Image © Jose & MidJourney
I do a bit of design leadership teaching in a local University. The word teaching makes me nervous, I was never certain of what it meant and if I was capable of doing it. I always saw teaching as a mix of telling students what to do, and evaluate them on their capacity to follow instructions. I was never confident there is a right way to do anything, especially in design, and I was never sure that anyone following instructions was the best way to prepare them for life. So, I always approached these opportunities to share with students all the ways I got it wrong, and then challenge them to be creative and critical about what needs to get done.
It’s not just about me sharing, I love to bring others to share their journeys, transparently, displaying courage to say where they failed by doing. We’ve all gone through the forced distancing period we did, and we all got fairly good at doing almost everything online, but to be fair, many of us are just sick of it and crave in-person human interaction. I do realize there are things that should have always been done online, and that some people might prefer to do everything online, sometimes I also prefer being online. But in general, I like everything in-person.
There is one thing that online tends to disguise well, human presence. We might all be “there”, but beyond whoever is on screen and the number of attendees that are supposedly on, we all know that so many times we are not really ”there”. But a presentation scheduled online where 15 people show up is not as much a fiasco as if you plan that in-person, especially if you are expecting 50. I think people are doing many more of these online because results are easier to disguise. While we tend to think more people show up online than in-person, independently of how many show up, you don’t get the most important thing when people come together, intimacy. In-person, it’s not how many people show up, but how they are “there”. The concept of intimacy is about in-person sense making, works when you can see and feel the size of the space, and what promotes intimacy. Online, space is infinite, intimacy is fake.
The students and I invited a couple of guests to come share their journey and experience, in-person, a typical small auditorium end of a weekday, limited communication outside the University, and perhaps a bit too late, someone could say a recipe for disaster. I told students we should not aim to fill the room, we should make sure the attendees in the room felt comfortable and taken care of (we had some interesting munchies), I told them we should prepare and send guests questions before so they could have some time to think about them, I told them we would not do online because my experience is that hybrid presentations never work, one group will eventually dictate the best conditions.
We only had about 15 attendees, in a 50-person auditorium (glad we didn’t pick the 500 seat one…). But the guests were at ease, no cameras, no computers and online platforms, just us and them. It felt real and intimate, you could feel the atmosphere, the guests themselves stated they loved the intimate format, and it makes you rethink criteria for success in these events. Could we have had more people in the room, sure. But you know what, those that showed up had a good time. Mission accomplished.