183 - The Secret to Engaging Virtual Meetings with John Chen

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Myriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is John Chen, and we speak about engaging virtual meetings and how to make those work. A quick apology, I forgot to turn my microphone on in the beginning of the interview. So, please stay with us for the first 5 minutes, and then everything will be sorted. So, I wish you an inspiring conversation. And if you don't have pen and paper to take your own notes, scroll down to the show notes to download my free one-page summary. And now, lean back and be inspired. Jordan Chan, so glad to have you here.

Thank you, Myriam. How are you?

I am very well and I'm a little bit hot. We're going through a heat wave in Europe.

How hot? How many C?

I think it's easily 30 degrees Celsius inside.

Do you want to hear my best hot story of the year?

Please.

Here in Seattle, we had a heat wave, 90+ Fahrenheit, right? And there's not very many air conditioners here in Seattle. And so I'm about to produce a program. I actually have 5 computers running for the first time and my air conditioner. And what happens? Blow a fuse. It's kind of metaphorical, right? Like humans, like we blow fuses, right? So anyways, luckily for me, I've already created— I've installed an uninterrupted power supply. So my computer kept running.

But the air conditioning didn't.

Well, no, the air conditioning didn't. And then my uninterrupted power supply starts squealing because I overloaded it. I plugged too many laptops. Like all the other laptops were plugged into the uninterrupted power supply. And so I went and turned back the fuse so I could get all the power back. And then because the program is just about to start, I had to make the decision to not run the air conditioner. And in 90 minutes, my office went from 72 degrees to 91.

And then it feels like a hot yoga class. Hot workshop.

Yeah, everything worked perfectly. But this is just like another one of those, you know, we'll just come and be vulnerable, which is like, Every time something changes in your environment, you'd have no idea if you're gonna encounter a new problem.

Yes, yes. And if just the color of your t-shirt changes over the duration of the workshop, everything is good, right?

Yeah, 'cause I'm actually producing this program. I actually wasn't on camera, right? So I wasn't having to show like, you know, spots or stains or anything. That's my summer heat story.

Love it. And I'm interested in another story of when did you start calling yourself a facilitator?

A facilitator?

Wow.

When did I start calling myself a facilitator? Well, now it's over 25 years ago because when can I say? Probably around '97 is when I wrote my business plan. Like, I was already kind of facilitating. And what I mean by that is that I was— I had a career at Microsoft prior to starting all this, starting in 1990. And even prior back to that, I was facilitating. I may not have called myself a facilitator, but even in college, I was arranging skateboard teams, right? I was also the president of Engineering Student Council. So I was already kind of leading and facilitating for other people. All right. My definition of facilitator is to make easy. So let's see, going on into 1997, I wrote the business plan for my company, and I started to professionally facilitate part-time while I was still at Microsoft. And it took me 2 and a half years to I finally leave Microsoft to become a full-time facilitator, and I'm happy to announce that, Myriam, this is my 25th year of my company.

Wow, congratulations!

Thank you. The stat in America is less than 4% of all companies make it to 25 years.

Wow. And thank you for making the distinction between facilitating and facilitator and kind of carrying this role and being proud of it. And interestingly, what I just realized is that many of my podcast guests started facilitating somehow in college, very early in their lives without knowing that there was something special, a special role to what they were doing. So it seems to be an inner calling or maybe a personality trait.

Yes, it could be, it could be inner DNA that you're naturally doing it, you're led to it. Without knowing what the title is until some point you decide to, you know, make a change and say, I want to do this, you know, more of the time or all the time or full-time, right?

So when you wrote your business plan, was it immediately all about virtual meetings and virtual facilitation?

No. Let's see, do you want my last 2 years in 3 minutes?

Absolutely.

OK, so I became the author of Engaging Virtual Meetings, right? Because I want to tell you a little bit more. It's not that I switched during the pandemic, right? I just want to show you where did all this stuff come from. So it was a little bit like this. I started with this face-to-face team building. And in fact, we actually use geocaching, a high-tech scavenger hunt around the world to teach team and leadership skills. And so I used to do about 120 events a year face-to-face. And then this little thing came around. And this is not really good for a face-to-face business because I had 15 canceled programs in March of '22. So, Myriam, I had to go back, back to my history when I was facilitating, right? Is that I was on this thing. And if you don't remember what this is, this is like pre-AOL, right? It was the first graphical-based meeting space.

So, um, just for the audience that is not seeing the video, we are seeing Prodigy, which looks like a very old-school computer game.

It's an online meeting space like America Online, and its notion was it was the first graphical-based meeting space. And this is, Myriam, what I love to tell people. This is when modems used to make noise, right?

I remember these days.

This is very good. That's very good modem, yeah, fax noise.

Okay.

So, so yeah, so I was on this a long time ago. And so what that meant is, is that I looked into my history. I've been meeting online for 35 years. And in fact, I wrote a book called 50 Digital Team Building Games in 2011. So for decades I've been trying to tell Myriam that we could do this, that we can meet online, do meaningful work, save the travel and expenses, right? Have dinner with your family, right? And friends at the end of the day. And everyone said, well, that's a great idea, but here's a bunch of money and you need to fly to Orlando, right? Which is as far across the country for me as possible. Anyways, I'm sitting in my office with nothing to do and—

Just one second. Was it just Tony Robbins who hugged you on the picture that you showed?

Yes, this is a very good observation. This is actually a picture where I was able to give a hand-signed book of my book, which I feel he's a little responsible for because he helped me start this company. This is again Tony Robbins, and this was actually shot in Fiji at his resort.

Wow.

And so I appreciate, you know, talk about facilitating too. I think this is one of the turning points for me was to go a little further into that, which is I actually was doing great work at Microsoft and then I got put on 6 canceled projects in 5 months. And the problem, Myriam, at the end of that is that at the 6th canceled project, I started to believe it. What I mean by that is that people used to make jokes at work and they're like, oh, if you want a project canceled, just put John on it. All right. And by the 6th program, like, I started to believe it myself. And that's the crusher, right? That's going to—

Right.

So I was like having problems of like being motivated at work. And so I decided like, I don't want to feel this way. I saw the, you know, Tony Robbins commercials and I said, I'm gonna go there.

The law of attraction, right? And that's basically what he also preaches.

Yeah, yeah. And I went there. I had my, I had my guard up too. Like, as a technologist, most of us have a very high need not to be manipulated, right? As a technologist. And so like, I went in there and I was very surprised. Within 60 minutes, he had converted me over going, I actually think he's authentic and what he's saying is real. And within 60 minutes, he had people like throwing pills and cigarettes and like stuff they didn't want to do onto the stage, stuff they wanted to get rid of. I'm like, okay, I'm interested, right? He's creating change in a very short amount of time.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes on a mass scale. And I go, that would be interesting. I would like to learn how to do that. And so I went through a number of his programs and got to learn that. And that's why I was able to give him a book back. I have a really cool other side story. I got called by his foundation and he was stuck in Vancouver, Canada, and he wanted to— he'd run something called the Basket Brigade every year. This is where they give back food, right, to families. Because it turned out when Tony Robbins was young, he was poor. And somebody came up and gave him a basket of food. And his parents tried to give it back going, we can't accept this. And the guy goes, hey, I'm just the delivery person. Right? Nice. My job is just to deliver that. And so he never forgot that. And now he literally helps people feed millions. So I would—

It's a facilitative act.

Oh, yes. Right. A giveback.

It's facilitation.

You're trying to make it easier for people who are hungry. Yeah. And so, uh, that millions of people do it. And the foundation asked if he could fly to Seattle from Vancouver and if I would host him. And I was only given 5 days notice. So I dropped everything, right? And for 5 days I helped plan this. In 5 days, we were able to feed 1,600 people with no budget.

Wow.

There was no organizing budget, right? Like, everything was volunteer basis. All the money donated went straight to the families.

Wonderful. Yeah.

And so anyway, so that's, that's what made a big impact, uh, on, on my life. So, so yeah, so this is, uh, one of the things that he teaches too is that flexibility is power. And what I mean by flexibility is like, like coronavirus is one of these things which is a disruptor. This disrupts all these patterns that, you know, right? Actually, before the program, you admitted to me that you're a little OCD, and OCD is really a helpful thing because it gives us the stability, all right, uh, of unpredictability of something. And coronavirus wiped all that out for almost—

The framework, and within it we can be chaotic and experimental and flexible. Yeah.

Well, and this is the moment, right? That flexibility is power. Those who failed faster in coronavirus, I think, succeeded more.

Isn't this generally true? Those who failed more often are more successful because they just tried more often?

They're going to have more life experience. I'm like 99% sure. The challenge is that I'm really trying to be honest around this because you can tell people to fail faster, but there is kind of a caveat. And the caveat is you need to fail faster without a catastrophic mistake. Do you know what I mean?

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Because a catastrophic mistake can really have long-lasting damage.

It's traumatic.

It's traumatic.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so when I say fail faster, you got to do that and then see, is there a way that I can fail faster but in a way that is somewhat safe, right? And I mean, it's, it's not without risk, totally without risk. There's some risk for sure, but not so much risk that if you fail that like everything Right, goes away. And so I, I, that's why I really want to try and manage those two. That's my personal life experience now with fail fast.

And I think the— that's why the fast is so important, right? Because if you fail fast, this means that you fail only a little bit. You fail with a prototype, and then you can improve it.

So that's exactly what I did with this, which is I put a class up called Virtual Team Building on Eventbrite. I gave it away for free. That was my intuition talking to me, saying, You know, just give this thing away for free as like a gift to like for people to deal with coronavirus. What I love to tell people is I don't make vaccines, but I can make your virtual meeting better.

Mm-hmm.

We had been collecting ideas that we tested over the last, you know, 2, 3 decades about the way virtual meetings were, but nobody was interested. Nobody was interested until this moment. And so in this case, we finally put this on here, right? And 5,000 people took the class. And the 5,000 allowed me to fail faster. Like, in the heyday, I was running this class every day at noon Pacific Standard Time.

Amazing.

Right? I've actually delivered this class probably 600, 700 times now.

What have you learned from that?

My number one, I think you'll love out of this, is that it took me 17 times to get the class to end on time.

What made the difference?

Well, number one was cutting. All right, you have too much stuff, right? Cut the stuff. And I love to tell I always tell people that, like, as an entrepreneur, I, I'm guided by 3 passions, and that's technology, adventure, and human change, right? If it doesn't have those 3 things, like, I shouldn't be doing them. And I've said no to ideas now. And that's what I'm trying to get to the idea. Sometimes it's harder but more valuable to say no to things than to say yes to things.

Mm-hmm.

And it's like what we were talking about earlier. It's almost easier to do a second 60-second interview than edit a 1-minute video because that editing takes a lot of time.

Or you just commit to record only 1 minute without the editing.

Yeah. And that's, then you get the both, the best of both worlds, right? Then that's a fail faster going, right? Exactly.

And then you put, that was my learning from starting to produce these short videos that if I produce so many, every individual video is less important to be perfect.

Yeah. It has to just deliver one core idea. That's where TED Talks really got its, you know, deliver one really core idea in 18 minutes or less. And that was like revolutionary when it came out and now it's standard.

Well, now 18 minutes is too long because nobody can focus for 18 minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can talk about the short attention span of the world, right?

Yeah.

You said unless.

Unless they're in a facilitated session.

Yeah, because I think what you have to do is, you know, like in the engaging virtual meetings, you need to buy them in in the first minute. In the first minute, most of us will make our decision. whether or not are we going to listen to more or not, right? You know, I hope like in my first minute, I said, do you want to hear a story? And then by being vulnerable and telling about a time that I, you know, failed, that you'll go like, okay, now I'm interested. Because, you know, I think most of us learn more from failure than we do from success. When we're successful, we're like, yeah, of course, I'm so great.

And I think it's also when we hear about success, whether we want it or not, I think there are parts of us that might become envious or jealous. So it's, we don't really connect and remember the successes of others, even if we want to be these wonderful people who are happy for others. Whereas when we hear about their failures, there's empathy related. So we relate to emotions, positive emotions. And I think our brain just remembers, okay, you better listen, because it could apply to yourself.

And I think, you know, number one is really talking about ways to make virtual meetings more engaging. One of them is vulnerability.

Right?

Like, this happened in somebody else's meeting. A gentleman, I think, either spoke or chatted that one of his family members was diagnosed with cancer, and the whole meeting changed. And then the chat started to blow up, and the chat was all support for him and his family, right? We're thinking about you. Can anything to do to help? Send me your address. I'm gonna send you some food, right? Or your friend, your family's members, and things like that. And, and it was amazing the amount of engagement.

Yeah.

Right, that you can get from that.

And yes, it's beautiful at the same time. And let me play devil's advocate for real. So it's beautiful to see the compassion, and still, if you do have an expected outcome or you want to achieve something in a meeting, something like that, as you say, can totally deviate and can bring a different How do you get from that back to business as usual, to something that feels so mundane and almost irrelevant after such an announcement? So as a facilitator, how do you deal with the chat exploding with compassion and you actually sitting there like, we have a decision to take?

You know, that's actually a great part. Every facilitator has to wrestle with this and has to create their own guidelines. And here are my current guidelines around it. Number one is that And I learned this while program managing at Microsoft, right? So as a program manager at Microsoft, that job is to help design something, and it's helped kind of like negotiate between developers who are making stuff and testers who gotta like make sure this stuff works, right?

Mm-hmm.

And at Microsoft, we called them tangents, right? Tangent means like, this is the direction of the meeting, and then somebody takes either a left turn or a right turn. And I think tangents are, are really valuable because only humans, you know, I think, are uniquely capable of tangents, which is this divergent thinking.

Mm-hmm.

So, so as a facilitator, I need— I feel like I want to let them go to a certain point, and then I gotta feel like, like I'm— this is part of the job of the facilitator, is you're feeling the room around it, which is if there's a lot of energy, keep going, right? And, and also then you can do a check-in, which is like, I'm gonna diverge from this thing that I thought, you know, was our goal, but this thing that we're talking about is now so important. Does everybody agree? And then you can get validation that everybody's going on that track, right? Or you stop it and say, okay, that's a great idea. I'm gonna park that idea at that stage, right? And so we can come back here, but I'm— I won't lose track of it. And so that's really— I think if you do that, those are all things that the audience will appreciate it. You know, ways to not do it is shut the conversation off in the middle too quickly without checking in on the audience. Like they really actually, you know, again, the energy's there. You gotta read that part or you go on that tangent so long that, you know, like half of your audience or more checks out.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I hear, and it's a good example, a good visual actually with the tangents, because the tangent is the straight line that touches a circle, right? That's a tangent. So it is still connected to the content. So as long as it still touches, but then if it goes too far, it goes somewhere to the moon, right? And that's not where you want to go. And what I hear from what you're saying is, okay, acknowledge what's happening in the chat, and that there might be something that the group wants to talk about that is more important right now. So acknowledge that, ask them, okay, do you want to continue to be in that space? Do you maybe need a break in order to shift gears? Or are you ready already? So basically to give them agency.

Yeah, yeah. Well, give them choice, or what we sometimes as facilitators call the illusion of choice, right? Which is give them 3 choices. And but the key here is, as a facilitator, you're okay with all 3 of them. I love your take a break, right? So the other one could be, let's take a break, right? And for 10 minutes, you can either walk away, take a break, or you can send as many messages to this gentleman as you'd like, right? When we return, we're going to come back to our business.

Yeah.

And now they feel like they got it out. Yeah.

Thank you.

So yes, it's an art. There's a science and an art, I think, to facilitation with that. And so, and this is what I discovered in this, this program here, which was that when after 5,000 people went with it through this program, number one, that was a fail faster. And number two, it showed me what people responded to very quickly. Right? So there's something that I did that were our ideas and like, you know, it didn't work. Right? Is it like it was 2020 was different than, you know, 2015 or whatever? And so it didn't work.

What was the most surprising finding that people— and I do have these moments very often that I fall in love with an idea, oh, I'm gonna do this, and then nobody responds to it, right? So it doesn't land. What was your most surprising—

Let me advance because then I'll share how we get to the most amazing piece, right? So that's this, which is my publisher came back who published the first book and said, hey, do you want to write your second book? I'm like, sure. The best joke that comes now, Miriam, is that they didn't know how long coronavirus was going to last, so they made me rush the book.

I see.

Spoiler alert, it's August 15th, 2022. It's still going on, right? So I wrote the book in 9 weeks.

Wow.

It came out in October 2020 and hit the number 1 Amazon hot new release. And so now I'm going to complete the story. By the way, this is now what I call tracking. Miriam. So Miriam asked a question. I needed to diverge for a few minutes on this other path that I was on, so I can— but, and, and the key here is to continually track to make sure that I address Miriam's question. That's something I think that's critical for great facilitators because they can track, they can track things that the group is wanting to do. And even though you don't do them in the moment, your group will give you agency or give you some freedom if they trust you and see you Make Energy to Kill, I will address her story. So she asked for the most interesting thing. These are some interesting people I worked with. Jay Badasinghe from The Walking Dead, the author, I was his producer. Patrick Lencioni, all right, he sold 6 million books for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This guy, Daymond John, of course, is on Shark Tank, sold a billion-dollar clothing company. But this is the story here is Elizabeth Gilbert. So do you remember Elizabeth Gilbert? She wrote a book called Eat, Pray, Love.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course. Yes.

Then Julia Roberts played her in a movie and it really kind of started a movement in the world of like being introspective and like trying to discover who you are, right? And so Elizabeth Gilbert got to be the keynote in a conference that I was speaking at. The one production note— she had great pieces here— the one production note is I helped her get a better microphone, right? It kind of sounded like she was in a bathroom. And then I said, do you have a, you know, do you happen to have a better mic around the house? She goes, oh yeah, hold on a second. She walked away, came back, and she goes, you mean like this? And it's like literally a pro USB microphone. And she plugged it in, right? And, and her voice like changed. It sounded like this. You mean like this? And the whole audience— like, this is the rehearsal audience, like the stakeholders are here and some other— her agent was there— and all of us fell over on the floor going, her voice quality just completely changed, right?

It makes such a difference.

Yeah. And it makes such a difference because what I want to share about Elizabeth Gilbert is that she entranced an audience in a virtual keynote for 45 minutes, and she used no additional tech. She didn't use breakout rooms. She didn't use chat. She didn't use poll. It was amazing, right? All she did was— she's got the right camera. She's got lighting. She's got an interesting background. It was like an in-person background. And then we changed her mic. Because what she did was really focus on authenticity, Vulnerability, right? And storytelling. And the proof of was 38 minutes into this keynote, somebody chats and goes, I feel like I'm having a one-on-one with Elizabeth Gilbert at an Italian cafe. And 650 people were logged in.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's amazing, right?

Because And it's possible.

Yeah, we're the ones that— again, I'm, I'm definitely the first one who says, oh, you should be using Mentimeter or a chat or like some other technical tool. And it really— I actually now have finally designed a program called Improve Your, Your, You Know, Virtual Meeting with No Additional Tech. And I run the talk with no slides, like all this fancy stuff. Like I said, I'm showing you all this fancy stuff for those who are on camera with us. And I don't show any of that. For 60 minutes, I talk about the 8 points around this keynote.

Awesome. I recently gave a workshop, a training, and I don't like slides. I hate using slides. So I used these slides. I just wrote down kind of my stuff on A4 paper. And as I was changing the slides, I was showing the slides into the camera. And the participants loved it. The audience loved it. Because it makes it tangible. It's— you connect the physical world with the digital, and somehow it helps you to connect to the audience.

Yay!

Yes.

And now we have to give props to our good friend Jimbo Clark for coining the term phygital.

Yes.

Right, which is the combination of physical objects with digital has something for us as humans, you know. And I love the slide technique. What was the other one? Oh, we have a friend and she created something called Just One Word, right? This is a— my friend Kathy Armias, who's a TED Talk coach in Portland, was trying to debrief a group of 50 people but only had a short amount of time. So she just thought like, what can I do that's different than chat? I already did that, right? And so she got everyone to get a piece of paper and get a thick marker and write like one word.

Mm-hmm.

And her 2 questions were really deep. They were, How are you feeling now on coronavirus? And they were very vulnerable, right? Scared, right? Depression, isolated. And then she goes, what do you think you need to get through coronavirus? Love, connection, right? Ingenuity. And the screen was full of that, right? She's in gallery mode. We got 49 screens full of these unique words of which you could read out and debrief from. And I think those are the genius things that came about. And so that's what I'm saying, that like Fail Faster, she actually did that and it turned into a hit.

Mm.

And I've given that hit now to many other people, and it's had the same response almost universally around, even in different countries. And there's this quality that's different about it because like in a chat, it's always that text, right? But when you write something out, some people sometimes put graphics on it or they put like, you know, Seattle, like a Space Needle or coffee or, you know, all those little small touches is what humanized, I think, the debrief.

Yeah. And to build on that, I would be curious of your explanation for that. Similar, there's this exercise where you ask everyone to cover their camera with a sticky note. And if they have different kind of colored sticky notes, then you have almost a mosaic in the gallery view. And it looks beautiful. And then you ask them, yeah, and like this, it's just kind of gray. But otherwise, if you have pink stickies, Anyway, and then you ask yes/no questions. And especially for very large groups, it's a nice exercise to get a sense, either to melt the ice or to get a sense who read the report before showing up to this meeting and who hasn't, right? Just to get a sense. For whom is it morning time? For whom is it evening? Who's having coffee? Who's having gin and tonic? To know in what kind of mental state they are. Long story short, the difference Because you could do exactly the same with turn your camera off or on.

Yes.

It would have the same outcome, but it doesn't have the same effect. It doesn't bring the smile on the faces of the participants. So what is it?

Well, I think in your example too, what happens is, is that to participate in this, you have to turn your camera on. But what you can do with this is saying, go ahead and first, you know, cover with a Post-it and then go ahead and turn your camera on. Because what it does is give permission to people who didn't want to be seen, the ability to turn on the camera, but it's covered, so they feel better about it.

Thank you. Yes.

Value bond. Because I was going to tell you that somebody did it with camera on, camera off. And one of their secrets is the last question you ask is kind of a universal on question, right? Yes question. Therefore, what happens is most people will have their camera on. And this person never told you to turn your camera on for the purposes of this meeting. They said, turn your camera on for the purpose of being involved.

Makes sense.

Yeah. So this is what I love here, too, is that in Fail Faster, I've now had to teach the difference between creative thinking and innovation. I'd love to hear, like, do you have a difference in your personal definition of creative thinking and innovation?

You mean me personally?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For me, creativity is connecting existing ideas in a new way. Does it necessarily lead to innovation? Not necessarily.

That's right. In the version that I've had to teach, that what they say is— and these are somebody else's definitions— but it's creative thinking is all the ideas, right, that you can generate, but innovation is the actual implementation of those.

Yes, thank you.

And so like, like this now is an innovation. And the best part is I haven't heard of using the Post-it as part of this, right? So to me, this is a new innovation. You know, for instance, if I was to write about it, I would, I would give you— I credited a lot of people In my book for giving me stuff that just worked. And again, it's the small distinctions. So your distinction about using a, you know, a Post-it is, again, might have this added benefit, which is, again, it allowed people to turn cameras on but feel a little safer about it. And I guess, you know, the key here too is like, even I could choose to do something or nothing is like, well, after I have my Post-it, right, I could just peek, right? Which is like, you know, there's a, like, you could show a different color or something else. Again, one thing that's super important to me, Miriam, is that. I have a class called Turn on the Damn Camera, right? And the joke about the class is like the worst way for me to ask Myriam to turn on her camera is, Myriam, turn on the damn camera, right? Which is like, she's already reaching for the, like, you know, turn the camera off. I have a very strong belief that people participate in the way that they want to participate, whatever that is.

Yes.

Right? And that even in your initiative, even if it was with, well, with a Post-it, again, if you don't want to be seen, like maybe you change colors of Post-its for yes and no if you do not want to be seen, right? So something like that. So again, there's a way so that I, the facilitator, am giving everyone a choice about how to participate.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, the explicit ask is almost intrusive because you also don't know what's going on in the space of a person. And maybe someone is just sensitive to visual overload and needs to turn the camera off or turn their back to the screen or whatsoever in order to really focus. So who are we to judge? On the other hand, I think assuming that we all long for a sense of belonging, that's a universal human need, right? We want to belong one way or another. And I think if we can create a sense of belonging within the first few minutes of any online session, then we got them. Because for me, the worst or the biggest trick is to avoid them to open a tab or to go down a rabbit hole within the first 5 minutes, because then you just lost them.

Yeah, because they made the decision that either this is not engaging or important to me, and therefore I can just listen passively.

And they cannot.

And then they go somewhere else, and then they can't. And now you've lost them. Like, they're logged in. And Myriam, this is no different than being in person.

Yes.

Right? In virtual, it just looks different, right? Which is I could turn my camera off or whatever, right? But in person, they can be in the audience and still be completely checked out, especially now with phones.

Yes. They are either on their phones, or you see it on the resting faces, or they never come back from the coffee break.

Oh, yeah. They go out for coffee. I do have something very funny though. Here, hold on a second. Let me see if I can actually show this. So I'll describe. Okay. I actually did put this together. So what this is here, and now you're seeing, is a button that I call away. So all I did was record myself in a virtual meeting. Now, you know, here's the real secret about this, why, you know, this is not working. So what those who can't see this is I'm running a video of me participating in some other virtual meeting. So I'm actually looking around and it looks like I'm being attentive. But now the total tell is that my vocals are not matching my lips, right? And so this was the away button that I occasionally use. It's mainly a joke. I like, again, but somebody actually did this for like almost at least half a year to a year, and nobody knew that he was not actually participating.

And that's hilarious.

I think that's the facilitator's job too. For me, this, if somebody was doing this to me, I don't think they would have got through my 60-minute class without me catching it.

Yeah.

Right. I would try and address that person. At some point, I'd be like, hey, John, right? Oh, that's so cool. I love that Hawaiian shirt.

Right.

And when I see they don't respond to him, like, wow, John, are you serious like that? Hey, do me a favor, hit the chat, right? And they want, you know, like, I'll ask for some things. And eventually, I'd most likely discover that they're actually not really there.

I would love to be the fly on the wall to see how you would actually act on that as a facilitator. Because you are already putting the person on the spot. I mean, they are tricking you.

Yes.

So, and you are putting them on the spot, but then how do you deal with it?

You know, in, in some ways it's like one of my theories around virtual meetings too is everything's okay. You know, if that's what you want to do and like fool us, that's fine because you're not getting the value out of this class.

Yeah.

And so what I do with it, and then as a facilitator, right, when I notice that, I'm like, you know, now If you didn't know, then you really have to like think about what this is. But now, like, I've seen this, so I'm gonna be like, oh, I see you most likely have a video that's pretty crafty, right? And I'll appreciate that as opposed to call them out, you know, for something bad. I'm like, oh, that's really, you know, we've heard that, you know, other people have done this. That's, that's amazing. I'll give you credit that you had me for at least 12 minutes. So that's what I would do as a facilitator. So it's, it's an acknowledgement, but it's still like, it's an okay.

Right?

Although that person, if they figured out that I called them, would most likely remedy the situation themselves because they would go like, oh, yeah, you're right. I'm not participating fully.

Yeah. And then we're thinking, how much are we actually taking ownership of our own time and our decision and multitasking?

Well, Miriam, let me give a real situation in this case. So I was in a 1,200-person conference. There's probably 600 people logged in, and one of the— the goals of the conference was to engage and interact with every attendee before the end of a meeting. And so this is a 60-minute keynote, right? And there's like 200 people working together to make it feel engaging for 1,200, right? And so one of our strategies is while the keynote is running, if there's like 6 or 7 people, they're assigned different letters of the alphabet. One person, right, reached out to somebody and going— actually, I think it was me, I reached down the middle, I'm like, Hey, Joan, right? This is John the producer. I just want to check in and see how the conference is going with you. And I didn't hear anything back. I'm like, okay, that's fine. And so 2 days later, in a break, she goes, oh my gosh, John, this is Joan. And I'm like, oh, hey, Joan, what's going on? She goes, I just want to tell you a story. I said, you chatted to me 2 days ago, right? And you asked how I was doing and I didn't answer you. And I said, look, I was just doing some other stuff. I got caught up. I was at home. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's fine. That's okay. And she goes, no, I just want to let you know. First thing I thought was, Are you able to turn my camera on? She thought I was looking into her window. And then afterwards, she thought about that, and she goes, man, I'm not really maximizing my investment into this conference. So I'm going to clear all my tasks out of the way. And for the next couple of days, I'm going to really focus on the education.

Bam.

And so she said, thank you for that.

Yes, one private message with a huge impact. And maybe not only that conference, but any other conference she will sign up for. Very nice example. On the other hand, and we talked in our exploration call about chat, and that you said that chat is one of the most underestimated engagement tools in online meetings, and I am very curious to hear more about that because I'm also aware of the distractive power of the chat. So for instance, if John instead of washing her dishes or multitasking, writing emails. Maybe she was so engaged and captivated by the content that she didn't even look at the chat and didn't want to give you feedback. So what are the pros and cons of the chat and how to use it in a constructive, enhancing, engaging way instead of a distracting way?

Yeah, my belief is that chat is the second most engaging tool on virtual, and the first one is this, the camera and the mic. We turn it on, we start talking, it's pretty engaging.

Right.

Second one is chat. And chat's special property is that it allows everybody to participate at the same time. Because this is the challenge. Like, at least Miriam and I are like, there are 2 of us. So, but even 2 people, you'll find sometimes it's challenging. Like, I'm having a thought, but John keeps talking. Would you stop please so I can get my thought in? And it gets harder and harder, right, when you get 100 people and like sometimes there's never an opportunity to talk. And so I think chat is one of those ways. So my guidelines for chat is show chat early. And you have permission— I tell the audience, right, you have permission to chat any questions and comments that you like. And again, then I add the caveat, if you're one of those people where chat is distracting from your goals from attending this conference, just close it.

Agency.

And I checked, right, because early on, right, early on there, again, there were no guidelines, Myriam. And so one conference had people who started chatting, and they were really against the conference organizers because there was a bunch of stuff that was like, had technical problems. And so their answer to that was to turn off the chat universally.

Hmm.

Because they just didn't want to hear the negative comments. And I was like, wow. And I did a poll. So I've done my own polls with this. And I did a poll, 44 meeting professionals came back. I said, chat on or off? And they all said 100%. 44 out of 44 said yes. Like, I can tell you, I have a very strong negative reaction to a virtual meeting where they come off and turn off the chat.

And it's funny because I only realized the relevance and importance of chat once I have repeated frustration with a big client of mine where they cannot use the chat as a default on their Zoom accounts. It is so frustrating.

You're missing an avenue of communication, right?

Especially if I believe that as soon as I'm showing a slide, 50% of the participants open another tab because it kind of, oh, she doesn't see me now anymore. I don't see them. They don't see me. So they get distracted.

Oh, interesting.

I don't know what your experience is, but maybe I'm— yeah.

Well, the other part too is as a facilitator, what I do is— and again, you don't have to call anybody out. What you do is use acknowledgment. And so for instance, if I showed a slide, right, and its slide is something you agreed with, I would add a line which is like, oh, great. I see Myriam shaking her head, right? So you must agree with the slide. So that's— I would use that to acknowledge the fact that, you know, in the opening part I tell people, turn your cameras on. So even if we're spotlighted, we have slides up, every speaker is, is designed to be able to technically see you. And then the speakers then follow up with that, right? So they'll do things like, what's that box in your background, Myriam? You know, they're, they're responding to and customizing the talk to respond to people in the audience. That again is an engaging piece. So it says that Right? The speaker can not only see stuff, but they're engaging with it. And a lot of people do miss this. They share a slide. If you have one screen and you share a slide, you lose your gallery. And now you're presenting and now you're getting no audience feedback even though they're giving it to you.

Yeah.

And so I think that you miss that part. I think going back to chat, right? Again, I love it when the chat blows up, even if they go off topic. I just had a friend who told me, and he goes, sometimes he doesn't like when I chat because I am distracting. And I'm like, well, yeah, you know, but I'm also trying to help the conversation going. This is again my personal viewpoint. You know, if I was chatting in his class, like, I'd be a little more cautious to stay on topic. But I like the humor. In fact, sometimes the funniest things are the humor inside of there. Like, here's— here, I'll give you an example. In a class that I ran just last Friday, somebody talked about— and I bring people up, like half of my time in a presentation is bringing other people up and hearing their stories. And that's so basically I'm facilitating the class. I'm not—

Yeah.

Right, a lecturer instructor. And so I brought somebody up and she was from Petco, the company that, right, like, and so they were talking about pets and somebody made a very funny comment of like, you know, the funniest thing we've heard is when you name your pet Grandpa or Grandma. Because all these funny sentences came out. Now the chat started to blow up about like, I got to take Grandpa to go to the bathroom outside now. That's totally off topic, but it was so Funny. It was like the highlight of the class that I, the instructor, picked it up and started making grandpa and grandma jokes that I've never made before. But I could see every time I did it, right, it's a repeated humor hit that goes—

And this creates bonding and a sense of belonging and hence engagement.

A shared experience.

Yeah.

There's no class that will ever use this grandpa-grandma thing like that and have it be funny.

Yeah. What it brings up for me is the sense of competition and the illusion that we can control the attention of anyone in the first place. So it's like when hosting a workshop on site, forbidding cell phones and telling them, put your cell phones away. Well, if my content is not interesting enough to compete against a cell phone and some Instagram sliding, Then maybe it's on me. It's my responsibility. So if I don't trust that my content is, or my spoken word is engaging enough to compete against the chat, then maybe turning the chat off is not really the winning strategy.

It's not the real solution. It's fixing the symptom and not the source, right? Here's a great example too. My very good friend Tom Singer, He's a keynoter, and he specializes in the closing keynote because he attends— his goal, he tells people, I'll attend the whole conference, and I'm going to customize my keynote to whatever happened at the conference.

Hmm.

And then he told this really heart-wrenching story about his daughter getting this very advanced medical procedure, right? And as he finished the story, this was a conference, and they were using Twitter as the back channel. And somebody then tweeted out, like, at the end of his story going, he goes, that's the mark of a true closing keynote speaker, right? No tweets for the last 8 minutes. Because everybody was tuned into this story to the point of, like, everything else went away.

Yeah.

And so I very much believe that. I have a few examples of things like this, and then you work to aspire to them. Right. So again, think about, can you run a 60-minute program, virtual program with no slides, with no other tech?

And no breakout rooms.

Oh my God, it challenged me. Yeah, it honestly challenged me. And now I can say I've done it. But it took me like 8 or 10 months to actually like find the right material and the gumption to do it and have the, have the confidence to do it. But Elizabeth Gilbert, like, she naturally did it right off the bat.

Awesome.

Because that's what she does. Yeah.

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