The Virtual Meeting Coach

As my friend and colleague, Carolyn Shaffer, knows well, a lot of us tend to worry these days about a lot of things.

Will we have enough income flow to see us through the years ahead?

How can we nourish crucial relationships with family and friends – when everyone’s scattered across the continent, or the globe?

What can we actually do to decrease the demand for fossil fuels – so we don’t have more disasters like we’ve already suffered in the Gulf this year?

A few years ago, Carolyn claimed her heritage in a long line of women who had all been “born worriers,” and decided  to take on the serious job of dispensing lighthearted wisdom for the heavy times in which we live.

Carolyn Shaffer
A long-time educator and, for more than 20 years, a clinical hypnotherapist and life coach (www.livingwellway.com), Carolyn has helped hundreds of clients move from fear and paralysis to joy and effective action. And, in response to the unprecedented global crises we face, Carolyn started whyworryguide.com to help thousands more learn how to make this shift quickly and affordably.

This week I will be Carolyn’s guest on her monthly Buddy Call. We’ll be talking about how all of us can move from worry to joy to effective action using virtual meeting tools (that are free or highly affordable) to reach more people and increase our income flow.

Strengthen Your Relationships With Family and Friends

Even if you aren’t in business for yourself, you can use the information and resources I’ll be sharing on Wednesday, August 11th, to take action on another front: strengthening your relationships with family and friends, especially those who live far away. In times of great change these relationships can turn out to be even more important than those multiple, flowing income streams.

Carolyn was a Madhatter in the Spring Session of the Madhatters Tea Party Group Coaching Program, so she’s been hard at work this summer applying what she learned to create new programs that will extend her coaching practice – using virtual meetings. She told me this week that she found the program demanding, especially for a computer-technology-challenged person like her, but also a lot of fun. Yes, F-U-N.

On this call, I’ll be sharing tips and resources for how you, too, can enter the world of virtual meetings and have a good time while you’re there.

Using our computers to communicate with each other – using text, still pictures, moving pictures and live drawing, along with our voices -  really does create conversations that are more engaging, more spontaneous, and more creative than just talking on the phone.  It’s true!

So, please join us on Wednesday, August 11th, at 6pm PDT for an hour of fun conversation. The call is FREE. So, bring your questions. Bring your sense of humor. Hell, you can even bring your worries! Between the two of us, Carolyn and I will do our best to help you with those, too.

There’s no cost to participate, but you do need to register at Carolyn’s site. Use the link below to sign up and Carolyn will send you the call number, conference code, and give you access to the call recording – in case you’d like to listen, but can’t participate Wednesday at 6pm PDT:

The Why Worry Guide Registration Page: http://www.whyworryguide.com/monthly-buddy-building-calls/

See you there! I mean hear you there…or hear you then…  It’ll be fun!

It’s storytime, friends. I’ve slowed down a bit this summer and as I begin gearing back up for the Fall, I’ve got a little story to share. If you’ve got a few minutes, please grab a cool drink…

Last weekend my dear friend, Diana Fairbanks, helped me gather up and move a bunch of things I’ve been storing at another friend’s property since I moved from Austin to Ashland almost four years ago. It was hot, heavy, dirty work in 105 degree heat and we were filthy, thirsty, and bone-tired when we got back to my place late in the afternoon with a car, a truck and a trailer piled high with stuff.

Fortunately, two cheerful, strong-backed, willing-to-work high school boys, Austin Huerta and Nick Geiger, were waiting to help us unload everything and fit it – somehow – into two small storage spaces under the building where I live.

As we began unloading, Austin and Nick noticed the flat file drawers stacked in the back of my car and asked me about being an artist. This opened a conversation about how much the boys loved Tetris and making art but hated geometry. We bonded immediately – across three generations – and the conversation about art and geometry kept us all from worrying too hard about the decision-making and stacking work as we hoisted stuff out of the vehicles and started tucking it into two pretty tight spaces.

As Austin quickly and skillfully transferred containers of different shapes and sizes from one place to another, he talked about how much he loved playing Tetris – and how irrelevant the kinds of problems he was being asked to solve in geometry seemed to him. And, as Nick helped Austin shoulder the heavy stuff, he chimed in about how much he loved drawing – but how painful geometry was for him because the formulas just made no sense to him.

As the boys demonstrated, moment by moment, how much geometry they had clearly mastered, I told them how happy I was that two smart young guys were having so much trouble with the damn theorems and postulates because I’ve been an artist my entire life and geometry was the only class I ever got a “D” in.

We agreed that theorems, axioms, postulates and corollarys weren’t the only way to work with shapes and that making art – and moving stuff around in space – were much better routes for people like us. Before we knew it, the work was done and we were high-fiving with a cheer for “Screw the postulates!” I thanked them for their cheerful company and quick creative thinking and we took off to get drinks and clean up. Despite the hard work and the heat, morale was high all around. What a day!

So, what’s this got to do with virtual meetings?

Well, three days later, as I’m recovering, I’m starting to wonder how I’m going to integrate everything into my life and my work now that all my stuff’s back under one roof. It’s a big deal to have all my books, tools, and supplies in one place four years after moving across the country! I went downstairs to survey the storage spaces and smiled immediately remembering the way the cheerful conversation with the boys lifted everyone’s morale.

And I’m also realizing that maybe it’s not quite true that theorems and postulates don’t work for me when I’m designing new solutions.

What might be truer is that, when I’m working as a coach, I’m always working with some theorem, axiom or postulate, assembling new corollaries, and searching for neat, provable little “systems” I can share with clients. Especially now that I’m helping coaches and consultants transition their face-to-face services into virtual meeting rooms.

But the thing is, instead of working with precise lines, protractors, and little letter-and-number-labels, I use words and phrases, together with photographs and video and cartoons and sometimes even little interactive games. There’s still a lot of rigor in the work and the systems have to “prove out” — or they’re not useful to anyone. And I notice that’s a liberating insight…

Advanced Coaching for Virtual Meeting Mastery

Throughout the Spring Session of the Madhatters Tea Party Group Coaching Program, Tom Carroll and I debriefed the Hatters about their action-learning experiences and I posted the videos here in the Virtual Meeting Coach blog. In those video interviews – and the written posts – Tom and I were actually fishing for axioms to share with the whole Virtual Meeting Camp.

But there was little time for me to reflect on my own learning, as the program director. So, I decided to chill a bit during the first part of the summer, have some fun turning 60, and take time to mull over the feedback the Hatters and Partiers shared so generously at the close of the session before attempting to design any followup coaching programs.

As August 1st looms on the horizon, I’m starting to dream again about some fast, fun, effective ways I could meet clients’ requests for advanced coaching this Fall. And, as I reflect on the geometry conversation, I’m realizing that the Virtual Tea Party Group actually handed me some powerful axioms in their post-session feedback surveys.

From both sides of the action-learning experience, Madhatter Hostesses and Virtual Tea Partiers agreed they want more

1. Learning community – to help them sustain morale while they take the time necessary to develop consistent virtual meeting skills
2. Real-time feedback – so they can design and deliver superior services – at a distance
3. Resources and support – for building excellent project team(s) that can help each other migrate successfully from 3D rooms to virtual meeting rooms
4. Practice – being exactly who they are in virtual relationships

And, as I’ve been reflecting on my own experience, it’s clear to me that running successful service businesses – businesses that deliver both face-to-face and virtual services – depends on our successful application of a couple of crucial corollaries as we design new service products.

I wish I could take credit for authoring all these – but this is actually an Oreo. I can only claim credit for the creamy center. The top and bottom cookies come from leaders at Pixar Studios.

(1) For imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
- Steve Jobs (CEO, Pixar Studios)

(2) Morale is the life-blood of imagination and without trust and respect, morale fails. Without exception.
- Meri Aaron Walker (co-author, “Teamwork is an Individual Skill“)

(3) With low morale, for every $1 your spend, you get $.25 value. With high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get $3 in value.
- Brad Bird (Director/Screenwriter, Pixar Studios)

I know, I know…

I can hear some of you muttering… “Tell me again, Meri, what’s all this GEOMETRY and OREO stuff got to do with me getting the results I need in this tough economy using virtual meetings?”

Hey, it’s summertime. And I just slid over the falls into my sixth decade… Rambling a little is just part of the territory.

What all this has to do with YOU, YOUR BUSINESS, and YOUR VIRTUAL MEETING MASTERY is this:

If you aren’t literally living and working within easy walking distance of all your coworkers, clients, and suppliers… (Not “A”)

… and if you are a service company that isn’t growing your profits fast enough to keep pace with this persistently volatile economy… (Not “B”)

… and if what you actually sell your clients, suppliers, and coworkers is your attention, intelligence and help applying new strategies to improve other people’s productivity and profits… (PLU$)

Then…

… taking time to learn to use interactive virtual meetings in ways that build trust and respect and sustain morale around you would be a great investment to make in yourself this year. (C)

So, are you needing

• a smart learning community,
• honest real-time feedback,
• proven resources and support for making your migration into virtual meetings, and
• a place to do real-world practice FREE tools with live, supportive audiences?

After this week’s Madhatters Tea Party, Julie Lockhart, Tom Carroll and I debriefed in the live video chat above.

Because I’m traveling today, I have less time that I wish I could take to write up a bit of the context. That said, I want to make this conversation available to the 6-Week Virtual Meeting Campers and anyone else listening in, so I’m just posting it today with a brief intro.

Julie is an experienced classroom teacher and meeting facilitator with twenty plus years in a traditional higher education setting. Her first foray into hosting her own “outside the academy,” live, fully interactive, online meeting illuminated a host of issues for her. Tom and I were both struck with how well she managed the complexities of the tools and the ways she referred and deferred to her team around issues of expertise. It’s hard to jump from one cultural context to another and the Web 2.o tools not only allow us to share the stage with each other – they just about demand that we do so. And this is a whole new arena for people who’ve had academic enculturation about expertise and authority.

The new opportunities for 2-way communication and interdependence that collaborative writing/editing tools offer us, for instance, can be truly paradigm-shifting. The primary value we have to offer others is no longer fixed to us knowing something that others don’t…and transferring it to them. Exchanges of value are potentially complex, depending not just on providing others with new concepts or ideas, but on our skillful hosting of contexts where safe, trusting, creative dialogue and relationships occur on a regular basis.

Welcome to the 21st Century! It’s a wild and crazy world out there… What do you think?

The Madhatters Virtual Tea Party #2, was another wild ride for the Madhatters and their friends, fans, and followers. It was hosted by the inimitable Gretchen Wegner – Interplay leader, academic coach, blogger, and inventor of MuseCubes.

I admire Gretchen’s commitment to bringing the whole body/mind into even the most intellectual of human pursuits – like writing and other academic pursuits.

I also admire her commitment to keeping play at the front of the mind.

It’s been my personal experience that these two commitments yield work experiences that provide human beings with deep satisfaction – not just paychecks. And, when work enables human beings both to express the skills we have mastered and to experience our fathomless human creativity, then it becomes the highest expression of our humanity. While also producing something of value.

Gretchen’s Virtual Tea Party gave participants an opportunity to see, hear, and begin to imagine a whole new range of possibilities for using live, real-time virtual meeting rooms to faciliate whole body/mind interaction – at a distance. It was a fabulous first-time demonstration of Gretchen’s potential for adding authentic telepresence to her skill pack.

Here’s a recording of a video chat that Gretchen, Tom Carroll of EvolutionaryLearning.com, and I had Thursday, April 29th, as we debriefed our experiences and talked through some of the background issues Gretchen found herself dealing with during the party. We talked for a little over 28 minutes. As I did last week, I’m posting the recording here in the hope that it provides some additional value to participants in the 6-Week Virtual Meeting Camp - and to anyone else who’s lurking in the shadows, peeking through our Virtual Tea Party windows, listening for tips and tricks you can use to improve your virtual meetings.

As always, I welcome your comments below, anytime you’d like to contribute to this conversation…

Both the Madhatters and Madhatters Virtual Tea Party 6-Week Virtual Meeting Campers asked me today if I could provide them with some lists of virtual meeting tools, so I’m sharing some links to places interested people can find these kinds of lists online:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pe48NjIzZGzkWcXotfwoseg
http://www.webconferencing-test.com/en/webconference_home.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~icy/conference.html
http://www.kolabora.com/news/2007/06/22/web_conferencing_tools_and_technology.htm

There are dozens of these kinds of lists online! Maybe hundreds of them. You can do your own research just as easily as you can follow these links. You’ll find a ton of information about meeting tools and their various features.

I don’t provide some “Virtual Meeting Coach” list of virtual meeting tools because as soon as I issued a list of tools, it would be obsolete. Features are being added weekly, new companies are coming online weekly, and companies that have had great tools in the virtual meeting space are going broke and going offline weekly.

So, those of you who are getting excited in the Madhatters Tea Parties and want to start testing and researching other options outside DimDim right now, please feel free to kick off your own research using these links. I also encourage you to do your own Google searches on virtual meetings, web conferencing, online meetings, etc. so you locate the most current data about what’s available right now.

No Magic Pills or Siskel and Ebert Reviews

I wish I could just give all of you a “pill” or some definitive list that would allow you to point a finger and just pick the right tool for you. But, frankly, that would be about as useful as providing you an index of all the pharmaceuticals on the market for depression (or some other complex illness). A list of pharmaceuticals doesn’t tell you anything about how the drugs really work in real human bodies with complex needs. And neither do tables of virtual meeting tools tell you what will “make the perfect virtual office for you.”

The tool(s )you choose to use will depend on the interaction of three fundamental factors:

1) What you do well – what your “Lion” strengths are (remembering our first Madhatters Tea Party?)
2) What it is you want to accomplish with your clients/coworkers at a distance.
3) What your clients/coworkers want from you – at a distance – and how they are willing to receive it from you.

The sites above offer a variety of ranking systems. Unfortunately, the criteria used for the ranking are anything but standardized. I wish I could change that. But, that’s just the way it is. Virtual meeting use is an art … not a science… And we’re operating in a volatile economy that’s changing the ways we think about working together every week. So the science is going to take awhile longer. Like maybe a decade or so…

There’s a Reason I’ve Become the Virtual Meeting Coach

And, it’s not to hawk virtual meeting tools for a sales commission. I’m an independent communication consultant who has been advising and coaching people in the skillful use of face-to-face interactive meeting strategies and electronic messaging tools for over two decades. I don’t have a “favorite” virtual meeting tool because there are mountains of things that people want and need to be able to do in virtual meetings. Many tools do some of those things pretty well and none of them that do all of them perfectly. Not even close.

So, I hung out my shingle about two years ago now in the interest of saving people time and money in your research and development processes. I delight in helping people identify ways you can take what you do best and port your special sauce into online meetings. Then, I like helping you frost the cake by tailoring your online meeting and business processes so you get the full value and delight available from the tools(s) you choose to use.

I love coaching individuals (and groups) through a step-by-step process that helps you quickly clarify what’s true for you about the three factors above. And then I’ll help you select and practice with the tool(s) that will best fit you and your clients’ needs. If you want more, I also offer groups in which I coach people in the adaptation of their favorite face-to-face engagement strategies to virtual meetings. I want my clients to make meeting with them virtually a true pleasure for others – instead of a pain in the #ss.

By all means, if you would enjoy spending your time doing the research yourself, please start with the links above. It’s horribly time-consuming but also great fun uncovering all the new stuff out there.

On the other hand, if you’d rather spend your time making money with your core business processes – and you’d like to save substantial trial and error time – you can hire me to consult and coach you quickly through the process of transitioning some of them online.

The Madhatters Tea Party Group Coaching Programs are one highly affordable way I’ve set up to help people learn and practice in small groups. I also work privately with clients who really need to speed things up by focusing on their specific needs in a one-on-one setting.

I offer a FREE 20-minute virtual meeting consultation to anyone thinks you’re ready to get started so you can see if you think we’d be a good fit. Feel free to use the contact form at VirtualMeetingStartup to set up a free consultation.

Opening day of the Madhatters Tea Party 6-Week Virtual Meeting Camp went just about as I’d imagined it would. Wild. Crazy. Full of surprises. And a little on the chaotic side for the first 15-20 minutes.

How else would you expect things to go with a gang of mostly inexperienced virtual meeters, coming from a dozen different frames of reference, with wide-ranging computer literacy, using both PC and Macintosh computers, and connecting through a free teleconferencing line and a full-featured multi-media virtual meeting room at the same time? And did I say most of them were middle-aged women?

As the Madhatter of Madhatters, I was utterly delighted by the whole event! It was the quintessential Virtual Madhatters Tea Party!

When it was over, participants’ feedback reflected various levels of cognitive overload … and excitement …and curiosity …and a desire for more!

I had a debriefing conversation about the first Madhatters Tea Party today with my colleague, friend, and former client, Tom Carroll, founder of EvolutionaryLearning.com.

Tom’s lifetime of research mapping human excellence and designing strategies to rapidly transfer that excellence from one human to another (and another and another…) has inspired me since we met a decade ago in Austin, Texas. When I first met Tom, he was a Senior Performance Consultant at International SEMATECH where he and his colleague, Mike Bown, helped semiconductor engineering and wafer fabrication teams make the most of their full human capacities in a high pressure, multi-company, multi-cultural consortium whose mission was to ensure that the US get ahead – and stay ahead – of the rest of the world in the development of semiconductor technologies.

These days, Tom has moved into his own consulting practice where he continues to research and test ways to help human beings perform better, faster, and cheaper in a variety of industries where the competition is tough and stakes are high.

At my request, Tom was a participant/observer during the first Madhatters Tea Party and I’ve asked him to continue observing. I’ll be publishing a series of our “behind the scenes” debriefing conversations here on the blog to help the Madhatters and the Virtual Tea Partiers – and anyone else who’s interested – get some background context for the experience-based-learning they’re doing.

I hope you find  something useful for yourself in this dialogue and, as always, I’m interested in your thoughts and feelings. Please feel free to comment below.

This first conversation is focused on Tom’s perceptions about the Virtual Tea Party and explores some of my assumptions about the language and culture of virtual meetings. Out of my training in educational psychology and anthropology, my personal experience teaching ESL and cross-cultural communication, and my research and testing of hundreds of virtual meeting technologies over the last three years, I have come to believe that immersing people in a learning experience that is both safe and serious is the only sound way to help human beings quickly build the literacy and fluency each of us needs in order to make the most of new, online meeting tools.

In this economy, the stakes couldn’t be higher – particularly for independent business people with high-value services to sell.

I’m completely convinced that once we understand how to use them, virtual meetings can allow teachers, trainers, coaches and consultants to lower costs while providing more and better service.

Give a listen. And by all means, feel free to share what you think…

What the #$&($# is a Virtual Madhatters Tea Party?

Everyone knows how to behave and relate in a traditional meeting environment. We’ve been doing it all of our lives. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. We have protocols. We have Robert’s Rules of Order, for heaven’s sake.

Live, online meetings have introduced a whole new meeting culture – one that takes time to make sense of. One that takes work to become familiar with. Software developers have spent a long time planning for and investing in new, synchronous meeting technologies. They’re spending a fortune advertising them. But the truly astounding thing is how little has been done to address the deep culture change required for human beings to shift into new, online meeting environments.

It’s like a conspiracy of silence that makes no sense to me.

So, I’m a bit of a drama queen. And I’m more than a little fascinated with Web 2.0, collaborative technologies, and the promise of live, synchronous meeting tools. There’s never been much about me that anyone would call “normal.”  But when I moved from Austin up to a small town in southern Oregon, and launched into three years of research and testing of virtual meeting tools and strategies, I never expected to turn into a Madhatter. But I did.

And yesterday – just like a Madhatter – or maybe the Pied Piper – I led a cadre of experienced facilitators, trainers, coaches, and consultants right off the cliff of well-known face-to-face meeting practices into the free-fall of immersion in a live, multimedia virtual meeting. It was a wild and crazy experience! And, judging from their immediate feedback, they got out of it just what I’d hoped they would – all their pre-existing notions of how human beings “should” behave and communicate were flushed out of the dark corners of their minds and deposited on the virtual “table” for us to examine and learn from. Oh, goody! In times like this, that’s just what highly experienced professionals need to be doing, because…

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you already got.”

So, yesterday we used DimDim in a fishbowl kind of format together with a separate teleconference line at Freeconferencing.com that wasn’t as reliable as I might have wished. But I promised the participants that the program would focus entirely on the use of FREE virtual meeting tools because I truly believe – based on my own personal experience – that buying a license for a virtual meeting tool before you really understand the NEW DYNAMICS OF THE CULTURE OF VIRTUAL MEETINGS is an exercise in futility. And expensive to boot.

The best way to learn any new language – or any new culture – is to be fully immersed in it. And that’s what the Madhatters Tea Parties are doing: dunking the participants and their friends head first into a whole new culture.

Over the coming weeks, as we share Tea Time online on five Monday afternoons, the group will be opening to meeting with others in new ways – ways that we can’t meet face-to-face. They will be examining assumptions about dia-logue and collaboration strategies. And they will also be developing new professional skills – and new ways to deploy old professional skills – while we are, together, immersed in a series of new kinds of meeting environments, testing some new ways to coach and consult with others at a distance.

I’ll be blogging about what I’m noticing as we move through the Virtual Tea Parties. I hope regular and new readers will feel free to get into the conversation around this folksy kind of ethnographic inquiry I’ve gotten into. It’s a wild and crazy ride! And I’m lovin’ it!

If you want to read more about the programs – and possibly become a Madhatter yourself during the summer session, go here. I’ll be posting a new video for the 10-Week Madhatter Group Coaching Program later this week on the Virtual Meeting Startup site along with a more extensive written description about the program.

From Clark Quinn’s blog, Learnlets, December 8, 2009:

What if the learner’s experience was ‘hard fun’: challenging, but engaging, yielding a desirable experience, not just an event to be tolerated, OR what is learning experience design?

Can you imagine creating a ‘course’ that wins raving fans?  It’s about designing learning that is not only effective but seriously engaging.  I believe that this is not only doable, but doable under real world constraints.

Let me start with this bit of the wikipedia definition of experience design:

the practice of designing…with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience…, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality

That is, experience design is about creating a user experience, not just focusing on their goals, but thinking about the process as well.   And that’s, to me, what is largely ignored in creating elearning is thinking about process from the learner’s perspective. There are really two components: what we need to accomplish, and what we’d like the learner to experience.

Our first goal still has to look at the learning need, and identify an objective that we’d like learners to meet, but even that we need to rethink.  We may have constraints on delivery environment, resources, and more that we have to address as well, but that’s not the barrier.  The barrier is the mistake of focusing on knowledge-level objectives, not on meaningful skill change.  Let me be very clear: one of the real components of creating a learning experience is ensuring that we develop, and communicate, a learning objective that the learner will ‘get’ is important and meaningful to them.  And we have to take on the responsibility for making that happen.

Then, we need to design an experience that accomplishes that goal, but in a way that yields a worthwhile experience.  I’ve talked before about the emotional trajectory we might want the learner to go through.  It should start with a (potentially wry) recognition that this is needed, some initial anxiety but a cautious optimism, etc.  We want the learner to gradually develop confidence in their ability, and even some excitement about the experience and the outcome.  We’d like them to leave with no anxiety about the learning, and a sense of accomplishment.  There are a lot of components I’ve talked about along the way, but at core it’s about addressing motivation, expectations, and concerns.

Actually, we might even shoot for more: a transformative experience, where the learner leaves with an awareness of a fundamental shift in their understanding of the world, with new perspectives and attitudes to accompany their changed vocabulary and capabilities.  People look for those in many ways in their life; we should deliver.

This does not come from applying traditional instructional design to an interview with a SME (or even a Subject Matter Network, as I’m increasingly hearing and inclined to agree).  As I defined it before, learning design is the intersection of learning, information, and experience design.  It takes a broad awareness of how we learn, incorporating viewpoints behavior, cognitive, constructive, connective, and more.  It takes an awareness of how we experience: media effects on cognition and emotion, and of the dramatic arts.  And most of all, it takes creativity and vision.

However, that does not mean it can’t be developed reliably and repeatably, on a pragmatic basis.   It just means you have to approach it anew.  It take expertise, and a team with the requisite complementary skill sets, and organizational support. And commitment.  What will work will depend on the context and goals (best principles, not best practices), but I will suggest that with good content development processes, a sound design approach, and a will to achieve more than the ordinary.  This is doable on a scalable basis, but we have to be willing to take the necessary steps.  Are you ready to take your learning to the next level, and create experiences?

Let me briefly explain. For the past three years, Clark Quinn’s thinking has been of enormous value to me while I’ve been researching and testing virtual meeting tools. I stumbled across this piece today through a pointer in Harold Jarche’s blog and I have to say that this post describes in the most eerily synchronistic way the assumptions that have been driving me as I’ve been building my new coaching programs for VirtualMeetingStartup.com.

The Madhatter’s Tea Party Group Coaching Programs are, precisely, experiential learning programs. And as I design them, I’ve been focused much more on creating quality user experiences than on increasing or improving functionality.

Why? Because the kinds of people I’m most interested in supporting are already experienced teachers, trainers, coaches, and consultants who have developed high levels of functionality. They just don’t know how to take the things they’re best at and move their interaction with others into cyberspace. They’re subject matter experts (SMEs), but that’s not what’s most precious about them. It’s their compassion, their creativity, their curiosity, and the depth of their empathy for others that make a real difference in others’ lives. Like they say these days, “information is free, experience is expensive.”

Out of my extensive research and testing experiences, it seems to me the best way for teachers, trainers, coaches, and consultants to learn to SHARE THEIR LIVING PRESENCE WITH OTHERS across space and time is to set up situations in which they just DO it. And then fail to connect. And then learn from their failure. And then do it again. And fail to connect in another way. Learn from the failure. And do it again. Etc…

And, since adults really don’t enjoy failing – especially when they’re sitting in a room all by themselves in uncomfortable chairs, staring at a monitor, wearing a headset that pulls their hair and makes their ears hurt – I’ve designed the learning experience to provide regular high-energy interaction, in real-time. And what they’re doing is learning to dump their fear, worry, embarrassment, and self-consciousness as quickly as possible.

Because of this, the Madhatter’s Group Coaching Programs focus on the Madhatters un-learning how to act like subject matter experts – especially at a distance – more than on any deliberate, staged learning about pumping their expertise through the computer into someone else’s mind.

I’m documenting every step of the process so that the design can be repeated, quite pragmatically. But I’m definitely seeing that what I’m doing is creating an experience design that I’ll be replicating, not a traditional “instructional design.”

Fascinating work for me! Hard, hard fun!

Join us, if this interests you…

I’ll be writing more about all this in the days and weeks ahead. What do you think about all this?