Facilitation by Telepresence

Having “grown up” as a face-to-face event designer, I’m naturally a little skeptical of the value of remote facilitation sessions. Trying to accomplish a lot on a conference call is very tough to do, especially if you use a lot of visual communication, as I am fond of doing. LiveMeeting or WebEx adds a bit of flavour to that but it’s still lacking. Expecting that complex problems can be solved over the phone in a short meeting is setting the bar too high.

I recently had the “Jetson-esque” experience of facilitating a session with a client using Cisco’s telepresence solution. This is not your grandmother’s Skype.

I was in a room with 3 60″ High Definition screens, 3 cameras, professional lighting, 1 camera in the ceiling and a projector. The client had the same set up on their side 3000km away.

Technology Thoughts

In a word, flawless. Set up was simple on our end, in that we sat in the room until they “called” us. And when they did, the whole system lit up instantly. Lighting, audio and video were perfect from the get go. Considering we were transmitting and receiving that much data (3 high def screens, audio, screen sharing, overhead desk camera), there literally wasn’t one second of latency, digital blocking (pixelation) or out-of-sync audio/video in four hours. Astounding, really. As a bit of a geek, I’d be curious to know what kind of WAN connection they have to make that happen.

A minor quibble is that the screen sharing was happening at 1024 x 768 so I couldn’t fit a lot of content on my screen.

We did not record the session and I’m not sure if that was a choice that was made or if it’s not technically possible with this system.

Process Thoughts

As someone who relies on employing a lot of movement in a session, such as getting people to move to different work stations, physically sorting post it notes and drawing large format diagrams, those tools have to be re-thought in a telepresence situation. The way the camera system works, is that there is a narrow depth of field so people who are farther back from the camera aren’t in focus. This is because the idea of the system is to have people sit in specific spots so they appear life-size on the screen in the other room. So trying to see a wide shot of the room and collaborate with people working on the walls isn’t really an option. Having them do some work as a team using big post-its on the walls is an option but they’ll have to do that on their own and then report their work. I’m used to bringing all the required supplies to a meeting but for a remote session I had to give the client a list of things to bring so that has to be done in advance.

It’s possible to have people do work on their own and share it using the overhead camera. There is a fixed camera in the ceiling which focuses on the table below and it’s possible to have paper or other objects shared remotely and in a large, viewable size. So I had people drawing models and sharing this way. I made sure they kept their paper and had them scan and email their work to me post-session so I had a record of it.

Those are a few quick thoughts on telepresence. If face-to-face represents a “10/10″ for desired collaboration mode and teleconference is “3/10″, I would put telepresence as an “8/10″. It was very impressive for a small group (1-5). You definitely get what you pay for. The Cisco gear, WAN connection and physical space required for the set up is enormous. But for a global company I could definitely see how it could save time and money on travel while being a very productive tool.

Citizenship as a “Mainframe” Model

I recently watched Eric Dishman’s TEDmed talk on ted.com where he presents his research from his work from Intel on healthcare. He posits that basic technology combined with a mindset shift about the what healthcare is, could radically improve seniors’ quality of life. A basic example would be someone wearing a bracelet that has an accelerometer that can measure how quickly people are walking, how fast they react to the phone ringing, and other minute bits of data. In aggregate, these “behavioural markers” can show very early signs of disease that would otherwise go undetected.

While this was interesting in its own right, Dishman outlined five main sections in his talk, two of which could provide interesting fodder for the ChangeCamp conversation.

His third section (6:35) was entitled: From Mainframe to Personal Health. The idea is that the model of healthcare is similar to that of computing from the 1960′s. Fifty years ago there were huge rooms with tons of equipment that required lots of power and took specialized, highly educated people to run. They were expensive and difficult to access. Computing has since moved to be relatively inexpensive and distributed. The computing power in an iPhone, Blackberry or even some wristwatches gives lots of people access to lots of computing power. He argues that the healthcare system is the same way. Hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and the like are analogous to the mainframe computer from decades ago. It’s an expensive and poor way to provide healthcare to the North American population. He argues that a mindset shift, coupled with technology can move the power of healthcare into the home and into people’s peer networks.

While I’m not especially knowledgeable about health care issues, the idea of the “mainframe” made me think about government, governance and citizenship. With Government as an analogue for the hospital, I see movements such as ChangeCamp seeking to reassert control over the ways in which society progresses rather than relying on the institutional machinations of Government and its Band-Aid approaches to problem solving. One of the pillars of the ChangeCamp movement is technology and its ability to facilitate connections amongst people, avoiding the bottleneck that bureaucracy can represent.

The Fifth Section of Dishman’s presentation was on setting goals. His frustration with the American health care debate is that the conversation was around how public health care gets funded. He argues that there should be a goal. REFORM. Meaning going to somewhere from where we currently are. He proposed that the health care equivalent of “putting a man on the moon would be to have “50% of healthcare services to be delivered in people’s homes by 2020″.

Does ChangeCamp and other citizen-led, grassroots movements need similar “man on the moon” type of goals? Peter Block might argue otherwise, saying that the end goal of citizens working on projects is the community strengthening that naturally occurs. The argument for setting high level goals (at least from a government perspective) is that setting a quantitative goal can spur inspiration, much like the space race did in the 1960′s. The investment in science and engineering inspired a generation of people to take up the challenge.

Questions I’m still pondering:

• What is the best way for technology to enable peer to peer citizen leadership and action? What combinations of tools and processes are ideal?
• How do you bridge the gap between people who use technology and people who don’t?
• What kind of quantitative goal would one set to inspire movement towards a greater good?

Any other big questions that I’m missing? Any answers?!

Creativity: “Not Required”

I was talking to a large Canadian company about their possible need for facilitation consulting services. The person I was talking to is in HR and has “collaboration” in her portfolio. She suggested that her company would most likely not be in need of my services because the corporate frame of mind was one of “retrenching” and therefore no innovation or creativity would be required.

In my view this is a very narrow and myopic view of how collaboration, visualization and creativity (CVC) can be utilized in companies. CVC does not have to be about brand new product ideas, 10 year plans, hockey stick growth or “out of the box thinking”. A well designed, facilitated workshop with CVC can allow creative thinking to be applied to extremely tactical, operational details.

Case in point: At the beginning of November I worked with the technology group responsible for delivering the infrastructure for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I’ve blogged about this project before as I’ve worked with them quite a bit over the years. On November 2nd the Olympic Opening Ceremony was 100 days away. On a project of this size, you can be sure that there is not a whole lot of new thinking going into the technology. Almost everything is locked and loaded and yet here we were with a group of 60 people representing 30 different Olympic venues applying the principles of collaborative work so that each group could rapidly identify outstanding issues, determine solutions and get the sign off from leadership in situ, before the end of the day.

The collaborative exercise began weeks earlier when a web-based collaboration tool was used to start a conversation with the 500+ technicians who will be servicing the Games with the following question: “What Issues are Keeping You Up at Night”? In other words, what are the most pressing technical issues 100 days from Opening Ceremonies. Many of the answers were around process and procedure for certain situations. The facilitation team worked in advance to identify themes and trends, categorize like answers and  and to offer insight into how the work should be tackled.

We made sure that the subject matter expertise was in the room during the face to face event and created a process where small teams of experts created solutions to the issues, filled in common templates and permeated the answers throughout the room to make sure that other teams knew what work was being done and, finally, got the requisite approvals from the executive team so that when the day was done, the work was complete. I would suggest that a typical meeting of 60 people in a hotel conference room would not have effectively solved over 40 pressing issues in one day without some process facilitation.

The point is that collaborative process doesn’t have to simply address “innovation” or “blue sky” issues but when done well can effectively accelerate the most detailed, operational, tactical work. Being more effective, more nimble, doing more with less, “retrenching” can always benefit from people’s creative power and a good collaborative process will help unleash that potential.

Novatel MiFi: Cool Device for Remote Events

Bell Canada is about to launch the Novatel MiFi 2372, a combination device that includes high speed wireless broadband on the HSPA network plus a wifi router plus an SD slot. For people who work collaborative events or conferences this is quite the all-in-wonder package. Internet service at conference centres can be really expensive or really shoddy. Being able to travel with small, reliable, reasonably priced gear is quite the boon. Of course the consistency and reliability of a wireless device can leave lots to be desired so while the MiFi might look good in theory, interference and network stability might make it less than awesome. And of course lots of conferences are in bunker like structures so the cell service is weak anyway. I’m looking forward to trying it and getting reviews of real world performance.

Uffe Elbaek and the Project Paradox

On October 15th I had the pleasure of attending the latest Design with Dialogue session, hosted by Peter Jones of ReDesign Research and Greg Judelman of Bruce Mau Design. The special guest of the night was Uffe Elbaek, founder of KaosPilots and the CEO of the World Out Games in Copenhagen which took place this past July.

Uffe was amazingly candid and generous in sharing his experiences, good and bad, in getting a huge undertaking such as the World Out Games off the ground in just 2.5 years. Having worked on the Olympics technology planning, I can tell you that 2.5 years to get an entire event off the ground and successful is a Herculean feat.

Five things stood out for me:

1. As the organizer of a major event, Uffe dealt with many sponsors, vendors, partners, political organizations and sub-committees…and in many of those instances Uffe was asking for something, whether it was money, products, permission, support, time. There were lots of asks. However, to make the entire experience beneficial for everyone, he authentically posed the question, “What can we do for you?” He really viewed the relationships with all of the stakeholders as a true two way street. But he didn’t stop there. He also viewed his role as the “hub” in all of this activity as a connector of stakeholders. He made sure that relationships were forged between sponsors, between political organizations and really acted as a catalyst for new connections. The committee could have been in a  ”take, take, take” situation but saw the opportunity to create a new eco-system around the goal of putting on a spectacular event.
2. This is Uffe’s design process, in a sense. It starts with an idea such as “let’s host the World Out Games”. Uffe’s assertion is that all too often people skip straight to the concept, put together a team, organize the team and then execute. He calls this the “Bermuda Triangle” because the important steps of figuring out what needs the idea fulfills, what the purpose is what values are held don’t inform the concept. This can result in conflict well into the project because there isn’t a cohesive understanding of what the team is trying to accomplish. In deciding things such as which sponsors to approach, a lack of unity on needs and purpose can result in interpersonal conflict and the project can suffer. Spending time up front to work on the first few steps can save time and conflict later in the project. Uffe’s took the time to write a manifesto of this work so that anyone could go back and visit the manifesto when tough, contentious decisions had to be made. Revisiting the question of why they were doing this in the first place helped make those decisions easier.
3. Your purpose should be succinct enough so that you are able to pee it in the snow. Apparently this is a common saying in Denmark. I guess it applies more to men than women. No visuals for this point.
4. Uffe’s team wrote a run book on how to deliver an event of this magnitude just BEFORE the event took place. The rationale is that the run book shouldn’t be tainted by the perceived success or failure of the event. While things will go wrong at an event of that magnitude, you wouldn’t want those mistakes to be overly represented in the run book. With a month before an event of that size, everything is pretty much locked down. Not much will change but a run book won’t be overly influenced with the emotion that comes with delivering the event if it’s done just before launch.
5. The Project Paradox. Uffe explained that in a big project with an end date you start with tons of decisions to make and very little knowledge . You end the project with all of the knowledge but no decisions to make. The challenge is to shrink the gap in those two curves so that the project kicks off more effectively. One way of doing that is to quickly ramp up on the knowledge curve or hire people who have that knowledge before making key decisions. Curious if there are any comments on the paradox and ways in which to overcome it.

Designing with Grade School Kids

On Tuesday I was fortunate to be invited by Mike Doell of Ross+Doell Design to kick off a design project that he has been running at his kids’ school for the past few years. Each year Mike guides a class through the design process to eventually create models and prototypes of all kinds of new products. In the past, Mike’s classes have created new toys, games, candy and clothing. This year Mike will be guiding the class to create entries for the Exploravision Awards, a design competition geared to K-12 students.

Mike asked me to join the class for a 1 hour kick off session as a “brainstorming expert”. Believe it or not, kids in the gifted program are already seeing the world in Gantt charts and project plans even at the age of 9 and need to be facilitated through lateral thinking exercises. While that’s a sad commentary on the education system, I’ll leave that for another blog post. Mike suggested that the biggest “problems” to overcome for the class were:

1. fixation on the first idea to pop into their heads
2. setting aside judgement of ideas.

So in the hour that I had between recess and lunch I decided to break out my old, reliable technique,  improvisation. As of right now, I feel that the principles behind improvisational acting are core to creativity and innovation.

Initially I introduced the group to the idea that “problem solving” is different from “design” by  asking them to shout out the answer to: 2+2. In 1 second everyone yelled out “4!”. I then asked them to shout out the answer to “What is the best video game?” There was a full 60 seconds of yelling out answers. Many people yelled out more than 1 answer. The point: Design processes have to let go of the idea of the “right/wrong” mindset because different designs might be better or worse depending on who you are designing for. The teachers pointed out at the end that this went against almost everything they’re used to. Startling at such a young age.

I then did a few rudimentary improv exercises that the group seemed to enjoy.

1. Association: While in one big circle, I told one student to say the name of an animal out loud and the person to her left had to say the first thing that popped into his mind based on what the previous person said. We went all the way around the circle. This exercise is meant to diminish the self-judgement that often occurs when brainstorming and to reinforce that there is no wrong answer. In the words of Bruce Mau, “the wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question.” We did this exercise twice, trying to improve our time around the circle, ie. be more spontaneous.
2. Malapropism: The kids walked around the room, pointed at an object and called it something that it wasn’t with conviction and enthusiasm. The kids seemed to find this easier than adults. Most adults find it difficult to walk up to a chair and call it a bowl of spaghetti. Our brains are so wired with patterns and taxonomy that we find it physically difficult to jump out of those well worn ruts. The mechanism that makes our brain so efficient at creating and recognizing patterns makes it difficult to force the illogical and nonsensical.
3. It’s Not A…: This game involves everyone sitting in a circle with a hat in the middle and people running to the middle of the circle, grabbing the hat and using the hat for anything other than cranial fashion. The point is to come up with as many possibilities for the hat as the group can. Lots of interesting, zany ideas emerged and there was definitely a “build” as we went on as the kids riffed on each other’s ideas. None of them were wrong.

Moving past the fun and games we talked about one of the jobs of designers being to identify problems in the world and to come up with creative solutions to those problems. To continue the theme of generative, lateral thinking we asked the kids to grab some Post-It Notes and write down a few things that were problems in their own life. The ideas ranged from “my brother is a dork” to “fossil fuels” to “internet is too slow at home” to “cottage cheese” and 50 others.

We sat on those for a bit. Next, I asked who in the class was an artist. Surprisingly only 6-8 people raised their hands. I thought it would have been higher. I explained the importance of being able to sketch out an idea, as words often can’t capture the essence of a design. As DeBono writes in Lateral Thinking, “it would be a pity to limit design by the ability to describe it.”

The task, in 60 seconds, was to sketch out a cup that wouldn’t tip. Awesome results. Even awesomer was that the kids attacked the problem from different angles. Some drew a cup with legs. Some drew a cup that suctioned to the table. One kid drew a hovercup that simply eliminated gravity from the tipping equation! Root cause analysis! I explained the importance of creating 40 possible solutions in 60 seconds and suspending the evaluative process of what was possible, affordable, etc.

Then I asked them to pick one of their “problems” from their list and to draw out the problem on a Post-It without using words. Lots of creativity here and one sad one. One student wrote “I Can’t Draw” on their Post-It.

And that’s where we ended after one hour. Lots of lateral thinking, free association, suspension of judgement and some drawing. All of the “problems” are stuck to the blackboard and next week they might go through an affinity exercise of some sort. Still TBD. The ultimate goal is that groups of 3-4 will form and create a product that will solve the problem of their choice.

To summarize:

1. Kids in grades 4-6 have trouble with notions of generative thinking and suspension of judgement.
2. The kids are being taught to map out their projects on Gantt charts.
3. Not many young’uns consider themselves artists.
4. Running things with kids shouldn’t be as seamless as with adults. Instead of handing out pens to everybody, they should go back to their desks to get their pens. They need to stretch their legs more often than adults. The one minute that it takes to get the pens from their desk will give you an extra five in attention span.

Physical Space: The Forgotten Factor

I happened to stumble upon some notes that I had in an old notebook  about a project that I had some involvement with while working at Bell Canada. It was about the development of Bell’s “campus” that was being built in the suburbs of Toronto. The idea was to collapse all of the smaller offices in and around the city into one big campus for the purposes of increased collaboration amongst employees. The assumption was that if everyone was located in a few buildings on the campus the company would be able to move more quickly, be more proactive, nimble and all of those other good things that companies strive for.

Our group became involved in the real estate discussions because as professional collaborators we thought we could contribute to the discussion based on our experience in designing for human interaction (albeit on an “intervention” basis) and in designing physical space to support those human interactions. In conversing with the architects, we learned some interesting things.

1. Research suggests that workers in large office environments tend to interact with people who are only within 150 feet (50 metres) of their own desk.
2. Up to 87% of knowledge creation is gained informally, through such means as social learning (water cooler wisdom), learning in the moment, communities of practice and other techniques. Information transfer occurs formally, through lectures, workshops and seminars.

* Farrow Partnership Architects

The conclusion I drew from this was that simple co-location does not even come close to guaranteeing increased collaboration amongst employees.

The conceptual solution that I had envisioned was threefold:

1. Apply architectural design principles that are used to build dedicated collaborative spaces to an entire office complex. It’s no secret that traditional cubicle farms don’t exactly lend themselves to lots of interesting conversations among inmates. While the initial dot-com boom accelerated the notion of a more “social” office space as a way of being more creative and productive, there are some deeper principles at play that go beyond free chocolate bars and a pool table. Innovation Labs has a whitepaper on the topic of designing collaborative spaces.
2. Train a network of specialized workers/facilitators/information synthesizers to be responsible for certain physical areas of each office floor. They would help to “design” the work that the employees are doing, facilitate small and large meetings, perform graphic recording, information visualization and other specialized tasks designed to tease out the collective intelligence of the organization. These types of workers would be part of a network of practitioners within the organization who are more in tune with the concept of social business design, the concept of which is now being put into play by the folks at Dachis Corporation. As a network of practitioners they would be in communication with each other and act as a “biological overlay” for the otherwise mechanistic organization. It is a lot to ask for a corporation to switch its mindset to being “social” but if there were networks of people within the organization acting behind the scenes to make this happen, wholesale revolution might not be necessary.
3. Implement the necessary Enterprise 2.0 software to enable knowledge sharing, insight generation, weak signal monitoring and other techniques that will allow the network of practitioners to bring the work from the rest of the organization into their areas of responsibility. They are acting as the eyes and ears to the rest of the organization (and the world at large) for the group to which they’ve been assigned. A further benefit of training these types of workers is that it adds a level of governance and risk mitigation for executives who see social media as being a risky endeavour.

I did my best to sketch out what this might look like at Bell Canada but it’s quite generic and could be applied anywhere. The idea is that with tens of thousands of employees it’s impossible to be co-located. With good design principles, implementation of a soft infrastructure based on principles of collaboration and a hard infrastructure of the right social tools it’s possible to realize a significant shift in how legacy organizations transition to becoming social businesses.

Let’s Not Fight

A new coffee shop, called The Common, opened up in my neighbourhood recently. It’s a very small place with just a few tables so they set up some chairs on the sidewalk. Those fill up pretty quickly so there is nowhere to sit in their shop. This happened to me the other day but I didn’t want to get my coffee to go so I wandered outside of the coffee shop and sat on the ledge of the storefront next to the coffee shop. The store next to the shop is a day spa. Hair cuts, nails, pedicures, etc.

Within a few minutes someone from the store came out and asked me to move and pointed out a sign that I had truly missed, which was asking people to not sit on the ledge, not block the signage, not smoke in front of the store, etc. On one hand, I can appreciate the owners of the business not wanting people hanging out in front of the store. But on the other hand I’m wondering if they’re missing an opportunity on how to be creative with the extra traffic that they’re getting.

For example, they have lots more foot traffic now that a place like a coffee shop has opened up. Maybe setting up a small table giving away free samples in the mornings would be one idea. Maybe setting up chairs in front of their own store, providing seating for the overflow customers in exchange for free coffee for all of the spa employees might be another. Perhaps setting up a “Morning Jolt” program where you get make-up done and an espresso for a bundled price.

Frankly, I don’t know if any of these ideas make sense but the point is that the spa’s “environment” had changed and rather than seek out opportunity in this change they had taken a more adversarial approach with its new neighbour and its neighbour’s customers.

Published in MPI One+

I was recently interviewed for and quoted in the Meeting Planning International‘s One+ Magazine for the July/August issue. It was interesting to talk about process facilitation and collaborative event design from an “event industry” perspective. It’s great to see some exposure on the idea that a typical meeting or event doesn’t have to have such a broadcast dynamic, where a speaker or a panel talks at the audience. Usually my work is with a specific organization which is trying to solve a particularly hairy business problem but conferences often have very smart, dedicated people as participants and it’s high time the participants and speakers started working together at conferences to solve some of the hairy problems that we face as a society.

Read the article.

Here’s a quote from Joel Spasky that I JUST picked off Twitter, from @ibmdesigns, which I think is relevant to the article in the MPI magazine: “Design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

What I Want From ChangeCamp

Over the past eight months a movement called ChangeCamp has emerged. On December 31, 2008 a bunch of people motivated by the election of Obama and the proroguing of the Canadian Parliament started to plan an “unconference” that posed the question, “How Do We Re-Imagine Government and Citizenship in the Age of Participation?” By posing such a broad question it allows for conversation on a wide variety of topics but it also makes it difficult to define the movement. It makes it difficult to define success. The issue of “What Change Do We Want to See?” pops up. How will we know when we’ve succeeded in making change?

Given that I’m not particularly passionate about electoral reform or other specific policy issues, I’ve been asking myself the question of why I’m even involved with the ChangeCamp people and the movement. Professionally, I’m interested in the process of collaboration and how to make it happen but my interest runs deeper than that and I think I figured out why. So here’s what I want from ChangeCamp:

I want to connect with my neighbours in making my community a better place to live.

I am a big fan of Peter Block’s work on community development and I feel that I lack a sense of connection, accountability and trust with my community. I love Block’s notion that “citizens” have to work with each other and government to effect change and not rely on government as a “service provider” with citizens as “consumers” of the service. Creating trust and accountability amongst community members is the initial step towards making that happen. I feel as though ChangeCamp is a way of helping make that happen. Trying to define  and agree upon the change we want to see or trying to identify when the ChangeCamp movement has been successful is not a good use of time or energy. Getting people engaged, literally out of their houses and into the community engaging in dialogue that is meaningful to them around the health and future of themselves, their families and communities is a worthwhile goal in and of itself.

In the spirit of Open Space Technology, whatever change emerges from those conversations is the only thing that could have.

With the belief that conversation, connection, trust and accountability is good for its own sake, I therefore believe that the big crazy goal of doing 100 simultaneous ChangeCamps across Canada on one day in September, 2010 would be an important, monumental event even if there isn’t a solid definition of change. The act of planning and executing such a thing would in itself be propagating action and strengthening community.

If you’re interested in learning more about ChangeCamp and engaging in the dialogue around what it could be, contribute to the ChangeCamp blog.

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