Balancing Control and Freedom in Virtual Meetings

About a month ago, Adrian Sogar posted a blog article titled Control Versus Freedom in Meetings. His blog post inspired me to look at it from the perspective of virtual meetings in particular. This look became a concrete discussion on the topic, which turned out to be my first article on LinkedIn.

The two leading questions I posed in the aforementioned article were “Are there any differences with respect to control and freedom between in-presence and virtual meetings?” and “How can we find a good balance between control and freedom?”

My first article focused on the first questions and in this second article I elaborate “how we can actually find and maintain a good balance between a level of control and our need for freedom? The first helps us to achieve valuable outcome and the latter helps us to spark creativity and innovation.

In this context, the term “balance” doesn’t refer to a static, leveled-out configuration of control and freedom that we keep between start and finish of a virtual workshop. Instead I think of a dynamic and virtuous “dance” with freedom and control over time.

Effective moderation of any meeting, no matter if it is in-presence or virtual, needs to take into account the actual position in the flow of a meeting and the observed actions / reactions of participants. So there needs to be balance in the moment, which keeps the virtual meeting within the accepted, healthy and useful boundaries. And at the same time a balance over the complete live cycle of the virtual meeting, which aims to optimize the valuable outcome.

One of the enabling factors for this “dance” is trust. The level of trust that either already exists or can quickly be established between moderator(s) and participants as well as between moderators and between participants (in self-organized environments, participants often “temporarily moderate” during meetings, even if they may not realize it or call it like this).

Participants (or invitees) have or develop trust, if they know and understand

• The purpose and goals of the meeting.
• Why they are taking part and what is expected from them.
• The timeframe and flow fit the purpose of the meeting.
• That the relevant people are attending.
• That the right space, tools, skills and experience are available.

Essentially, they need to know that it is worth their time spent.

Moderator(s) needs to trust that participants use their freedom to further the meeting towards a valuable outcome. This is mostly achieved by planning and designing a course of action, that ensures that everybody gets their opportunity to contribute and being heard.

It is crucial that meeting design and moderation ensures an effective playing field for communication and collaboration. The flow and the macro- / micro-structures used, need to support that this effective playing field comes into existence and can be maintained.

What are your experiences with balancing out control vs. freedom?

All of the above is true for both in-presence and virtual meetings. The big difference stems from the fact that the channels for communication between people in virtual meetings are much more narrow than compared to in-presence meetings. For example:

• We can see each other, but only really small and in rather static settings.
• We can hear each other, but only at full audio level or not at all.
• We lack spatial orientation, i.e. our relative position with respect to other participants.
• We have almost no means to observe body language.
• We have a hard time to spot emotions, if at all.
• Interactions happen through a layer of technologies that we all master at very different levels of ease.

Essentially, we are all – moderators and participants alike – confronted with very low bandwidth versions of the sensory inputs that enable our self-control and influence on others in virtual meetings.

I believe that software platforms or tools for virtual meetings need to address and solve some of the negative impact that comes from the differences mentioned above (and in the first article as well). Or virtual meetings will be regarded as less suited for creative and innovative group collaboration, because as humans we rely on "broadband" connections with our peers, so that complex group dynamics and unpredictable co-creation results can happen.

With thing.online we explore the continuum between control and freedom for the purpose of enabling more effective, collaborative virtual meetings. thing.online widens the connection between participants by providing spatial orientation, expression of emotions and user interactions that are easy and intuitive.

Are you curious to learn more about what we do? Please don’t hesitate and register for one of our thing for the Curious user testing sessions.