Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
nature.com
nature.com
Imagine a TV show where a political candidate is asked a question, and instead of answering, he remains silent. The camera pans on him and zooms in. 3.5 seconds later, we switch to a close up from the camera on the left. The guest is still silent. 3.5 seconds later, the camera switches to the host who is also starting to look confused. A whole 11 seconds has gone by and the guest is still silent, his eyes looking up. Right before the host is about to halt things and go on a commercial break, the guest breaks his silence with a single word. "No".
Even without knowing what the actual question was, you know this candidate is not going to win the race. It was a bad performance. But what if I tell you, he was asked a difficult question that he hadn't thought of before, and he took all of 15 seconds to consider it before giving a sound answer?
That's the problem with video, any time spent thinking on screen can be perceived as incompetence. 3.5 seconds is the average length of a shot on TV. And it makes silence look awfully long. Brainstorming requires doing some silent thinking.
In my previous job, I used to spend hours in a conference room with my colleague after we had plotted our plan on the whiteboard. Then, we would just sit down and look at the board in silence for long period of times. With the occasional "what if... no never mind." When covid hit, we tried to do that via zoom. Didn't work.
Silence does not work well on camera.
The description you're giving there, of the performance, is one where only one person is doing that, so it's not 100% analogous - though in the context of TFA it certainly is (ie. 'group brainstorming').
Tangentially but related, John Ralston Saul had this to say (complain about?) on the subject of immediacy in the face of questions:
"ANSWERS [are] A mechanism for avoiding questions.
"This might be called obsessional avoidance or a manic syndrome. It is based on the belief that the possession of an education — particularly if it leads to professional or expert status and, above all, if it involves some responsibility or power carries with it an obligation to provide the answer to every question posed in your area of knowledge. This has become much more than the opiate of the rational élites. It may be the West’s most serious addiction.
"Time is of the essence in this process. An inability to provide the answer immediately is a professional fault. The availability of unlimited facts can produce an equally unlimited number of absolute answers in most areas. Memory is not highly regarded. Right answers which turn out to be wrong are simply replaced by a new formula. The result of these sequential truths is an assertive or declarative society which admires neither reflection nor doubt and has difficulty with the idea that to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way."
it's different when pairing or being continuously online with your team while working, because then you don't have the feeling of waiting for someone to talk all the time.
> Silence does not work well on camera.
I think that this is not a universal law. My current collaborator and I, who wouldn’t be able to work together in person most of the time under any circumstances, have weekly Zoom calls which are of exactly the mostly-silent type you describe. (He calls them “grunting occasionally at each other.”)
Everyone does have to be on board, though. We tried the calls with a third collaborator last year who was less on board with the methodology, and it did not work at all, with a pressure to say _something_ all the time leading to much more talk but much less done.
1. lack of body language, which people highly overlook. To go back to your political candidate question, if those 11 seconds were spent with him jostling through some notes, scribbling some ideas down, and then saying "no"... it may not still be the kind of candidate the people want. But it would be a much better performance than dead silence. Now in a video call setting, the people won't see that. they at best see you looking down at your feet and maybe hear a bit of paper.
2. partially due to #1, a change in dynamics of focus. You don't have to maintain eye contact in a limited space in an office nor small conference room. There's a pressure to do so in a video call because all that's usually shown are a face and maybe a tiny bit of background. You may as well be in a straight jacket and try to claim that you can brainstorm just as well as normal.
You have less means to communicate, so closing those avenues make it harder to collaborate.
I could see how cameras would make things awkward though. My suggestion is unless you're introducing yourselves for the first time ever, I don't see the point of a camera being on for every single meeting.
This is not a problem in multiplayer video games with voice chat because I think they somehow manage it with multiple simultaneous audio sources. I'm surprised that Zoom has not done that yet. Just do what video games do.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using...
I think the catch is that people need to be on headphones for echo prevention, which might be the case for most of the gamers.
This kind of mixing won't work well in a game for obvious reasons, so the audio is sent direct. However, the game uses direction and distance based audio to make the sound more natural. E.g. if the player to your right speaks, the signal you hear will be panned to the right. Humans are great at identifying different voices coming from different directions - you can try this yourself by loading up some voices into a DAW and seeing the difference in intelligibility having them panned out vs mono.
Note that this tech may work well in a VR meeting room or something but it won't in a regular monural video call. Also the user will need a proper stereo setup (headphones or speakers a reasonable distance apart) for this to work.
You don't need a VR meeting room to simulate the same idea, it'd make the call so much realistic and easy to follow.
FYI that is fairly atypical. Mostly in mil-sim type games like ARMA, or VR games. Most in game voip is just a mono source played through both stereo channels equally.
By default it’s setup like a game. Audio in both channels. It can be (and often is) extended.
The same issue has plagued cheap camcorders with no manual gain controls for a long time too as they crank up the gain whenever there's silence - making their audio noisy garbage even if the ECMs and pres are adequate.
Honestly there's very little good about video calls. I would prefer In-Person ideally, but if that is not possible, it is always more productive to just use slack or email. Or just a short audio call.
I love working from home more these days, but those days I do go into the office I find that meetings are way more engaging and productive. Being face-to-face with folks it's just much harder to disengage and focus attention elsewhere.
Most meetings can (and in my opinion should) be emails or chat messages. My rule is that I only go to meetings where there is a demonstration of some kind that cant be sent in an email, or cake.
"People think there is more social connection.. ..but we found the exact opposite. So we found in the virtual condition, people are looking significantly more at their partner, almost double."
If anything, the video suggests video calls are problematic because individuals focus too much on being presentable and looking at their conference partners, rather than putting their focus on the actual activity. Quite the opposite of tuning out deliberately (even if this is still possible).
1 person gets to talk as long as they dont get interrupted or leave a long enough gap for other folks to speak up.
its like talking but with a 5 second latency.
so what ends up happening is people dont like to be rude, so they dont speak up unless theres a long gap of silence.
but gaps dont happen because usually 1-2 people hoard the discussion, you know the type who never pause between sentences and drone on and on.
in real life those people would be sidelined because people look away and have side conversations. but in a virtual meeting these people hijack every conversation for the entire hour
Not sure if I'm the problem or the tech.
You, as an individual, can also deploy several redirection techniques to shut those people down in either virtual meetings or in-person meetings.
Tacit approval is either given by non-verbal acknowledgement (looking at them), vocalized agreement, e.g. "uhuh", "yeah", "and then what happened?", or by silence.
I have an internal count that I do when someone starts talking and I become conscious of the interlocutor: "Hey, I need to interject, you raise a valid point about X but I have a question around it, <name of other participant>, what do you think of <completely unrelated subject>?"
And you repeat the "Hey, I need to interject,hey, I have a question, Hey, I need to interject" until the other person stops long enough.
Some days, you just have to be firm and get into the conversation.
You can also just butt in with "Hey, that's interesting but it sounds like we are lost in the technical weeds, could we please take this offline or move it to a different meeting?" If the person running the meeting doesn't pick up on that, they shouldn't be running the meeting.
I also like to drop in "Hey, I have to cut this short, I've got another meeting I need to run too, can we move this along?"
People are very unaware when talking on the phone or in a video meeting. Like literally they become deaf. After three or four attempts of interjecting in a very short period of time of just 15 seconds or so, if the person isn't listening, I've just started talking directly to the meeting running directly over them and saying "we need to move on. Can you mute him?" It might be considered rude, but it's what everyone is thinking.
What you are describing may be a better way to hold a generic video meeting but it does really highlight how bad video calls are for brainstorming in particular. What you are describing would be terrible for that.
I’d argue that it’s no different from in-person unless you ban laptops and cell phones from the meeting.
This is as true in in-person meetings where people are allowed to bring in their laptops. It was a common problem pre-pandemic, and I'd often criticize meeting organizers for having a poor meeting format (e.g. team meeting every week or two weeks with unclear agendas, or having agenda items where each item only involves 1-3 people, but since it's a different set of 1-3 people for each agenda item, everyone is forced to be present for the whole meeting, etc).
Analog voice service is limited to 300–3,300 Hz, and being analog, subject to line noise/static/etc. About the only constant with it was that people would hold handsets up to their heads that were purpose-built, and reliably had a decent minimal level of quality.
With IP-based conferencing, you get as good as the worst link. A lot of people use built-in microphones on their laptops in a noisy room, and so the audio sounds like garbage. The people with consistently high quality have gaming-style headsets (or really, any >$100 headset). There's a couple people I talk with that have (inexpensive) studio-style microphones on boom arms, and they sound phenomenal.
Of course it could be you. If you're listening using garbage headphones or the built-in speakers in your laptop, it doesn't really matter how great other people's microphones are.
You're clearly misremembering the quality of analog phone lines; at their worst they're better than a bad IP-based service, but at their best they are blown out of the water by people that put even a modicum of effort into their setup.
One quick "hack" is to do your conferencing on a box connected to your router via Ethernet (or through switches). It can help bad connection paths but it's not a panacea. Another is if you have a slow internet connection, try to get a router with QoS and apply that to prioritize your VoIP packets.
Unfortunately other than cellular standards, there's no good way way to easily get a low latency, low jitter connection as most packet switching is optimized around throughput. Personally we use Zoom at work and I know the Zoom edge has low jitter to me so if anyone needs to VC me at work, they should get "as good as it gets". For my personal VC needs I ended up using Matrix and hosting a TURN server in a DC that peers directly with my ISP. Folks in my area can call me on it through WebRTC and get latency on the 3-6ms range.
I find working together on a document keeps attendees focused (along with a few tips/tricks like polling individuals, aligning current discussion with others' previously stated ideas and writing what people say as verbatim as possible)
What I find often is that there's TOO many people in a meeting that aren't needed for the brainstorming sessions and essentially don't contribute to the meeting.
When we had a meeting in a physical room, if I noticed someone hadn't said much, I could go "Hey John, any thoughts on this idea?", and it would largely be appreciated by John because it gave him an opportunity to speak in a room filled with other folks who were much better at getting their 2 cents in.
However, doing the same thing on a video or voice call feels completely different. It feels like I'm calling out the person who has been quiet, and comes across as a psychologically negative experience both for me and for John.
That's not whom I'm talking about.
And it's very easy to tell the difference between someone who is thinking and waiting to speak, and someone who is trying to get a word out but is unable to because they are more introverted or less confident than most of the other people in the room.
I think if I need ideas, I need to ask people to think them through independently. The "video conference brainstorming" or "in-person brainstorming" is there just to make people "participate" - to create a theatre of "work" instead of doing actual creative work.
This is what I would prefer doing instead of brainstorming. This technique is also can be done offline, which is great.
depends on the idea and the nature of the work. For highly technical solutions with a non-trvial problem, you don't brainstorm answers. You brainstorm approaches*. If you're trying to answer the question on the spot you won't get a chance to hit the subteties and edge cases. Figure out some entry points and then send people out into the weeds.
But for higher level concepts like an artwork idea or what to eat tonight, brainstorming works fine. Or at least, as fine as social dynamics will allow in the situation. The problems highlighted are absolutely correct, but they aren't unique to brainstorming and will affect any other forms of communication or productivity in general.
*I think in general this is why people grow weary of brainstorming. In grade school they treat it like you are finding an answer to a question that you could probably figure out alone. And in later work life, the worst brainstorming sessions are just the ceremonial ones where you know seniority is going to rule anyways.
I also find the bad audio quality and delays annoying enough that it becomes unpleasant enough to be downright irritating.
Not a good setup for communication.
At times I'd rather just not work with remote people than have to deal with them anymore.
Eh, I don't think creativity is so easily measured and also what they're calling creativity is incredibly narrow. As someone who went to art school, constraints are a huge part of being creative... when you ask a lot of artist what the "right" tool for their craft is, the answer is often "any tool you have will do"... being creative IS about doing more with less, and if you need to be face to face to do a proper brainstorming, perhaps you are not as creative as someone who can.
For one class, a bead-work class, we used a camera attached to a flexible gooseneck and a switcher from Blackmagic Design[1] to go between normal camera and the bead camera. It worked well and got me thinking about how we do our home setups. I think the laptop webcam with a small screen is the real problem. It just isn't the best placement. I watched my nephew and niece do remote classes on a Chromebook and that really seemed uncomfortable. It feels like your looking at a room through a porthole.
I am starting to think that hardware needs to be improved, and the whiteboard needs to become an actual surface in your office with remote updating. Multiple cameras is a winner and a big screen to view the video call seems to work really well.
I get the feeling that if I ever go back out into the mainstream workforce doing remote work, I will invest in a home production setup with multiple cameras and a switcher with overhead (documents) and camera pointed at a whiteboard.
I wonder if it's possible that it can be approximated with Google draw and Wacom tablets
From my perspective, Zoom's one and only benefit is how easy it is to share a link and get into a video chat. Everything else about it is painful to use.
If, on the other hand, we were to assume that creative ideas are generated mostly during solitary work, then differences between video- and in-person group situations are not actually important.
"Brainstorming meetings" so often for people who want to spread responsibility for bad decisions without admitting they have no clue even beyond the problem :(
We'll start off with a topic and give everyone, say, 15 minutes to write ideas in the doc on their own. Then take the next 15 minutes to read digest what everyone else wrote, and then rest of the time to discuss as a group.
It's great because it gives everyone a chance to think through the topic and share their perspective, but also you can quickly see the common themes.
A meeting should only ever be between two or three people. Any more and it's just a waste of time.
1) Keep them short (30-45 minutes). Do them just before lunch so people have a hard stop but also an opportunity to keep the discussion going in an even less structured way. 2) Keep them small (3-5 people). If you've got a dozen people you want to include, break it up, and then if you need/want, do some follow ups where you can group people differently and iterate on some earlier ideas.
The most creative / brainstormed ideas come from when you're having fun with brilliant people. The best ideas for products I've ever had were in a restaurant, a bar, or at a fun event/party. Even as a remote employee, I also have similar ideas when playing games or catching up informally with co-workers online.
I think we need to challenge this type of research given it's removing so many different senses that who would even try to be creative if your soul has already left the room before you began experiments? There's a reason why big tech companies have very colorful and vibrant offices. Would creativity increase as new ways of video calls become mainstream? i.e. metaverse, world of workcraft, etc.
Do you have any scientific evidence (preferrably peer-reviewed) that the tool is not the problem? If not, it would seem to me to be a reasonable thing to study.
> Look at the experiment they are doing. The room is so boring and controlled.
If I am reading the paper correctly, the rooms being used by remote and in-person participants were identical. While they may be boring, the point was to control for the effect of the room, not to study it. It sounds like you are wishing for a different study.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3051058
Specifically look at:
Table 5. Categories and characteristics of the PWE influencing creativity
It's very similar to how the more nature you bring into your working environment, the more "life" you bring into your work. We're humans, we're not meant to just sit in boring rooms all day and expect to be creative.
> My comment was mocking scientific evidence as this study is pure science and not very practical from the human perspective.
I generally agree with your idea that a natural work environment is better than a boring one. My point was about your assertion that we should get rid of the idea that the tool is the problem, followed by discussion of other factors in a work environment. If we want to know whether or not the tool is the problem, we need to study the tool.
As you point out, and the paper you linked makes clear, there are many other factors involved in creativity in a work environment. The OP study is about one tool however, and it makes it fairly clear that the tool in this case can be a problem. Whether or not it is the main problem is another matter of course.
More generally, the thought that we should even attempt, let alone need, to get rid of any idea without strong evidence to refute it strikes me as worryingly antiscientific. In the context of workplace optimization this may not be very important in the grand scheme of things, but in other matters (climate change comes to mind) it may well be of existential importance.
All video calls are good for is exposing latent unconscious biases in your colleagues.
Why do video calls expose that in particular?