Facilitate Proceedings » Collaboration Technology

The Art of Steering a Virtual Session

Julia Young — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:50:36 +0000

Recently I responded to a question from one of my LinkedIn professional groups. Someone asked: “During web conferences involving several locations, I often find myself sending SMS’s to my boss at the same time so as to steer or modify the meeting/discussion on the fly – does anybody else do this? Yes, indeed I do.

July Webinars – How to keep participants fully engaged

Julia Young — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:17 +0000

With our Interactive Webinars series, we’ve been exploring the concept of building highly interactive elements into virtual meetings and webinars. We invite anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas with us to engage in an interactive experience of creative thinking about ways to design collaborative activities in what is too often a one on many, presentation heavy format. Our series continues this month with more opportunities to collaborate on ideas about designing interactive webinars and virtual meetings. We’ve got two great webinars planned for July.

Strategic Planning in Second Life

Julia Young — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:38:45 +0000

Strategic planning in Second Life plays out in this YouTube video of a session with IBM and Schneider Electric. I am left wondering if the technology really creates the engagement that the narrator mention or if the technology simply prompts the meeting planners to design in more interaction than a typical virtual meeting.

So, you want to solve problems and generate quality ideas in your meeting?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:29:37 +0000

If solving problems or generating high quality ideas are among your primary meeting goals, which of the many meeting venues available to facilitators should you select? Face to face? Teleconferencing? Audio and video conferencing? Text messaging? Asynchronous or synchronous? With or without collaborative systems? Does it make a difference which meeting tools you select or the time frame you select? This month’s Research Brief addresses these questions, with a clear winner emerging.

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. Click on the link to read today’s full Research Brief. These Briefs are intended to communicate the results of my already published research to practitioners in the field. I appreciate and encourage your feedback; you are the best qualified to judge the relevant application of my research in the workplace.

5 Tips For Using Smart Phones To Make Large Meetings Interactive

Mike McCall — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:31:31 +0000

Lately I’ve been interested in the use of smart phones paired with web-based tools to make meetings more interactive. (see blog post For This Meeting, Turn on Your Smart Phones). Recently I helped facilitate a session of 150 people where a variety of smart phones were used to allow meeting attendees to provide instant input to the session organizers. There were several useful take-always from this experience.

1- Explore what resources and tools you’ll need to achieve your meeting objectives

If the objective is primarily to provide “information by presentation “, then making sure your speakers are available and setting up a good projection system may be all that you need. If your speakers can’t physically be present at the session you’ll need networking, video conferencing or telephony capabilities to enable their virtual presence.
If, on the other hand, your meeting process calls for an interactive session with group input (especially with a group of 50 people or more), using smart phones or other devices is a good way to efficiently collect the information from all participants without disrupting the meeting flow. Make sure that the majority of your audience own smart phones and that you offer alternative input options so no one feels excluded. Provide loaner smart phones or Apple iPod Touches , or have a few laptops around the room for people to use.

How To Use Social Networking Tools To Strengthen Virtual Collaboration

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:56:54 +0000

I recently plunged (well, maybe dipped a toe or two) into the world of Twitter. It was inevitable, despite some of my early protestations. Pretty much all of my colleagues are doing it, as are my competitors, and more and more of my clients. Social networking (SN) tools like Twitter really are opening up new ways for virtual workers to connect, communicate and collaborate. SN tools do what email, instant messaging and other more traditional communications means cannot: They foster emergence, meaning that people and groups can naturally and easily link together based on their common interests, skills or profiles, often with people they never even realized existed.

Of course, any tool can be disruptive in a group if used in inappropriate ways. Based on my work with clients and colleagues who work as part of geographically dispersed teams, here are just a few helpful ways to use SN tools.

Which Venue Works Best For Dispersed Meetings?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:38:20 +0000

In my last Research Brief for FacilitateProceedings, I shared the quantitative results to date of my study on the effectiveness of six different meeting venues on the bottom line of organizations. This month I thought I’d share some of the qualitative results.

I noticed the questions I received from my first blog posting asked my opinion about why we were seeing some of the results. In the larger, long-term study, I analyze the data using not only statistical techniques, but also by using “qualititative methods of inquiry,” a newer research method that helps researchers and practitioners understand not just “what” they are seeing in the research results, but “why.”

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. The research I summarize for you in this blog has already been reviewed and deemed credible by top scholars in my field. The ultimate result of this research is to design meeting models and processes that will help practioners choose the most effective methods to conduct meetings globally, across time and space, using the latest technology.

Synergy or Oxymoron? Reflections on Asynchronous Facilitation

Gurpreet Gil — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:54:10 +0000

In this research brief I will share some of the experience of Synergy, a project exploring the use of collaborative meeting software to facilitate asynchronous group activities.

Most staff developers see themselves as facilitators of the learning process – knowledge is distributed throughout the organisation and the learning process happens when people successfully collaborate with others. The role of the facilitator is to encourage this process by providing a clear framework for discussion, creating opportunities for dialogue to occur across different groups and communities of practice. Sounds great doesn’t it? If only it were that easy!

In reality, availability of the right people at the right time is often a major issue and what appears to be a successful outcome for the group who attended can subsequently be undermined by the absence of key individuals. This is where collaborative meeting software comes in, by offering a solution that enables people to be involved in a facilitated meeting, irrespective of their geographical location and existing diary commitments.

Matching Technology Tools to Collaboration Style

Danuta McCall — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:21:16 +0000

I just read an interesting article published by eminent consulting firm McKinsey & Company entitled “Using technology to improve workforce collaboration” (authors James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee).

A new class of worker: the Collaboration Worker

The authors recast the workforce sector known as Knowledge Workers (a venerable term coined by Peter Drucker in the mid 20th century) in terms of what most non-production or transaction workers do: collaborate to solve problems, nurture ideas, serve customers and engage with partners. Their research reveals that “the performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. It follows then that productivity improvements in this sector of the workforce could have a significant impact on the bottom line. As we have a plethora of collaboration tools available to us today, we’ve got ourselves a real opportunity to nail this one. Right? Yes (the article describes how Cisco saved more than $100 million in travel and business expenses and increased productivity by 78 percent), and it’s not quite that simple.

Are We Losing The Art Of Decoding Expression?

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:21:19 +0000

With increasing reliance on text as a primary form of communication, younger generations may be losing the ability to read vital nonverbal cues. And for those of us who multitask all too often, we may be losing the ability faster than we think.
So what’s the real harm here? Absent constant opportunities to decode expressive forms of communications, we simply will not learn how to react or respond to others’ nonverbal cues. The ability to impart meaning from one’s facial expression, tone of voice, choice of words, or cadence is a nuanced affair that takes years of experience to get right even most of the time.