The Wall of Silence Weekly Update

Have you had one of these Zoom meetings recently? I’ve had several.

Reading HBR isn’t good for my ego. Just when I think I might have a handle on my profession, I read something by someone much smarter. Like this one by Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny talking about how to get people to participate in virtual meetings. Here’s a condensed version:

Let’s face it, most meetings have always sucked because there’s often little to zero accountability for engagement. When we are together in a room, we often compensate with coercive eye contact. Participants feel some obligation to feign interest (even if they’re staring at their phones). In situations where you can’t demand attention with ocular oppression, you have to learn to do what we should’ve mastered long ago: create voluntary engagement. In other words, you have to create structured opportunities for attendees to engage fully.

The 60-second rule. Never engage a group in solving a problem until they have felt the problem. Do something in the first 60 seconds to help them experience it. You might share shocking or provocative statistics, anecdotes or analogies that dramatize the problem. Make sure the group empathetically understands the problem (or opportunity) before you try to solve it.

The responsibility rule. The biggest engagement threat in virtual meetings is allowing team members to unconsciously take the role of observer. To counteract this implicit decision, create an experience of shared responsibility early on in your presentation. Don’t do it by saying, “Okay, I want this to be a conversation, not a presentation. I need all of you to be involved.” That rarely works. Instead, create an opportunity for them to take meaningful responsibility.

The nowhere to hide rule. Research shows that a person appearing to have a heart attack on a subway is less likely to get help the more people there are on the train. If everyone is responsible, then no one feels responsible. Avoid this in your meeting by giving people tasks that they can actively engage in so there is nowhere to hide. Define a problem that can be solved quickly, assign people to groups of two or three (max). Give them a very limited time frame to take on a highly structured and brief task. Ask everyone to type their answers into the chat box, and/or call on one or two to share their example.

The MVP rule. Nothing disengages a group more reliably than assaulting them with slide after slide of mind-numbing data organized in endless bullet points. It doesn’t matter how smart or sophisticated the group is, if your goal is engagement, determine the Minimum Viable PowerPoint (MVP) deck they need. In other words, select the least amount of data you need to inform and engage the group. Don’t add a single slide more. A side benefit of this rule is that it forces you to engage the attendees. If you have too many slides, you feel enslaved to “getting through them.”

The 5-minute rule. Never go longer than 5 minutes without giving the group another problem to solve. Participants are in rooms scattered hither and yon with dozens of tempting distractions. If you don’t sustain a continual expectation of meaningful involvement, they will retreat into that alluring observer role, and you’ll have to work hard to bring them back. In a 15-minute presentation, you can have 2-3 brief, well-defined and meaningful engagement opportunities.

We’re guilty of the 94-slide presentation on Zoom. (“But every slide is important!”) Maybe to us and our direct client, but not everyone else. It hard to sacrifice one of your precious nuggets of wisdom. But I often find that 6 months later we can distill a giant presentation down to a five-minute story. The perspective of distance is powerful, and we just need to find a way to use that when we write the presentation in the first place.

I was also intrigued by the Minimum Viable Presentation which is a spin on the lean start up focus on the Minimum Viable Product: a product that can be continually improved as you validate (or invalidate) assumptions, learn what users really want and build future iterations of your app that better serve your customers.

Other important MVP’s:

• Most Valuable Player – think Connor McDavid.

• Market Value Pricing – think the open price of an equity.

• Most Vacuous Pastime – think writing themed lists of acronyms.

• Most Valuable Primate – think worst kids movie ever made.

• Mike Vinny Paul – think drummer for legendary Metal band Pantera – most famously known for a special appearance in Spongebob Squarepants' episode of "Pre-Hibernation Week".

• My Vittle Pony – think the beloved children’s show/2013 horsemeat scandal.

If we’re going to try and distill our work down to the MVP, there are a couple strategies we can pursue. First, reduction. Take away anything that isn’t necessary. Reduce pages to paragraphs, paragraphs to sentences and complex sentences to simple ones. In a presentation, focus on only what your audience needs to complete their tasks. This will help reduce the other fluff that is unnecessary. If you carve this information away, you will let people focus on the information they need to know.

Second, fermentation. If you’re managing tight to the deadline, it will be very hard to identify the essential elements as that often requires perspective. Give yourself more time. (Even I fell of my chair laughing at the improbability of this advice.)

We can take a few more lessons from the hazards of home distilling, all of which are very important considerations at Friday afternoon Zoom meetings. Beware of

• Alcohol vapour explosion

• Irresponsible drinking

• Alcohol addiction

• User error

• Drinking alcohol above 60% concentration

• Electric shock

Perhaps electric shock is exactly what we need at the next online meeting. Judiciously administered every 3 – 5 minutes as recommended above, and we wouldn’t need to ask anyone’s opinion to maintain engagement.

Diving into this further, Ars Technica reported that men are willing to self-administer electrical shocks in order to avoid being left alone with their thoughts.

To truly get a grip on how much people hate being alone with themselves, the researchers asked participants whether they'd pay to avoid getting an electric shock; most would. But then, given 15 minutes on their own in an empty room, two-thirds of the male participants ended up giving themselves a shock to avoid the tedium of their own company. (And that's after they removed the data from one guy who gave himself 190 shocks in the 15 minutes.)

So the next time you plan to present 90+ slides in a Zoom meeting, mail everyone a 9-volt battery that they can lick every 3-5 minutes. Your work will be truly unforgettable.

Stay safe, stay engaged.

P.S. The Minimum Valuable Part of the weekly update is: Present Less. Shock more.

And don’t leave men alone with their thoughts. Nothing good comes from that.