Full Circle Associates

Nancy Settle-Murphy and Penny Pullan of www.chrysalisinternational.com shared this checklist as a tool to help determine of you should meet F2F or remotely. Nancy had shared it on the Yahoo groups OnlineFacilitation list I facilitate. I offered Nancy this feedback:

I really nodding in recognition with the second half, but the first half was harder for me to fall into step with. I think some of the characteristics you identify with F2F meetings are also REALLY essential to distributed meetings. 1-4 particularly apply to distributed mtgs. 8 can work really well remotely. 10 may be a reason FOR an asynch meeting.

Can you share a little of your and Penny's thinking about these as stronger indications for F2F? Or is it the whole group together on the first table that is the indicator?

Nancy responded (and kindly said it was ok to share this on my blog):

Our thinking was that if the list of statements on page 12, taken together, were mostly answered with an "I agree," then chances are, a FTF meeting may help achieve objectives in less time, with richer results. We drew from our own personal experiences as meeting facilitators, and considered the conditions under which remotely-facilitated meetings can work well, and when FTF sessions typically produce better results. I emphasize "usually," since sometimes it is possible to, for example, have a useful in-depth discussion with people you've never met. It's just usually more
productive and more revealing, given all of the ways we communicate nonverbally, to have these discussions FTF (yes, there are exceptions!). And yes, you're right that statements 1-4 can apply for those who wish to/need to meet remotely---we were thinking that if "yes," was the answer for all of these, then FTF might produce desired results more quickly. Again, this is based on our experience as FTF and remote facilitation over the years...

What this reinforces for me is that any tool or process to help us identify how we might do something - F2F or online - needs to allow us to include context. My context recently, for example, is distributed groups that at BEST can be F2F once a year. I have many people call or email me asking me, "how should I choose a tool or remote prcoess for my group." My most common answer is, "it all depends."

(This has an echo to Clay Shirky's essay Nomic World.)