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.