and energy when our sessions fall flat.
Thoughts?
Yours truly.
Shannon Hughes“

A helpful comment

Among many great comments, Edward Liu‘s stood out.

“Lot of good suggestions so far. The only thing I can add is from one of the best work trainings I ever did, where the first thing the instructor asked was, “who’s here because they want to be and who’s here because they were told to be?” The majority were “told to be,” which she acknowledged and said, “I was told to be here, too, here’s what I suggest to make our experience a little better for the 2 days we all have to be here” and then outlined her expectations and some basic ground rules. I can’t even remember what they were, because I was so struck by an instructor acknowledging that maybe we didn’t really want to be in the class.

She was good enough that we all wanted to be there after an hour or two, and also happened to teach a bunch of management techniques that I can now frame in applied improv terms. But I’d say her very first question was itself an improv technique: Listen to your partner, recognize what they want, and then do your best to give it to them. More often than not, trying to do that means they’ll reciprocate. In this case, your partner is the whole class and you can use the question to intuit what it is they actually want vs what you were hired to do, and then improv your way to ensuring you both get to group mind about the session as a whole as soon as you can.” [Emphasis added.]

Lots of good stuff! Here’s my take.

How to work with folks who don’t want to be here

1. Ask the key question that Edward shared:

At the start of your workshop, conference, or session, ask who chose to be here and who was told they had to be.

2. If there are people who don’t want to be here, then immediately sympathize with them! If possible and appropriate, gently find out why they had to attend.

3. Next, explore what you might be able to do to optimally meet attendees’ wants and needs:

Perhaps you can modify your workshop or session appropriately. In some cases, the Powers That Be may prescribe the entire curriculum, and there’s little or nothing you can do. But in most cases, you’ll have some latitude to adjust what happens while you’re together. If so, first use pair share to get participants thinking about what they’d ideally like to happen. Then run Post It! to hear what they’ve come up with and create a revised plan that takes the expressed wants and needs into effect.

This work is well worth doing if only to let attendees know that you’re thinking about their wants and needs right from the start. But you can almost always improve your time together by simply asking Edward’s opening question and responding sensitively to the answers you receive.

A closing story

I once taught Computer Science for a decade at a small liberal arts college. Every year, I’d teach an introductory class. One year, the class felt very different. Students were more disengaged than usual. The whole classroom environment seemed different. It took me a few weeks before I was bold enough to share my experience with the students. When I did so, I learned that a third of the class was there to fulfill a degree requirement I didn’t know about, imposed by a new joint degree program with another institution. At every class I’d taught previously, all the students had chosen my class voluntarily. I was getting a crash course in teaching students who didn’t want to be here.

I wish I’d thought to ask my students at the first class why they were there. Perhaps I could have made the class a bit better for those who had no choice.

If you are leading a workshop or session and have any suspicion that some attendees may not want to be there, ask them! Your experience and theirs may be all the better for it!

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Hub and spoke meetings

Monday, July 19th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Ever since my first encounter with the hybrid hub and spoke meeting topology at Event Camp Twin Cities in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of the format. Yesterday [see below], I realized that hub and spoke is a great format for purely online meetings too. But first…

…What’s a hub and spoke meeting?

A hub and spoke meeting is one where there’s a central hub meeting or event that additional groups (aka “pods”) of people join remotely.hub spoke meeting: A diagram with a yellow circle at the center labeled "hub event". Connected to it by dotted lines are six smaller purple circles of various sizes labeled "pod 1" (and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)Hub and spoke is an event network topology. The hub event and each pod may be either in-person or online.

A terminology reminder
In-person meeting: participants are physically together.
Online meeting: participants are connected to each other via an internet platform like Zoom or Teams.
Hybrid meeting: A meeting with in-person and online components as defined above, plus additional forms explored below.

The benefits of hub and spoke

Increased learning, interaction, and connection

If you want maximum learning, interaction, and connection at a meeting, small meetings are better than large meetings. Using good meeting design, simply splitting a single large group of participants into multiple small groups in an intelligent way provides increased opportunities for each group’s members to connect and interact around relevant content.

Flexibility

Hub and spoke topology allows tremendous design flexibility for a meeting.

In-person pods can be set up at any convenient geographical location, reducing travel time and costs for pod participants while still providing the benefits of in-person interaction.

You can segment online pods to reflect specific “tribes”: groups of people with something in common. For example, think about a conference to explore the implications of a medical breakthrough. One pod could be for patient groups that the discovery will affect. Another might include medical personnel able to deliver the new technology or procedure. Yet another group could contain scientists working on the next iterations. [A hat tip to Martin Sirk for suggesting this example!]

Creating pods that reflect event participant segments allows different communities’ goals and objectives to be optimally met while sharing with all participants a common body of learning and experiences via the hub.

Convenience

As noted above, using in-person pods can dramatically reduce the travel time and cost for event participants without sacrificing the benefits of meeting in person. This allows more people to attend the hub and spoke meeting, and makes it easier for them to do so.

Hub and spoke variants

Depending on the choices made, a hub and spoke event will take one of the following forms:

In-person hub and in-person pods

This is the classic hybrid hub and spoke format that we used 14 years ago at Event Camp Twin Cities (ECTC).

Producing Event Camp Twin Cities 2011

Here’s a little information about the groundbreaking ECTC. Besides the attendees at the in-person hub event in Minneapolis, seven remote pods in Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Silicon Valley, and two corporate headquarters were tied into a hub feed that—due to the technology available at the time—was delayed approximately twenty seconds. As you might expect, this delay led to several communication issues between the hub and pods. I wrote about ECTC in more detail here.

There will always be some communications delay between the hub and pods, though these days it can be reduced to a fraction of the delay at ECTC. Such delays should be taken into account when designing hub and spoke events.

Online pods

My recent experience of being in an online pod viewing an online hub event made me realize that online pods can be used to great effect with either in-person or online hub events.

Since February 2021, my friend, tech producer, and meeting industry educator Brandt Krueger has been hosting weekly EventTech Chats on Zoom, together with another friend, his talented co-host, “The Voice of Events”, Glenn Thayer. Yesterday, Brandt was presenting at an MPI event on hybrid meetings, so Glenn shared the event so we could kibitz. Seven of us were in a Zoom, watching a Zoom…

hub spoke meeting

I commented about the recursive nature of this…

…and Anh Nguyen replied that the experience was like Inception. She also mentioned Giggl, which, similarly, allows a group to interact (text and voice) on a shared internet portal. This could be useful if you don’t have a Zoom license.

Our pod experience

The MPI meeting had over 150 viewers. We noticed that there was little interaction on the MPI Zoom chat. Our little group was much more active on chat. We were a small group with a common set of interests, and we all knew each other to some extent.

It’s clear to me that we had a much more interactive, useful, and intimate discussion than the hub event group.

Yes, this is one anecdotal example. But I hope you can see how being in a small pod of connected folks can lead to a better experience than being one of many attending the same event at a hub.

The ease, with today’s technology, of creating an online pod with whomever you please to watch and comment on a hub event, makes this an attractive option for attending the hub event directly online. (If you wanted to, of course, you could do both—as Glenn Thayer did for our pod.)

In-person and online pods

Finally, there’s no reason why a hub event can’t support a mixture of in-person and online pods. (In fact, ECTC had a small number of individual remote viewers as well, though I suspect they could only watch the hub stream.) Once the hub stream is available, one can share it with an online pod, or on a large screen with an in-person pod. Mix and match to satisfy event stakeholders’ and participants’ wants and needs!

Conclusion

I believe that hybrid meetings, catapulted into industry awareness by the COVID-19 pandemic, will be a permanent fixture of the meeting industry “new normal”. Once we’ve firmly established the design and production expertise needed for hybrid, hub and spoke is a simple addition that promises the many advantages I’ve described in this post.

It may take a while, but I think we are going to see a growing use of this exciting and flexible format.

What do you think about hub and spoke meetings? Have you experienced one, and, if so, what was it like? Do you expect to use this format in future events? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Is the end of an event important?

Monday, July 12th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Is the end of an event important? Animated graphic showing three illustrations: a trail through a landscape, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and a runner breasting a tape at the end of a raceIs the end of an event important?

It’s complicated.

12 years ago, I wrote about how to create especially memorable events. Including many different kinds of short experiences during our meetings, allows us to hack the peak-end rule to maximize the impact of an event on attendees.

Here’s what I said…

…the peak-end rule suggests that we judge experiences largely based on how they were perceived at their peak and at their end. This implies that we should concentrate on making sure that our events end powerfully. That’s because the peak-end rule implies that we’ll better remember an event with a peak and then a powerful finish than one with two peak experiences sandwiched in the body of the event.
—Hack the peak-end rule to maximize conference impact, April 2013

So, clearly, we should ensure that events end with a “powerful finish”, so they’ll be especially memorable.

Right?

Well, maybe not.

What can we learn from professional speakers?

Think about good professional speakers for a moment. They know about the peak-end rule. Professional speakers invariably include one or more peak moments during their presentation and end powerfully. They do this to be memorable.

Good professional speakers have an emotional impact, which makes them memorable. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s no guarantee you’ll learn anything more from them than a “poor” presenter covering the same content.

The danger of focusing on a powerful event ending

There’s nothing wrong with employing a powerful event ending to make it memorable.

Unless—we do so at the expense of making the entire event not only memorable but also useful.

Because memorability is great while it lasts. But it isn’t usually important in the long term.

What is important is that the entire event ends up satisfying stakeholders’ goals and objectives as much as possible.

Here’s Seth Godin’s take on the danger of what he calls the focus on the last thing:

“…We focus on the thing that happened just before the end. And that’s almost always an unimportant moment.

Things went wrong (or things went right) because of a long series of decisions and implementations…

When you get to the thing before the last thing, don’t sweat it. It’s almost certainly too late to make the outcome change. On the other hand, when you’re quietly discussing the thing before that before that before that before that, it might pay to bring more attention to it than the circumstances seem to demand. Because that’s the key moment.”

—Seth Godin, The focus on the last thing

So, is the end of an event important?

The answer is yes.

And, so is everything that leads up to it!

To make an event maximally useful and productive, concentrate on its conference arc rather than a grand climax.

That’s the way to create a truly memorable event for everyone involved.

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How meeting professionals can measure and improve event ROI in a post-pandemic world

Monday, July 5th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

[My June 2021 guest post for BlueJeans by Verizon on event ROI.]Event ROI: Illustration with buildings in a cloud "raining" down dollar signs. Below them are people with arms crossed thinking about dollars surrounded by rotating circles.

What is event ROI?

Return On Investment (ROI) is such a familiar business concept that it’s easy to gloss over the complexities of defining it in the context of events. So let’s define event ROI in a little more detail.

Typically, ROI is thought of as a financial metric to evaluate the profitability of an investment. Some event stakeholders use ROI as a financial tool to evaluate the profitability of holding or attending an event. Others view it as a non-financial metric. For example, an academic invited to speak at a meeting might compare their investment of time and money spent attending with their expected return of increased status, easier access to colleagues, or greater likelihood of obtaining tenure.

Rather than spend more time delving into the complexities of defining event ROI (explore further at the Event ROI Institute), suffice it to say that event ROI is an intricate attempt to measure value for event stakeholders.

Who gets ROI at an event?

Events have multiple stakeholders. All events have owners, suppliers of services and products, and attendees. And there are often other stakeholders, such as associated organizations, exhibitors, employees, and volunteers.

Which stakeholders receive the event ROI?

Ideally, all of them!

For example:

  • Event owners expect to profit financially from the event, or its contribution to shareholder value, or its support of an organization’s mission.
  • Suppliers of services and products plan to make a financial profit from their investment of time and resources, and perhaps firm up additional profitable business too.
  • Exhibitors hope to gain new customers, maintain or strengthen existing business relationships, increase brand awareness, and promote their offerings to a wider audience, thus obtaining greater market share.
  • Attendees profit by learning about top-of-mind topics and issues of interest, getting their questions answered, building their knowledge peer network, and maintaining or increasing their status and visibility.

Notice that different event stakeholders think of ROI in very different ways. Successful win-win events provide attractive ROI for every stakeholder.

Event ROI and the pandemic

With the loss of most in-person meetings during the pandemic, stakeholders with tangible investments in face-to-face meetings have an ROI of zero. The meeting industry continues to reel under a wave of cancellations, postponements, and uncertainty.

Post-pandemic, potential event ROI is not significantly different from what it was before, except that the delivery models for meetings are going to be different. It seems likely that the mix will include:

  • Fewer in-person;
  • More online; and
  • More hybrid (in-person and online) meetings.

Considerations for event owners

Calculating post-pandemic ROI is especially difficult for event owners because it’s not clear yet:

  • What the mix of these three delivery models will be.
  • How eager people will be to attend in-person events.
  • Whether there are attractive ROI models for online exhibitors, who are typically significant revenue contributors to in-person meetings.
  • What will people be willing to pay for online attendance, compared to what they paid for pre-pandemic face-to-face meetings?

In addition, the meeting industry is still clarifying the production costs involved with larger online meetings. After a year of hasty learning how to produce online events that satisfy still indeterminate norms for event production quality and reliability, it’s still unclear what a typical online meeting will involve and cost for each of the different pre-pandemic meeting sectors.

Considerations for event supplies and attendees

Calculating post-pandemic ROI for suppliers and attendees is unlikely to be markedly different from what they did before. Attendees, of course, will now often have the option to attend online or in person. It will be interesting to see the choices people make. One clear trend has been the increase in attendance for meetings that have successfully transitioned to online from in-person. Larger audiences at such events may be a way to increase revenue (though at a lower cost-per-seat) over time.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic positively affected the meeting industry?

Yes, the coronavirus pandemic has had a terrible impact on the meeting industry. But, there’s a silver lining.

During the pandemic, online meetings replaced many in-person meetings. Producing and experiencing online meetings has been challenging. Yet stakeholders have discovered numerous positive aspects, including:

  • You’re instantly “there”. Travel expense and time is eliminated, with an associated sustainability bonus.
  • It’s become clear that many in-person meetings can be conducted just as effectively and successfully online. Meeting stakeholders now have much more experience as to when online can replace in-person meetings.
  • Participants’ increased familiarity and acceptance of online meetings have led to the rise of new ways of meeting for organizations. I’ve worked with clients who have replaced large in-person meetings of physically separated senior executives with more frequent, smaller, tightly targeted online meetings. These meetings have been so well received, that they will continue online post-pandemic.
  • Online meetings, which attendees can easily leave or ignore, have increased stakeholder awareness of the importance and value of using engaging, interactive meeting formats.

Event platforms for connection

The pressure to find comprehensive replacements for face-to-face meetings has sped the development of technology platforms that better support connection between participants. Pre-pandemic online platforms were designed to provide broadcast-style meeting formats. A host of new online platforms, like Gatherly, Wonder, and others, allow fluid, participant-driven connection much closer to that found in an in-person meeting social. These platforms provide the “hallway conversations” missing from larger platforms, like Zoom, BlueJeans, and Teams.

Finally, the pandemic has helped the meeting industry to better appreciate the unique advantages that pre-pandemic, in-person events could offer. The value of our human desire to meet in person, unfettered by masks and social distancing, has only been strengthened by its absence. The meeting industry will never be the same after this pandemic. But, thanks to it, we have all gained a heightened awareness of the importance of face-to-face meetings in our lives.

Improving event ROI

The COVID-19 pandemic has given the meeting industry and its customers a painful but potentially valuable opportunity to rethink events.

The most promising way to improve event ROI involves simple but fundamental changes to the processes and meeting formats we use at our meetings.

During the last decade, the meeting industry has become aware of the importance of providing meetings that are highly relevant, interactive, and engaging. In the past, once you induced attendees to attend an in-person meeting they became captives of the meeting program.  They were trapped in the middle of a row of seats during sessions that were often irrelevant/poorly presented/boring.

Over a year of online meetings with attendees routinely tuning out after a few minutes, has clearly shown the poor quality of the majority of traditional meeting sessions.

Improving meetings

Decades of experience show that you can improve all kinds of meetings, whether in-person or online, by designing them to:

  • Provide opening opportunities for participants to discover who else is present, what they want to discuss and learn about, and the collective expertise and experience that’s available to tap.
  • Include significant time for participant-driven sessions. In other words, the meeting provides a real-time structure for participants to choose what they want to discuss and learn, and then create sessions that meet those wants and needs.
  • Create and strengthen community throughout the meeting. Meetings are perhaps the most powerful ways to build community. This pays rich long-term dividends for everyone involved. Yet traditional meetings provide little if any explicit support for community building.

When participants are truly happy with the meetings they attend, all stakeholders benefit. The adoption of participant-driven and participation-rich meeting formats improves event ROI. Why? Because such events are better at satisfying stakeholders’ actual wants and needs. It’s not surprising that responsive and interactive event designs and sessions are steadily replacing the lecture-centric formats of many formerly webinar-style meetings.

Event ROI is likely to improve in other ways, of course. For example, as online meeting technology matures, production costs will likely drop, improving event owners’ bottom line. But I think the greatest (and easiest) improvements to event ROI involve adopting human process technologies that allow meetings to become what participants actually want and need.

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Powerful Panels interview with Adrian Segar

Monday, June 28th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Powerful Panels interview: screenshot of Kristin Arnold and Adrian Segar with the caption WWW.POWERFULPANELS.COMHere’s my Powerful Panels interview with good friend and meeting panel doyen Kristin Arnold. During our 25 minutes together, we discussed various panel formats, their value, and how to structure and design powerful panel discussions into the larger context of meetings, conferences, and events.

Annotated timeline of the video

0:00 Introduction.

2:30 A brief history of meetings; why lecture formats are still so popular; how panels fit into the larger context of meetings.

5:30 When and how to use panels, and why.

8:00 Different panel formats.

9:00 The fishbowl—Adrian’s favorite discussion format (which includes panels as a special case).

10:15 Adrian describes the fishbowl sandwich format, and how he used it to find solutions for an industry-wide problem with a group of several hundred people. Includes a description of pair share. How to know when a session is a smash hit.

14:00 Comparing the fishbowl to Clubhouse. How to run fishbowl in-person and on Zoom.

18:00 Kristin describes her version: empty chair.

18:30 Alternative seating arrangements for fishbowl.

19:00 Why you should use curved theatre seating.

21:00 How these formats satisfy the core purpose of meeting formats: creating great conversation with smart people that delivers valuable takeaways.

22:45 Using the Post It! technique to determine what should be covered during a meeting or session, and at what level.

24:45 Most important takeaway: Be curious about doing meetings differently. Now, there are better formats available for meetings than those we’ve always used. Don’t just read about these formats, but experience them at a well-designed, well-facilitated/moderated event to truly learn how great a meeting can be.

We covered a lot in a short time, but there’s much more to learn about Powerful panels and good meeting design!

If you liked this Powerful Panels interview, check out Kristin’s other Powerful Panels Podcast interviews!

And check out the links in this post to learn more about the topics mentioned.

Bonus: More ways to create panels designed as if the audience matters.

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Why our meetings are still full of lectures

Monday, June 14th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Why are our meetings still full of lectures?

Well, listen to and consider this June 11, 2021 quote from former candidate and now New York City Mayor Eric Adams:

“With new technology of remote learning, you don’t need school children to be in a school building with a number of teachers. It’s just the opposite. You could have one great teacher that’s in one of our specialized high schools teach 300-400 students…”

When the Mayor of New York City has this take on how people learn, perhaps it’s not so surprising that we’re still sitting through endless broadcast-style sessions at meetings and conferences.

Yes, switching to active learning is hard, but it’s worth it! Social learning is humans’ true superpower. Learning researchers and our best teachers and meeting designers have known this for a long time. Learning in a community allows us to uncover and incorporate all the questions, discussion topics, expertise, and experience available in the room.

Until we elect leadership that has a basic understanding of how great teachers actually teach, and how their students can effectively learn, we’re going to continue to live in a world of meetings full of ineffective lectures.

Video courtesy of The Matt Skidmore Show

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Social learning is humans’ true superpower

Monday, June 7th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

What is humans’ true superpower? [Hint: We’re not more intelligent than other species.] We can make a strong case that humans’ true superpower is social learning. Why am I writing about social learning on a blog that’s (mainly) about meeting design? Because social (uncovered) learning is the best learning model for conference sessions. This means, to create the best meetings we need to maximize the social learning that takes place.

Humans’ true superpower

I’m reading Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman‘s absorbing and optimistic Humankind. The book presents a ton of evidence that — despite the torrent of bad news that daily floods our media — “humans are hardwired for kindness, geared towards cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another.”

Early in the book is this passage:

“What makes human beings unique? Why do we build museums, while the Neanderthals are stuck in the displays?”

“Chimpanzees and orangutans score on a par with human two-year-olds on almost every cognitive test. But when it comes to learning, the toddlers win hands down.”

“Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines.“

“…humans have another weird feature: we have whites in our eyes. This unique trait lets us follow the direction of other people’s gazes…Humans, in short, are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us. But far from being a handicap, this is our true superpower, because sociable people aren’t only more fun to be around, in the end they’re smarter too.” [emphasis added, illustration based on this research]
—Humankind, Rutger Bregman

An illustration entitled "Human's true superpower" showing scores on four kinds of intelligence tests by chimpanzees, orangutans, and human toddlers. Illustration from "Humankind" by Rutger Bregman.
Illustration from Humankind by Rutger Bregman

Or, as Seth Godin puts it:

“If you know how to walk, write, read, type, have a conversation, perform surgery or cook an egg, it’s probably because you practiced and explored and experienced, not because it was on a test.”
—The revolution in online learning, Seth Godin

We aren’t superior thinkers. Humans don’t remember stuff better or longer or more accurately than other species. We aren’t better at causal reasoning. The one characteristic — our superpower — that distinguishes us from the other life on our planet is how we learn from and with others. (And how they learn from and with us.)

Social learning is how humans learn. We’re great at it, compared with other life forms. (Yes, there’s always room for improvement.)

So, for pity’s sake, don’t lecture and test. Eliminate all the one-hour (or longer) lecture sessions. Instead, build social learning into your meetings as much as possible.

So, how can I incorporate the power of social learning into my events?

It’s not hard to unleash the power of social learning at your events! Simply implement the participant-driven and participation-rich processes I’ve described and taught in my books and workshops for over thirty years.

What are you waiting for?

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Are Online Meetings Reducing Our Collective Intelligence?

Monday, May 24th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

online meetings collective intelligence. Image attribution: Business people having an online meeting by Jacob Lund from Noun Project
Are online meetings reducing our collective intelligence [CI]? New research from Carnegie Mellon has been widely interpreted as concluding that, for example, “Zoom is actually less effective than a phone call”, and “Video conferencing can hurt collaboration”.

Not so fast.

New research about online meetings

Here’s a summary of the research findings from the abstract of the article:

“We show that…the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support.”
—Speaking out of turn: How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence. Maria Tomprou, Young Ji Kim, Prerna Chikersal, Anita Williams Woolley, Laura A. Dabbish

Translation: in the experimental setup used, the researchers found that online meeting participants were:

  • better able to avoid interrupting each other; and
  • shared the available time more equally.

There’s good evidence that both of these factors improve CI. How?  Theory of Mind (ToM) research shows that a group’s CI is correlated with members’ scores on a remarkable test: Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME). Google’s Project Aristotle research on creating high-performing teams—i.e. teams with high CI—found that teams with high RME scores also displayed these two behaviors.

I don’t have the background to evaluate the experimental methodology and protocols used in the CMU research. But I have no problem accepting their results.

Where I disagree, however, is how the researchers extend their experimental findings to everyday online meetings.

Can we conclude that turning off video increases collective intelligence during online meetings?

I don’t think so. Why?

Because the vast majority of online meetings provide a significantly different environment than the CMU researchers used.

From the research article:

“…our findings were observed in newly formed and non-recurring dyads in the laboratory…”

“Each session lasted about 30 minutes. Members of each dyad were seated in two separate rooms. After participants completed the pre-test survey independently, they initiated a conference call with their partner. Participants logged onto the Platform for Online Group Studies … to complete the Test of Collective Intelligence (TCI) with their partner. The TCI contained six tasks ranging from 2 to 6 minutes each, and instructions were displayed before each task for 15 seconds to 1.5 minutes.”

Artificial online meetings

My first objection is that all the CMU experiments were conducted with only groups of two participants, neither of whom had ever met before.

This hardly describes the makeup of most online meetings. And, perhaps more important, when we are meeting with people for the first time there is a lot more to process than in subsequent meetings, when we already have some familiarity. An initial phone call with a stranger may be more comfortable than a Zoom video chat because it is less intimate.

My late mentor Jerry Weinberg encapsulated the overloading that occurs during an initial (consulting) meeting in his Five-Minute Rule:

“Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell you the solution in the first five minutes.”

Unbelievably, I’ve found this is true. Unfortunately, the problem is listening well enough, despite the initial sensory overload, to hear what needs to be heard.

Working as a team

My second objection concerns the brevity of the research exercises. “Six tasks ranging from 2 to 6 minutes each” simply doesn’t reflect what people with more than a passing relationship do in real-life meetings. In my experience, it takes time to build a sense of someone through their facial expressions and body language. It’s unrealistic to extrapolate from what occurs during a series of brief interactions with someone you’ve never met before to how a larger group will function during a longer meeting or series of meetings.

The following story may illustrate this point. In 2016, I experienced my first escape room. Two teams competed to escape two identical rooms. Both teams included people I hardly knew. (This occurred during the first Meeting Design Practicum in Utrecht, The Netherlands: more details here). One thing I noticed was that my impromptu “team” of strangers spent no time on body language cues while working together. As we explored the room, we would call out things we’d discovered, and other team members would gather and look at what we’d found. We communicated with each other by voice and used our vision to concentrate on clues.

If I had stayed with the same team and continued to play escape room games, over time we would have picked up the body language of other players and been able to use it to improve how we worked together.

My experience of the value of seeing participants during online meetings

In my experience, I find seeing participants when meeting online to be useful in groups that have a relationship formed by multiple meetings over time. Although you might reasonably question whether eye contact with people online can evoke the same responses as seeing them in person, there is research that indicates that eye contact during online meetings creates the same kind of responses as eye contact face to face.

In addition, I think the CMU research actually supports my experience, when applied to longer and longer-term meetings with more participants. The article’s discussion includes this passage:

“We did find that in the video condition, facial expression synchrony predicts collective intelligence. This result suggests that when visual cues are available it is important that interaction partners attend to them.”

I would argue that the negative effect on CI that the research found when video was available is due to the overloading effects I described above. When team members become more familiar with each other, overloading disappears and visual clues are not a distraction but a positive influence on CI.

CMU discussion

The CMU researchers acknowledge the points I’ve made above.

“Our study has limitations, which offer opportunities for future research. For example, our findings were observed in newly formed and non-recurring dyads in the laboratory. It remains to be seen whether our findings will generalize to teams that are ongoing or in which there is greater familiarity among members, as in the case of distributed teams in organizations.”

Conclusion

So, are online meetings reducing our collective intelligence?

I hope my perspective will turn out to be valid, counteracting the initial, IMO overblown, interpretations of the CMU research. Although we all hope things will change, right now, we can’t universally meet safely face-to-face without social distancing and wearing masks. Both these requirements significantly reduce our ability to “read” others. Given the ease of meeting online and the fact that we can actually do decent eye contact there, I’d argue that online meetings with video have the advantage right now.

P.S. Bonus tips! It can be hard to figure out who should go first or speak next during an online meeting with multiple participants. Check out my posts “Who goes first?” and “Who goes next?” for ideas!

Do you think online meetings are reducing our collective intelligence? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Image attribution: Business people having an online meeting by Jacob Lund from Noun Project

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A novel way to assess consensus

Monday, April 19th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

assess consensus: a blurred photograph of an audience overlaid with an illustration of people humming at different volumes

Chapter 44 of my book The Power of Participation explains how facilitators use participatory voting to provide public information about viewpoints in the room, paving the way for further discussion. In particular, we often use participatory voting to assess consensus.

It’s often unclear whether a group has formed a consensus around a specific viewpoint or proposed action. Consensual participatory voting techniques can quickly show whether a group has reached or is close to consensus, or wants to continue discussion.

Methods to assess consensus

For small groups, Roman voting (The Power of Participation, Chapter 46) provides a simple and effective method of assessing agreement.

However, Roman voting isn’t great for large groups, because participants can’t easily see how others have voted. Card voting (ibid, Chapter 47) works quite well for large groups, but it requires:

  • procurement and distribution of card sets beforehand; and
  • training participants on how to use the cards.

A novel way to assess consensus with large groups

I recently came across a novel (to me) way to explore large group consensus. This simple technique requires no training or extra resources. In addition, it’s a fine example of semi-anonymous voting: group voting where it’s difficult to determine how individuals vote without observing them during the process. [Dot voting (ibid, Chapter 49), is another semi-anonymous voting method.]

Want to know how it works?

By using humming!

Humming: a tool to assess consensus

Watch this 85-second video to see how it works.

I learned of this technique from the New York Times:

“The Internet Engineering Task Force eschews voting, and it often measures consensus by asking opposing factions of engineers to hum during meetings. The hums are then assessed by volume and ferocity. Vigorous humming, even from only a few people, could indicate strong disagreement, a sign that consensus has not yet been reached.”
—‘Master,’ ‘Slave’ and the Fight Over Offensive Terms in Computing, Kate Conger, NY Times, April 13, 2021

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)is “the premier Internet standards body, developing open standards through open processes.” We all owe the IETF a debt, as they are largely responsible for creating the technical guts of the internet.

On Consensus and Humming in the IETF

The IETF builds consensus around key internet protocols, procedures, programs, and concepts and eventually publishes them as RFCs (Request for Comments). And, yes, there is a wonderful RFC 7282 On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (P. Resnick, 2014).

Software engineer Ana Ulin explains further:

‘In IETF discussions, humming is used as a way to “get a sense of the room”. Meeting attendees are asked to “hum” to indicate if they are for or against a proposal, so that the person chairing the meeting can determine if the group is close to a consensus. The goal of the group is to reach a “rough consensus”, defined as a consensus that is achieved “when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated”.’
—Ana Ulin, Rough Consensus And Group Decision Making In The IETF

When assessing rough consensus, humming allows a group to experience not only the level of agreement or disagreement but also the extent of strong opinions (like Roman voting’s up or down thumbs). And if the session leader decides to hold further discussion, the group will have an idea of who holds such opinions.

Voice voting

This technique to assess consensus reminds me of voice voting at New England Town Meetings, which have been annual events in my home state, Vermont, since 1762. But, though it’s possible to hear loud “Aye” or “Nay” votes, humming makes strong opinions easier to detect.

Conclusion

RFC 7282 starts with an aphorism expressed by Dave Clark in 1992 on how the IETF makes decisions:

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting.”

“We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

Replace “running code” with your organization’s mission, and you may just have the core of an appealing approach to decision-making in your professional environment.

And let us know in the comments below if you try using humming as a tool to assess consensus!

Video “Please Hum Now: Decision Making at the IETF” courtesy of Niels ten Oever
Image background by Robert Scoble

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Ask Me Anything—a better alternative to guest lectures

Monday, March 15th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Ask Me Anything

Recently, I’ve been appearing as a guest at college event planning and hospitality courses to talk about meeting design. (I love to do this. Teachers, please contact me, it’s free!) Rather than lecture for an hour, I’ve been using an Ask Me Anything (aka AMA) meeting format.

Here’s why I think Ask Me Anything is almost always a better session format than a lecture.

I’ve written extensively on this blog (1, 2, 3) and in my books about why the meeting lecture is a terrible way to learn. (A one-sentence distillation: learning is a process not an event.)

But suppose a group gets the opportunity to spend time with a content expert who knows a lot more about their field than anyone else present? Isn’t a lecture the best format to use in these circumstances?

Well…sometimes. First, let’s explore the circumstances when a lecture may be the way to go. Then I’ll make a case for why an Ask Me Anything format is usually a better choice.

When a lecture is appropriate

Lectures have one thing going for them. They are very efficient ways to share a lot of information with a group.

Short talks

The problem with broadcasting information is, of course, that the recipients are passive attendees. And they may well not be attending. Research shows that our ability to absorb and retain broadcast information falls rapidly over time. To avoid significant “tuning out” it’s vital to share content in small chunks, typically not more than ten minutes long.

So one scenario where lectures work is when they are short. I’m a big fan of carefully prepared five-minute lightning talks and Pecha Kucha (6 minutes, 40 seconds) and Ignite (5 minutes) formats. The latter are invariably entertaining, which helps people absorb and retain what’s presented.

Brilliant presenters

Some people — but not as many as you might think — are really good at creating effective learning experiences via a lecture format.

However, these folks are rarely the people who get the big bucks for their inspirational keynote speeches. Highly paid speakers are usually good at creating emotional experiences for their audiences. Now, there’s nothing wrong with creating an emotional experience for an audience. In fact, learning is often enhanced. Unfortunately, a great speaker may well provide a more enjoyable and emotionally satisfying presentation—but the learning that results is not significantly better than that provided by a mediocre lecturer!

Sadly, I can count on the fingers of one hand the presenters who taught me, via lecture, things I still retain to this day:

  • My mentor Jerry Weinberg (a genius at telling incredible stories that illustrated the learning he wanted to impart);
  • The molecular biologist John Medina (who always divides his lectures into ten-minute segments, each introduced with a relevant emotional hook); and
  • A few of my high school science teachers who knew the draw of enthusiastically performing exciting experiments in front of us (“What will happen?” “Can you figure it out?“)

Conclusions

So, unless your presenters speak for a short time or are brilliant (and I’m not including motivational speakers in that class), lectures are a lousy way for audiences to learn. We can do better.

Ask Me Anything — a better format for learning

We know that active learning is a superior modality for learning more, learning more accurately, and retaining learning. So, how can we incorporate active learning into a session where the session leader/presenter has far more expertise and knowledge than everyone else present, and time is limited?

An Ask Me Anything format provides a great way to improve session learning. Why? Two reasons.

First, the attendees are not passively sitting listening or watching but are actually interacting with each other (see below) or the presenter. That means that active learning is taking place, with all the benefits that ensue.

Second, an Ask Me Anything responds to what participants actually want and need. Rather than a presenter guessing exactly what their audience wants to learn, an Ask Me Anything ensures that many topics, issues, and questions that are top-of-mind for the audience will be addressed.

OK, let’s see how this works.

Warming up an Ask Me Anything with preliminary small group work

I suggest priming the audience with a couple of introductory pair- or trio- shares.

If meeting in person, have people move into small groups with others they don’t know. Online, move people into a set of Zoom’s automatically assigned breakout rooms, or another online platform’s equivalent.

Typically, the first trio share is a “take 90 seconds each to”: a) introduce yourself to the others in your group, or b) “share how you got to be in this class/session/event”.

On returning, ask everyone to think of one issue or question they’d like to discuss with or get answered by the presenter. Emphasize that it can be anything they want to know or hear about.

When working with students, ask the class teacher to pose this exercise a few days before the class and collect and share responses with the entire class and me. This helps the presenter, the teacher, and the class learn about what’s on students’ minds. Before running the next pair share, tell the students they don’t have to stay with what they submitted if something else has come to mind.

Next, run the second pair share, giving each member 90 seconds to share with their partner what they would most like to learn from the presenter. For students, this gives them a chance to prepare for asking the presenter what they want in front of the class.

The Ask Me Anything

Running the Ask Me Anything is straightforward. Have your presenter ask for questions, and enter a dialog with each questioner in turn. If there are a slew of questions, use a fishbowl (in person) or hand raising (online) to control the flow. Remind your presenter that silence before someone speaks is OK; they don’t need to fill it by speaking themselves. Also, make sure that everyone who wants to participate gets the opportunity before allowing more questions from people who have already spoken.

Closing pair share

I strongly recommend closing such sessions with a final pair share on “lessons learned”. This reinforces learning while it’s fresh, making it more likely to be retained, remembered more accurately, and retained longer. For more details, see my post on the fishbowl sandwich, or read the relevant chapter in my second and third books.

That’s it! What do you think of Ask Me Anything as a replacement for lectures in a session? Do you have comments to add or questions to ask? You can Ask Me Anything! Simply share in the comments below.

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