The challenge of brainstorming virtually

Given the challenges of facilitating the Collaboration Grants online, it’s a tall order for facilitators like me to achieve the intent of the initiative: “creating a space for both deepening relationships and [sparking] bold imagination.” An article I came across about a study around this phenomenon points out, “People are worse at coming up with creative ideas during a video call compared to meeting in person.” It continues, “The study said that ‘videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on the screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.’ That kind of focus might help select the best idea – but hinder coming up with one in the first place.” Melanie Brucks, the study’s co-author, summarizes the findings: “We are most creative when we’re unfocused and free.” 

Participants alluded to this complexity of facilitating the participatory grantmaking process online. “How challenging it was to communicate with each other with various ideas, in different languages, and in such limited time given the constraints in our schedule,” reflects one participant. Establishing a common ground was a painstaking process, frustrating and exasperating at times, for all of us. It was an ongoing delicate balance between “the necessity to get things done, and the sensitivity to meet everyone’s needs,” according to another participant. “It was a learning process throughout,” many admit.

Missing out on critical contexts and signifiers

Depending on our location, each of us has varying access to reliable internet. The ease with which we communicated with each other was further mediated by our individual level of comfort with the technology as some are not as adept at using the different online platforms. For the participants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, they often dropped out of the discussions due to poor internet connectivity. Some of the participants could not sustain a strong enough connection to keep their videos turned on the entire duration of a session due to insufficient bandwidth. Devoid of any signifiers—their facial expressions, body languages, and other cues—it has been challenging for me to cultivate in-depth exchanges carried mainly through the participants’ voices across virtual platforms.

An essential element I was missing while facilitating the gatherings virtually was context. How critical it is to forge shared contexts to build real communities. As I wrote in my journal, reflecting on these online gatherings: “Our contexts are effaced, and our identities flattened as each of us was reduced to simple dots on a screen devoid of the infinite tangentiality of each of our multiple and complex lives. How can we create a sense of community if we are out of depth with each other?” 

Just like in face-to-face meetings, we also got distracted and had interruptions online, for instance when participants would drop off or zone out during the discussions. But this time, because each session was so short, these distractions were more costly. For each moment when we had to disengage to attend to some other concerns, to reset or reconnect after dropping out of the digital platform, or to take time to repeat points for those who came late, were minutes lost from our tightly allotted time. Because the sessions had to be truncated to fit the limited time for the convening, I felt hurried, harried—like a dog panting out of breath endlessly chasing after time! Harnessed as tools of capitalism, geared towards profit and productivity, the digital platforms did not encourage us to linger.

Demanding of presence, unforgiving of silence

I felt drained after facilitating each of these sessions. I made time for yoga and meditation to center myself and prepare. During each session, I listened intently. Along the way, I tried to paraphrase the participants’ contributions to convey that I had heard them and valued their involvement. I took notes extensively. There was no downtime – I could not let my attention wander. During every second I was facilitating the session, I was conscious of imbibing it with my full presence. As Allan Kaplan, a mentor in a reflective social practice course I am taking, writes in his article “Metamorphosis, the sense for truth”: “Though Zoom fragments and distracts and narrows through its rituals of compliance and separation, we hope that it can, to an extent, be gentled and softened through the same human faculty that accompanies the faculty of observation – the profound simplicity of presence.” 

If demand for demonstrated presence persists, these online platform exchanges are unforgiving of silence. During our online sessions, we could hardly tolerate “emptiness” in the airtime. Most of us would rush to fill in the silence, fidget demonstrably if we had to pause for quiet reflection, or silently wait for someone to begin the discussion. During our brainstorming sessions, we had to explicitly state that we were taking time to think, lest our silence be misunderstood. In instances where I was not guided by any other signifiers except the voices of the participants, it was difficult for me to read the multiple meanings of silence. As a facilitator, I often wonder what each moment of silence means: Is it taking time to ponder? Is it expressing hesitancy? Is it conveying discomfort? Is it acquiescing or giving in?

As I contemplate the multifaceted meanings of silence online, Sue Davidoff, Allan’s co-mentor in the course, offers a valuable insight. According to her, “Silence is not the absence of sound. It is an inner quality that we always carry within us.” Reflecting further, it occurred to me that as we shifted our lives virtually amidst the pandemic, inevitably we were altering our relationship with time and life itself. Living virtually is prompting us to be ceaselessly on the move; stillness is not a stance one can take online. Silence, and the inner quality of life embedded in it, does not translate virtually. We feel obliged to fill in the silence to indicate that there is something happening—that we are actually present. We could not be still, lest it be presumed we have dropped off from life. With less consciousness, we are being trained to ignore the space in between sound and silence, between movement and stillness. 

Compelled by circumstances brought about by the pandemic, I observed how I had slowly slipped into a virtual existence and facilitating the online sessions for Fenomenal Funds was just a small part of this. This change happened incrementally, and I was too oblivious to notice its unintended consequences: truncating our deeper conversations of shared understanding and sensemaking, erasing the multiplicity of our identities and contexts, eroding our relationships of intimacy and trust, pushing us to speed up heedlessly. What unsettles me is that if I don’t stay conscious and present, I could overly sanitize myself within this virtual existence, and mindlessly, I could get sucked into a virtual void.