Service Designers Connect 20: virtual meetings that don't suck — notes

About the event

• Usually in person meet in Nottingham, this was session 20, hosted by Paul Bailey and Cheng Cheng
• Community started January 2023, 1,600+ on LinkedIn, supported by Nottingham Trent University
• More info on Meetup
• Main session led by Dave Gray (Gamestorming, Liminal Thinking), structured as a workshop in Mural, deliberately meta: a virtual meeting about virtual meetings

Dave's core ideas

• 90% of a good meeting is the prep, not the running
• Energy is the underlying material you're working with - structure exists to channel it (campfire, not forest fire)
• Three energy modes in a virtual meeting: room, individual, breakout. Introverts recharge on the individual bits, extroverts on the breakouts. Design a rhythm that switches between them
• 90 minutes is the ceiling for a single virtual session, same reason a film starts to drag past that point
• Longer sessions: don't compress, distribute. A two-day offsite becomes eight 90-minute blocks spread over a working week, with proper gaps between
• Hybrid meetings create an unfair asymmetry: Default to fully virtual if anyone can't be in the room.
• The 7 Ps template (People, Purpose, Product, Prep, Pitfalls, Practical concerns, plus the agenda structure of opening, exploring, closing) is on the gamestorming blog

Workshop moves worth stealing

• Walked everyone through the Mural board before letting them in, rather than dropping the link cold. People knew where the penguin was before they had to use it
• "Spectral analysis": Plot a recent virtual meeting on a good/bad spectrum. Just sticky notes on a line, but framed as something
• Explicit permission to leave breakouts without apology, or not join them at all
• "The whole Mural board persists, you can come back to it a year later, copy bits between sessions"

Our breakout

Five of us, 20 minutes to talk about good and not so good meetings.

• A recurring ways of working meeting in a team that's doubled in size, with about 20 people being read at from a spreadsheet for up to two hours
• A programme playback where the agenda evaporates the moment a senior person arrives and the actual user research gets squeezed to five minutes at the end
• A team dynamics review, framed against what they learned on a master's: service design does the work of sharing preferred ways of working up front, where the person's previous brand strategy world just sat people down and got on with it
• A monthly leadership workshop that's awkwardly half virtual and half in the room, where you can't always tell who's speaking, there's too much talking and not enough interaction, and it tips into boring
• Service mapping sessions plotted across the spectrum, the good one earning its place through breathing space, breaks and time to ask things, and the bad one being someone hammering through it like a template.
• Miro and Mural usage with limited licences, which gets messy in stakeholder workshops when half the room doesn't have access

I think I said too much, exactly the dynamic Dave's session was kinda warning about: five people at a dinner table needing roughly even airtime. Noted on a stickie on my monitor.

Q&A TLDRs

• Pace matters, especially with non-native speakers in the room
• Name the meeting type up front (meeting, huddle, stand-up, check-in). If you can't say what it's for and who's needed, don't have it
• Virtual meetings skip the context setting in-person meetings get for free. People overcompensate by stuffing in content, but anyone leaves with one or two takeaways max
• Ask both "what do I want to give?" and "what do I want to get?"
• The Mural walkthrough earlier in the session before letting people in was a deliberate move. The board itself is reusable, so prep effort compounds
• In virtual you lose the reaction signals. Ask explicitly for the feedback you want rather than assuming silence is neutral
• Long sessions: don't translate a two day offsite into two virtual days. Consider something like eight 90 minute blocks across a week, with gaps designed in
• Hybrid: default to don't do this. Do in person or remote. One exception that sometimes works: Parallel streams with two facilitators