My daughter got married and I started Visual Collab in 2018

I bet you are intrigued by this title. Yet, this is not a bait to lure you into reading my latest article. My daughter indeed got married and this was a key event in our family, but it also sparked a flash of inspiration to write about business strategy and innovation in the newborn field of visual collaboration. I am explaining below what's this all about and will be offering a 'change readiness' scale for innovation adoption where you can map your current level and the one you should be aiming in 2019. Please, be my guest for a few minutes.

Let's start with a brilliant idea

As you can barely notice in the picture, the bride's wedding dress is a critical element in the ceremony, it is the steward of one of the leading characters in the ceremony. And my daughter didn't want any dress, it needed to be 'the dress'. So, after the normal hesitations around the fashion-street stores such as Rosa Clara or Justin Alexander and the likes, she opted instead to purchase from a smaller dress designer shop that she had heard about from a friend of a friend and renowned as very fashionable. "I was lucky" - my daughter said - "by her own choice, she only makes 100 dresses a year and was almost fully booked".

I got thinking to myself, here is a very interesting business case. You limit upfront the number of customers you know you can successfully handle in a period and then you stop taking orders once you reach your production cap. I wonder what can we learn here for an industry I know well, IFPDs or Team Displays.

The IFPDs - interactive flat panel displays - are taking over the previously booming video-projector and interactive whiteboards (IWB). Will this interactive surfaces become a critical technology in our workspaces? 

If 'collaboration' is one word that has many meanings, adding the 'visual' element certainly increments that variety. In a previous article, I delved on these concepts. Yet, there is undoubtedly a new trend in the workplace - including schools, universities and business organizations - for the use of large-sized interactive screens and specialized software that increases the effectiveness of teamwork.   

A boutique designer strategy

By limiting the number of clients my daughter's wedding dress designer never fails the attainment of her business profit goals. Why is this so difficult to accomplish for most IFPD companies? I do remember back in 2016, Microsoft also had a fixed cap on the production limits of its revolutionary Microsoft Surface Hub - the first series of the large diagonal touch screens produced by this company and no longer commercially available, by the way.

For the ones who need to know, the Microsoft Surface Hub is a large-screen meeting room device (offered in 84-inch and 55-inch models) that's capable of white-boarding and videoconferencing (Skype for Business), as well as running various Office applications. Currently, more than half of Fortune 100 companies have purchased Surface Hubs, according to Microsoft's announcement (1).

The Microsoft Surfaces Hub example reminds me of a lot my daughter's wedding dress producer. In comparison to her 100 yearly dresses, the ambition to produce and sell less than a hundred thousand touch screens a year is more or less the equivalent of being a small boutique workshop in the AV industry.

Whereas my daughter wedding designer is probably happy with a perfect work-life balance, Microsoft has made a lot of business partners unhappy. These companies have invested to join a selected distribution program to resell the Surface Hub, that included sales training for a highly expensive piece of equipment, just to realise that the existing Surface Hub models could not be sufficiently scaled to meet the demand.

Yet, some of the unhappy Microsoft business partners I have inquired admitted that their sales of the Surface Hub represented a very marginal profit contribution to their business overall. In spite of their growing demand, the sales of 'team displays' do not have yet a significant impact in the sales profit of most major IT resellers and integrators, with a few renowned exceptions for the companies that specialise in this market niche such as (alphabetically), AVI-SPL, BIS Econocom, Dekom, GMS Media Services, Insight, QConferencing, Kathea, Kinly, Videlio.

The rest of the world versus China

Pioneered by a number of regional startups in the US such as (alphabetically) Digital Touch Systems, Planar, Prysm, and ViewSonic, or in Europe, Avocor, CleverTouch, CTOUCH or Prowise, most of these brands are now serving customers in both markets with their group-sized touch screens that are becoming slicker and much smarter.

I am excluding here the case of China because of market size. Their sales volume and IFPD market penetration are so significantly higher than completely sets them aside from the rest of the world. Renowned market research firms like FutureSource often split the sales data from China when publishing reports.

Since 2016, heavyweight companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Google with the JamBoard, all have released their versions of what is now being called - a Team Display.

The volume opportunity for Team Displays is about to explode and sooner rather than later the big consumer electronics brands will also be stepping into this market. Think for a minute, instead of today, imagine we are ending the first quarter of this century. Admitting that the pace of the digital revolution remains the same, imagine you are in 2025 and ask yourself:

• How many schools in any advanced country would still be using the old traditional chalkboards (excluding China or Turkey, where IFPDs already are a standard today)?

Now, let's think about the corporate world for a moment:

• How many huddle spaces are there with paper flip charts today? How many will be replaced by a digital equivalent by 2025? In the workshop rooms, how many large digital canvas would be used instead of placing post-it notes on the walls?

The biggest large flat displays producers in the world like Samsung or LG that didn't pay serious attention to the collaborative touch market niche so far, are finally waking. You can bookmark here my previous article about the Samsung Flip - Flipping the flipchart. Of course, Microsoft is about to launch an equivalent product - the Surface Hub 2. We can simply wonder, how many huddle spaces will have not have these digital visual collaboration devices by the end of 2025?

The business potential of a company like LG to enter the visual collaboration market niche is tremendous, if we think about the recent launch of their latest Signature product line for the consumer market. I am just imagining extending this technology design concept to the realm of the business workplace, and you?

Would these interactive flat panel displays finally be replacing the flipcharts in meeting rooms? How would the market be responding to the appearance of a large digital canvas where the knowledge workers can contribute handwritten notes and digital media such as video and annotate on top? Why would the visual interactive collaboration technology be in strong demand? We know for a fact that sticky notes in walls are increasingly being used by lean managers, scrum masters and group facilitators in all sorts of collaborative-intensive projects.

What's my role in all this?

If you are reading this article you are likely employed to manage the pace of innovation and improve strategizing in your organization or the ones of your clients. Me included, we need to be attentive to even the weakest signals of change and be ready to engage and drive it. The degree of preparedness to change can range from less to more according to this scale:

This scale helps to understand where you stand amid this newborn industry of digital tools for visual collaboration and group decision-making.

If you are a small company with a less than 100 staff and if your closest competitor still uses flip charts and does not require video conference more than occasional skype calls, it is fine to stay at LEVEL 1 or 2.

If you are a manager in a large company (+1000) in charge of the way knowledge is produced and applied in the business, or making IT available for the success of your workforce, or simply hired as a consultant to improve problem solving and group decision-making, you should be definitively at LEVEL 2 or LEVEL 3 if you want to lead the competition.

But if you are the CEO of a lean startup that is competing in a knowledge-intensive field where your digital infrastructure is an instrumental part of the way you engage with your customers and business partners, then I doubt your teams can effectively meet without the support of digital tools for collaboration and team displays. You should be LEVEL 3, in the very least.

Finally, if your business involves designing graphics templates for group processes or decision-making software you would be better accomplishing your mission in LEVEL 4 and prescribing the group collaboration tools that will have a decisive impact in the governance and strategy of your customers' organization.

In a different way to look at this scenario, the extended range of business opportunities related to the Microsoft Hub represented by the diagram below. Innovation and change management firms, including graphic facilitators, should be focusing on the 'solutions' section and co-create new apps or end to end vertical or horizontal solutions with Team Displays.

Why Visual Collab?

I currently work with several colleagues that do the same thing I do. As group facilitators and facilitative leaders in our col.lab | collaboration laboratory we do not advise companies about the best strategies, we co-create with them the 'magnetic compass' they can use for choosing their course as a business with fewer risks of derailing.

Visual Collab is a Thought Leadership Community facilitated by col.lab. Our goal is to open a space for relevant industry stakeholders, technology producers, workplace designers, group facilitators, knowledge managers, and other business leaders, to be able to encounter and express themselves in meaningful conversations about the future of the digital workplace and its tools for visual collaboration and group decision-making (2).

In 2018, we ran our first Future Café (a special type of a Knowledge Café) at the RSA House in London with several knowledge contributors from both Europe and North America. You can meet our knowledge contributors here.

The Knowledge Café is a conversational method in which small groups of people come together to have open, creative conversations on a topic of mutual interest, to surface their collective knowledge, to share ideas and to gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved (3).

An agenda with two challenges

Not required in a typical Knowledge Café, in a Future Café we do need to capture participant's inputs and we have done so with Nureva Span a collaborative tool that extends and replaces the power of a large wall where we can post sticky notes with a digital canvas that can capture those paper notes and other digital objects and instantly shares them with anyone remotely located.

The worldwide remote participants and keynote presenter were virtually connected to the RSA House in London with Zoom (a popular video conference platform). For our first Future Café we were challenged with two questions by our keynote speakers.

• In spite of the interactive whiteboard having been invented in 1991, why is it that so many organizations still struggle to move away from white paper and post-it notes and what are the signals of change that might lead to the wider adoption of digital visual interactive collaboration?
• How do we design for active participation in problem-solving?

Visual Collab 2018 special contributions, from left to right clockwise, Colin Messenger (Senior Analyst, Futuresource Consulting), John Hovell (Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder at STRATactical International), David Gurteen (Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning consultant, speaker and facilitator), Jon Knight (Commercial Director, Ascentae), David Martin (Chairman, Nureva). I am truly thankful for their contributions and conversational leadership within this community.

We shape our tools and our tools shape us

Even though the potential for such new collaborative tools is tremendous, technology alone does not engages your team nor the whole organization, for all that matters. You will be needing a lot more besides these powerful digital tools in the meeting room to take advantage of the full potential of a digital collaborative workplace.

In my previous article (Future foresight methods) I argued that when we deal with digital tools for visual collaboration we approach the realm of what has been called by Group Decision-Making Support Systems (4). The providers of this highly sensitive technology need to team up with trainers, coaches and group facilitators to deliver something more than a digital tool. The package needs to include the skills' enhancement for their users to be able to lead a transformative change in their teams and subsequently throughout the whole organization. 

Manufacturers need to rethink their value proposition not just to include enhanced features but also to involve their customers or knowledge expert partners as early as possible in the design process (see above LEVEL 4) to find out about real use cases and how to better address them.

The Visual Collab 2018 green paper is due this year and it is still work in progress but you can check more about the interim report here.

Why joining Visual Collab?

Let me offer you 3 reasons.

1) Learn how to create a collective compass for better decisions about the future of your business.

By joining Digital Collab you will be meeting and engaging with expert facilitators and consultants that work with process tools and other meeting technology that you can also use as a meeting host.

2) Share your opinions with those who appreciate your views.

The value of a Future Search Conference is in getting the participants to think more deeply about issues that impact our present. By sharing our ideas we are also building relationships, the most important outcome in this community.

3) You can benefit by interacting closely with your competitors.

By joining Digital Collab you will be meeting your competitors and assess where they stand about what works well or not. You will be making more informed decisions and shaping the future of your industry as a whole.

Convinced? Please check the membership options here and if you want to learn more about this thought leadership community visit the website.

References

(#1) https://rcpmag.com/articles/2017/06/01/surface-hub-creators-update.aspx

(#2) https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/lets-gather-converse-visual-interactive-collaboration-paul-nunesdea/

(#3) https://knowledge.cafe/knowledge-cafe-concept/

(#4) Formerly the GDSS group: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/8587277/

(#5) A quote by Hermann J Steinher