How to encourage engagement in virtual meetings?

Virtual meetings are here to stay. Increasingly, organizations in our sectors are promoting the use of online web conferencing and web gathering tools to organize learning events, team and project meetings, information sharing sessions, etc. Budget cuts, the increasing availability of technology solution, and the way we are more and more working in decentralized, virtual teams, all ask for online meetings that are well designed, facilitated, and engaging.

webinar by Jules on Flickr

So how to make this happen? What are the options and techniques to make a virtual meeting more productive, participatory and engaging?

To explore this questions, yesterday I joined a webinar organized by CORE Group and the Knowledge Management Task Force of the TOPS FSN Network. Even if it was late at night for me, I was very happy I joined the event. Both the conversations that emerged, and the way the event was designed, were a great learning experience.

Virtual meetings are… 

Even if I joined the meeting few minutes after it started, I immediately knew I was in the right place. A slide in the middle of the screen was asking me “When you think about virtual meetings, what’s the one word and feeling that comes to your mid?”. And the answers I was hearing from the other 20 plus KM and communication professionals that were in the room, they all resonated well with me.

Virtual meetings can be unpredictable. For as much as we may like virtual meetings, there’s always the possibility of a technical failure. Your keynote and presenter may be late or not show up, or you may have a lower attendance that you had expected. Users may not be familiar with the conferencing platform, making it more difficult for them to engage with the technology and the other participants in the event.

Virtual meetings can also be very demanding, with a lot that goes into preparing and delivering, in terms of time and manpower. You need at least one producer, a chat host, a note taker and an MC. Sometimes these roles can overlap, but it works better if the various tasks are split between different people.

On the other hand, virtual meetings are a necessary, and they’ll be even more in the future. And they allow a great deal of experimentation in the way you bring people together to interact online. 

Engaging participants to speak up 

We were brought into separate breakout rooms according to the answers we had provided to a pre-event survey. While one group discussed how to create engaging content for webinars and online meetings, in the room I was assigned to, we looked at options to stimulate participants using their microphones. Different techniques and approaches can be used to make this happen:

• Users’ need to know how to open their microphone, so sending some pre-webinar information on how this work may bring you a long way when they have to start interacting. 
• There’s a clear and understandable sense of ‘fear’ when talking to a group of strangers online that you don’t know and can’t see. So creating trust amongst participants and a safe environment for everyone to feel comfortable with is very important. 
• The use of breakout rooms is an excellent way to create safer and more intimate spaces for conversation, where participants may be less afraid to contribute their opinions. 
• Also a progression through different means of communication can help in building trust. You start with introductions via chat, then move into breakout rooms, and then in plenary. 
• If you want participants to contribute, have clear, open ended questions they can relate to and engage with. 
• Most important, don’t be afraid of silence. There’s often a few seconds where nobody wants to speak, that awkward, short but long moment of silence. If you’re the facilitator, let it be. Eventually someone will take the floor. 

Preparation, design and facilitation are the key to success 

The webinar was very practical and participatory from the very beginning. The organizers had gathered our inputs before the meetings, and this info was used in defining the questions we addressed in plenary and in the the breakout rooms.They also made great use of the conferencing technology (Adobe Connect - the platform we use ourselves for online and blended meetings), using polls, chats, different meeting layouts and progressing swiftly through various techniques and tools in facilitating the session. Moreover, they made attendees take responsibilities for facilitating parts of the session and reporting back to the whole group.

It’s true that the participants make the webinar, and a webinar is good only as the participants engage with it. But what yesterday's webinar demonstrated to me once more is that investment in preparation, event design and good facilitation techniques are the things that will make or break your next virtual meeting.

I’d love to hear what are your obstacles in producing and facilitating virtual meetings, and what you’ve learned from your own experience. Have something to share? Please drop a line in the comments below here!

Blending online and offline meetings - 5 short lessons from Addis Share Fair

Earlier this week, we supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation. As well as giving people that could not travel to Addis the opportunity to participate in part of the event, for us this was also an occasion to experiment more with Adobe Connect and how to use it to support online and offline events - and blend them together.

In designing the remote participation, we had decided to try with different formats and modalities of e/participation.

• A webcast of a session from Addis via Adobe Connect, with online interaction carried out via chat and breakout rooms
• Two sessions where the conveners joined in remotely, and online and offline participants interacted in various ways from group chats to bilateral chats to small groups in breakout rooms
• A blended session with activities in parallel on site and with a fully blended group, with two people from Addis joining three online participants into Adobe.

We’ll be having a debrief with the rest of the team that supported this experimenting. And we’re collecting feedback from participants, to understand how they have experienced these sessions, and how they can be improved. But to get the conversation started, here are 5 quick takeaways from this recent experiments:

1. Online and offline have different pace and dynamics
   We probably all knew this before but experimenting to bring remote participation into a face to face meeting confirmed how interactions and exchanges have a very different pace, online and offline. In the former, the feedback loops are much slower.
2. Split the processes - and bridge in debrief
   Because interactions work differently online and offline, running the two in parallel is easier to manage. You can have the same activities F2F and online, but these may have to be facilitated in different ways. For example, you may go through a set of 1 to 1 chats between physical participants, while having a group chat with all virtual participants. The exchange and cross over between online and offline can be done in the debriefing sessions.
3. Blended ain’t easy
   It’s very different is when you try to have physical participants interacting in small groups with online participants. This requires a lot of preparation, and an optimum use of the technology, not only to avoid sound issues but also to make sure participants can interact using text, video and voice.
4. You need a team

Depending on the type of e-participation that you want to enable from a face to face meeting, you may need different people being part of your facilitation team: two facilitators (one onsite and one online), one technical host and, if the onsite facilitator isn’t experienced with blended meetings, one ‘blender’ who connects online and offline from the physical meeting room.

5. Always have (some) Plan B(s)
   Always be prepared for what can go wrong. For example, in one occasion we lost the video and audio feed from the room - it’s important to have ways to notify participants immediately, and be ready to fill in this gap with other activities.

We’ll keep on reflecting on this experience and experimenting with tools, approaches and facilitation techniques, and we’ll make sure we share our findings here. Let us know what your experience is with blended online offline meetings and what we can learn from other experiences.

Pier Andrea Pirani

Learn with us online at the ‘AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair

On 25 and 26 May, we'll be joining the ILRI communications and KM group in Addis Ababa and several partners in the AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair.

The focus of the event is on the "design and delivery of truly effective ‘process’ improvements that lead to applied innovation, social learning and value for money (in agriculture)."

While Pete will be onsite in Addis, I'll be connecting online; together we'll facilitate and host one session on social reporting. We'll also provide technical support and participate in the other 3 sessions that are open for online participants.

To help us organise we’ve set up Eventbrite pages for the four sessions currently open, so please register here (all times East Africa Addis Ababa/Nairobi):

• Mon 25 May, 10.30: (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) http://bit.ly/1S0DG4q
• Mon 25 May, 13:50: Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani) http://bit.ly/1QWIJRM 
• May, 15.50: Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne) http://bit.ly/1HmYr4b 
• Tue 26 May, 11.00: Liberating Structures (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston) http://bit.ly/1Ftf0hi

We’re experimenting with different types of online engagement, from a simple webcast of a Liberating Structures workshop session to more interactive formats, with presenters both online and in the room, and participants able to interact equally with those physically and remotely in the room.

If you're interested in learning and experimenting with us, please do register for the sessions and join us online next week!

Learning - sharing what we know we know

Here's a terrible story whose details we'll hide. It’s from an excellent, well regarded development agency where around 1998 a smart, experienced project manager learned in a country programme that a particular approach didn’t work, it upset people and their lives and was a waste of money. As s/he recounted the experience another equally smart experienced person stood up and said s/he’d learnt the same lesson working in the same organisation in another country around 1989. And I later spoke to someone who works for the same organisation who was too embarrassed to admit in plenary that s/he had learnt the same lesson for the same organisation in another country in 2004!

Stories like this are dismayingly common, and not just in international development cooperation. DfID’s Learning efforts, to take just one, scored Amber/Red ¹ in a 2014 assessment by the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI). So what can organisations do to learn better? This perennial question is at the centre of a review we’re doing with Water Aid UK on Knowledge Sharing and Learning. It overlaps with the other sanitation work we’re doing, KM in the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) programme. Three sub questions are interesting to both projects:

• Are we too cautious about saying what we know we know? 
• How do we record what we know and have learned in ways that people will pay attention to? 
• How do organisations develop cultures where it is “socially unacceptable not to learn”, as one grantee put it recently? 

Known knowns

On the first point, a conclusion from the terrible story is that the first smart experienced person, who told the story, groaned as he learnt that the same error had repeated, in the same organisation. He suggested we don’t declare loudly and clearly enough what it is we know we know. We are often too tentative and vague, delivering high level bullet point recommendations or simply not sharing our conclusions. As part of the BDS KM programme we're supporting a Learning Exchange where he is going to sit down with two others from two organisations and try to write down what it is they have all learnt, what they know they know (about Sanitation Marketing, in this instance). We're encouraging them to tell the story using a range of media, to try and make their ideas sing and dance.

We'll also be encouraging the group to produce content that makes people think. If there is a document that tells you how to do something, and doesn’t require you to think, then it's probably only a technical fix: important for sure, in specific contexts, but not necessarily generalisable nor stimulating to other people's learning. Meaningful outputs that might enable people to learn across contexts are those that require people to talk together, question and reflect on the basis of what they read/hear/see in the documentation - to learn socially.

But it’s not easy to pronounce on what we know we know. It’s quite a bold thing to do. It’s much easier to ask questions, be tentative. I tried in a long, excellent conversation about knowledge and doledge on the KM4Dev discussion list, and I still feel uneasy about being so definite. A better example is a great blog, "Do we learn enough and does learning lead to improved sector performance?" The authors are two more smart, experienced, WASH specialists and the blog reflects on learning from the recent BDS annual convening meeting in Hanoi. The authors described elsewhere how, when they first re-read what they had come up, with they were startled at how obvious a lot of it seemed. But the blog has been well received, possibly because by stating the obvious, statements about which they were confident, the authors are providing navigational markers by which other people can steer.

But it takes time – and a learning culture - to mainstream that kind of reflection and recording. To quote from the ICAI report on DfID: “DFID is not sufficiently integrating opportunities for continuous learning within day-to-day tasks. In particular, staff do not have enough time to build learning into their core tasks. DFID is not fully ensuring that the lessons from each stage of the delivery chain are captured, particularly in relation to locally employed staff, delivery agents and, most crucially, the beneficiaries. Heads of office do not consistently define a positive culture of learning".

We'll be addressing culture in the next blog.

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^{1. [programme performs relatively poorly overall against ICAI’s criteria for effectiveness and value for money. Significant improvements should be made]↩}

Facilitating emergent conversations – variants on Samoan Circles and Fishbowls

Trying to ensure that the brains and experience of all participants are brought into the room is one of the more enjoyable challenges of facilitation. It’s mainly a question of finding the right balance of different approaches since there are so many formats that provide opportunities for different combinations of people to share knowledge and questions. Our knowledge of those formats comes from ideas and stories freely shared by other facilitators, in person or via resource bases like the KS Toolkit. We do a lot of event facilitation using those ideas so to give back to the Commons we’re sharing here some recent workshop experience.

Samoan circle discussion during 2015 BDS convening 

One element of a good balance is to do with mixing up deliberately ‘leaderless moments’, where natural leaders or burning discussion topics can fill the space, with more structured processes such as those that promote particular people as conversation guides, or even gurus, around whose ideas and presentation discussion flows. Samoan circles and Fishbowl formats can lend themselves to most points along that spectrum of options, and we happily experimented with two variants at the recent annual workshop of a large Sanitation programme.

At its core it’s a simple method: a small group of people have a conversation amongst a wider group of participants. The difference with panels, for example, is that the small group sit in a circle surrounded by the participants. Samoan circles are possibly the purest form of the approach[1]. In this format the central group begin discussing the topic. People in the outer circle cannot speak unless they replace one of the speakers in the centre. If somebody wants to participate, she taps one of the current speakers on the shoulder as a sign of intent that she wishes to replace one of the current speakers in the circle. The conversation continues until the time is up or the conversation dies.

The democratising nature of the format generates a particular energy that drives people into the inner circle, in an active and engaged way. And crucially, people are able to intervene at precisely the point in the conversation which engages them, rather than having to wait and ask questions later, that then take people backwards to an earlier point. As a consequence conversation tends to flow organically– assuming of course that the chosen topic is interesting to the participants and that they are comfortable with and trusting of each other. It’s not a tool to use very early in a workshop.

The Feldman variation

The Feldman Variation

The excellent Liberating Structures group propose a variant, in which the outer circle ask questions, but not randomly. At a given point the conversation in the middle stops and the outer circle talk among themselves, agreeing questions, which they then put to the speakers. Peter Feldman, one of the main organisers of our recent sanitation workshop, proposed a variant in which there were two spare chairs in the central circle. The central speakers stayed in the ring and other participants could join the conversation by sitting in one of the empty chairs, or join by following the tapping convention to replace one of the speakers, but only those in the extra chairs.

We used the Samoan circle and the Feldman variation in the workshop, in two sessions, one focusing on Sanitation financing and the other on Behaviour change. The choice of topics meant that there were many people with ideas and opinions to contribute but it was interesting to see how the two formats operated. We used the Feldman variation for the Financing discussion, partly because we believed there was a great divergence of experience amongst participants, so having a group more familiar with different approaches operating as an expert panel seemed appropriate. The format engaged more participants in the conversation than would be normal in a traditional panel discussion, partly because the conversation didn’t always return to the experts but followed on from ideas introduced by the ‘outer circle’. However, having one group of people always present meant that the conversation was anchored by their experience and confidence in speaking about the topic.

For the Behaviour Change conversation we used the Samoan circle format. The topic and the format generated a lot of debate, lasting a full 90 minutes - at the end of a long day, and the fourth day of the workshop at that. However, the conversation ranged around the interests and opinions of participants and wasn't anchored in the same way. Our conclusion was that in this format someone, either the facilitators or a participant, needs to step forward pro-actively, intervening to summarise, reflect back opinions so far and point out questions that hadn’t been properly answered or addressed.

The workshop was organised around wide range of activities, including two straight-forward presentation and discussion sessions, world cafes, 1-2-4-All, field visit and feedback sessions, spectrogram exercises, group discussions - and the emergent conversations above. That variety scratches all the itches - allowing participants time to listen, reflect and engage participatively both individually and collectively. It's probably one of the reasons why participants were so positive about the Fishbowl exercises, which they were. Organising opportunities for participants to stretch both their legs and brains in stimulating conversations about issues that matter to them is a great way to earn a living!











[1] And apologies to co-facilitators and participants at the 2015 BDS convening, I was calling this a fishbowl!

Knowledge at ICT4AG

We were active at the ICT4Ag conference organised by CTA. It was a big event. About 400 people passed through over four days, and even by the end of the fourth day around 200

(thanks to Nancy White for this photo of groups at work)

people were still prepared to spend time thinking together about what they had learnt and what kind of actions would advance the different agendas that had been surfaced

Pier Andrea Pirani trained and led the social reporting team and we were also there to both support and try to enrich the learning and knowledge sharing and try to capture some of the processes  – the conversations, any outputs of individual and shared thinking, the formal presentations and, if at all possible, some of the informal exchanges that are always at the centre of conferences and workshops. It was a busy time, for participants and us. After an introductory Plug and Play day, which we helped facilitate, and of which more in another blog, the central three days of the conference were split up into:

• Plenary panel presentations 
• Parallel sessions, 24 in total, where three or four people presented case-studies, projects, studies and stories and, if the presenters were able to convince people to keep to time, some discussion; 
• Two ‘open sessions’, where the aim was to encourage collective reflection, cutting across the thematic streams which were part of the organising framework, to surface fresh perspectives and emerging trends   

Learning and knowledge sharing 

So participants at ICT4 Ag experienced a rich and varied programme, that offered a broad span of opportunities to learn new things, to deepen existing knowledge, to meet informally and exchange ideas with other people, to take part in more organised group discussion activities, participate in processes aimed at encouraging reflective thinking and the emergence of collectively sifted ways to improve the use of ICTs in Agriculture. Participants had access to detailed programme and background information from a website, a mobile phone application, a printed catalogue, presentations during content sessions and brochure material distributed by those who were presenting. Those who use and engage in social media shared in the production of a huge number of content items including tweets (8,778!), blogs, video interviews and Facebook posts

Participatory?

A daily narrative of each day was published on the site, as was a short video story. And then there were the evenings – something happening most nights, for most participants, with one ‘reception’ well fuelled by alcohol (there is a blog somewhere about alcohol and development, how for people who meet rarely, and work virtually globally, it shortcuts to more intense connections and conversations and, of course, makes it more fun!)

If my own experience is typical, all of those channels will have enabled those who participated actively to leave with an enriched understanding of trends; new ideas; which older ideas work and which don’t; deepened relationships and extended networks, as well as a range of fully and partially formed ideas about doing things differently, or doing new things.

Knowledge – or information – management 

And that is all without having a look at all the output that we and others have gathered during and since the conference. We weren't able or resourced to provide a full record of the event: 

• If we had videoed content session we would still only be providing a small proportion of the learning represented by the recorded sessions, since there wouldn’t have been the conversations before, during and after those sessions that provided context and material for comparison. 
• We could have documented each content session in detail: harder to absorb, but possibly a basis for later analysis for major and common ideas. 

Instead the CTA team aimed to participate fully in the event and gather material from the inside, looking to surface and record learning:

• Four people were employed to participate in and write syntheses of the key ideas and features of the parallel content sessions. Deliberately, we aren’t looking for neutral reports of proceedings but a personal take of the material and conversations, based on our own judgement, informed by experience and, of course, our own preconceptions, based on our own imperfect understanding and knowledge; 
• The output of from the social reporter team was aligned to those content sessions using tags identifying three main streams of work 
• Participants were encouraged to leave ‘what next’ reflections on wall boards, which we will be sifting and sorting; 
• In the two non-structured 'open sessions' participants were first encouraged to identify themes which had emerged, cross-cutting the formal conference structure and then envision a future within the themes which emerged and note down what could be done to support progress, actions for themselves or by other stakeholders in agriculture. 

We’ve been capturing and analysing the material, sense-making as we go along. And we’re at the stage now of trying to work out what will be really useful, for both participants and other people interested in ICT4Ag. We don’t want to generate material that is only valuable to researchers and archivists. So who needs what? 

• One of the main audiences is participants themselves, who have a shared experience and for whom syntheses, tweets, blog stories will serve to jog memories and start reflections. 
• Another is CTA and its organising partners, who will all value more structured, forward-looking material, to support planning and programme development and to help shape the course of ICT4Ag, as well as attract more resources to support that work and those who work in it, all ultimately aimed at improving the well-being of populations in ACP countries. 
• There are some lessons and ideas that will be valuable to people who weren’t at the event. Although without the conversations and atmosphere of the conference those will be thinner in terms of understanding. 

The challenge, I think, is that whatever we produce will be a pale reflection of the actual event, where participations had a kind of broadband experience, multi-dimensional and intense.

So what’s our K goal? I’ve been trying to use the triple-loop learning frame as a guide 

AIM	LOOP
To capture for CTA, for reflection and planning?	Single
To share more widely, selectively, to help people practically (e.g. trip reports) ….. …..and in terms of learning (double)?	Single Double
To identify what we think are lessons that people in the sector could use to make their own work better?	Double
To promote innovations that we think are worth watching or backing?	Single
To reflect on our own learning?	Triple
To encourage/enable others to reflect on their own action…. and learning	Double Triple

Again, if my own experience is a guide, participants are likely to look at some of the final output, selectively, picking out those things that impressed or moved me. And while I do sometimes watch video-recorded events, I personally find that reports or summaries of action-points, however full and well-written, rarely move me to do anything. Whereas the energy from a good event continues to drive follow-up of various kinds for some time afterwards.

What about you? What kind of output from events that you didn’t attend do you find genuinely useful, and how much do you read?