Working Virtually is a Dance Between Humans and Technology
By: Sarah Fisk
Tags: Productivity, Work, Digital Life, Technology, Remote Work

Working Virtually is a Dance Between Humans and Technology

Will this information be obsolete by the time you finish reading it?

For years before this pandemic put all of us online for everything, my students of group facilitation were already trying to hold meetings on digital platforms.

Project managers, non-profit executives, college administrators, HR people, grassroots organizers, pretty much anyone who needs to run groups successfully came through my workshop, and mostly they were holding face-to-face meetings. But more and more of them needed to meet online. They used whatever platform their company recommended, and yeah, it was quite the variety.

Lucky for me, in spite of different software, they all had the same questions about how to facilitate an effective online meeting. I enjoyed the challenge of translating the values and techniques I teach into an online environment, but I realized right away there was no way I was an expert on the technology.

Tech is definitely not my jam. Plus, innovation was a moving target. Every few months there was a new favorite. Notice I am not mentioning any names? Because we don’t use those tools anymore. In fact, you might as well put this whole article in your 2020 Time Capsule right now because there’s a good chance that by the time you finish reading, it will be obsolete.

Since my students were the ones using the tools, I could hardly claim more expertise than they had. So, I told them, “Right now, developing online meeting tech is at the Wright Brothers stage of flight. We are riding a bicycle with paper wings down a sand dune.”

Then I reviewed the requirements of any successful meeting and encouraged them to find ways to meet effectively. “Innovate!” I said.

It’s a partner dance: We lead and we follow.

This got me thinking about how technology develops in relation to how we use it. Humans invent machines to do things we need to do. Meanwhile, machines shape us as we use them, based on what they are capable of — which is often amazing, but still limited.

Probably none of us are old enough to remember when cars were invented, but there was a lot of discussion back then about how people would lose the ability to walk. It may seem silly now, but a century later here we are; the increase in obesity and cardiovascular disease in developed countries can be linked, in part, to the nearly universal use of automobiles. Raise your hand if this will stop you from driving your car.

More recently (you do remember this,) along came the cell phone. Undeniable value. Everyone all over the world has a cell phone: in cities, remote villages, even people who have never had any other kind of phone. Even people who have to walk miles to access electricity now have a phone.

It’s just a massively powerful computer in your pocket. What could possibly go wrong? Ahem. There’s plenty of data on how looking at little screens all day causes eye strain, bad posture, or even cancer. But the people I know who would forgo their cell phone for these reasons I can count on one finger.

We humans create technology and then risk actual physical harm (not to mention environmental catastrophe) to use it and we barely notice. Why?

Obviously, tech is magical, and it offers amazing personal value.

But there’s another reason. The best technological advances are successful because they are intuitive to use. They do what we need them to do in a way that allows us to stay comfortable as human beings; they integrate well with innate human behavior.

When a device feels intuitive it’s like an extension of what we were doing anyway — only better. It’s like when you are shopping with a friend and you try on a new shirt and they say, “It looks like you already own it.”

Steve Jobs knew this and designed for it, famously saying,

Some people say give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me ‘a faster horse’.”

Jobs was talking about making things that already fit into what people do naturally and extend our capability without much effort from us.

Socio-technical Systems

Systems thinkers call this dance between people and machines a socio-technical system, meaning the elements of the system that influence how the system functions and changes are both human and technological. Meeting online is a prime example of this.

“Meeting” means communicating. The struggle of digital communications is to recreate human face-to-face communications. And since we humans are evolutionarily the “storytelling ape” (apologies to Terry Pratchett) and we literally survive by communicating, our standard is very high and it involves all our senses.

Technology is trying to catch up, and making progress. From drums in the distance, to letter writing, to the telegraph (not intuitive), to the telephone (intuitive), to big clunky video cameras in conference rooms (no one used them after the first week), we have finally arrived at — drumroll please — Zoom!

Ok, I know there are many other platforms for meetings, but Zoom is the current hands-down favorite. It’s not perfect, but the pandemic has made it ubiquitous. Even my cousin Liz uses it.

And why? Pop quiz! — you know the answer: because it is the most intuitive to use, and currently gives us the best technological version of face-to-face communication and the best tools to collaborate.

This won’t last, for two reasons. The first is competition from other tech developers. (MS Teams has a beta version out that sends chills down my spine.)

And the second reason is us. The users. People using technology changes the technology. We make tech do things we need it to do even beyond its original design.

Cool Zoom Hack

Here’s my example. Zoom has many handy features including easy-to-use breakout rooms. I absolutely need breakout rooms! I support groups to collaborate on complex issues, and small groups are where it’s at because people need to actually talk to each other.

Zoom breakouts provide the obvious: You can put people in rooms randomly or manually organize who goes in what room. Every room has its own chat and a whiteboard — it's great.

But what if you want to make topic-specific breakout rooms and give people the choice of which topic they want to talk about, then allow them to move from room to room on their own?

I definitely need this. My philosophy is to give people as much autonomy as they can stand. This is what I do in my face-to-face work, and my clients need to do the same online.

Luckily, in the mad scramble to teach Zoom to our clients, my friend Raymond van Driel from the Applied Improv Network figured it out. He immediately shared his discovery, and now we can all easily do Open Space and a host of other essential formats. You can get specific instructions here. Or wait for Zoom to make this easy, which I hear they are planning to do.

When the breakout rooms can have designated topics, and people can move between the rooms on their own based on their interests, it feels natural. There are lots of applications, not just in work settings, but also in family gatherings, social events, even complex games like Werewolf.

Not surprisingly, we aren’t the only ones to discover this, so it really is like the era of the Wright Brothers, when many groups were separately trying to invent a flying machine. We are all in this dance of invention, even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as tech-savvy.

But let’s not stop there.

Technology is being developed by us. The dance back and forth between human needs and tech capability will continue. You hear a lot about both the wonders and the horrors of new technology. This is an invitation to not just see ourselves as consumers of the wonder, and victims of the horror. Let’s do the best job we can to make technology reflect and support the finest aspects of who we are as humans.

With a nod to Sam Kaner for inspiration.