Category: collaboration

A Response to Seth’s field guide to the Meeting Troll

Lotus of conversationAh Seth, we know the troll of which you speaketh in your blog post,  Seth’s Blog: A field guide to the Meeting Troll.

In response, here are the people I want to invite into the circle. (See, I even avoided the word “meeting” as we have so many coded “dirty words!”)

Come into the circle with me.

  1. You are curious. “Not knowing” is an asset, not a deficit. You ask AMAZING questions.
  2. You are playful. Risk taking is in your repertoire.
  3. You love creating opportunity for yourself and others. Love is an operational word here…
  4. You love solving wicked problems… I can see the glee on your face.
  5. You bring and SHARE your chocolate (oranges, carrot sticks, croissants, coffee, etc.)
  6. You create space, not only fill it.When you occupy space, it is always with genuine presence and  contribution.
  7. You don’t hide behind your words. Or your positional power.
  8. You explain your acronyms (this is important to me– I work in international development!)
  9. Failure is a learning opportunity for you. You help me mine the learning from my failures. You seek multiple perspectives to learn from your failures.
  10. You discern when something is simple and when it is complex and act accordingly. This includes knowing when to STOP doing something.
  11. You are not fearless, but you do not shy away from fear.
  12. You trust me. I trust you. We know how to honor and forgive.

Roland Harwood on Tapping Each Other to Solve Our Problems

nancy and charles chatting
nancy and charles tapping into each other

Via Johnnie Moore (thanks!) comes something that is remarkably akin to the Liberating Structures approach I’ve been diving into deeply.

2 degrees of separation – 100%Open.

And so recently, we’ve prototyped an exercise at various workshops and events called ’2 degrees of separation’ that has worked so remarkably well that a) I wanted to share it and b) see if anybody can help prove exactly how it works. The way we have run it to date is as follows:

In a room of at least 30 people, ask everybody to think of a project or problem they are working on right now where what would really help them is to be introduced to a specific person or organisation.
Invite people to then take it in turns to shout out the name of who they are trying to reach, and also to briefly introduce themselves (if necessary) and why they want this introduction.
Ask the whole group if anybody knows that person or organisation directly, or might know how to reach them, and if so to raise their hands.
If so, just point them out to each other so they can chat afterwards and repeat the process a few times.
We’ve now done this exercise 3 or 4 times with group sizes varying from about 30 to nearly 100 and every single time we’ve been able to make a productive connection. And whilst I thought it would probably work I am struck how well it has worked so far.

Jessica Lipnack’s Story of a Virtual Presentation Prep

There are a pile of good lessons on presentation preparation in Jessica’s blog post,  Endless Knots: In the future, now: presenting virtually, but I appreciated all the layers around virtual collaboration, about walking the talk at every level when we talk about sustainability, virtual teams and collaboration. Sweet! Thanks, Jessica! Here is a snippet, but click in to read the whole thing.

OK, so what was so special about this? I always vet my presentations with clients and usually have a back-and-forth to fine-tune. This was the most global preparation I’ve ever done and I say this having done quite a number of these virtual presentations. And by the time we were done with all the preparation, Karl, Jacobina, and I felt like a team.

Zoom and Re-Zoom for Facilitators

Last month I finally got a chance to use a facilitation activity called Zoom which I found on the Wilderdom’s Game resource page — a great resource!  I deeply appreciate that they put the “copyleft” designation on all their resources. THANKS!  As I learned and read facilitation ideas from other sites, I realized I should share some of my experiences as well. Here is the description from Wilderdom’s resource page (which also includes all instructions – I’ve attached a pdf copy at the bottom for taking to an event, but please DO visit their page!):

This game is based on the intriguing, wordless, picture books “Zoom” and “Re-Zoom” by Istvan Banyai which consist of 30 sequential “pictures within pictures”.  The Zoom narrative moves from a rooster to a ship to a city street to a desert island and outer space.  Zoom has been published in 18 countries. The Re-Zoom narrative moves from an Egyptian hieroglyphic to a film set to an elephant ride to a billboard to a train.

I’ve done similar activities, but I love the multicultural perspective of Istvan Banayi’s books, so now I’ve stocked up on multiple copies of both ZOOM and RE-ZOOM, and have on my to do list to break them down and put into protective pages. I left the last set with my colleagues at ICRISAT in Hyderabad. I am also keeping my eye out for used copies, because I like the idea of leaving the book pages behind for groups to use with OTHER groups they work with. Viral facilitation and collaboration!

We did the exercise with a large group of social scientists who work in different parts of the world. Most of their work is done in smaller teams, but there was a real need to connect as a whole team as well. It was very interesting to observe the exercise. First we started with the version where you can’t show your card to anyone else. The group didn’t make much progress finding their order. Imagine if we had tried the “no talking” version! With the “no show” round, I asked if they were ready to show and see if they got it. There were some totally confident and others totally sure they did not have it. So I asked them to put themselves in order (again without showing the cards) and then we’d check.  Uh uh, not even close.

Then they used visual clues to reorder the series. This is where a few individuals really went to work and the rest of the group stood back. It was an interesting shift in agency. When there was a higher degree of “not knowing,” more of the team participated in working the solution.

When we debriefed, I did notice a shyness to share some of the observations people gave me individually as the power dynamics in the group made some of these things harder to say. I try not to be the voice for others in the room, so I had to represent my observations as just that — my observations. But I need to think more critically how to handle this during the debrief.

Here are a few angles on our play together…

zoomcollage1

 

Resources from Wilderdom, copyleft – please share with attribution out of kindness!

Quick Revisit of Web Meeting Tools – What is your favorite?

I just received a request for some quick suggestions for picking a web meeting tool. I cobbled a few quick thoughts here (really ought to edit this properly, but maybe later.)  I’d love any additional opinions and suggestions.

My Selection Criteria

OK here are the criteria I use for evaluating web meeting systems, followed by a few quick brand comments. But you need to know, I am very focused on interactive engagements, so I’m biased away from tools that are broadcast-centric and hierarchically controlled!


Purpose, Purpose, Purpose! What are you going to do?

First be clear on the range of purposes you need the tool to support. There is a big difference between a “broadcast model” and a small group working session. Some tools can’t handle that range, particularly at the more interactive end. For broadcast to large groups, you need a host that can support that many connections, so consider size range. Consider what types of content you need to share/host and what kinds of activities you need to foster.

Related to purpose is cost — if something is REALLY important, does it also have a budget line or do you need to use just free tools?

Specifics (in no specific order!)

1. Audio Connection Technology: Can it accommodate Phone bridge AND VoIP – this may not be crucial for you, but when I’m working internationally, it is. 😉

2. Recording: Can it record calls? Do you need just the audio or do you need the audio and video? Do you need them separate? Can those calls be saved in a non proprietary format? (I.e. Blackboard’s web meeting is a proprietary file that has to be replayed via their web platform. It can be export to a common .wav  or mp3 (for audio only ) files but you have ot know how to do that. ) Is file size an issue?

3. Diverse Participant Roles/Controls: It has a chat room where participants can chat peer to peer and not just mediated through a moderator. Webinars create a pretty significant power imbalance when only the moderator(s) can allow anyone to do anything. For a broadcast situation, this is fine. For engagement, you need more options for devolving control and agency to participants in an appropriate process and with appropriate technology. This means:

  • a peer to peer chat room (I MUST HAVE THIS FEATURE!!!)
  • ability to easily pass moderator roles to a person or more than one person. (For example, if you have to be the moderator to use the white board, then can you make EVERYONE a moderator.
  • sometimes having a private chat option is important
  • sometimes a controlled/moderated question queue is important. (I don’t tend to use those myself…)

4. White board. I can’t help myself, I’m visual. Particularly I like whiteboards where everyone can participate. I also like it when whiteboard tools can be used to annotate slides.

5. Applications/screen sharing: For web tours, showing things, etc.

6. Ability to share slides: Both in-app and via screen sharing. Sometimes one is better than the other. That said, please don’t bore me to death with your slides!

7. Do you need video? Some platforms support one camera at a time, others (like Adobe connect) support multiple cameras giving that sense fo F2F conversation. (Called multi-point video display)

8. Bandwidth tools: Does the platform have technology to ameliorate the impacts of diverse participant bandwidth?

9. Polling tools:  I like these — and ease of use of the polling tool is important to check. I like both planned and ad-hoc options.

Advice: Don’t believe the hype — TRY IT!

Don’t just believe the marketing materials! Try it and try it with the size group you plan to work with!

Tools I’ve Tried:>

  • Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) – Great whiteboard, very stable, proprietary recording format, good adjustments for different bandwidths, higher on the cost end… @thatchmo also likes this tool!
  • Adobe Connect – good for multi-camera video, decent white board, chat room, etc.
  • WebEx – there are different webex products – make sure you trial the one you are looking for. Some are more broadcast oriented, some are more collaboration focused.
  • LiveMeeting – Very higherarchically controlled. I would not recommend.
  • GoToMeeting – recently changed and I have not evaluated the newer platform. I’ve read that there are some challenges in recording meetings.
  • MeetingBurner – for smaller, team meetings, but not so great for large groups
  • I’ve also used Google+, Skype, etc, but I suggest you avoid systems where people have to have a username/password. These are, however, great for ad hoc groups and G+ recording and autoposting to YouTube is slick! We used it this past fall for an online course. @BonnieZink likes G+

Resources:

And if you for some bizarre reason want more to read on webmeeting process:

Now, what are you thoughts? Criteria? Recommendations?