Covision Goes To Work at Midnight, in Pajamas!
As part of a continuing trend of work in Europe, we recently got invited to bring our CoVision engagement methodology into a Cocoa Innovation session for the Dutch government in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Stakeholders from around the world participated in a three hour think tank /brainstorming session to develop innovative solutions for transforming world cocoa production into a certified and sustainable system.
This session was part of a larger day-long symposium on sustainable trade … BUT the conveners couldn’t afford to fly us to Europe for a three hour session. So the challenge was … could we, somehow, deliver any form of our method from California?
We worked out a unique combination of technologies that allowed us to facilitate the interactive processes of the meeting in real time (which for us was midnight to 3am) from our homes in California.
The technology design involved us watching and listening to the meeting in real time via internet based video and audio – it felt like sitting at a side table in the middle of the room – and conversing with the facilitators at their table in the front of the room over audio headsets. We could all view the ideas that small groups in the room were inputting. And we could work with a Theme Team in Haarlem to help craft a distillation for the participants to discuss. Finally, through use of participants’ laptops and the high bandwidth internet available in the meeting room, we were able to keep costs exceedingly low (and the carbon footprint too) — making this particular collaboration possible.
The process design was very similar to how the methodology would be applied in any brainstorming session where we were present in the room. And the design conversations leading up to the meeting were also similar, focusing on the same principles, concerns and solutions that would arise in any design setting. In the actual meeting, our visual and audio connections, combined with seeing the participants’ input screens, allowed us to follow the flow of the meeting and to suggest process modifications as the meeting unfolded (with the usual falling behind in the agenda schedule, etc.).
For us, this was an exciting milestone: combining existing technologies in new ways in order to make our methodology more available to organizations and efforts (like the Cocoa Innovation session) wherever in the world they need to meet. This sort of international remote support/facilitation was a first for us. But we’re curious! … have you heard of anything similar, or a situation where something similar would be workable (and helpful)? Let us know.
Posted by Karl Danskin
