Covid-19 and Zoom: the 2 biggest disrupters in our business

We foresaw this even though we didn't predict the cause. Two years ago, in an internal strategic reflection process that we did, using Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas in Nexus, we asked ourselves "what would our work as consultants become if we could no longer travel? " We played with various scenarios such as skyrocketing airplane prices, chronic air traffic strikes, natural disasters such as tornadoes, floods, fires or volcanoes. We had prepared ourselves in advance, starting to transfer some of our content to an online platform, creating partnerships, etc.

And now we find ourselves living in a world where our hypothetical scenario is becoming real: travel is currently impossible and will become difficult for many months ahead, and reaching clients on the other side of the world to facilitate processes of transformation (or regener'Action as we call it) is no longer possible. We spend our days in front of the screen, on Skype, on Teams, on Hangouts but most of all on Zoom. During one of our remote team meetings (on a Zoom of course??) we asked ourselves: what we are learning? And what follows are the 8 main themes that came up. Whatever your professional background, we would love you to comment, enrich, give us your point of view.

1. Person-to-person engagement (albeit through a screen) is necessarily shortened when using videoconference. Let's picture an iceberg representing the work of a consultant, in which the time of presence is the emerged part and all that is below the water line is the preparation (interpretation of the client's context, listening of needs, creative work of connecting information, work on one's own bias and mental models, preparation of slides, setting up the Zoom room, debriefing, etc.). Effective and efficient person-to-person engagement (the emerged part of the iceberg) actually requires a much bigger volume of work, which the client can’t actually see – i.e. the hidden part of the iceberg. Somehow, the ration has shifted: for 1 day of consulting/facilitation with a group in a conference center, we might have need 2-3 hours preparation; now for a 2-3 hours Zoom consultancy/facilitation session, we could need up to a day around the session itself! How can we value this hidden time with our clients?

2. The essence of the essence. As a consequence of the reduced time of P2P engagement, we’ve had to quickly adapt our facilitation style to ensure that listening and speaking time are centered on what is really essential. Depending on the different cultures and personalities this can be more or less easy. The opportunity that comes from this reduced time in videoconferencing is that the time in front of the screen has to become a time of absolute presence and dedication to the purpose and that this full presence helps to choose what we really feel can have an impact. This also means not filling the time with increasing levels of complexity, hoping to put as much into this short time as possible, as if quantity was more important than quality. When you think about it, the short conversation time that Zoom offers should be just that: a time for authentic conversation – everything else can probably be done through emails and document sharing. So in practice, in our experience, this means that in each unit of a couple of hours there is only room for one work topic.

3. The "check-in" time. A “check-in” is the moment we use in groups to help people “enter” the actual meeting, and therefore become fully present. Before working online, when we had (what now feels like) the luxury of being all physically in the same room, and have at least a day or two together, we would offer some time, at the beginning of the day, for people to share how they are entering the meeting, why they are attending, what they are hoping to come away with, etc. This practice comes from the tools of dialogue and is very effective in deeply aligning people with one another and also with the purpose of the meeting. We realized the importance of giving even more time, in this moment of crisis, to this initial stage, because we’ve noticed that people’s lives are being so disrupted, and that, as a consequence, they come into the meeting so filled with other thoughts and feelings that unless we give them space and time to voice them, they will not be able to be present to the work that we are there to do together. To put it another way, reducing the “Check-in” time with the aim of using all available time for the “work” is actually a miscalculation; until they’ve been able to voice (even briefly) what truly going on for them, people can’t work – they might pretend to be present, but in fact, they are not, and the rest of the time will just be wasted, directly (people cutting in all the time) or indirectly (people going away and not auctioning anything that they agreed on). For this reason, check-ins have become an even more integral part of the work for us, and sometimes it even becomes the work itself, helping to re-establish that connection and alignment between the members of the group and to foster a sense of belonging to the organizational body – a sense that is under threat of fragmentation when working remotely.

4. Access to internet and to the working language: Our work involves facilitating groups whose members come from different parts of the world. A usual meeting for us includes Indians, Indonesians, North Americans, French, British, Irish, Italians, Koreans, Africans, South Americans, etc. in the same room. While, with a good interpreting system, differences in the capacity to access the working language can easily be evened out when you are in the same room, when you are each in your own country in front of your computer this homogeneity is not to be taken for granted: the different power of the internet connection (and the electrical grid) can generate real differences in participation and become an unintentional exclusion factor, especially towards the south of the world. In order to counter that, we work with our clients prior to the actual online meeting to explore with them the various alternative solutions they have at hand should something go wrong with their computer connection: use Ethernet cable rather than wifi, switch to smartphone/tablet if electricity goes down, dial-in access to the room, etc. We’ve also chosen a videoconference provider with an interpreting feature, whereby you can create several language channels and invite your participants to listen to the language of their choice. Professional interpreters will then simultaneously translate what is being said in the videoconference, and will only be heard in their specific channel, not in the main call – just like in any international conference.

5. Zoom. After looking at several platforms, we chose Zoom because we realized its many potentialities: possibility of working in subgroups, interpreting channels, downloading chats, surveys, whiteboard, etc.). However, even if Zoom has proven so far to be a reliable platform, there will always be the risk that, in the condensed time of the "presence" on Zoom, technical failures pop up and torpedo the work process, which, as you can imagine, becomes very stressful. We’ve adapted pretty quickly to that by ensuring that there will always be two of us in the facilitation team, one primarily focusing on working with the clients, and the other attending to all the technical issues in the background – swapping roles at various points as the process requires.

6. Juggling multiple realities. In the past, when we worked with groups on their deep organizational transformation, our work together was usually counted in days: 1, 2, or 3-day workshops, sometimes longer. We would travel to the venue, stay overnight, and travel back, which offered helpful boundaries for us to enter into our client’s reality, remain immersed in it, and slowly come out of it on the train/plane back home. Our full attention would go solely to their specific issues for the whole of that time, even if the occasional email or phone-call during lunch-break or in the evening might require us to think about another client’s reality. Today, it’s another story altogether! We are still working with our clients in bringing about deep transformation in their organization (in fact, Covid-19 is usually amplifying their need to adapt to the emerging reality), but through 2-hour Zoom sessions at a time. This means that we might be immersed in client #1’s reality early in the morning, client #2’s around mid-day, and client #3’s early in the evening. There is no transitional space for us to move through to get from our home to their world – just a short walk from the kitchen to the computer. And soon after, it’s another reality we have to dive into, with its own specificities, its own dynamics, etc. This requires a lot of mental and emotional flexibility but also a lot of resistance to tiredness: the working days get longer, the deep presence in every situation is also very tiring. What we’ve found is that it is particularly important to take some enforced breaks in between sessions during the day; do not think that, because you have free time, you can do some emails or work on some documents. It is important to take a real break to rest, both physically and emotionally.

7. Creative messing around. What is missing inside the Zoom conference? Juanita Brown and David Isaac, creators of the World Café, a methodology for facilitating the emergence of collective intelligence, got their idea from the insight that in meetings the most valuable information and ideas circulate not so much during moments of work, but during breaks, chats at the coffee machine, informal moments in which the playful and light-hearted dimension help us free ourselves from our own self-censoring that prevent the expression of creativity. An element to keep in mind, when organizing Zoom meetings, is what space to give to these needs of informal interaction that risk being forgotten for the benefit of an idea of productivity only coming from "real work".

8. The end of planning. An important learning that we have achieved over these last two months of operating in this Covid-19 crisis is that detailed planning – once regarded as a key building block for efficiency – is no longer useful. Worse, it could actually become pretty inefficient to invest your resources in planning when many plans just end up being scrapped after a week or two. What is required, instead, is a capacity to work with, and adapt to, the emerging reality, constantly modulating your own plans according to the new data emerging in the field. This is akin to what Frédéric Laloux describes as a key feature of Teal organization: the “Sense and Respond” approach. This approach only works if you are clear about the overall purpose of your actions – the central Why that Simon Sinek talks about in his theory of the Golden Circles. In other words, what Covid-19 is teaching us is: be even clearer than before on the Why, and evolve the How and the What according to the emerging possibilities.