Category: engagement

Beck Tench and Zen of Zooming

I was so, so, so sure I had blogged about this wonderful online practice shared in 2020 by the amazing Beck Tench. But when I went to find it to reshare, I could not find it in my archives. So today I am getting this on the blog!

On Zoom we have all these little windows into others’ faces (if their camera is on). It is oddly a great place to do portrait sketching as a way to see, to pay attention, to shift out of monkey-mind. Beck pulled this practice from her reading of Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation.

Go to Beck’s post and read how to do it. https://www.becktench.com/blog/2020/7/26/the-zen-of-zooming

Then if you get to try it with others, I’d love to hear your impressions.

I found it really helpful to get out of my “solve the problem now” habits. To really look at another which I’m not sure we do as well online as we might F2F. When we HAVE shared our sketches with each other in all their glorious imperfections (you sketch WITHOUT looking at the sketch) we laugh, we wonder, even blush. It is a very human moment for me.

I’ll put some of my sketches below.

Stop “Assuming Good Intent”

Image of 8 panel chalkboard framed in red with writing in white. One panel reads "HURT NEVER."
Hurt Never

One of the first lessons I learned about hosting and facilitating online conversations was “Assume Good Intent.” As I read someone’s words online, this approach was practiced before I reacted, to assume the writer “meant well.” A breath before reacting. I have to say, it did keep me from writing overly reactive posts…sometimes.

This practice came out of hosting in the Electric Minds community, and later on The Well and other online communities. In his tip sheet on The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online, Howard Rheingold talks about “assuming good will.” It made so much sense to me that it became one of the cornerstones of my online facilitation workshops. My assumption was that if people practiced good intent, gave each other the “benefit of the doubt,” all would be well. Or at least less bad. 🙂

What I missed so blindingly was who gets the power to assume good intent. And that someone’s good intent could be coming from a well of white supremacy. This all blossomed into my consciousness with a post on LinkedIn by the astute Tara Robertson.

Tara pointed me to Megan Carpenter, who wrote something much more useful.

“I’ll give you grace if you give me effort”

Megan Carpenter

That feels like it makes the responsibility clear for each party, and not excuse a lack of care or grace under the flag of “good intent.”

It is funny, now I’m seeing the words “good intent” everywhere I look, and I am consciously trying to reshape my language towards grace and effort.

Comparing F2F and Online Idea Generation – broaden our focus!

Picture of a small person looking out of a blue car's window as seen through the side mirror, with fainter image of hands on camera taking picture through front passenger window.
How many perspectives? Foci?

Earlier this month on the KM4Dev email list, one of my colleagues pointed to a study comparing F2F and online idea generation in the journal Nature and concluding F2F produced better results.

Virtual communications curbs creative idea generation, by Melanie S. Brucks and Jonathan Levav was a fascinating read. The authors did more to test their hypothesis compared to other studies I’ve read which claim one environment or other is better for some function. I take them with the proverbial grain of salt. This one got me thinking more deeply. Here is a bit from their summary:

Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged4,5,6, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

Brooks and Levav

Narrower cognitive focus! In the example studies, they talked about the power of objects around is in a physical room to help us get creative. We limit those options when we diligently focus on the screen online. Wait, we focus on the screen because that is what we have habituated as proper virtual behavior. “Focus on the screen! Avoid distractions! And then we lose a bit of ourselves. Have you ever had that experience at the end of a Zoom where you have to reground yourself in your physical space?

Broader cognitive focus! Our habits impact our participation and our results. What if it is our lack of imagination and attention to what full presence and participation means that hampers us? What if we invited ourselves to use our F2F external environment WHILE attending to the screen? What if stepping away from the screen was part of the idea generation practice which not only widened our visual cognitive focus, but reawakened our kinesthetic selves?

It is convenient to assume that environment trumps all. And thus we begin to bias our thinking about the issue of F2F vs online options and choices that are so top-of-mind these days.

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions. What if the question was “what kinds of focus most contribute to idea generation?” And THEN ask how that focus can play out across different environments. This might be a great area for experimentation!

Image of tree branches in foreground, looking across a bay to a row of factories in the pink/orange of dusk.
View from a hotel room in Cameroon

Back when there was “social” in the software…

Picture of the head of a dog (Australian shepherd?) looking at you.
Alan Levine’s blog avatar

Alan Levine noted that he is just past his blogaversary and linked to a post of his from 2006 that I just love. It is a story of how he created an artifact from a presentation I gave at NorthernVoice (a BLOGGING conference, can you IMAGINE that?? We were crazy kids back in the day!). What was magical about this story is how Alan’s recording of my talk rippled across our respective networks and how people added to it and amplified it. (Bev, I loved your notes. Still do! Nick, all these years you mashed it up and now retirement is on the horizon! Who would have guessed!) I think this is when I really became a fan of CogDog, aka, Alan.

A picture of a woman in 2006 with shoulder length curly born hair glasses, holding two bags of Dove Dark chocolates. Photo by Alan Levine.
Photo by Alan Levine of a much younger, shaggier me, sharing chocolate

Alan’s post also has me looking back at years and years of Flickr event albums. Mama mia, there are stories. I often think I have few stories to tell. My problem is simply that I just don’t practice telling them! A little nostalgia… And boy, I was a lot younger back then! And with a lot longer hair. Still sharing the same Dove Dark chocolates though!

Edit a few minutes later: I’m listening to the audio. Still relevant.

From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process.
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things.
  • Celebrate!