Detangling remote interactions with neuroscience
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
Title |
| |
Subtitle |
| |
Title of Series | ||
Number of Parts | 49 | |
Author | ||
License | CC Attribution 4.0 International: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
Identifiers | 10.5446/51763 (DOI) | |
Publisher | ||
Release Date | ||
Language |
Content Metadata
Subject Area | ||
Genre | ||
Abstract |
|
FrOSCon 2020 Cloud-Edition17 / 49
1
2
5
8
9
10
13
19
20
21
22
23
25
26
27
29
31
32
33
34
35
42
44
46
48
00:00
MathematicsSelf-organizationPhase transitionBitConnected spacePower (physics)MereologySlide ruleDataflowMachine visionRemote procedure callShared memoryInteractive televisionLattice (order)File formatOpen sourceAuthorizationFitness functionTouchscreenElectronic program guideContext awarenessMultiplication signSpacetimeRemote procedure callWordLattice (order)Point cloudOpen sourceSpacetimeSocial softwareXMLComputer animation
03:53
System callLattice (order)Computer-assisted translation
05:04
Medical imagingCodeMathematicsSelf-organizationType theoryCategory of beingDialectFreezingDecision theoryState of matterBitConnected spaceContent (media)Complex (psychology)MereologyMoment (mathematics)Physical systemSlide ruleResultantDataflowDependent and independent variablesCovering spaceArrow of timeCASE <Informatik>Normal (geometry)Remote procedure callLaptopOcean currentNegative numberWordOnline helpInteractive televisionStress (mechanics)Lattice (order)Sound effectCondition numberSpeciesTouchscreenMultiplication sign2 (number)CollaborationismSpacetimeMechanism designQR codeRational numberConnected spaceContent (media)Physical systemTerm (mathematics)Matching (graph theory)Process (computing)Remote procedure callStress (mechanics)Lattice (order)NP-hardSpacetimeComputer animation
13:25
2 (number)CodeMatching (graph theory)Remote procedure callLattice (order)Computer animation
14:41
Dynamical systemFormal languageGame theoryShooting methodDialectBitConnected spaceGroup actionLoop (music)MereologyMoment (mathematics)Slide ruleDot productVirtual machineSystem callDependent and independent variablesRemote procedure callInheritance (object-oriented programming)Moving averageWordRoundness (object)Data conversionObservational studyLattice (order)Film editingOnline gameCoefficient of determinationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Block (periodic table)TouchscreenDegree (graph theory)Context awarenessUniform resource locator2 (number)Spacetime1 (number)Drop (liquid)INTEGRALDialectConnected spacePower (physics)PhysicalismDependent and independent variablesMatching (graph theory)HypermediaRemote procedure callSet (mathematics)Lattice (order)XMLComputer animation
21:36
Formal languageSelf-organizationArithmetic meanBitConnected spaceFunctional (mathematics)Group actionMereologyMoment (mathematics)Slide ruleTerm (mathematics)Time zoneLink (knot theory)QuicksortSystem callFamilyDependent and independent variablesState observerShared memoryVariety (linguistics)Computer iconData conversionLattice (order)Graph coloringCondition numberDifferent (Kate Ryan album)TouchscreenContext awarenessMultiplication signCollaborationismSpacetimeMechanism designINTEGRALReliefConnected spaceGroup actionDependent and independent variablesOpen setUMLXML
28:28
BitConnected spaceGroup actionContent (media)Slide ruleLink (knot theory)Remote procedure callVapor barrierOnline chatWhiteboardMultiplication signFreewareSpacetimeLevel (video gaming)Connected spaceProjective planeTunisFood energyOpen setWordDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Bookmark (World Wide Web)Computer animation
32:02
UsabilityFormal languageInformationFeedbackTelecommunicationNetwork topologyBuildingVideoconferencingTask (computing)BefehlsprozessorBitConnected spaceContent (media)Loop (music)Moment (mathematics)Slide ruleVirtual machineHydraulic jumpNumberDataflowSystem callLogical constantRemote procedure callFood energyCross-correlationPoint (geometry)ProgrammschleifeWordHidden Markov modelInformation overloadData conversionObservational studyDirection (geometry)Lattice (order)Condition numberMultiplication signFigurate numberPosition operatorTangentTwitterMoment (mathematics)ProgrammschleifeLattice (order)
38:50
Formal languageInformationFeedbackType theoryLevel (video gaming)VideoconferencingTask (computing)State of matterArithmetic meanBitConnected spaceGroup actionLoop (music)Moment (mathematics)DataflowSystem callPlanningRemote procedure callFood energyVapor barrierControl flowProgrammschleifeInformation overloadOnline helpData conversionLattice (order)Sign (mathematics)Collaborative softwareClosed setInterrupt <Informatik>Different (Kate Ryan album)Electronic program guideMultiplication signCybersexRule of inferenceSpacetimePosition operatorThumbnail1 (number)FrustrationTask (computing)BefehlsprozessorVisualization (computer graphics)DataflowFood energyControl flowSource codeBootingAssociative propertyXML
45:37
TouchscreenSpacetimeComputer configurationPerformance appraisalTime zoneDataflowWhiteboardUMLXMLComputer animationProgram flowchart
46:29
FeedbackSolid geometrySoftware testingMoment (mathematics)Visualization (computer graphics)Link (knot theory)PlanningArrow of timeVector potentialExistenceArithmetic progressionNeuroinformatikComputer animation
47:47
BitDataflowMathematical analysisMathematicsPlanningFood energyGraphical user interfacePoint (geometry)Control flowRegulator geneComputer animation
48:39
FeedbackReduction of orderComputer configurationBitConnected spaceComplex (psychology)Performance appraisalMereologySlide ruleDataflowLinearizationPlanningHypermediaProcess (computing)Remote procedure callOpen setThread (computing)Data conversionInteractive televisionObservational studyLattice (order)GoogolCondition numberStreaming mediaMultiplication sign2 (number)1 (number)Connected spaceRemote procedure callLattice (order)SpacetimeXML
53:53
Game theoryHacker (term)Real-time operating systemBitExpected valueForcing (mathematics)Universe (mathematics)Complex (psychology)Table (information)Remote procedure callSystem administratorVapor barrierCuboidData conversionInteractive televisionLattice (order)Electronic mailing listPlastikkarteOnline chatOnline gameMotion captureWhiteboardComputing platformBlogFlagCurveContext awarenessMultiplication signRule of inferenceFreewareActive contour modelSpacetimeOffice suiteMechanism design1 (number)XML
59:07
Point cloudJSONUMLXML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
Thank you for joining our talk and a very warm welcome. It's fair to say that remote working has taken the world by storm in the last year and I think all organizations are at different phases of adapting to it right and we've come to find that one of the most
00:23
challenging aspects of remote working is the human aspects and specifically the human interaction parts and so today we're going to use neuroscience to help us navigate some of these challenges and share some possible solutions with you. But first let's introduce ourselves so you can go to the next slide. So hello my name is Kirsten
00:46
and the other lady you can see on the screen is Jay. We're both based in Cape Town, South Africa and we're working at a company called IO. Some of you may know IO as the company behind Adblock Plus but our bigger vision and mission is actually to create a sustainable
01:03
and fair online ecosystem by building monetizing and distributing ad blocking technology. So Jay and I are working as remote agile coaches and we've both been really passionate about remote facilitation for the last couple of years and we're the authors of the remote facilitators pocket guide. So we're looking forward to sharing some of our thoughts with
01:23
you today and we're gonna continue now. So some of you might be sitting there wondering why we are talking about meetings at an open source conference. I think when we think about open source communities at least a lot of what we think about is the power of how organically
01:42
they operate and how asynchronous they are and so where does meetings kind of fit into that picture and for us we think it's important to talk about meetings because of open source organizations and so for example in our context we work at a company that is open source
02:00
and even though we were very remote friendly before corona hit, we have now had to go fully remote and it's been a bit of a change for everyone and so the importance of optimizing these meeting spaces or the way people come together online really really for us hits home when you think about organizations and so that's going to be our kind of target audience for
02:22
today's talk. If you're working for an open source company and looking for ways to bring your people together in more effective human ways, we're hoping that you'll leave with some new ideas and maybe some inspiration. Okay so what can you expect from this talk today?
02:43
So we're first going to look at the brain and just talk a little bit about how that relates to remote meetings and we're also going to give a very brief introduction to facilitation. What's the importance of in meetings? Next we'll move on to our first principle
03:04
which is called creating connection and we'll speak here about how we can help people connect into remote spaces. We'll not only think about the principle but we'll also share practical methods that you can take away and use. We'll give you some silent time to also
03:23
explore a little bit here about created formats that we've made and then next following a similar format is our second principle which is called flow. How can you create flow within your meetings? What does it feel like to get stuck? And then again some practical tips that you can
03:42
take away. So this is kind of what you can expect from our talk today but first I just wanted to find out if any of these faces feel familiar to you. You've called a meeting
04:01
to solve a problem or get into a discussion for a particular topic hoping to get everyone's engagement. So you dial in a few minutes early and now you're just waiting one by one for people to join the call. Everyone starts on mute and it's starting to feel a little awkward
04:21
with these faces just sitting back at you. So you say welcome and you ask how everyone's doing but no one replies and all you have is the sleepy cat looking back at you already totally bored by this whole affair. You might have the angry squirrel that's wondering
04:41
why you invited them to this meeting in the first or you might have this shy seal staring back at you with nervous look in their eyes hoping that you don't ask them a question hoping that they don't have to speak and it just feels like no one wants to share anything and it's just beginning to feel super awkward. But we want to share that meetings really do matter
05:08
and if you think about what an organization is built on, it's built on tons of tiny interactions and meetings are just one part of those interactions. If the quality of the meeting
05:21
is low it can impact the whole organization. It impacts not only people's time but also the outcomes that you're there to achieve. So you find ways to achieve healthy meeting outcomes especially in these crazy times of change. It feels like remote collaboration is especially hard
05:42
and a few years ago we could have said that remote was considered cutting edge but it really isn't anymore. We're getting into a space where it's becoming quite the norm. So meetings matter and remote collaboration is hard. So we we all probably know what it feels
06:04
like to be on a remote call and see some of the benefits. What we don't often speak about is some of the challenges and how hard it can be to hold the space for effective remote meetings. One of the most important challenges work is the collaboration and the human aspect of it.
06:23
So we want to show you what we can do about it. But before we get into how the brain works, we just want to quickly touch on facilitation and we won't be able to go into this in great detail but we just want to share three things to think about facilitation.
06:44
We see it as both a role and a skill. So the first is facilitation is about making it easy. It's about making it easy for people to collaborate and making it easy for people to reach outcomes. The second is about neutrality. So your role is not to focus on
07:07
the content but to steer the process. You're really there to help people get to great outcomes. And lastly, focusing on the quality. So focusing on the quality of the interactions
07:21
and the outcomes. If you can remember just these three things, it can really help your meetings. But now we will look at the brain and see how that can affect the quality of your remote meetings. Okay, so now we are going to start talking about the brain and how a basic
07:41
understanding of the brain can really strengthen both your facilitation as well as your subsequent outcomes that your meetings will achieve. And if we think about the brain, one simplified way of understanding it is that in many ways it's just this big threat reward detection mechanism. So for those of us who joined our workshop yesterday, we shared the
08:02
same image. But the image here really is that in every given situation your brain first off is trying to do one of two things. It's trying to determine am I safe here or am I possibly in danger? Because if I'm in danger I need to make a quick decision. I need to either get to safety or I need to do something quickly. Whereas if I'm in a safe space or
08:25
there's a possible reward, then I can behave in a completely different way. And what's interesting is that a lot of research has shown that the brain is much more likely to detect threat than reward. And what this simply means is that as human beings we're much more likely
08:41
to see something in a negative light than a positive light. So if you think about a practical example, if people walk past you and maybe someone looks at you out the side of their eyes, it's often the case that you will interpret that negatively. Like maybe they were judging me or maybe something was off there. And it could have been for a million reasons that they were looking at you that way. But humans are kind of primed to detect threat in a situation
09:04
because that's what keeps us safe. As an evolved species the ability to detect threat and respond quickly is what kept us safe. Being able to determine that there was some chocolate cake or whatever around the corner doesn't have any evolutionary significance. So the first thing
09:20
to bear in mind is that humans are very very likely to detect threat in a situation. And the second thing that's interesting as you can see in the size of the arrows is that the threat response in the brain is felt much more strongly and it lasts much longer than the positive reward states. So when people are feeling threatened the chemicals that are
09:43
released stay around for much longer. Which is why if you felt stressed or you had a fright you kind of feel that sense of anxiety for much longer than when you're in a positive state that can change really quickly. And now if we go to the next slide, going into this in a little bit more detail you can see two regions of the brain there. And these are really the primary
10:04
regions that are activated either if you feel threatened or if you feel safe. So the prefrontal cortex is that part of the brain which is responsible for rational complex thinking. This is really what we want people to be able to access in meetings. We want them to be able to do this rich high quality creative thinking. However the limbic system is what is
10:24
activated when people feel stressed. It's that fight flight or freeze response. And when people start to feel stressed for the smallest reasons what happens is resources start getting diverted away from the prefrontal cortex and they start going to the place where people are going to make quick decisions. And bear in mind this is all happening unconsciously right? We're not sitting
10:44
there going okay need to make quick decisions do it. It's happening invisibly. Maybe someone says something rude in a meeting under current word and you begin to feel threatened and slowly you begin to edge slowly not quickly slowly towards the small threatened state.
11:00
And now if we go one step further and you can click next. What's interesting here is that conditions impact cognition quality. So if we're thinking about things as facilitators it's really important for us to bear in mind that the conditions surrounding a meeting and within a meeting are going to impact the quality of thinking that people are able to do in that
11:23
meeting. And it's going to be totally unconscious for people. They're not necessarily going to be able to articulate why they feel either threatened or safe but they are definitely going to be impacted. The quality of thinking that they're able to achieve will be impacted. And the next thing is that quality thinking is going to be essential to achieve quality
11:45
outcomes. And so as facilitators we really need to keep this in mind. If we are after quality outcomes we need to help unlock quality thinking and to do that we need to be paying attention to the conditions that are around us in these meetings. So that's kind of a foundation
12:01
understanding of the brain as we begin to think about the kinds of thinking that we are hoping for in meetings and the kinds of states that can be present around it. We can go to the next slide now. Okay so just going back to the agenda we briefly covered some content
12:22
about the brain and we'll cover that a little bit more during each of the principles during connection as well as flow. For now we're going to move on to our first principle which is about connection. How can we help connect people in remote spaces? But first we'd just like to do a
12:41
little interactive questionnaire which is which picture best matches your experience in the remote meetings? And you'll find this if you go to ci.com and either type in their code or use the QR code. So you can do this either with your phone or if you're on a laptop at the moment
13:02
you can do it there. So we're just asking you one question which is which picture best matches your experience in remote meeting? So I'll leave this code on the screen for a minute or so and then I'll show you what the results look like. I also popped it in the
13:34
Okie dokie. So we'll have a look if there are any results. So far we have a clear winner.
13:52
We'll just give it a couple of more seconds. Ron is almost winning. Okay
14:13
so not that many great experiences. Oh we have a tie this is getting interesting.
14:22
Okay so thank you for participating. So far it looks like Sleepy is winning. Hopefully at the end of this talk we would have given you some tips about how to make it more engaging. So thank you for participating in our quiz. So we're just going to go back to
14:45
our presentation and so we just wanted to share some scenarios with you. We've seen some of these examples in remote meetings but maybe some of these yourself.
15:01
It could be that you join a call and you speak a completely different home language to everyone else and so you don't understand any of the inside jokes or you don't understand some of the context or they use words that are just way too fast for you to even grasp. That gives you a feeling of being left out and not part of the group.
15:26
There may be a situation where your connection keeps stopping but nobody seems to notice and they just continue with the call without you and you're desperately trying to connect back or even grasp what was said in the last couple of minutes while you weren't there.
15:43
That also can make you feel quite late in the conversation. Or there's a situation where one or two people are dominating the call and they're speaking super fast and you're trying to say something but when you do say something nobody acknowledges you. Some of these experiences
16:06
might feel familiar and experience are not that uncommon in remote meetings. So now let's look at what happens. So what might be going on for people in these scenarios and we're going to go a little bit deeper into some of the neuroscience stuff and before we do
16:25
I wanted to ask if anyone could relate to stepping on one of these guys. So I don't have children but I do have dogs and there are often toys scattered around and once in a while I step on one and whilst it's not lego the shooting pain that goes
16:40
through your foot and the subsequent rage that follows is maybe something that you can relate to. I think that acute feeling of being angry because you're in pain is probably relatable and also if we think about meetings it's definitely not going to help us to do high quality thinking. So what relevance does a lego block have to remote meetings? Now if we go to the
17:05
next slide somebody called did a study which I just really like the name of it's called broken hearts and broken bones and she was busy looking at what is the relationship between social pain so feeling rejected or not part of the group to physical pain and to study this
17:24
the way she went about it was she hooked people up to machines and they were asked to play an online game called cyberball and in this game the participant could see three dots on the screen and they were told that they were one dot and the other dot were two other participants sitting in another room. Now what they didn't know was that those other two participants were
17:45
actually part of the study too and so in the first round of the study the three little dots pass the ball so that little black dot is a ball and the participants happily passing and all three of the dots are passing the ball nicely to each other then they enter into a second round
18:00
unbeknown to the participant and now the other two dots only are passing the ball to each other so they are excluding the participant who is now the red dot and what's really interesting is what happened when people started to feel excluded in something super simple just passing a ball amongst people you've never met on screen if you go to the next slide you'll see
18:23
what was what was the outcomes. So the first thing they found which was interesting is that the brain registers social pain in the same regions as physical pain. So physical pain activates the brain in two ways the first way is this so the location of the
18:43
pain in my shoulder is in the top part the bottom part your brain needs to know where the pain is happening and the second part is the affective part so that's the you can go back one bullet and so that's the part of the brain which is now understanding the emotional aspect so this feels horrible or I'm not in a good space we need to change the situation because
19:04
I'm in pain and what's interesting is that social pain activated the same region of the brain as physical pain and the next one which is even more interesting is that that part of the brain is responsive not only to experiences of rejection but to cues that represent social
19:25
rejection and so what that means is that the part of the brain responsible for physical pain is triggered if you feel an actual experience of rejection so maybe a group comes up to you and is very clear cut it's an experience of social rejection but that second part is that cues also
19:46
can trigger it so it doesn't have to actually be an experience of rejection maybe it's just something you've come to correlate so maybe somebody on a meeting rolls their eyes when you say something maybe for you you interpret that as a cue of rejection this person feels a
20:01
certain way about me whereas in actual fact maybe they just got something in their eye and trying to get it out of their eye but because for you it's a cue of social rejection the same parts of your brain that get triggered in physical pain are now likely to be triggered because you're interpreting it as social rejection and if we go to the next slide
20:22
when we start thinking about the consequences and what this means for us if we think back to those stories where Jay was talking either about someone maybe not being able to speak the same language and feeling a little bit left out or maybe their connections dropping and it feels like no one's actually pausing to look after them what's interesting is that this study found that we're able to engage in poorer quality thinking
20:46
when we're in pain and that kind of makes sense right. Rationing the lego block example when you're feeling pain you're not going to be doing high quality thinking and similarly when people are feeling any degree of social pain they're less likely to achieve high quality thinking. The second interesting consequence is that people in pain are more
21:06
likely to engage in aggressive behaviors and this is interesting because people are ultimately in those moments responding to protect themselves so rather than doing the thing that would reintegrate them into the group so if someone rolls their eyes rather than doing the
21:20
behavior which might reconnect them for example saying hey I feel like maybe you missed me there or is it okay can you hear me they're more likely to do something defensive and respond in a protective way which then can create a loop where it exacerbates their behavior because now they start checking out and then you can actually start seeing weird dynamics happening. And the third part is that over time this can lead to maladaptive beliefs
21:46
and what that means is that the more times which you dial onto a remote meeting like this and either you have a negative experience or maybe you perceive someone in a certain way over time that can lead to beliefs either about meetings or individuals and if you think about
22:02
organizations we really don't want people to be developing these kinds of beliefs either about collaboration being hard and not worth our time or about other individuals because then they're not going to be able to collaborate with those people and so to kind of wrap this piece up before Jay goes a little deeper into the principle if we think about the brain and this
22:22
this kinds of narrative that the conditions around us impact the quality of our thinking the ability to connect with people and feel socially accepted actually plays a really big role in people feeling safe enough to begin to do high quality thinking and accidentally we often trigger the opposite response in people without even meaning to especially remote meetings.
22:48
So okay so if we speak about nurture connection like what are we also and if we can connect with someone we are far more likely to be forgiving and compassionate
23:02
and people will then in turn far more likely feel safe being themselves. It can be quite incredible to see how different we behave when we understand someone when we understand their context. So remote working can be quite challenging when it comes to creating connection and understanding. If you're in person for example it's almost accidental
23:28
often that you create connections with other people it can be as simple as someone wearing shoes that you have and you go oh I really like your shoes I have the same pair and you start triggering your conversation from there and forming some sort of relationship
23:43
and in remote spaces though it needs to be a lot more intentional it requires a lot more effort and so if meeting people being at their peak performance and their most authentic self how do we create the conditions that can foster these kinds of connections in meetings.
24:04
What are some simple things that we can do and so now we'll just share with you some of our practical methods that we thought about and these are by no means like all of the ways that you can create connections these are just some of our ideas and so the first one
24:24
is open the space and open the space in the check-in but also paying attention to those first few moments of a meeting and how you open that meeting. So for example if you start the meeting getting set into the detail with a little bit of aggression or not really introducing the
24:45
space it sets a completely different tone to when you're opening the meeting with some sort of agenda or sharing how you will engage in this what people can expect and sometimes we say open
25:00
the space of the check-in because sometimes checking questions can be quite useful and we don't mean that it has to be super frivolous or like what color are you feeling right now it can be something super meaningful so like how comfortable are you that will meet our deadline and that kind of check-in question can help bring people into the space
25:21
and then also give you some data for the rest of the meeting. The second is working in smaller groups. A lot of times people try and solve problems in one big group but it can be useful to break your group down into smaller pieces so another name for this is murmur groups
25:44
and it comes from when you're in a room and you break people into smaller little groups and there's this murmur going around the space it gives people a little bit more safety in terms of speaking up and sharing the opinions. It allows everyone to have a chance to speak
26:02
which is less likely to help you in one big group. We know that not all tools cater to this functionality but there are other ways you can do it by creating different calls for example and just preparing beforehand how people can join and join in smaller spaces. The third is just paying attention to the space so this might not feel super practical
26:26
but observation is one of your biggest things in a remote call and this can just be like noticing what's happening in this space so you can only see this much of me but maybe you observe someone's dropping their connection or someone is trying to speak or not able to maybe
26:45
even as something simple as seeing the icon of mute and unmute on someone's screen indicating that they're trying to speak but they're not able to engage. Just paying attention to the space and seeing if you can notice as much as possible so you can take care of that remote
27:04
meeting. The last one is just attention to different contexts so when you're working with persons it can be super easy to forget when someone is skipping lunch because the meeting is booked in the middle of their lunch lot or someone is missing dinner with their family
27:23
because it's cropping over their lunch lot and it could even mean a challenge of different languages and not acknowledging that someone is speaking too fast or going at a completely different place for someone able to follow. Just making sure that you're
27:45
bringing attention to the different contexts and maybe it's just showing all of the variety of time zones that are on the call to acknowledge what is going on for people or maybe it's providing a writing mechanism to say this will be easier for us to read so that we don't
28:03
have to follow up quickly with verbal cues. Just providing different ways to share context is useful. So now we'll just give you some time for you to explore. Yeah so we wanted to pause here and I think because this is a lecture not a workshop the chat might be locked so
28:23
we'll share the link in the chat but Jay is also going to slowly scroll through that deck and we'll share the slides afterwards so you can access it but what we really wanted to do here was pause because we've shared quite a bit of content and we wanted to allow some silence for you to reflect on what's coming up as well as look at what some of these practical ideas
28:42
might look like in real life. So I'm sharing it in the chat. I'm not sure if everyone can see the chat. If you can't Jay is going to go through these slowly and we're not going to talk. We're just going to allow you some time to process or notice these. Oh people are joining so I think they can get the link. Okay cool and just one quick note we use Google
29:06
Slides just because it's free and most people can access it and there's quite a low barrier to entry. So there's lots of cool whiteboard tools out there as well but this one's pretty easy to access for now. So ah thank you the chat should be public for all users. Cool I'm
29:25
gonna keep quiet now. Yes so thank you Jay and Kirsten. A wonderful talk if anybody has questions.
30:00
Are we supposed to be finished already? I think so. You have the time left. Yeah sorry we're halfway we're just pausing here to allow people a chance to look at these slides. Is that okay? We will be finished at 3 30. We're aiming for an hour. Okay and as we look at that
31:51
we're going to transition back to the main deck but we will share our main slide deck with you afterwards as well and you're welcome to reuse these come to your own.
32:01
Those are just some practical ways that you can nurture connection in remote spaces which then brings us back to our agenda and just to recap where we've been so far. So we started speaking about the brain and the kinds of conditions that we would like to activate in remote meetings so that people can do high quality thinking and then we spent quite a bit
32:22
of time thinking about connection both what happens when we don't feel connected to people as well as how as facilitators we can help connect people and now the last bit of our talk we're going to speak about flow and how we can create that ease of movement through a meeting because often remote meetings feel jerky and stuck so what can we do about flow in remote
32:42
spaces? Okay so once again we have some scenarios for you that we've seen happen in remote meetings. These are things that you might have also noticed. Being which we mentioned a little
33:04
bit earlier you jump and you jump and someone jumps straight into the detail jumping straight into the comment not even taking a minute to set the tone figure out the agenda or set this tone for the meeting jumping just straight in. The second we've seen
33:25
is the how fatiguing meetings of video calls can be and so much of it is because we are unable to see body language and so people kind of get tired not sure when they can speak
33:40
constantly interrupting each other maybe it's because of lag maybe it's just because of connection so that constant introduction can be quite fatiguing and the third one is just holding so much content in your mind so the brain can only hold so many pieces of information
34:02
at one time but sometimes when there's an alliance in verbal communication there's so much information floating around people can't actually hold all that information at one time um so now we'll look at the bread some more to help us unpack some yeah and to get us started i'd like you to think about crossword puzzles so
34:25
growing up my mom loved to do crossword puzzles and i hated them because i could never get them but every once in a while i would find one of those words and if you've ever done a crossword puzzle you can probably relate to that little zip of energy you get when you put in the letters and they match and it works and you just know you've closed a little loop
34:44
because ultimately solving crossword puzzles feels good or any of those things maybe it's more familiar to you that aha moment when you come to an aha it feels good so what is going on for people when we have these kinds of aha moments because if we think to those scenarios
35:01
that joe that they um just shared those are the opposite of aha moments remote meetings can be frustrating because we get stuck because people are trying to solve something they're going off on a direction together and they've opened this loop and they're not getting to the point where they can close that loop whether it's for technical issues or because maybe there's
35:21
too much going on and they're getting distracted or they can't see the other people we're trying to solve the crossword puzzle we're trying to come to something together and remote meetings present all these reasons that stop us from getting to the aha moment so if we go to the next slide and there was a study done in 2018 looking at the neural
35:42
correlates of aha moments and the way that they studied it was they hooked people up to machines and they presented them with three words and so you can do it for yourself now if you look at these three words house bark and apple what's um participants were asked they were asked to find the fourth word that links all three of those words so for a moment i'll just pause
36:04
if you can think for yourself can you find the fourth word that connects to all three of those words okay well do i feel bad if you couldn't because i couldn't either um but once in a while some of them you can so the word that connects all three of these is tree because word building
36:24
a house bark an apple tree and so they looked at what happened for people when at the moment that they came to that aha moment at the moment that this loop that they had opened closed and if you go to the next slide you will see the consequences of what happened so the first thing is that closing loops activates reward circuitry in the brain
36:44
and reward circuitry is the circuitry that feels good so when you do something and you get rewarded for it it feels good and you want to do it again and it's kind of your brain going hmm that was really nice let's do it again so when you solve the crossword puzzle word your brain's going oh that felt good let's do it again and and we'll think about this a bit
37:04
more in detail in meetings now but that's kind of what you want you want the opposite of the stuck feeling and you want people to be feeling this feels good i want to keep going that energy that'll keep propelling them forward and the next thing that they found also which is interesting is not only do people feel more engaged and positive but they're able to think more
37:24
creatively so each time they close a loop or something positive like that happens they're able to get more creative and do better quality thinking and so if we think back to remote meetings this is exactly what we want when people are collaborating we want to be unlocking better quality thinking for people even though it's unconscious we want to create the conditions
37:44
which enable them to do this and unfortunately remote meetings often accidentally result in the where people aren't able to flow and get to these moments of aha and if we now take the next step and we connect this back to remote meetings and the consequences of what's going on
38:03
in the brain i can go to the next slide the first consequence that you might see is people begin to feel disengaged so when people are trying to close a feedback loop let's say you've been trying to solve the crossword puzzle it's now been 10 minutes you're staring at that and you just can't get it you begin to disengage because your brain eventually at some point says
38:23
you know what the effort's no longer worth it um it's too tiring and i'm not getting the reward that i was seeking and then you start getting distracted that's maybe when you're sitting in your remote meeting and you start scrolling twitter you've just gotten to the point where like we're going on so many tangents so many conversations are being spoken about we're not
38:40
closing any loops and you kind of just check out consequence number two is that you get tired because you've got this background task running and it's consuming brain CPU so maybe you start finding that this remote mean is just getting really tired and you're not quite sure why but you're just feeling tired and it's because you're running so many background tasks
39:02
the thing that you started talking about didn't get resolved and then maybe someone dropped off the call and then you have to start again and it begins to create this fatigue and the unconsciously you're not quite aware why but you begin to become a little bit unnecessarily
39:24
frustrated so that little angry squirrel at the beginning i've definitely seen lots of angry squirrels in remote meetings where people are just a little bit on edge or angry and it gets incorrectly associated to someone so i may be frustrated at someone else on the call but it's
39:40
not actually them that's frustrating me i'm frustrated because my brain's trying to close these loops in the meeting and it's unable to for all these reasons and then i just begin projecting frustration and so to kind of wrap this up if we think about remote meetings and all the possible things that block us from flowing through a meeting it's very possible that people become disengaged tired and frustrated and we see this so often it happens all the time
40:06
so what can we do about it okay so what we're speaking about here is enabling flow um remote meetings are often punctuated with stops and detours and they can be quite frustrating as kirsten mentioned um but it can be avoided with a little bit of planning and
40:25
some guidance and some preparation beforehand um but some of those stops and and punctuations could be because of connection dropping as we mentioned or people constantly even interrupting each other because of lag um or because um people have simply gotten lost in all the information
40:46
that's been shared and not knowing where they are in the conversation and some of this is caused by an absence of behavioral and that causes interruptions maybe the group is just struggling to think because they're tired and it's hard to notice that in a call uh these are
41:04
moments that can make remote meetings feel jerky um and people like you're just getting stuck and not able to get to those quality outcomes that you were hoping for and so a facilitator skill is about judging what's helpful and unhelpful details that we can
41:22
have in a meeting and what details can have a meaningful impact on the outcome how can you shift the flow of meetings um to help the group arrive at those quality outcomes um and so maybe it's just thinking about uh off-topic conversations for example
41:41
figuring out a way to to take that out of the meeting and put it in a parking lot and channel it in the difference um it's just some of the ways thinking about how you can enable flow in your meeting and Kirsten will share some practical methods for how that's done
42:01
okay so as we said with the last one these are just some of our practical methods and there's lots of other ones out there but the first thing you can do is simply make the agenda or session rules visible so there's a lot going on in a meeting and people especially in a remote meeting they're juggling the technical tool probably also their calendar's popping up they also
42:22
maybe are using a collaboration tool and oftentimes there'll be an instruction given or something will be said and it's missed so simply by visualizing that you're creating like a bit of a road sign for people that'll help them to navigate through and it's one less reason for the meeting to get stuck so if we all know how we're going to proceed in the meeting
42:42
we have a clear picture of where we're going to go and there's a visible space where we can refer back to it it means that we're more likely to flow through the space we know where the detours ahead are coming the next technique is about co-creating visual documentation and this is this is a really big one for us because remote meetings get stuck
43:03
often for simple things like someone's audio breaks up and then you have to repeat the instruction for them or as Jay mentioned maybe people speak different languages at home and while we're all speaking English we have slightly different comfort levels and so maybe falling behind or not quite getting it but if you are co-creating visual documentation even
43:21
if it's something simple like a written text document where everyone can type there's another additional guide to help people through the meeting so we've often seen someone will drop off on the audio and they'll come back and they can read they can catch up by reading and now the whole group doesn't have to stop on their way to closing the loop that person can reconnect or sometimes maybe someone's actually unable to hear but they can still see it
43:45
being typed because your video conferencing often drops off before your documentation tools do and then the added benefit is for people struggling with the language it's sometimes easier to read than it is to hear and so you're bringing people together and keeping them together on this journey of closing loops in the meeting the third one is one which
44:05
Jay mentioned briefly which is creating energy cues and making space for breaks so quite simply one of the things which can begin to create fatigue or detour people in a meeting is they're getting tired and so we think it's really important to take off take frequent breaks in
44:22
the meeting so our rule of thumb is like every 45 minutes take a 15 minute break both because remote meetings are more tiring as well as if you get people to if you allow people that space to have a break they'll come back with more energy and be able to close the loops and flow through the meeting more quickly than kind of slogging it out as you go
44:42
and then the last one is routing participants in the present so this is really just about at regular intervals reminding people where we are in the journey so that we don't get lost in the cyber space of a remote meeting and because a remote meeting is virtual people often can you know you're trying to hold so many things that picture that Jay showed of the guy
45:02
with all the charts up we're all trying to remember so many things that are going on and if you can just remind people this is what we've just covered this is what we're doing now and this is where we're going it creates that sense of flow and it helps remove some of the barriers and helps people to then close feedback loops and get to that kind of nice positive state that we're really wanting so that we can keep thinking in a high
45:22
quality way and what we're going to do now is we're going to do the same thing we did just now where we're going to share what some of these practical ideas look like in silence and we're going to pause in silence to allow you the space just to think about it for yourself because we've been doing a lot of talking um so Jay is going to share the deck
45:43
in the chat and she'll also be sharing it on her screen and just for a couple minutes we're going to keep quiet and allow you the space to look through it um and after that we will then wrap up okay I think that brings us to the last one there thank you so once again
48:33
you're welcome to use any of those and that's just some ideas that maybe you can start playing with to bring a little bit more flow into your sessions
48:41
and what we're going to do now is we're going to just do a quick recap and wrap up so our intention today was to detangle some of the complexities of remote interactions using neuroscience so giving facilitators a little bit of a deeper understanding of what's happening for people at quite an unconscious level so that they can create conditions that are helpful
49:03
and so we spoke about the brain and threat and reward as well as what a facilitator can be thinking about creating and focusing on the process and then we spoke about connection and the importance of people feeling safe and connected because otherwise people can
49:20
experience social pain which actually registered in some way as physical pain and we just spoke now about flow and creative connect ideas and we come to solutions and how frustrating it feels when we're unable to do so for whatever reason it is and how you as a facilitator if you can do small things that help people to flow through a meeting
49:42
you can really improve the quality of that space and that pretty much is a wrap so we have I think a few minutes left if there are any questions but all that's left for us is to say thank you and our resources the studies we referenced are on the last slide so if you would like to check any of them out but thank you so much for your time and yeah any questions
50:08
yeah so thank you a second time everyone who wants to make a question come into the vbb room just below the stream and I will make your microphones open
50:26
Jay's just shared the slides in the chat also if you would like access to them thank you for the feedback that's coming through any questions oh okay you can always reach us on
51:06
social media if you have questions or want to explore things further we are open to discussing things offline as well so I don't see any questions out there the slides can also be found
51:31
in our plan later on oh I see one coming through do you have any suggestions on how to reduce meeting durations I have a few that came to mind and then Jay maybe you do too
51:47
and I think using asynchronous ways and the build up up to the meeting so if there's parts of the discussion that you can have via text before the meeting that can really help so I've heard meetings criticized often for only capturing people's first reactions rather than
52:04
the deeper thinking so if it's a like a session or you need to evaluate lots of options often what we do is create whether you use conference or google docs and invite people to add comments to each other's thoughts there and get some of that initial thinking out so that when you get to the meeting all you have to do is talk through the comments or whatever it's one way
52:25
another way is I find also to allow silent time within a meeting so whether it's time for people to read or like write in silence means you can have 10 threads going on rather than one linear thread of conversation so people are able to get out what they need to say in
52:42
silence at the same time and then you can discuss it so those are two I don't know Jay if there's anything else that came to mind uh though I would just echo the asynchronous part um I recently had like an interactive meeting but um I asked participants to fill out the sheet
53:00
beforehand um so they were able to gauge and read each other's answers before coming into the and then we just had a quick 30-minute discussion about what we saw so and definitely one of the good options of reducing meeting time the other thing that also came to mind for me there is remote meetings also tend to take a lot longer than in person in that because of the technical
53:24
issues or you just need to go a little bit slower so I also find it's better to actually just take on less in the meeting rather than trying to do everything just take a small piece of the problem and solve that and then you can take the rest offline or have another meeting but a short one as well so rather a few short ones spread out then long chunky ones um where it
53:44
begins to become unproductive anyway hope that helps okay um I believe one thing people miss in a remote meeting or in remote workspace is more of one-on-one talks with their colleagues
54:02
there must be some time allotted for that just like what a cooler canteen kind of talking yes um absolutely agreed uh I've seen lots of teams solve that in different ways I think it's a nice challenge to team because it's kind of something they can come up with
54:21
some things that I owe that we do is um we have random coffee chat slots where uh you can just dial in and you get paired with someone randomly for a very short time box so it doesn't get awkward just five minutes and the room has some questions in it already some conversation starters if you'd like um but there's also you need lots of ways so we also
54:42
have like a gaming channel where someone can suggest if they want to play an online game because there's a lot of um I don't know if you've played foosball or ping pong in the office that casual way that you come around a table together you miss in a remote space as well but there's quite a few fun real-time games you can play online which are super simple too and offer that to your teams as a casual way to connect so um I definitely agree that you
55:06
need that space um those are two possible ways Jay any others um so one thing that my team came up with is they just scheduled social time uh in the afternoon uh so it's basically just
55:22
it's a suggestion that came from the team and it's basically not a forced thing so anyone who wants to join from the team can join and it's just a casual conversation there's no um because the team is quite close in this and they're smallish um it's it's easier to just um you know converse about random topics that it would be when people don't know each other so
55:46
um definitely depends on context team and what they come up with for sure I see what is your preferred online game so I love board games and I've looked spent a lot of time investigating the equivalent online so the ones I can recommend if you're looking for very quick
56:04
games that are like ping pong so simple with a low barrier to entry um and you obviously need to be able to create a private room uh hacks ball is a really nice one um we're going to be writing a blog soon because we've got a list of these hacks balls really nice uh tetra io is like a real-time tetris where you compete with each other and there's tag pro which
56:26
is a capture the flag mechanic um curve fever which is where you make little like snakes so those are the ones if you're looking for a more complex game I really like the jackbox games on steam they're really fun and there's a lot of cool ones on the jackbox party packs
56:44
um and if you're into more complex games dominion which is a card game has a free card game platform and that's also quite a nice one um there's lots others but those are my favorite
57:00
jay hi may I pose a question yes um in university business we are used to set meetings for let's say nine o'clock in the morning and to start really at a quarter past nine this is the ct contemporary which is quite common at universities uh would that be an idea
57:22
for an online team online meeting as well just to leave the people 15 minutes for social interaction yeah I think that would be awesome in fact um if you're working with agile teams I've seen a lot of teams you know the typical rule of a stand-up is that it's short it's time
57:41
box to 15 minutes we come in we say our three things but in remote spaces I think allowing those to go on a bit longer and allow people time to chat's really important so um I think that's actually really nice to start a meeting intentionally with that in mind um plus one for me it's also something you can agree with as
58:01
as a team as well we didn't speak about it in this something we spoke speak about is agreeing on your session rules or your meeting agreements um and that often you like pull from the from the from the people in the meeting and not necessarily from you and so if it's a regular meeting with the same people you can come up with that kind of like agreement so
58:25
you set that expectation for everybody in the meeting so first 15 minutes is just about you hanging back so at least everyone's away cool I think we're probably on the hour now or at least at the end of our slot and there's
58:44
possibly other things happening so I'll hand over to the room admin now to close or do whatever is necessary yeah so thank you again um I think we'll close down and see you in the
59:00
next talk thank you