Remote collaboration is here to stay. Should it be?
By: Erica Nevas
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Strategy, Team Building, Pandemic, Remote Working

Remote collaboration is here to stay. Should it be?

Or, when a plane ticket is really worth it.

Without a crystal ball, it’s impossible to say which of our hard-won pandemic adaptations will stay for the long-term. Yet with so many industries facing a low-cost environment, it’s fair to say that virtual meetings of some sort will remain for some time after it is safe to be in person. During COVID-19 remote work, my Design Strategy team converted our entire physical workshop practice into a digital strength. It wasn’t easy, but I now believe it is possible to create design thinking workshops — meetings crafted to pull ideas and insights from diverse participants — that are more effective virtually than in person. However, this conclusion comes with a caveat. Human brains were not designed to create connection, build trust or derive clarity in a virtual environment. We either need to design around these virtual limitations or limit our own expectations if the long-term virtual workshop is here to stay.

Abandoning the core strength: moving from in-person to remote workshops

The in-person design thinking workshop was a staple of our Design Strategy team’s offering. Colorful, inventive, and choreographed to the minute, they were a place for our participants (in groups up to 90) to harness their creativity and collaborate with peers to solve difficult problems. We would spend weeks delving into problem definition and debating the right methods to pull insight from our participants on workshop day. One of our points of pride were the fit-for-purpose tactile experiences we would design to harness cognition — a workshop designed to create a 20-year-vision included a journal-like workbook with case studies and writing prompts, while one identifying new markets featured a flipbook where participants could mix and match markets with potential applications. The pandemic forced us to abandon these old strengths and determine new ways of working. It was nothing short of an identity crisis, but we knew we needed to pivot quickly if we wanted to help our clients evolve their businesses during an economic crisis.

Unanticipated benefits of remoteness

As expected, pivoting was hard. We learned new technologies, experimented with synchronous data capture, and built another layer into our choreography (“backstage” was now occupied with assigning people to breakout groups, monitoring the chat window, or solving technology problems). But it wasn’t two weeks into virtual work that our Design Strategy practice started to see unexpected — and even delightful — benefits of remote workshops. The first came when the Singapore half of our team started participating more wholeheartedly in our weekly team meeting. With an equal place on the grid, they could more easily join a topic. Everyone could see when someone was waiting for his or her turn to speak, and the team leveraged playful backgrounds to celebrate milestones and designed a picture guessing game using a shared digital whiteboard. (For more suggestions for improving your team’s virtual meetings, download my checklist.)

The energy of an in-person session didn’t translate. In fact, I was convinced people had checked out and were bored. But then we saw their output and it was, quite frankly, incredible.

It made sense that a team that was used to playing together could transition to remote. The real surprise came when we saw the output of our first remote design thinking session. Our task was to leverage cross-disciplinary groups to redesign laboratory equipment. Separating objectives from the traditional mechanisms for achieving them in person was critical. My partner and I split what would have been an eight-hour “maker space” session into three virtual meetings over three days. Following a short scene-setting kickoff meeting, the teams generated individual improvement ideas, then reunited several days later to combine their ideas into a prototype that would go head-to-head against other teams’ in the final day’s pitch session. The energy of an in-person session didn’t translate. In fact, I was convinced people had checked out and were bored. But then we saw their output and it was, quite frankly, incredible. They had combined their inputs effectively and generated four completely different concepts, each designed to address a critical set of problems. Their feedback after the second session was more surprising still — they were collaborating. They felt heard. They were having fun. Better yet, they felt they had generated better ideas because they had been virtual. The time to think between sessions and the chance to ideate at home, where their minds could wander, allowed them to generate better insights. It was a turning point in how we saw remote work.

Since then, my team has gone on to plan and guide countless remote workshops, intended to help teams uncover root problems, comprehend and synthesize diverse input, generate market entry strategies, or transform business processes. After one session, an executive posed the question: Can a remote session like this still take place after the pandemic is over? After all, she reasoned, we could unite disciplines from around the world without calendar headaches, jet lag or airfare — was the marginal utility of an in-person session really worth the complexity and cost?

Can we save airfare and have remote workshops, like, forever?

The answer to this question, as you might imagine, is nuanced. Cognitively speaking, there simply is no substitute for in-person, face-to-face interaction. The amount of information an individual can capture from gestures, tone, facial expressions and the like, is more than the bandwidth possible through onscreen interaction. Researchers believe humans developed language explicitly for the purpose of social unification, which would give them an advantage by organizing in service of a common goal. That interaction was not optimized for a two-dimensional flickering screen.

It follows, then, that the areas where leaders will want to invest time and money in airfare — or lower their expectations for output — are those challenging human-to-human interactions that involve either developing trust, synthesizing group experience, or deciding as a group between multiple uncertain outcomes.

At the same time, humans are resilient, and there are things we do just as well virtually as we do in-person. Basic information processing, like reading this article or digesting financial analyses, is nearly as efficient online as it is in person. It follows, then, that the areas where leaders will want to invest time and money in airfare — or lower their expectations for output — are those challenging human-to-human interactions that involve either developing trust, synthesizing group experience, or deciding as a group between multiple uncertain outcomes. In our experience, the following workshop goals are difficult enough to contemplate airfare — or to allow your team the time to implement mitigating tactics.

Download a checklist for planning your next virtual meeting here!

Workshop goals you need to consider closely before settling on remote.

1. Building trust or camaraderie. Virtual working robs us of the serendipitous connections we form from aimless small talk, which costs very little in person but must be awkwardly scheduled or inserted as an interruption to a group session while collaborating virtually. Think about the last time a customer confided in you or you had a marvelous team breakthrough. Did it happen during the staged interview or in the taxi ride to dinner afterward?

If you have to build trust remotely, allow extra time to allow informal data to enter into your conversations as a group. Schedule non-objective time. You might start a meeting by sharing what unique strength each person brings to the group. As trust is forming, schedule one-on-one sessions with members to ensure the questions they don’t feel comfortable asking online can be addressed before they do too much work on their own.

2. Synthesizing and communicating a “hive mind.” Getting everyone on a team up-to-speed with shared data is a task better accomplished in person, where the brain’s natural storytelling processing capabilities can be fully engaged. We’re much more likely to remember that story Han told about his meeting with the Prime Minister where he had egg on his tie than the fact that six out of seven respondents preferred the green bottle. This also applies when forming a new team — understanding whom to turn to when a specific expertise is needed is often a story recollection, rather than a stated fact in a shared database. These stories — or the data that teams gather individually and then assemble into a group insight — are better captured in-person.

If you have to build on team information remotely, allow extra time to establish a common format for data capture (Basecamp™, Slack™, Microsoft’s OneNote™ and Azure DevOps™, are all tools we’ve used with success) and allow time in your group meeting to bring it together verbally. When sharing verbally, ask people to share one key insight and one surprising observation from their research or past experience. This allows them to hone in on what the takeaway was, while also sharing divergent information that might add up to a group insight when the team hears it.

3. Making a decision amidst uncertainty. If data and variables are quickly changing and people need to react to that information, a virtual workshop will be difficult for people. It’s not just the added time to synthesize changing information in the meeting; the variety of information processing tendencies on any team is likely to make the verbal learners overpower the visual learners, and the kinetic learners walk out the door.

If you have to make an uncertain decision remotely, allow extra time to create clarity around the team’s ultimate objective. Depending upon the level of uncertainty and research needed, this could take weeks. As the team is working, help them process existing and new information by prioritizing based upon what they will be able to do when they have more information, and if they’ll be able to act in time once they actually know. Focus on the actionable, and recognize a level of risk with those that remain uncertain. (If you want to remember these tips after you put this article away, download a checklist here.)

The lose-lose-lose situation: an in-person virtual hybrid.

While you might use time or creative design to overcome most remote workshop obstacles, the one interaction I have consistently seen fail to live up to expectations is a meeting where one or more participants are virtual, while the rest are in-person. This is a lose-lose-lose proposition. The people in person have to slow down their thinking (and talking) to ensure people on the phone can hear them, and they can’t use tactile tools like sticky notes or templates, which so seamlessly connect kinetic and auditory learning in a workshop setting.

If it’s not possible for every participant to be in-person, these meetings are best held completely virtual.

Unless you’re using some pretty high-end videoconferencing software, the virtual participants don’t benefit from seeing everyone and cannot easily interrupt or participate in conversation. And the moderator must simultaneously juggle hearing inputs, synthesizing the direction of the team, with managing a/v hiccups along the way. If it’s not possible for every participant to be in-person, these meetings are best held completely virtual.