The differences between face-to-face brainstorming and virtual brainstorming depend on the virtual medium you use. Immediacy provides direct interaction between participants, which makes face-to-face brainstorming effective. The more immediate the virtual medium, the lower is the risk of inadequate results. A videoconference is more immediate than a telephone conference, for example.
Virtual brainstorms that rely on less-immediate media, such as email, wikis, or proprietary "joint authoring" platforms, have multiple problems.
- Joint authoring platforms are usually asynchronous
- With asynchronous media, people might not interact simultaneously, which creates difficulties for monitoring everyone's level of effort. For all their faults, synchronous connections, such as video or telephone conferences, at least let you know that the participants were connected for a definite period of time.
- Joint authoring platforms dampen excitement
- Although The more immediate the
virtual medium, the
lower the risk of
inadequate resultsthey do support participant interactions, they don't transmit momentum or excitement very well, because they tend to mask the pace and frequency of contributions. Excitement and rapid pace are helpful in brainstorms, because they tend to limit self-censoring, making the ideas flow. - Joint authoring platforms are usually text-based
- Text-based systems disadvantage participants who favor spoken interaction, and favor the more skilled writers or faster typists, which can bias results.
- Less-immediate connections can produce toxic conflict
- Less-immediate connections are more susceptible to the online disinhibition effect, which increases the likelihood of deviations from behavioral norms, such as suspension of judgment.
So what can we do about this? Some suggestions:
- Use telephone or video
- Even if you use a text-based medium, provide synchronous audio or video connections. Teleconferencing simultaneous with text-based authoring might be difficult, but alternating between the two can be workable: 15 minutes of teleconferencing, followed by 15 minutes of text work, for example.
- Schedule multiple sessions
- Because things take longer in virtual environments, multiple sessions might be required.
- Focus on maintaining attention
- Face-to-face sessions are less vulnerable to distractions than are virtual sessions, because the action draws attention. Keep virtual sessions short. To focus attention, display accumulating contributions on virtual flipcharts.
- Provide equal access
- We can try to apportion talking time fairly in face-to-face sessions. We might encounter difficulties occasionally, when some individuals dominate, but skillful facilitators can address that. In virtual sessions, the problem is more difficult to manage. The "group-of-groups" geometry, in which several different face-to-face groups are connected electronically, is known to be problematic. A central site with most people face-to-face and a few people participating by phone or video isn't much better, because the "remote" individuals tend to have difficulty hearing or participating.
- Anticipate these issues. Structure sessions to give everyone equal access to the virtual floor. Favor bridge lines with all participants connected equally. Poll everyone for contributions, in fixed order, round robin style.
With luck, virtual brainstorming can work well enough. But if the issue at hand is truly important, find a way to bring people together. First in this series Top Next Issue
Are your virtual meetings plagued by inattentiveness, interruptions, absenteeism, and a seemingly endless need to repeat what somebody just said? Do you have trouble finding a time when everyone can meet? Do people seem disengaged and apathetic? Or do you have violent clashes and a plague of virtual bullying? Read Leading Virtual Meetings for Real Results to learn how to make virtual meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot shorter. Order Now!
Your comments are welcome
Would you like to see your comments posted here? rbrendPtoGuFOkTSMQOzxner@ChacEgGqaylUnkmwIkkwoCanyon.comSend me your comments by email, or by Web form.About Point Lookout
Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.
This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.
Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.
Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.
Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.
Related articles
More articles on Virtual and Global Teams:
- Dispersity Adversity
- Geographically and culturally dispersed project teams are increasingly common, as we become more travel-averse
and more bedazzled by communication technology. But people really do work better together face-to-face.
Here are some tips for managing dispersed teams.
- Dispersed Teams and Latent Communications
- When geography divides a team, conflicts can erupt along the borders. "Us" and "them"
becomes a way of seeing the world, and feelings about people at other sites can become hostile. Why
does this happen and what can we do about it?
- Virtual Communications: III
- Participating in or managing a virtual team presents special communications challenges. Here's Part
III of some guidelines for communicating with members of virtual teams.
- Social Entry Strategies: II
- When we first engage with a group at work, we employ social entry strategies to make places for ourselves
to carry out our responsibilities, and to find enjoyment and fulfillment at work. Here's Part II of
a little catalog of social entry strategies.
- Virtual Teams Need Generous Travel Budgets
- Although virtual team members who happen to be co-located do meet from time to time, meetings of people
who reside at different sites are often severely restricted by tight or nonexistent travel budgets.
Such restrictions, intended to save money, can contribute to expensive delays and errors.
See also Virtual and Global Teams and Problem Solving and Creativity for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming March 20: Top Ten Ways to Make Meetings More Effective
- Meetings are just about everybody's least favorite part of working in organizations. We can do much better if only we take a few simple steps to improve them. The big one: publish the agenda in advance. Here are nine other steps to improve meetings. Available here and by RSS on March 20.
- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success. Available here and by RSS on March 27.
Coaching services
I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrendPtoGuFOkTSMQOzxner@ChacEgGqaylUnkmwIkkwoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.
Get the ebook!
Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:
- Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
- Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
- Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
- Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
- Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
- Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )
Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info
Follow Rick
Recommend this issue to a friend
Send an email message to a friend
rbrendPtoGuFOkTSMQOzxner@ChacEgGqaylUnkmwIkkwoCanyon.comSend a message to Rick
A Tip A Day feed
Point Lookout weekly feed