One difference between in person and video calls interaction is, a video call is a performance. This is better explained in Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman, but let me attempt.
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.
I concur - dead air in person is much more palatable, especially if multiple people are engaged on the same (mental) task at the same time.
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."
Does it work better with just an audio-only group call? I've sat on 2-3 hour long group audio chats with teammates and that seems to work better, just having enough time for dead-air, like you're saying. I know it's not as good as in-person, but it may be an improvement over awkwardly sitting in front of the camera.
i was going to say, audio knly doesn't work better. one reason i dislike phone calls. don't get time to think.
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.
I've found this to work very well, given a wireless headphone. I can pace around, make notes, stare out the window.
If the call has comfort noise enabled and I am having a one-on-one with a colleague, the silences are very bearable.
I don't think (vocal) silence is the problem per se. It's more a factor of
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.
> 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.
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.
That gives me an idea. We should have an audio-conference instead and everybody could just lay on their bean-bags at home. Every now and then somebody says something. Somebody else replies at some point. Or perhaps poses a new question to think about. Encourage people to "think deep" and enjoy the experience.
Maybe I'm an odd one out, but my team never goes on camera unless we notice others doing so. What we instead do is either talk it out, or someone shares a screen and types into OneNote or any other software and we all just talk things out.
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.
I don't think meeting is equivalent of online TV show prior elections. The format is different, the stakes are different, the expected level of preparation is different.
What bothers me the most about video conferencing software is when people talk over each other and you can only hear one of them properly.
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.
I hadn't even thought to tinker with this, because the auto-volume stuff is not that annoying... but now that I know it's there I'll try it out, so thanks for posting this!
The reason for this is because the conferencing system typically has an automixer setup which turns up the active speaker and turns down everyone else. That's why it's impossible to say have a group of people sing a song together on Zoom (ignoring latency) because the automixer will switch between different singers erattically as opposed to hearing them all at the same time. In typical videoconference setting with one person speaking at a time this feature typically makes sense.
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.
I think a huge improvement to zoom and other conferencing systems would be to place the other call participants in virtual 3d circle around each person. The human auditory system is great at reconstructing directional audio even just from a stereo source.
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.
A problem is that many wireless headphones nowadays have horrible mics. I can immediately tell which person is using an airpod in a meeting. They always sound low in volume and quality, and have difficulty in hearing what I'm saying.
> E.g. if the player to your right speaks, the signal you hear will be panned to the right
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.
Yes however, this can be configured and for the real-simmer’s out there, it’s a must. DCS SimpleRadio has two split audio channels for two radio frequencies. Arma 3 has tac radio that does this too.
By default it’s setup like a game. Audio in both channels. It can be (and often is) extended.
One other automixer problem: they are tuned for overly-sensitive laptop condenser mics with an assumption of massive fan noise. My dynamic mic with a hardware mute switch causes me all kinds of weird gain problems when I use the mute switch instead of the software muting.
I also use a dynamic connected to an interface. The issue is that there is still a bit of noise from the preamp and analog circuitry when the mic switch is turned off, and the AGC cranks up the gain when it detects that thinking that you're speaking softly. I know in Zoom and Teams there is an option to turn off AGC in-app (think it's called automatically adjust mic volume or something like that).
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 think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully.
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.
"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).
In one on ones, or small groups, maybe, but most of my meetings are just board rooms full of glassy eyed people, staring, trying not to look like they're going to fall asleep, caching JUST enough of what's being said to respond without looking entirely stupid if called on by the only person who actually cares about the meeting: the person running it.
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.
for me the biggest problem is how the flow of natural conversation is broken in video calls.
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
Then that is a failure of the person running the meeting.
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.
I still think this is much more of a problem with video calls. Sure, the person running the meeting can take concrete steps to mitigate it slightly, but it's still added friction relative to in-person sessions.
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.
The redirection process though is a huge amount of effort which might be why OP (or someone else in the thread) mentioned their thought process specifically around video calls being a more painful way to engage in discussions
My team has (not entirely consistently) tried to encourage people to use the "raise hand" button in the video call software if someone would like to speak. The currently person talking can either pause, or finish up what they're saying and then hand things over to the person who raised their hand.
Yes, that is a good method. But some are oblivious, and again, it comes down to the meeting runner to enforce that. "I need to cut in here, Justin has had his hand raised for some time and I want to address his points or questions before we wander away from the topic." Again, meeting running/manager needs to be firm. The people that drone on and on are frequently oblivious to everything except what they want to say next.
Absolutely. Sometimes with coworkers I'm relatively close to, we'll have those side conversations in a Slack chat...but then that's just making the argument for Slack.
> I think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully.
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).
Even when no laptops or phones are present, people who are not interested in the current topic will find a way to zone out. Especially in longer meetings with more than 4-5 people it is an illusion to have everybody engaged all the time.
I hardly use video on my meetings. I tend to use screenshare and voice only except in circumstances where a higher fidelity is required.
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)
I miss landline telephones. For whatever reason, the audio clarity of video conferencing still has not touched the quality we used to get out of old fashioned analogue over copper.
Some of it might be nostalgia, but some of it is definitely latency and jitter. Even into the 90s there was only so much latency on a phone call and most phone lines tried their hardest to _act_ circuit-switched. The average video caller is on WiFi, so there's packet buffering at the AP (which can be quite large since most people are running meh quality consumer routers at home), again at the router, then however many hops until the RTP endpoint. Jitter can be quite large. That doesn't even get into the scourge that is modern NAT and the possibility of TURN relays along the way.
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.
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.
Jitter and buffer bloat are huge issues with VoIP. People that deploy audio VoIP solutions often terminate VoIP at the nearest router to the WAN they can and use DECT to serve wireless VoIP phones because of how bad WiFi can be for jitter. It's not as simple as your setup and codecs.
Unsure about others experience but from an engineering perspective using tooling like exalidraw or miro we're able to brainstorm much more effectively than just a single whiteboard along with being able to have everyone contribute.
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.
I have the idea that brainstorming on a meeting is a waste of time. It is better to do it async. On a shared doc where people can comment and improve over a short period of time (like a week or so).
Then, and only then, you can have a round of presentations or debates.
I hugely prefer this for a lot of stuff and wish it could happen more often, sadly when tried usually people just don't end up contributing unless you trap then in a room (real or virtual).
One of the greatest challenges I'm facing running team meetings virtually is getting input from the less extroverted team members.
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.
On small to medium groups going "around the room" and asking everyone if they have anything to add can work without calling out one specific person. Of course not for every meeting type and situation.
Yes, those people usually speak out before the end of the meeting.
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.
Have you tried using break out rooms? We've tried grouping people to small groups (even as small as 2) and then regrouping to discuss further. It's not perfect, but does increase participation.
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.
"I think if I need ideas, I need to ask people to think them through independently"
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.
Very much agree with this. But, I recently came across brainwriting (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/using-brainwriting-...) and have been using the technique successfully for leading remote workshops. One of the things I really like is that it creates a space where lots of different personality types can contribute, rather than just ceding direction to the most confident and/or loudest voices in the room. (SCAMPER is another nice technique, although it typically requires a bit more of an explainer.)
I haven't done many video calls, but from watching a lot of presentations using the tech, it's the inappropriate inclusion of faces everywhere that is a problem. Humans naturally gravitate to faces and movement, which makes paying attention difficult when you always have a few moving faces onscreen. Screensharing good, video bad.
It's interesting to note that in the common big presentation format in person, the presenters face is almost invisible, whereas the main thing we can see is their posture and gesturing, with a tiny bit of facial expression.
True, but I think a big part of it is that we do see the whole picture. And we do see everything without delay and without 5Hz refresh rates, that you often have in video chat.
So tired of this stuff and I think it's getting worse, the amount of mumbles and ummmms I have to sit through before people get to the point is absolutely insufferable.
At times I'd rather just not work with remote people than have to deal with them anymore.
> We assessed idea selection quality using two different measures: (1) the ‘creativity score’ of the pair’s selected idea23 and (2) the ‘decision error score’—the difference in creativity score between the top scoring idea and the selected idea—where smaller values reflect a better decision
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.
I'm starting to wonder about setups for remote meetings and if that is a big part of the problem. Like most colleges, we were thrown in the deep end with distance learning. We've done distance learning in a single classroom that is well equipped for twenty years, but never from a teacher's home.
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.
Shared whiteboards have been a thing for a long time in the corporate world. These days you don’t even really need a specialized device - Teams, for example, has the functionality built in so all you need is a large screen (although input without a touchscreen kind of sucks)
It’s basically unusable without a touchscreen but really you need a stylus on the touchscreen to write notes, draw shapes, etc. Even then, if the screen is 12 inches diagonal or less, it can be really cramped and hard to manage the board content, especially when it’s a collaborative board.
Gaming voice products figured out the delay problem long ago (eg if you scream "flank" your team needs to respond ASAP). Video conference products are woefully behind.
I think gaming voice chat usually has a keyboard trigger. They solve echo cancellation by assuming microphones are usually off! Modern video conference software assumes users aren't using headphones, so they need sophisticated echo cancellation. Now, whether the delay is a side effect of noise cancellation, or one of the mechanisms is not clear to me.
Gaming voice chat (discord/teamspeak/other, not in-game) solved it way better than just push-to-talk. Voice activity detection, adjustable voice gate thresholds (open and close), echo cancellation, background noise removal, individual person volume settings, adjustable application attenuation.
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.
Dude, Miro makes online meetings waaay better for brainstorming. Just divide people up into small groups then come together as a group. It works so well. Takes a bit of culture, but it is highly effective for us.
I have not done much of a brainstorming over video call, however debugging session over call is very productive in my experience. 2-3 people is what worked best most of the time.
The paper relies on an extremely questionable premise: that creative ideas are generated in groups.
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 are usually a fail anyway, resulting in the lowest common denominator solution chosen, or the one of the loudest/strongest persons in the room. Much more superior is tasking the right person (or duo/trio) with thinking through it and proposing one solution or alternatives with trafeoffs.
"Brainstorming meetings" so often for people who want to spread responsibility for bad decisions without admitting they have no clue even beyond the problem :(
If you go into a brainstorming session with the expectation that you will choose anything, you're right, they are usually going to fail. If you go into them with the sole purpose of exploring a problem space and gathering a diversity of viewpoints, but not evaluating ideas, they can be amazingly valuable. My other two points of advice are to:
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.
Brainstorming asynchronously on a shared doc of some sort (google doc, miro board, even slides) is way better. Kick off with a meeting to set some parameters and answer questions, then let everyone enter ideas at their leisure for a week and regroup to dicuss.
The most effective seems to be to do the first round independently, IE each person come with their 2-3 best ideas before collaboration. Otherwise there's a strong tendency to just +1 existing ideas rather than think independently.
I was going to say this exactly. We've started doing this recently and it's worked really well.
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.
I feel the same way. There is even a culture of 'how to run successful brainstorming sessions' at my employer (sometimes called sprints). I have never once enjoyed that process, and I have never seen the result of those sessions be worthwhile or any better than just sitting down for 15 mins 1:1 with team members and talking through the problem. My feeling is that extroverts love them because it's a social gathering at work. I work in user experience.
The responsibility of whatever topic is on the team’s (not on individuals). So if a decision must be made then the whole team should feel responsible for it.
We need to rid this idea that the tool is the problem. Look at the experiment they are doing. The room is so boring and controlled. It's like putting an animal in a cage and expecting them to behave the same as they would in the wild. They are also sourcing random students/people off the street. Not those who may thrive in a remote fashion.
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.
> We need to rid this idea that the tool is the problem.
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.
My comment was mocking scientific evidence as this study is pure science and not very practical from the human perspective. But yes there are plenty of studies and even studies on studies:
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.
Most often than not, tools are rarely the problems. People always blame the tools because it's easy and you don't put responsibility onto the organization or people.
I share your viewpoint. I think having conversations in a fun environment like a lite videogame or a fun virtual hub would be the best thing for team building and creativity.
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.