Help Build -Some of- the Metaverse

I was going to tell you all about my Elon indignation again on here but being that I already covered it twice this week and that given enough rope and time he’ll soon hang himself again, let’s ignore his actions that only suggest maybe he’s taking his belief that we live in a simulation to the extreme and treating real humans poorly because of it. Instead, speaking of simulations, let’s talk about the Metaverse.?

As part of the research for my upcoming book “Tech-Led Culture” I’ve spent some time reacquainting myself with the topic and the state of connected technology. This doubles as product research seeds for our upcoming “To VR or Not VR” design sprint at PeopleNotTech. I last looked at it maybe a year ago, I was sorely disappointed by how little progress there was in the interim.

Analysts seem to agree that collaboration and productivity are, alongside gaming and learning the biggest potential applications of the Metaverse and therefore it would stand to reason that’s where we need to be headed since we are making the platform to empower the human side of work with our Dashboard but equally, we never made anything just for the sake of cool or trendy and without clear indication that customers would truly love it and derive serious benefits from it so we need to double-check the supposition first.?

Our narrative in the design sprint? (and yes, we’re trying out the OKR alternative framework of NCT at PeopleNotTech) is “If work should ever take place in the Metaverse - how do we enable and enhance the human work with our platform on there?” and the first Commitment is that we find a way to efficiently MVP the Playbook and see how/if our users find any of the immersive learning benefits in using it. In fact, while we haven’t kicked it off yet, drop me a line in the comments or the DMs if you have an Oculus and would like to help us test.

If you don’t have time to participate in the experiment maybe you could send us a couple of words answering some of these questions please:

Are you already doing meetings in the Metaverse and loving it and why? How many a week? How does the experience feel different? Do you feel closer or further from your teammates when you can’t see their faces but their avatars only? Is it physically uncomfortable? Are tech glitches like bad graphics or mismatched actions distracting? Do you feel it is silly or a good idea? Are you excited about more VR/XR in your future work-life??

From the theoretical research to date there are interesting use cases and the potential for it being a useful addition but for the following issues:

• Facial, speech and body language abilities are still utterly rudimentary rendering it useless -and potentially detrimental- to developing?EQ;
• Mass adoption is aeons away;
• There’s very limited interconnectivity between multiple competing proprietary closed circuits making a serious investment in development a real gamble;
• There are serious ethical questions in terms of the undoing of the progress on work flexibility and autonomy for instance what does it mean for servant leadership and lack of command and control if line-of-sight for middle managers is to be replicated in the Metaverse? and many more

We’re not unique in working out where we fit in the Metaverse but I think we may be one of the few ones wondering if there’s much point entirely and if it isn’t just a shiny distraction.?

Ideally, this POC will give us a way to measure if there are tangible behavioural benefits over doing the same/some team action on a simple video call meeting and therefore counterbalance -or support!- the user experience sentiment. That way we’d have a more rounded view of what we want to build -if anything-.?

This test is not in lieu of any of our usual exploration into what makes it the easiest for the team to modify behaviours so that they’re happy and high performing. We’ve also not given up the “FFS pay them for the human work now that they are making it into an every-sprint practice” narrative to enterprises nor have we stopped reminding them daily of how much HumanDebt they have and how much more they risk if they pull Elon moves on their people, don’t worry, that very heavy flag is still our day job, this foray is just one of the many we’ve always had in the background that allowed us to move the product ahead as fast we have done so far.

Exciting as it is to learn and to plot experimentation, I find myself having trouble getting excited about the Metaverse entirely and the same is true for the team -it gives our CTO “embassies in Second Life circa 2010 vibes” :)- but I have to remind myself that as a group of individuals we are cape fatigued, cynical, old and weary and that during our lifetime we have seen many a disruptive technology false alarms and many non-tangible-dodgy-coins come and go so perhaps we owe it more enthusiasm than we can muster.?

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At?PeopleNotTech ?we make?software ?that measures and improves the wellbeing and Psychological Safety of teams, come see a DEMO.

“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt?.”

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link