What if Web Meetings were wrong? I think web meetings or virtual meetings today all suffer from the same assumption that we want to just emulate a face-to-face (f2f) meeting online for a geographically distributed group of people or a team. I think this is wrong, and since there has been little innovation in this area for many years, most people (in all sized businesses) today have bought into this model, thinking this is what we have and what we have to live with. In this article I want to not only question these assumptions but offer some of my thoughts on how to make a virtual meeting a useful social construct. Most web conferencing tools today are generally broadcasting or publishing tools, with some back channel chat capabilities. They don t really support interactions between the speakers or interactions between the other meeting members very well. We have all suffered in poor face-to-face (f2f) meetings as well as web conferences (virtual). Most web conferencing tools today don t make the meetings any better they just make it more efficient for us to get into bad meetings. But let me take a step back and look at the assumptions around online meetings in general, and ask the question is a web meeting the right social construct for interactions in today s collaborative world? When we initially started meeting online (1990 s) there were severe limitations to the technology and we had to adapt our behavior to deal with these technology limitations. But today I have more processing power in my iphone 4 than a mainframe did in the 1990 s, we have the Internet, we have hundreds of thousands of mobile apps that are not only elegant but run on a screen only 4 inches in length. Given all this advancement in technology, why are we still meeting online like it was still the 90 s? If you are looking for traditional software vendors to lead the way, think again. Most of the web conferencing tools are pretty much the same as they were 10 years ago. Yes, they have a few enhancements, and yes they have better support for VoIP, or can accommodate more people in a meeting, but overall there has been little innovation in this area for quite a while. What if I did not want to have the same kind of meeting online that I do in person? What would that look like? For me, I would like to be able to get more and different types of information in an online meeting than an in-person meeting. In the online meeting I am not constrained by the physical limitations I have in a F2F meeting. For example, let s look at what other types of meeting information are available? Computers are great at counting and compiling data from a variety of sensors. When I am a meeting I need to concentrate on who is speaking and what they are saying. I am not keeping track of how many times they are interrupted, or who is interrupting them (see figure 1). But my computer is able to track and display this data in a graphic showing meeting dominance that I can see at a glance. Instead of me trying to remember what everyone in the meeting has said my computer can generate a written transcript of what has been said by who in a separate window.
What if meeting software told me skin temperature and pupil dilation size of everyone in the meeting using dynamic graphic like a sound meter. With this information I not only can tell who is listening, but how what I say is affecting them emotionally, even if they are not in the same room with me. Figure 1: AMI- JFerrett augmented meeting software My computer can look at the words anyone in the meeting speaks, search for key words, and pop up any blogs, online discussions, community or social network posts that they have made on this topic so I can see their full context. I have not seen a tool that does this currently (that does not mean there is not one out there), but Gist (now owned by RIM) does do about half the job as it allows you to do intelligent aggregation of everyone in all of your inboxes (Outlook, Facebook LinkedIn, etc.) and it also helps you put that contact (person) in context by creating a profile of people in your business network by using publicly available information from sources such as Rapleaf and makes it available any time someone emails you. The combination of great email plus social context is a good step towards the web conferencing feature I outlined above. What if I was able to attend more than one online meeting at the same time? Something every executive I have known and coached has wished for. At some point in the near future my avatar (below) might be smart enough to attend a meeting for me and report back when the meeting is over.
Figure 2: My Avatar (not intelligent enough yet to attend a meeting for me) What I am saying is that the software for an online meeting should AUGMENT our role in the meeting not just make the online meeting a poor substitute for a F2F meeting. I believe when we are able to get this level of information about each other in an online meeting, then virtual meetings will start to become more popular than F2F meeting. Some More Suggestions What if we had a heads up display of all the players in a meeting, much like a guild master does in World of Warcraft? Why are the web conferencing vendors not looking at gaming technologies for their next versions of software, making meetings more interesting and fun? Figure 3: World of Warcraft, Guild Master Addition pack
Inappropriate meetings Online meetings are not always about technology. True the technology is the enabler that helps these meeting happen but the other critical parts of a meeting are people and process. When working with clients and the topic of meetings comes up, I always need to focus on behavior rather than technology. The problem with most meetings is people, and bad behavior. How many boring project status meetings have you sat through (virtual or in person)? How many meetings have you been in that had an interesting topic but the person running the meeting was inept? How many meetings have you been in, were the conversation gets off topic and you spend all your time discussing the details of something that in the long run probably makes little difference? There are some new tools available to help with meeting management like YAM, which offers features, like brainstorming, parking lot, 2X2 matrix for priorities, SWOT, etc. MeetingSense, is similar in that it also offers pre-and post meeting collaboration, agenda, and other meeting features, but it is tied to Outlook where at YAM is more web-based. PowerNoddle is another tool that helps meetings go better, with brainstorming features, tools for convergence and prioritization of ideas and eventually moving the resolutions into tasks and follow up. One suggestion I have for all of these tools is to dump their task output into either a task or project management tool. I know YAM is working with Google Tasks, and MeetingSense can put meeting tasks into Outlook tasks. Aside from technology, here are some of my rules for better meetings: 1- Don t do status meetings in person (or virtually), save those real-time interactions to deal with issues that need a back and forth conversation to help work out a solution. You are better off posting status updates on line in a DPM (Distributed Project Management) tool like (PIEMatrix, TeamBox, or Central Desktop). Status information works better asynchronously, and if it is so important that the status has to be updated right way, then it probably is an issue that needs to be discussed in a conversation in real-time. 2- Don t let the tool get in the way of the conversation. How many times have you been asked to be in a WebEx, or GoToMeeting event, and you have to log in, then download the software, then deal with the audio (VoIP or POTS), then make sure everyone else is on the same page (literally) before starting the conversation. Often when we talk with our large enterprise clients about their use of WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting, we hear complaints before we even ask. Usually they are about the meeting process and how awkward it is, or how the technology did not work right for everyone, every time. 3- Don t run a meeting you own. This is a mistake most people make. But if you have ever been in a facilitated meeting, you can see/hear the difference immediately. In this case the meeting owner or convener is able to listen and be part of the meeting, rather than focusing on trying to run the meeting, and doing a poor job at both. 4- People need to do their homework before meetings. In some meeting tools, like Adobe Connect you can create a persistent meeting space. If you want you can post different documents or objects there and notify the meeting participants that the content is available and
then need to read it prior to the meeting. In some of these tools you can track who has read which document and when (not in a big brother way). You can also track any conversation that occurred around any of this content. In a recent online meeting I attended that was facilitated, Julia Young and Nancy Seattle-Murphy from facilitate.com were the facilitators. One of Nancy s tips in running an engaged meeting is pre-work. In our case we got 3 emails (the recommended amount) asking us to participate in the asynchronous part of the meeting prior to the virtual meeting. This did a few things: A- I got nagged enough to go do it and participate B- It kept me engaged with the content that we would deal with in the meeting C- It allowed me to work with the technology in private, so I did not have to look stupid in front of everyone during the virtual meeting. D- I also got to see what other people were thinking and contributing. 5- Some of the features that make meetings and their outcomes easier are: a. Support for breakout groups b. Easily see the meeting agenda on half the screen and the area where you are shown content or contribute on the other half of the screen c. Meeting output can be saved as a Word document 6- Make sure outcomes from the meeting are assigned as tasks to the appropriate people. Make sure that task outputs are easily moved into a task tool or project management tool. Otherwise they get lost, and nothing ever gets resolved from the meeting. In summary, I believe we are working today with very old software focused on an old model of F2F meetings. Today s meeting software should give us more information, make virtual meetings a better process, and support both synchronous and asynchronous interactions. We need to make virtual meetings different, not just moving a F2F meeting online, which is what we have done for the last decade. Once these virtual meetings start to change I think not only they will be more popular but more effective. David Coleman has over 20 years experience with both collaboration technologies and best practices. He is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, an industry analyst and consulting firm focused on collaboration. He is an expert on collaboration writing for GigaOm Pro. He is a regular columnist for Elearning Magazine, and is a major contributor to the collaboration blog. He is the author of 4 books on collaboration. His latest is 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration (was written through a social network). His most popular book is Collaboration 2.0, and it is currently being updated (to Collaboration 2.1) and will be released at the GigaOm Net:Work conference on December 8 th. David can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197, twitter = @dcoleman100. David works with both collaboration vendors and end-user organizations using collaborative tools and technologies.
Summary Version of: What if Web Meetings were wrong? Most web conferencing vendors believe we want to reproduce face-to-face (F2F) meetings virtually. I disagree, and believe that we should stop meeting like we were in the 1990 s and use the technologies we have to make a web meeting radically different than what is common today. When we moved documents from our desktops to the web (1.0) and created static web sites, we have done much the same with meetings online. We need to move into the Web 2.0 world with meetings. This does not mean just offering it as a SaaS, or allowing more people in a meeting; but revamping what an online meeting is and what kinds of information we should be dealing with in these interactions. Having meeting tools quantify our interactions to a much greater degree, giving us data on who said what, and even automated searches for keywords from their speech. Newer meeting tools like YAM, PowerNoodle, MeetingSense, etc. can also help us make meetings we are in (f2f or virtual) more effective. Using the power of the computer we can get more information on those we are meeting with and use the computer to AUGMENT this information instead of just being the conduit for messaging and the enabling platform for a meeting. We can look at things like: the number of interruptions; who has dominance in the meeting; who is paying attention; a transcript of what everyone has said; track topic keywords from people in the meeting to their blogs, online communities or social networks or even comments they posted (to give us a greater context). We are only doing web meetings today in a first order sense, much like we did when moving documents from our desktops to static web sites. No one in 1995 (well maybe Tim Burners-Lee) saw the Internet as a way to support social interactions. What will the second order effects be for web meetings? Maybe we can use avatars to start to attend meetings for us, as long as they can portray the information we want and record the information we need. There is a lot of opportunity in the web meeting space and lots of room for improvement.