Category: facilitation

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

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!

 

From the Archives: Sensing Our Changing Roles

Well this little post has tried to be born into the world twice. Time to give it light. I’m going to leave it exactly as it was with it’s last draft date of 2015. Seems to me the image suggests so much that is relevant today!

A blog post from Peggy Holman on  Changing Roles in Changing Times from way back in February of 2014, came across my screen today and triggered one of those moments “blog this, Nancy!” While Peggy’s post was about the changing roles in journalism, the image she included from the Berkana Institute was what caught my eye.

From Peggy Holman, adapted from Berkana Institute's

From the Archives: Visual and Audio “Getting Into Online meetings” Ideas

Back in 2020 and 2021 some of my friends and colleagues refused to get stuck in the same-old, same-old of starting meetings online. Fisher Qua showed me a Music Labs experimental tool and playing with it (in this clip) opened possibilities of co-creating visually and aurally that could start a meeting in a way that immediately changed our participation and experience.

A bit wild, sure, but why do we seek so much to maintain the status quo? Why do we snap back to the safe, predictable, without even considering if it is still useful? Time for more creative destruction. Make space for something that is more useful. What meeting starting habits have you creatively destroyed? What new practices emerged from that space you created?

Snapback, Falling off Horses, Toxic Nostalgia and What Do We Do Next?

Picture of a horses nose and mouth with bridle on.

Today is my birthday. Always a good time for reflection….

How do we discern what practices to keep and which to throw away? What have we noticed in our changing practices since the pandemic and how do we make the MOST of them? Or not! Are we wallowing in toxic nostalgia?

Dr. David Viscott, author of a book entitled Emotional Resilience, defined toxic nostalgia as “a subtle mixture of feelings, attitudes, perspectives and needs from different ages all showing themselves at once as the unresolved past attempts to define the present.” I found Dr. Viscott;s quote via Rabbi Mike Harvey. Rabbi Harvey also made his own offering describing toxic nostalgia is “thinking that things used to be amazing, focusing only on good memories, and defining the past by those good memories, then projecting the difference between the reality of the present with the imagined reality of your past and seeing the difference. “

Once I started looking, toxic nostalgia shows up in the media a lot lately. I felt resonance. Think about our societal polarization on so many issues. Our blindness as we endorse things that do us harm.

For me and my group process practice we use the term “snapback.” Snapback to the old, familiar, comfortable ways – even if those old ways are no longer serving. For groups working together, the pandemic tossed us out of our familiar ways and ruts and many of us rapidly embraced new ways. Now that things are leaking back into old settings (i.e. F2F offices, meetings) the snapback is showing up. I’m noticing that some of the groups I worked with during the pandemic where they created and adopted new, productive practices, are slipping back into high control, low liberating practices.

If we don’t examine and compare our practices, we may default to toxic nostalgia and snapback. Or we can stay awake, notice what has changed and how that change has or has not positively impacted what we are trying to do together. We fear “falling off the horse,” but perhaps what we should fear is not noticing with either got back on or fell off the horse and learned NOTHING!