Think back to our minibus taxi. A minibus is a mechanism to get from one point to another. As passengers jump in, there is implicit faith placed in the driver that they know how to drive their vehicle. The time for learning is not while there are 20 innocent paying passengers sitting behind the driver.

Just as a minibus is a vehicle for transporting a group from A to B, a tool in a remote meeting assists in helping the group to reach their destination. While a really fancy vehicle can make the journey more enjoyable, trying to drive a fancy vehicle without knowing how to drive it will frustrate your passengers and possibly cause harm.

It is often tempting when planning a remote session to want to use exciting tools, hoping that it will add to the energy and flow of your sessions. However, if you are unable to drive this tool, you run the risk of relinquishing control to your tool. Furthermore, if insufficient thought has gone into the purpose and planning of the session, the tool may inadvertently decide this for you. In this chapter we get practical and discuss things to consider about tools so that you are in the driver’s seat.

Do not let your love for a tool dictate what you will use. Start with the purpose and the desired outcome for the session; trying to understand the desired outcomes and what kind of thinking will be required to achieve them will help you to choose a tool. Once you have your intended purpose and outcomes, it may be useful to work backward, considering which types of artifacts you might need to achieve those outcomes and then decide which tool might be most appropriate.

We have seen that meetings so often become servants to the tools being used. You are in a meeting and someone has spent a few minutes looking for a way to undo what was just done on screen. Or maybe the tool we are using will not let us paste for some reason, so we all watch (and yawn) while links are manually copied across. Does any of this sound familiar?

When thinking about meetings and tooling we need to think about what we need to optimize for and then choose the tool—not the other way around. It’s perfectly fine to use one tool for collaboration in a meeting and another tool for the documentation of outcomes. This feels relatively natural in co-located meetings (we use whiteboards in the session and someone commits to document outcomes after the session). Yes, this means that there may be a little extra work capturing outcomes—but how much lower is this cost than sacrificing quality thinking in the session in order to simplify knowledge management across the organization?

If you need to be creative in a meeting, use a tool that enables creative thinking—probably something that is easy to use, visual, and allows real-time collaboration. Consider what kind of thinking your session requires and choose a tool that enables it, not just the one you’ll be using to capture outcomes and tag action owners. If you do not, your meeting outcomes will remain stuck within the confines of your tool.

Remote sessions generally require more preparation than in-person sessions. Once you have established what outcomes you need and how you will run the session, you must also ensure that you put in the work to create whatever artifacts are needed. For example, if you want participants to brainstorm answers to a question and you have established that you need digital sticky notes, then preparing that beforehand will improve the flow of the session by reducing wasted team effort on menial tasks. This way no one’s time is wasted watching someone perform an administrative task in the session and everyone can easily focus on the activity at hand.

Another aspect to preparation is ensuring that everyone has easy access to the tool you want to use. Sharing a link beforehand and asking participants to check if they are able to access it saves time in the session. It can also allow for participants to play around and familiarize themselves with the tool if they have not been exposed to it yet. It can be frustrating for both you as a facilitator and the participants to lose 10 minutes of a meeting waiting for people to log in: picture 20 people waiting on a bus while one person spends 10 minutes trying to walk through the door, unsuccessfully.

Just as in in-person meetings, things seldom go according to plan. As a facilitator, your role is to support the group in achieving their outcomes. This might mean changing direction when something has come to light in the session and spending the rest of the session exploring that direction. Often when we have prepared a well-thought-out remote format we are more hesitant to change direction. Maybe you have a slide you really love coming up. Maybe the technique you had planned was going to be really interesting. Keep your purpose front of mind at all times and be willing to toss your tool in favor of serving the group.

Another aspect to consider is how you will cater to people struggling on the call in a way that does not hold the entire group back. Back channels, pairing on facilitation, and secondary tool options are backup mechanisms that will help you handle in-the- moment complications. For example, if your intention was to use Zoom for video call, you can state that should Zoom encounter a hiccup, Slack will be used for further communication. Another invaluable option is to have a co-facilitator if possible; we have found when pairing it is easier to have one person deal with the administrative side and technical details while the other is focused on the group as a whole and ensuring the session is moving forward.

Let’s think about how a traditional whiteboard functions in a co-located space. The whiteboard is a thinking and collaboration tool. A team could use it to brainstorm ideas, creating a messy spider web as they go. This whiteboard visual is not intended to be beautiful or complete, it is a tool to aid thinking. Thus, provided there is a photograph or some mechanism to capture the content that was created, it is unlikely the group will be disappointed when the mind map is erased.

We have observed an interesting tendency in remote meetings: the use of remote collaboration tools often leads to an attachment to meeting artifacts, which drives unhelpful behavior within the session. A team may be using a certain tool to enable them to think visually, together. However, as the artifact being created grows, it can occur that the attendees start neatening and “beautifying” the artifact, for example by deleting unnecessary comments or summarizing points. This desire to have a coherent outcome can begin to shadow the more important work to be done in the session—the actual “thinking together” part. Capturing outcomes is essential. However, this is an activity that should commence once the thinking is concluded. This activity does not require the whole group’s time and thus can be done asynchronously. Just as we wipe clean a whiteboard once it has served its purpose, it is okay to throw away digital meeting artifacts.

An example of an artifact can be seen in figure 23.

Notice how it looks slightly messy, there are comments scattered around, and you can clearly see that the team’s thought process has been made visible. Rather than trying to make this neat as they progressed, the team focused on the conversation at hand.

Figure 24 shows an example of how a team might capture these outcomes after the session.

As facilitators, we have found our personal default has often been to focus on the human nuances of meetings. Security and tool access were not things that came to mind initially for us. However, they are important logistical considerations that can have significant consequences. If you decide to use a free tool, ensure that you are not compromising your company’s security. When thinking about user access, we usually prefer tools that do not force attendees to create accounts, as this can be a big deal for some people.

We often default to Google Slides because it is free to use, easily customizable, simple, and safe to share (permissions can be set at various levels). Additionally, because Google Slides is similar to PowerPoint, most people seem to be familiar with how to use it. There is still value in making sure that the respective group being facilitated by a tool has a basic fluency in it and if not, adapting the complexity of tool- related interactions in the session accordingly. That said, we still walk through step-by-step instructions for each session.

New tools are popping up every day, which is why we have not explicitly mentioned particular tools in this book. The movement of remote working is expanding rapidly and the tools available in this space are too. So how do you choose a tool? Apart from access and security, we consider the following:

• Collaboration tools: If you are looking for a tool to facilitate collaboration it needs to be intuitive, easy to understand, and flexible. This probably means it has the ability to configure visual elements on the fly and move them around (i.e., group them or connect them) easily. Apart from the features of the tool, the most essential aspect for us is smooth, easy, real-time editing by multiple users.

• Conferencing tools: Tools that are used to meet online ought to be our highest-quality tools. If you are able to spend money, spend it here—poor audio and video can be very distracting. As such, we look for tools that have built-in solutions for bandwidth issues. We also love tools that enable screen sharing, screen annotation, voting/polls, and breakout rooms.

• Presentation tools: If you are presenting a lot, collaboration may not be needed, but keeping people engaged is. When looking for tools to complement presentations we look for ways to have questions visible and possibly ranked based on opinions, the ability to get feedback easily, and a channel to allow parallel text-based discussion among participants.

Just as a driver who is still figuring out how his vehicle works puts their passengers at risk, a facilitator who does not understand their tool puts the whole session at risk. Spend some time before your meeting getting comfortable with your tool. Fit-for-purpose, accessible, and safe tools are far more helpful than fancy ones that you are not quite sure how to drive.

Take some time to consider one or two of the questions below in relation to a meeting you are responsible for:

• Purpose: What are you trying to achieve with the meeting?

• Preparation: What can you do before the session that will make the experience smoother for everyone?

• Accessibility and security: How familiar are you with the security policies of the tools you are using?

1. Start with a purpose

2. Arrive prepared

3. Pivot when necessary

4. Pair facilitation

5. Back channels

6. Artifacts are not synonymous with outcomes

7. Consider access and security

8. Choosing a tool

If you’d like to know more about which tools we enjoy using and the basics of how to use them, we keep an updated list on our website, available here: https://theremotecoaches.com/resources