One of the challenges Rees McCann’s clients often have is this one: how to generate creative collaboration remotely, when some of the participants are at a massive digital disadvantage.
It’s a very valid concern. Low bandwidth, frequent outages, worries about cost… if your meetings often have participants in lower-income countries, as many of our humanitarian and social impact clients do, you’ll know all about this stuff.
From a quick search online, it would be easy to imagine that online creative collaboration is all about beautiful whiteboard software – Miro, Mural etc. These tools are lovely, and when everyone in your group is set up with all the right kit, and knows how to use them, they make the facilitator’s life easy.
But here’s the thing.
- These tools are bandwidth-heavy. They won’t work on dodgy internet connections, and in places where data is expensive, they have a real cost
- They’re big, with lots of space for details. That means they really won’t work on a phone-sized screen. Your participants need to join from a laptop or desktop computer
- And when you use these tools in an online video meeting, they should be used alongside the video stream, so that you can see the people you’re collaborating with. That means everyone needs a second screen (or a separate tablet connected to the whiteboard tool)
In a lot of creative situations, then, these tools aren’t suitable for use in creative collaboration meetings.
How to sidestep some of the challenges
So when we want to get groups collaborating creatively, remotely, even when the bandwidth sucks, what do we do instead?
At Rees McCann, we don’t start with the tools.
We start by thinking hard about the process. What, specifically, are the intended outcomes and outputs, formal and informal? Then, what need to be the specific steps? What is wanted at each stage? That might mean digging out the virtual textbooks, and referencing Design Thinking or Agile processes.
Because it’s online, we know we will need to make explicit a whole bunch of things that we might not consider so deeply if we were due to be in a room together, and then think hard. What can we do to ensure this includes everyone, as far as possible?
For example, mingling-over-coffee at the start of a collaborative meeting isn’t optional. It’s an important element of any creative collaboration. So we often use the Magic Waiting Room in Zoom.
Tool choices do matter, of course. For a “gathering ideas”, we might use Mentimeter, because it works well on a smart phone. The “Q+A” function allows upvoting, for prioritisation…
Remember the async superpower
And there’s another level of thinking to do, especially if participants may struggle to use video. That might be about bandwidth, or it perhaps “housebarassment” – in a lower-income country, people are less likely to have the luxury of a private office space and are more likely to be sharing, for example. (Blurring your background adds to the required bandwidth, apparently.)
Building collaborative relationships in a meeting is harder when you can’t see each other.
So, we turn to the superpower of remote teams – asynchronous working. How might we make some or all of the process asynchronous? (Asynchronous, or async for short, means “not all at the same time”. Translate it as “not in a meeting”. )
Asynchronous tools – email, chat, groups, WhatsApp, Teams channel etc – can be just as clever as Miro and Mural, but often require much less bandwidth or screen real estate. And Miro and Mural can also be used asynchronously, which may work better for people on slower or more intermittent connections.
We can often break down a creative process into a series of steps, some or all of which might be asynchronous.
Facilitating async conversations isn’t the same as leading a meeting. You could argue that it’s a whole other skill set. But when you want to collaborative creatively, and some participants’ bandwidth sucks, it’s a skill you’ll want to master. (And it’s a skill we teach. Feel free to get in touch!)
And, we know the work we do is imperfect. We can’t include everybody – none of this stuff works without the internet, and 80 per cent of households in lower-income countries don’t have access to the internet.
But we feel very strongly that this is work that needs to be done. Without it, either important voices don’t get heard, or the planet suffers because of the climate cost of travel. As a species, we can’t risk either.