Control versus Freedom in Virtual Meetings

Two weeks ago, Adrian Segar 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.

Right at the start of his blog post, he reminds us that we need to let go of the misconception that we can completely control a meeting - it’s what he calls “The myth of control”. Some level of control is vital though, like being prepared for unexpected developments during a meeting, he continuous. “It’s when we try to tightly control every aspect of our meeting that our events suffer.”

At the same time he admits, that “to elicit freedom and release creativity, we need to recognize that participants are stakeholders in the event, rather than just an audience.” And goes even further by claiming that “participants are event owners because, to some extent, they control what happens next.”

From years of personal experience as a facilitator of both, in-presence as well as virtual meetings (or larger events), I agree with what Adrian writes. For a meeting to be successful facilitators need to find and carefully maintain a balance between control and freedom. Or "Autonomy" and "Enabling Constraints", terms I think are better suited for the space of meetings and events. When I was reading these lines a lot of questions popped-up in my mind . Probably the most prominent two 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 immediate, gut answer to the first question was “Yes, there are differences!” But which ones? I decided to give it a first shot and started with the aspect “the environment”, “the venue” or “the circumstances” (and believe me, I do not have the intention to make this a complete list):

How is the environment of a virtual meeting different with respect to Control? 

• In a physical building or room, it is very unlikely that a meeting participants is unexpectedly removed from the room temporarily (or for good). In virtual meetings you can lose your Internet connection anytime or experience bandwidth bottlenecks for now obvious reason. The risk of not getting (or loosing) access to a virtual meeting is much greater. Once you are in a building or room, the risk of being shut out or shutting yourself out is very small and mostly depends on your own behavior. 
• In most virtual meetings a set of online tools is used: a video chat app, a white-boarding app, a surveys app, …! Even if you have a stable Internet connection, it is possible that one of the online tools used experiences a glitch (as I happened to experience with Miro just 12 days ago). The equivalent in an in-presence meeting would be that all whiteboards, flip charts, paper, sticky notes, etc. are taken away - very unlikely!
• Participants attending virtual meeting are more susceptible for interruptions that originate in the physical space they use during the virtual meeting. You can find a lot of evidence for this in funny videos on YouTube. In-presence meetings carry a lot smaller risk of interruptions I think, leaving aside the occasional private emergency calls or bosses that need your immediate return from the meeting, which btw poses a threat during virtual meetings too.

How is the environment of a virtual meeting different with respect to freedom?

• In a physical building or room, a participant can simply and autonomously decide on his own where to move and with whom they want to have a conversation. The often experienced value of unplanned coffee machine conversations have actually lead to the invention of the Open Space technology. In virtual meetings a layer of technology exists that very often prevents participants from “moving around” or start ad-hoc conversations as they wish.
• Physical spaces by their architecture (or landscape if you are outdoors) trigger emotions and can help participants to open up and prepare them for the purpose of the meeting. In many virtual meetings the video chat app forces us into a grid of faces, there is no “room atmosphere” that can be used to support the meeting’s purpose and invites for participation. Steps to address this issue are taken by tool vendors as we speak, but we’re still far from closing this gap. 
• As a participant of in-presence meetings, I always liked to bring my own workshop materials. Simple things, like the flipchart markers I like most, a card deck or a set of dice, just in case we could use them during an exercise, or my preferred brand of sticky notes for example. There is a psychological aspect to that as well, not just a practical one: With these materials, a little bit of my personality is weaved into the fabric of the in-presence meeting. That helps me to co-own in-presence meetings. As far as I know, breaking out of the carefully configured virtual meeting tool setup or adding to it autonomously is not possible in a virtual meeting.
• In in-presence meetings I can make ad-hoc offers to step-in as co-moderator or co-facilitator helping the whole group or breakout-group to structure the flow or overcome a roadblock for example. In virtual meetings it is much more difficult to do this, mostly because (a) the online tools assign specific roles and features to specific users during the virtual meeting that cannot be easily overcome and (b) ad-hoc co-design of a virtual meeting spans across all tools used and it is not easy to add another tool into the mix or use content that wasn’t made available by the original facilitator(s) for example.

I guess above I see enough empirical evidence to at least convince myself that virtual meetings are in fact different from in-presence meetings when it comes to control vs. freedom. 

If I think about additional aspects, like controlling the complete group of participants or giving them freedom to do something, or at the sub-group level, or the individual participant level then I believe I can find even more differences. What are your anecdotes, stories or observations worth sharing here?

With thing.online we explore the continuum between control and freedom for the purpose of enabling more effective, collaborative virtual meetings. The type of meetings we have because we are working together (or collaborate) in realtime to find innovative ideas and solutions. On one side they require autonomy and serendipity and on the other side effective guidance towards valuable outcome (enabling constraints) is needed. 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.