Opportunities for meeting face to face – for people in Europe and North America – are slowly opening up. Although we’ve been forced into more online encounters, it has been an opportunity for many people to discover new possibilities for interacting. Kids popping up and partners strolling across the scene behind us have breathed fresh life in how our clients or work colleagues know us. Hairdos floating weirdly across scenic zoom backgrounds will have our grandkids chuckling in disbelief when they look at the iconic images of today.

Going hybrid

I think this experience will make hybrid events fashionable. Hybrid events are those where some people are in-person and some are participating online. Media companies like Zoom, are scrambling to capture the market with meeting tools adapted for these kinds of events. 

We have been running our BEtreats as hybrid events since 2011. Back then, we saw it as the future. We thought it was crucial to develop the practice of meeting this way. I’ve reflected on what we do and what practices have worked for us in several blogposts – like this one in 2014, this one in 2016, and this one in 2020.

Meaningful connection

I also think that this hybrid trend us going to make people more demanding about the quality of all modes of interacting. If you are going to travel somewhere, it’s going to have to be for a good reason and what happens face-to-face had better take full advantage of physical presence. If you are going to participate online, you’re not going to sit through endless presentations – even those with an “interactive” veneer. The fine art of hybrid events will be to find the sweet spot where online participants are not second-class citizens, but where the tech isn’t too intrusive for in-person participants.

Three principles

Here are some of the strategies we’ve developed and how we hope to put them into practice in our new Social Learning Lab here in Sesimbra, Portugal.

First, we have three overarching design principles that drive our whole approach. That is, design for:

1. Conversations in various configurations between people about things they care about
2. Dancing in the space between knowing and not knowing
3. High value for precious time

Some heuristics

And then there are other heuristics for hybrid meetings that we are incorporating into our social learning lab. They include both physical and tech considerations.

Design elements

Physical

Technology and tech practices

A feeling of space and openness

Large windows, wide horizons, high ceilings, indoor-outdoor movement, big sky

Minimal agenda with lots of white space

In-person seating so that online participants can see different angles of the in-person spaces

Pre-event guidelines for online participants about where and how to sit and move around while participating online

A map and photos of the venue so you have a sense of the geography when in-person participants move around

Small group conversations

A diversity of attractive and comfortable places for conversations in pairs, as well as small, medium, and large groups

Contact information of all participants (face-to-face and online) so it is easy to bring someone in on different devices or applications

Breakout rooms in different formations (online with in-person, online with online)

Multiple devices and apps to bring online participants into the room (e.g., iPad sitting on table for a small group conversation)

Down time for reflection, alone or with someone else

(Quiet) places to sit and work or do nothing

Respect for own time

Frequent short pauses for people to collect their thoughts before starting a conversation

Silent time in agenda for joint written reflections in a google doc shared by both online and face-to-face participants

A shared memory

Visuals, posters, photos, videos

Hospitality

Good food, drinks and snacks

That extra touch

Welcoming, hosting approach

Time and attention to online participants even in in-between moments

Distributed leadership

Designing for initiative

Sharing in leadership tasks

A sense of belonging

Playfulness

Safe to make mistakes or a fool of yourself

Multiple places for having online participants to have their say, e.g., in the chat, on the mural, in a google doc. all of which are woven into the overall conversation,

Buddy system between online and face-to-face participants to make sure online people are fully included and to immediately address something that isn’t working, e.g., someone is blocking the camera

Seeing each other (literally)

Attention to what online participants are seeing, e.g., faces of in-person people

Visual clues for clarity over who is talking

Online presence, with good light and no bright window behind

Lifelike representation in the room, for instance, with a screen at a space at the table

Visual cues for online participants to draw attention

Together through sound

Make people aware of what sounds “in the room” give a poor experience to online folk

Point out the places where sound quality will be better for online participants

Strongly advise good quality sound

Practice mute button

In-person participants take turns in taking notes in real time to help online participants (e.g., on the chat)

Encourage use of multiple devices and to have plan B, C, and D for when things go wrong

Insist on a tech check with online participants prior to event

While these heuristics generally map onto in-person and online participation, we would emphasize that many tech design elements apply even to a totally in-person event and physical design elements apply to totally online events. Both sides can challenge and enrich the other.

And often it is. Sound quality is poor and made worse by people not muting their mics. There are no informal spaces for serendipitous conversations. And worst of all – people transport poor meeting or event practices into an online space where they are amplified by unfamiliarity with the technology.

I would like to share when I like online participation.

Note that online participation can be synchronous (all in same time e.g. conference call) or asychronous (at different times e.g. a discussion group). For the most part, it is a mix of both.

Feeling connected with people I might otherwise not meet

• This happens in meetings where there are small group conversations – for example in breakout rooms, discussion forums, on Twitter…
• It takes place at events where there are spaces to find out more about other people beyond their work personna and discovering I have something in common with them e.g. online café, informal introductions e.g. in a google doc
• It’s more likely to happen with an agenda/program where a small group of us are solving a problem or preparing for an initiative together
• I feel it most when there is a place where there is cheeky banter and we can be playful

Learning from reflection and feedback

• I learn so much when there are regular moments and spaces for everyone to take notes in a shared document (e.g. google docs). There is time in the agenda to write down our key insights and ongoing questions from the previous session/conversation and read and comment on what others have said.
• I love asynchronous conversation more generally. I’m more of a ponderous person who finds quick quips and clever replies only after everyone has generally gone home (!) so having time to interact someone’s words in my own time helps me express myself better
• It’s easy to take the temperature in or at the end of an online meeting, through a chat channel, a tool (e.g. mentimeter). That’s great for making iterative adjustments to group dynamics, agenda design, and for future events.

A shared memory on the go

• It’s great having a record of the meeting/event: a recording of the whole thing or parts of it; the conversations, reflections, questions, and insights; analytics data of who was there, their device, and other info that helps you plan for the next meeting.

Distributed leadership

• There is a lot to do in an online event and it’s an opportunity to share out the leadership – taking care of the tech, looking out for people wanding into the wrong space, gathering the different issues and ideas into one shared space, reaching out to people who can’t get in. It’s really an opportunity to reach out and build a sense of community.

Am I the only one who enjoys these things? What else do people like, appreciate or even love about virtual meetings and events?

This is why.

First, social learning is first and foremost about – well – learning. Learning as a social enterprise. Say, write, or even think a word that you assume makes sense to someone else and you are engaging in something social. Coming to a shared understanding of what that word represents (or not) has been a process of social learning. That process hasn’t necessarily been smooth. The word has been contested, hijacked, distorted, re-interpreted, adapted, agreed, and disagreed on. Its shared meaning right now is simply a snapshot of its unfinished journey through social learning.

That’s the same with all artifacts, reifications, and processes that make up social learning in communities of practice. The ride to where they are today has not necessarily been smooth. There may have been some collaboration along the way, but it’s unlikely to be the full story.

What’s more, collaboration can be a euphemism for papering over disagreements and politics. It can be a way to silence voices or disregard issues of power. But disagreements, contestability, and awareness of power are all opportunities to enrich and maximize a community’s learning capability. It’s not necessarily collaboration you want, it’s the maximizing of your learning potential. And doing that requires an artful mix of engaging diverse voices, stimulating people’s imagination to what’s possible, and creating horizontal alignment among them.

What about sharing knowledge, the favorite child of collaboration? Forget it. What happens if you’re in a room (or a discussion forum) and are told to share your knowledge? Nada. But what if you are in a room with someone you can relate to who shares a problem they face? The chances are you will jump in to help – with stories of what you did in similar circumstances, what worked, and what didn’t.

We meet lots of community organizers losing sleep over the question of how to get people to share knowledge. If it’s going to keep you up at night, a more fruitful question is how to help frame an inquiry about what is not known. What is an issue facing a member that most people will relate to? How do you get them to tell a story about it in a way that invites a response? What kind of activity will deepen the inquiry – a debate? case clinic? role play? And how will you track and share how this leads that person to change how they “do business” and what happens as a result?

Framing the inquiry means tuning into the learning imperative (i.e. what we don’t yet know), doing ground work (who else shares this problem and what are the different perspectives that would be useful to bear on this?), designing a meaningful activity (one that will help push the inquiry), and keeping a record of the learning as it flows into practice and has an effect on the world (and feeding this back to the community).

So if you hear someone ask me about collaboration and knowledge sharing, be warned. I might just say boo!

There is always a moment when face-to-face folk wave good-bye to those participating online. The feeling on both sides is one of friends parting. What is it that gets us to that moment?

We’ve written before about our experience of blending online and face-to-face (here and here) but I thought I’d revisit the topic with our ongoing learning about what works for us – and what we could do better.

(Main photo is a screenshot from an online participant)

The tech set-up

Wiki
As usual, we have a wiki for our online home. It’s the first meeting place for online and face-to-face folk.  We share the program and resources and each participant has their own page for reflections and for sharing the project they are working on. We start using the wiki before people arrive – for personal introductions, signing up to a leadership group, and sharing travel logistics.  Everyone is invited to connect on Skype and have each other’s contact information before the workshop begins. This makes it quicker to connect in small groups during different activities.

Devices
There were a number of innovations this year. We got rid of the big screen where we used Adobe Connect to project slides along with the online participants. A screen sends the energy to the wall rather than keeping it in the group space. This year slides were on the wiki, which people accessed on their own device. It’s easier these days because a) “everyone” has a device and b) devices and portable computers take up considerably less space than they used to, so the table doesn’t feel crammed.  Our concern that people would then have their nose in their device rather than with the group did not happen. People are so used to having their own device at meetings that it felt very natural and did not detract from conversations.

Skype
We used to use Adobe Connect for visuals and Skype for sound. But without the need to project slides, we only used Skype for the synchronous discussions. The sound and image quality in Skype is so much better. And combining Adobe and Skype occupies too much bandwidth for people who don’t have great connectivity.

Displays
Instead of the big screen, we had a high-resolution Apple Thunderbolt display for the online folks in the room. It made us feel like they were sitting with us around the table.  As before, we also connected into the Skype conversations with a phone attached to a selfie-stick so that there were close-ups of the person talking.

WhatsApp
Another innovation this year is that we used WhatsApp for side conversations rather that the chat function of Adobe or Skype. This worked really well for keeping up a social conversation that included everyone – face-to-face and online folks. And the conversation could continue on any device, whether we were on Skype or not.

Tech notes: The sound quality from our MXL AC404 USB conference microphone (price $83.99) is excellent, better than ones we’ve used before. (Aside: it’s also light and compact so ideal for traveling). We still use the Logitech C930e laptop webcam (price $104.28) with its wide-angle view.

Some practices

Here are some of the things we do that people have said work:

Gather first
We start at 8:00 a.m. with breakfast and coffee. Online folk are brought in on a device and join the breakfast conversation. I don’t think it would generate the same buzz if we got down straight away to work at the table.

Buddy up
Everyone has a turn at being a buddy with an online person. They become the eyes and ears for them in the room and make sure they don’t get left behind. There is something about caring for someone that creates quite a bond.

Switch leading
Everyone has a chance to lead a session, which means we get some people leading from a face-to-face position and some from an online position. It’s a good switch of modes. We even had one session where Etienne ended up participating online (even though he was just sitting in another room). That also helped to equalize the conversation.

Extend your “home
Every artifact that is created during the workshop goes in the wiki. It’s as if the wiki was an extension of the physical building – or the physical building is an extension of the wiki. Not only does this make everything (except food and drink) accessible, it also helps us create a good record of each workshops.

What doesn’t work

Too many people talking at once
Face-to-face folk can sit round a table and have multiple conversations going in parallel. It simply doesn’t work if you are online. Everything is going through the same microphone and it’s a noisy garbled mess.

No buddy
Sometimes we forget to assign or remind a buddy and an online person gets left on a table waiting … That doesn’t work!

Busy busy
If you participate face-to-face you tend to seal off the four days for a workshop. But if you are participating online it can be tempting to try and squeeze in some meetings. We tell people that this is a four-day experience, whether you are online or face-to-face. It’s an immersive experience and not one you can dip in and out of. You need to be locked away from your family and work colleagues.

Why participate online?

Practical reasons
People participate online for a number of reasons, including travel costs to California, visa issues to the U.S., needing to be somewhere etc.

Pacing yourself
But there are people who prefer the online experience. We’ve heard a similar line from several people who have participated in both face-to-face and online mode. They say that online participation is better for reflection. They find the face-to-face version intense and with competing calls to your attention. For example, at breaks you are drawn into yet more interesting conversations with people you want to hear from. But if you are online it’s easier to gather your thoughts, reflect, and work at your own pace.

Online charisma
We have also noticed that the people who prefer online often perform better when they are online. They have a charismatic online persona and can hold the group’s attention in ways that weren’t so noticeable in face-to-face interactions. It is a curious observation.

What we need to get better at

Leveraging online presence
What are the advantages that an online person has over a face-to-face person in a small group activity? Our activities tend to assume that an online person has to be “brought in”, but what about “flip” activities where online folks have the advantage and bring in the face-to-face folks.

Exploring vulnerability
Participating online in a face-to-face has some similarities to being in a wheelchair. People can talk over your head, or as if you weren’t there. You are dependent on someone “carrying you” (on a device) to join a conversation. You are at the mercy, to some extent, of someone who is participating face-to-face. Feeling vulnerable is an important dimension of learning. How can we turn this online experience of vulnerability by an online participant into a learning opportunity for all?

Is anyone else out there exploring the boundaries of blending online and face-to-face (with a budget of your average community)?

I cry.

It’s a technology that I suggested and helped to create. But I seem powerless to convince them that the proportion of resources they are investing in technology as opposed to building the learning network are a waste of everyone’s time.

Technology and community building are not the same thing. I get it. Funding can be easier for tech. Tech is sexy or mysterious – depending on your relationship with it. Organizations understand $$ for tech.

But it won’t build you a network. Building a network requires social artistry, persistence, understanding the community, knowledge of the domain, attention to practices, conversations, more conversations, and concern for creating value.

If your only qualifications are being a tech whizz, you are not cut out for the job.

If training people on how to use a simple technology takes up a hundred per cent of your attention, you are on the wrong track. If it takes up less than five percent of your time – in response to requests by network members – you are probably getting close.

It’s community building 101. And I have to watch as my.own.client repeats the same.old.mistake.

I cry.

Download a PDF copy of the report

How do you show that a network’s activities have changed the performance of its members in their practice? And, how do you use that information to feed into a vision of where the network should go next?

That’s how we used a new version of our value-creation framework for a learning network whose members come from different countries in Southern Africa.

For this network one project cycle was coming to an end and a new one was beginning. Not only had we collected many value-creation stories to show the connection between network activities and changes in public finance management in their respective countries, but we also used the value cycles in the framework to look at what the project had aspired to in the beginning, what happened, and what should happen in the next phase of the project.

The report I produced for the project summarizes the new version of our framework (based on the original framework, but now substantially expanded) and demonstrates how this new framework can be used to provide a strategic tool for evaluating and shaping a big social learning project.

Highlights on using this updated framework:

• What was really powerful in this session was the combination of value creation stories and indicators at each cycle. This is what the framework is about – not just value-creation stories as is often interpreted.
• In a meeting that was potentially fraught with political tensions the framework gave a shared language for understanding what had happened and for negotiating the way ahead in a productive and transparent way. In particular the strategic and enabling value cycles helped to surface some of the most serious places of disconnect in the functioning of the project.
• We collected value-creation stories for nearly four years. During this time most network members felt that collecting these stories was a hoop to jump through to keep project funders happy. But when they were put together into a strategic document based on the framework, network leaders finally realized the power of their stories for their own network learning.
• The idea of feedback loops was extremely helpful for showing how learning comes from talking about successes and failures and that both need to be integrated into the discourse of the network.

Cautions

• It is very time and resource intensive to collect and refine good value-creation stories and the data for the different cycles. We collected hundreds of partial stories; it took persistence to follow up with people to complete them. There were only about fifty stories that went through all cycles (often at a stretch) and around twenty stories that were really good.
• Next time it should be easier because people will now have some good models of stories and see the value of collecting them. But it will take discipline to turn the telling and recording of stories (and the feedback loops) into a regular network practice.
• In the real world – certainly the one I live in – the process of collecting data is much more messy than people realize. And it’s certainly not linear. It was more of a bricolage as we went back and forth between people, stories and indicators, scraping out time, improvising, and making up tools as we went.

Integrating social media

There is increasing familiarity with social media. Fully integrating the use of a wiki into our activities and interactions was still quite a novelty when we started. Today it seems unremarkable, almost expected.

Our goal is to achieve seamless face-to-face and online participation with commonly available community resources. Something we’ve noticed is that people who thrive in face-to-face/online integration tend to be playful and inventive and curious about connecting in multiple ways. And online participation seems to work well for people who enjoy reflective modes of communication.

We are still wondering what the ideal mix of online and face-to-face is. The three BEtreats this year were very different. In the state-of-the-art BEtreat, we had a small group and one online person. She became the darling of the workshop and felt very integrated, but she did not have online company.

The cutting-edge BEtreat had a large group and four online participants. Sometimes we worried we were neglecting onliners, but they had developed enough confidence as a group to tell us to stop talking to them as face-to-facers with a disability and get on with things until they told us it wasn’t working for them.

In the academic BEtreat, we had eight online participants and eight face-to-face. This pushed the limits of the technology too far in the beginning – to the extent that we offered them their money back. However, they all wanted to continue and, as the technology improved, we saw an interesting whole-group dynamic where onliners were not a minority.

Breadth, depth, and sector focus

Balancing depth and breadth of focus is still a challenge for us. Four days seems like a long time, but it shoots by. Which conversations should we cut out to stick to the agenda? Streamlining the number and diversity of topics that come up while not missing out on anyone’s concerns requires some fine-tuning that we need to get better at.

We spent more time in sector groups this year. It allowed people to focus on shared issues within sectors and help each other address them. We will certainly push this further next year, especially for exploring emerging issues. But it will also get us thinking of how to balance the time we spend on sector-oriented learning, cross-sector boundary encounters, and general topics and issues.

Broader focus

We have seen a broadening of the focus of BEtreats over the years. Three years ago, the main concern was in building robust communities of practice. While this is still important, there is also an increasing interest in social learning theory and its application more broadly. The discussion of our current research direction focusing on social learning capability in landscapes of practice generated a lot of interest. We doubt this would have got as much interest three years ago.

This invitation to give a public lecture was related to an initiative that the University of Hong Kong has launched as part of a curriculum reform project. Under the leadership of Professor Amy Tsui (the book she and her colleagues published on university-school partnerships is a good example of a social-learning perspective applied to action research), this initiative is placing what they call “experiential learning” at the heart of the university’s pedagogy.

Under this initiative, students conduct concrete projects in their area of study, run by the school for their pedagogical and social value – for instance, building a school in a rural area. Students become involved in all aspects of the projects, from planning to realization. They face the full complexity of an actual project including its practical, social, technical, and ethical dimensions. The initiative organizes learning, not merely as the transmission of a formal curriculum, but as the transformative growth of full human beings as they enter a field.

The University is not just seeking to give students a bit of practical experience as is often done with internships. The central use of actual, meaningful projects aims to make experiential learning an integral part of the core curriculum. The initiative has started in professional schools, such as engineering, architecture, and business (see a short video that describes these projects). Eventually the vision is to adopt the approach across the university and adapt it to every discipline.

The initiative still faces important challenges, with difficult questions about evaluation and full integration into degree programs. Yet it is exciting and inspiring to see a well-respected university embrace the social and experiential nature of meaningful learning and take on the challenge of giving this perspective an institutional realization.

We are eager to remain part of this promising experiment and we hope that other institutions around the world will join this ongoing exploration of higher education and the place of the university in the 21st century. There is an embryonic community here, and this is one we would love to help convene.

After the session, Debbie Jennsen, who is leading the ABSugar initiative, asked me if I could connect her with people at Deutsche Bank, also based in London. She had seen the blog post we had written about them “Social learning at Deutsche Bank” and that story made Debbie want to talk with them directly.

This made us reflect on the role of stories in our practice and the ways they reflect our roles as consultants and what we do to:

• Open up imagination: expand what is possible by showing what others are doing
• Carry learning: convey what we and our clients are learning about the practice of enabling social learning
• Connect practitioners: connect people within and across sectors and disciplines to develop their social learning strategies and make them feel part of a broader movement
• Reframe strategies: when we tell the story of an initiative, we do it from a given perspective, which tends to reframe what people are doing in ways that open up new possibilities for taking strategic action in developing social learning capability. It also refines and expands the perspective.

We are realizing that in deepening our own practice we are developing ourselves as a certain kind of story-teller and as a connector of people across the landscape. This is probably why one of our favorite assignments is to research and write up cases….

And perhaps the reason we get so excited about our BEtreat workshops is that they combine all these roles into one event.

It’s a massive conference (around 3000 people) and the dinner was a big affair. In that environment it made sense to have a speaker. Jane Fonda was scheduled to give the dinner speech, but news came that she wasn’t going to show up.

On learning that she couldn’t make it the organizers created what we thought was a great social learning activity – and that turned out to be much better than a keynote. Two of the big names in the Psychotherapy network played some video snippets – from the Soprano series, the film Analyze This, and In Treatment (HBO series). After each snippet we were invited to discuss at our dinner table the following questions:

• what’s happening?
• what boundaries are being crossed?
• did the psychotherapist do the right thing?

Feedback from a couple of tables after each snippet was followed by comments from the two big names, playing the role of facilitator.

Certainly the dinner discussions at our table moved beyond polite chit-chat and networking. We’d bet that more meaningful conversations happened than what would have done with an after- dinner speech. It also surfaced some whole room consensus that the profession is not very well-represented in the media.

Lesson learned for creating conversations about practice?

Invite big names to talk at your event – and then hope they cancel! 🙂