Are Your Virtual Meetings Virtual Nightmares?

There's a fairly famous satire of virtual meetings: "The Conference Call," by Dave Grady. If you haven't seen it yet, or if it's been a while since you've seen it, now's your chance:

Probably Skip to the Details:
How To Orderyour meetings aren't quite that bad — not most of them, anyway. OK, maybe for some of you, they are. But even if your virtual meetings are barely tolerable, they can still be maddeningly frustrating.

Would you like to just get your work done?

Leading Virtual Meetings for Real Results shows you hundreds of ways to make your virtual meetings better. No, really — Hundreds. And many of the things you can do to make your virtual meetings better cost nothing. Most of them don't even require approvals from anyone else. You can just do them.

Leading Virtual Meetings shows you how to explore the "risk space" of virtual meetings. By applying this method to a common class of virtual meetings — the virtual team meeting — readers see how to use this method and adapt it to their own particular needs. And it's organized by risk: Infrastructure Risk, User Equipment Risk, Human Behavior Risk, Presentation Risk, and so on. See the Table of Contents for the general organization.

Within each chapter you'll find a collection of short tips, ranging from 100 to 500 words. Each tip is focused on one aspect of managing a risk: understanding what generates the risk, explaining what the risk looks like when it materializes, mitigating the risk, and dealing with unexpected manifestations of the risk once they've occurred.

Unlike many business books, this one is designed as an ebook for the hyper-reader. That is, even though it reads well cover-to-cover, you don't need to read it that way. You can search for topics related to the challenges you face, and when a term or phrase is used that you want to see defined or explored further, you can click or tap that term and see the definition or explore that term further.

This ebook is also available as an iBook at Apple's iTunes Store. Since all my ebooks are available in Acrobat (PDF) format, you've always been able to read them on ebook readers, such as iPad, iPhone, Nook, or Kindle. But this iTunes version makes use of the special capabilities of modern ebook readers. Check it out!

And it's all packaged in a single, compact ebook. Load it onto your Acrobat-enabled tablet, mobile devices, or laptop and carry it with you on your next trip.

Some sample tips

Here are some samples:

Know how to manage runaway dialogs

A runaway dialog occurs when an exchange between two attendees devolves into a detailed discussion between them, with all other attendees looking on or listening in. In face-to-face meetings, this phenomenon is costly enough, but the cost is only time and perhaps some feelings of being excluded. In virtual meetings, the cost is much higher, because in virtual meetings the onlookers (on-listeners?) are free to occupy themselves in other ways, using any of the multitude of distractions available to them. Bringing the meeting back together after a derailment like a runaway dialog can be costly in terms of time and lost contributions. And, of course, unless you can see everyone, you can't really tell that everyone is back from whatever they decided to do instead of attend to the runaway dialog.

The problem has a more advanced form that appears in serial virtual meetings in which the same pair of participants regularly engage in runaway dialogs. Under those conditions, when the first member of the pair speaks, and the second member responds, many of the other attendees recognize that simple exchange as Step One of a runaway dialog, even if it isn't. They then disengage from the meeting. In this way, disengagement can occur even if a runaway dialog doesn't occur.

One solution: have a three-exchange limit for dialogs.

Choose site names carefully

The names of the sites of a virtual meeting can inadvertently convey status messages. When they do, the conveyed status is conferred on the participants located at those sites, independent of their actual contributions to the business of the meeting. The status they acquire can lead to evaluations of their contributions that aren't based on the merits of those contributions, and this can distort the outcomes of the meeting.

For example, a site called "Field Office" is typically less important organizationally than a site called "Corporate Headquarters." When someone from the Field Office site contributes to the discussion an idea that contradicts a position favored by someone from Corporate Headquarters, some participants might be biased against it, outside their awareness. Others are biased and they know it. Still others have no real position of their own, but they believe that going against Corporate is a bad idea, so they adopt a biased stance.

Other sources of difficulty are the cultural connotations of site names. In some cultures, for example, certain numbers have significant negative connotations. For instance, in some Western cultures, many believe that 666 is associated with evil. Referring to a site as 666 because it's located at 666 Enterprise Boulevard might therefore be problematic. Most cultures associate names, concepts, words, and at least some numbers with negative concepts or bad luck. Verify that the site names you're choosing are free of undesirable baggage.

Know how to deal with virtual controversies

Because controversies enhance the urge to contribute to the discussion, the speaker queue can become lengthy and unmanageable. By the time someone's turn to speak rolls around, what they had to say might have been said already, or contradicted by facts offered by another, or even refuted preemptively. People can feel frustrated even if none of this happens, as they sit and wait their turn to speak. Emotions run higher, faster, than they do in face-to-face meetings. The online disinhibition effect (sometimes known as "keyboard courage") complicates matters even further.

The online disinhibition effect was first identified by John Suler [Suler 2004]. The essential idea is that when we interact face-to-face, inhibitions prevent us from behaving inappropriately. In the virtual environment, these inhibitions are much weaker.

Controversies are helpful. Their existence indicates engagement and interest. Although we can usually resolve controversies in face-to-face meetings, virtual meetings present difficulties. Do as much as you can to focus the conversation in advance of the meeting using small-group interactions, such as one-on-one telephone conversations.

To deal with the remaining issues in a virtual meeting, recognize that the higher the headcount, and the more complex the set of issues, the more likely are explosions. If you expect an elevated probability of controversy, take these steps to simplify the discussion:

Break up the problem

Factor it into smaller pieces, and explore the pieces one by one. Recognize that resolving the problem piecewise might not be possible. If a piece cannot be resolved independently, it can at least serve to generate a set of questions, which, if answered, could lead to resolution.

Create caucuses

Factor the set of attendees into groups of like mind. Assign an issue to each caucus. It's OK to assign the same issue to two or more caucuses. Have each caucus meet privately (possibly in a virtual room), and generate a set of deliverables that include either a proposed resolution and justification for it, or a list of open questions. Have each caucus designate a speaker to represent it.

Reconvene

When the entire group reconvenes, the discussion is limited to caucus speakers for a period of time. They engage in debate, and work together to revise the list of problems. Next, open the discussion to the full group again, to adopt the revised problem list, or to amend it and adopt it. Review caucus assignments, changing them as desired by the attendees, and repeat the process.

Convergence is the goal. If convergence remains elusive, try assigning positions to caucuses that directly conflict with their preferences, and ask them to defend those positions. Usually this leads to new insights and breaks deadlocks. Iterate until convergence is achieved.

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Details

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This book has an ISBN of 978-1-938932-11-3.

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