Over the past year and a half, I have completed all of my consulting mandates, including all components, digitally, including workshops. That worked surprisingly well. But that's probably because there was no alternative. So when I moderate the first strategy workshops on site again soon - with all the precautionary measures - it will probably look different than before March 2020.
With the wealth of experience from this time, which is still growing, I will certainly do a lot more of my work digitally in the future than before the pandemic - including and especially workshops and meetings in strategy processes. But at the same time, I have learned a lot in the digital space that will change my work on site in the future.
Because, like many other people, I have improved my ability to read faces transmitted digitally via camera, to hear the tone of voice, to feel between the lines, in the last 15 months or so. But above all, I have learned one thing: to ask much more explicitly about everything that empathy is not able to filter out from the shared digital space.
Obtaining information that goes beyond the facts
Much, much more often than in physical workshops, I explicitly ask for feedback at certain points. I ask certain questions in a certain way in order to obtain information that goes beyond the facts. The art and, at least for me, the particular challenge here is not to pressure anyone into making statements or even to confront them. In the digital world, too, it is important to open up an appreciative space in which previously unspoken things can and may be verbalized.
I realized how valuable it is to express more things explicitly in words. Even though I have always given many rounds of feedback in workshops, empathy is a very subjective phenomenon. Sometimes your own empathy can be deceptive, and if you ask more questions, sometimes you get something different than you expected.
Empathy and free attention: also situationally different
In general, empathy and sensitivity are not equally distributed student data among people - and are not always available to the same extent either. For example, someone who is involved in the strategy process often does not have as much objective distance and free attention as an external moderator to always be aware of the underlying processes that other participants are currently running.
I have now spoken to many other people who have had similar experiences with the changes in working practices over the past year. My hope is that the learning effects from the digital space will help to improve communication overall. Because saying things out loud instead of thinking you can feel them: This in no way excludes empathetic listening, as taught by Marshal B. Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication .
No elephant in the zoom, no elephant in the room
On the contrary: If everyone speaks openly to one another under equal conditions, then the elephant will no longer be in the way, not only in Zoom, Teams or WebEx meetings, but also in the physical workshop room. In this way, the change that the pandemic has more or less forced upon us all can have a lasting effect, at least in this respect.