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For centuries, meetings have been our key mechanism for collaboration, but the nature of collaboration is changing as never before, and with it, the concept of meeting is also being transformed.
No longer is meeting confined to one event, in one place, at one time.
The potential that is now available blurs the boundaries and conventional limits of what we think of as meeting. Meeting in this new world is not so much an event as a discipline, and it is now possible to hold meetings as multiple events, in multiple places and at multiple times* if required.
*Meeting that takes place at different times for different people is referred to as ‘asynchronous’
Furthermore, it is not about picking one of these options for meeting, you can select any productive subset or combination within that – whatever is most effective and efficient for moving things forward.
Whereas meetings were originally very much a product of the top left-hand corner of the diagram on the right, the forces at work in the world today encourage, support, and ultimately demand their (partial) migration into other areas of the chart.
This takes us into a range of creative options where different tools can be adopted in different media, and involve different people in different ways at different (or the same) times.
One subgroup can engage with an on-line tool via their laptops in the same environment that other colleagues are updating a wall display and yet a third group are polling opinions via social media on their phones.
The reality is that global, technological and social developments are having a big impact not only on how meeting takes place, but on the very nature of meeting, and we will either engage with this or be overwhelmed by it.
For those who choose to engage, the potential of these new opportunities for more efficient, productive, creative and exciting means of meeting is tremendous.
So how do you engage? We would like to propose two options to you:
- To get started, try out some of the tools we propose in Online Tools for Collaboration
- Once you have run out of ideas you want to try from the above, Lisette Sutherland curates an amazingly comprehensive list of resources at Collaboration Superpowers