Text Polling

I've discovered and am quickly falling in love with a cool tool called Poll Everywhere. It allows for people to respond to questions using narrative, by using the tools that they almost certainly have on hand anyway.

You just create a poll online by typing in a question, and then project that question on the screen. The audience simply sends an SMS with the text "Cast (and your keyword)" plus their questions, suggestions, responses or input, to a constant number.

There is little one can do to synthesize the information once received, but it does create reports in Excel, and it's free or virtually free for an upgrade. There are more robust polling options, but they usually require specialized devices. This requires an internet connection, and wireless devices that are present in every meeting room, for better or for worse.

The advantage is that people can provide anonymous feedback in the moment. It can also help presenters to steer presentations in the direction that that is required of the audience. There are also multiple choice polling options.

The danger of course, is encouraging people to interact with a device that usually signifies a dying meeting or disengagement.

The Collaboration Paradox

Quintessential article from John Abele concerning collaboration now available, called "The Collaboration Paradox..." It examines the necessity for collaboration - no surprises there - and why it is, if we accept that collaboration is often a necessity, we can be so bad at it or resist it so much. A few reasons are that we are conditioned to excel independently, and that we don't afford collaborations enough foresight or strategy. John does a better job of explaining it than I can, so I'll leave the rest to the article.

The Kingbridge reason for being is founded on this need for improved approaches to collaborations. The Kingbridge philosophy is founded on the methods John has influenced and learned from over the years, which he references in this article.

The article is available through XConomy, an interesting study in collaboration unto itself. It's an exceptional blog with exceptional content, from a whole slew of guest authors. It's not totally opensourced or crowdsourced, as the articles are edited/policed, and the editors do contribute. A successful middle ground.

Commuter's Collaboration

There's a new GPS device out there called "Dash". CNN had a spot on it, that you can watch here. The idea is that the GPS communicates with other GPS's from other cars in the network. The Dash tracks traffic by tracking all of the Dash's that are out and about. Moreover, it can alert drivers to their relative proximity to things you may be looking for, like products. You get a little notice if you are in the region where something you've keyed in is available.

Of course, this network depends on many subscribers to the network to be successful. If only 1% of cars have the Dash, then there's probably too few signals to get an accurate picture of the traffic situation. This gets me thinking a lot about critical mass issues with social networks, wikis, and other collaborative places, but that's for another post. For today, we'll look at a more literal parallel in a conferencing environment.

There are all kinds of gizmos like nTAG that house participant profiles, and beep or do other obnoxious things to let their possessor's know when there's somebody approaching that shares an interest or offers expertise in an area of need. This is all well and good, but it seems that this function could be done by cell phones in the near enough future, and probably is already although I'm unaware of it. It would be nice if phones could be more easily used as polling devices as a replacement for Audience Response keypads.

Any cool devices you'd like to share? Better still, what's the best collaborative use you've seen for a mundane technology, like a cell phone?

Brain Waves

There is an interesting article in today's Globe and Mail about advertising juggernaut (they would probably say "media research firm") Nielsen investing in NeuroFocus; a company that specializes in monitoring neurophysiological patterns and phenomena. This is an alternative to focus groups, surveys, and other antiquated methods and metrics that can help organizations gauge emotional response and engagement.

The space organizations like NeuroFocus (and there are others) occupy is primarily for advertising and product development purposes. While this makes indisputable sense, I think it's a narrow view of what we can do with people's brainwaves.

What about meetings? I wax prophetic about the value of audience response nearly every day. But my expertise in that arena would become obsolete as quickly as your brain can transmit signal to your mouth to make you say "unemployable" if the cool little keypads were replaced with non-invasive brain imaging devices, or cool helmets that monitor engagement, emotional response, and other physiologically immaculate indications.

There are obviously challenges to what is a step towards reading minds in a meeting. I would definitely be skeptical of what's being monitored and who would know what about my thoughts and perceptions. Skepticism could be tremendously damaging to the sense of (damn, this soft word again) trust in a meeting. And perhaps there is such a thing as too much truth. I firmly believe that if there are issues that exist in the minds of meeting attendees, then they need to be surfaced, addressed, and discussed. But even as this happens I can mask my irrational disdain for others, that if surfaced, wouldn't help anyone.

I would love to one day be a part of the strategic alignment meeting where the CEO presents the plan, and turns to the screen to see a perfectly clear picture of whether people buy into the plan, and if they think it's feasible. It might not be soon, but we've got to start thinking about neurophysiological science's implications in collaborative efforts. After all, a big reason why physical meetings still exist is that our brains react differently when there is a human being in front of us that our various senses can perceive. We actually stimulate and fire different synapses in our brain than is possible without that sensory engagement.

For now I'm kind of glad. The information - from the smell sense in particular - that would engage those synapses and the resulting opinion if you were experiencing me say this in person today instead of reading it would sabotage the message. That's correct, I was at a St. Patrick's Day party at Steamwhistle brewery last night. The availability of beer would have registered a powerful emotional response with the NeuroFocus technology.

Survey Says...

Using an Audience Response System (ARS) in a meeting can augment and shape discussion, and be a powerful tool. It can also be easy trivialized, and a waste of time. Many of the individuals I design meetings with are familiar with and have used ARS, but only a small portion of those have seen value in it.

The most notable reasons I see for integrating ARS into a group engagement are to leverage the anonymity and surface what a group is really thinking, so the meeting focus shifts from the bullshit that leadership wants to shove down everyone's throat to the real issues that the group has illuminated as what needs to be addressed. In terms of learning and development, it's also handy to gauge understanding from time to time. Again, you're illuminating areas where the group is confident and need dwell no longer, or where they need to spend a little more time and need more depth than what was planned in the agenda. Both of these purposes require a fluid meeting format, that not many are comfortable with.

Used well, ARS's don't just get feedback on how the meeting was. They shape the very course of the meeting. This is an uneasy notion for the rigid manager that wants to script proceeding, outcomes, and know exactly what to expect from a meeting. There's also a lot of resistance from anyone who fears embarrassment or, god forbid, disalignment from polling. This is difficult to understand. Why would candor be a threat? The group has an opinion. You can choose to ignore that as you try to establish a new universal outlook, or you can acknowledge it and explore what may need to be altered to improve or build upon that state.

Comments on how you feel about ARS are strongly encouraged. This is one of those topics you can expect me to post a lot about in the coming weeks. I'll drill down on why a negative view of ARS may exist, and share some strategies for effective ARS implementation.