You can watch a 5-minute quick overview of these ideas, or browse the image/text version below.
With just one lamp and one window, it’s possible to look great on video. It means you may need to move your furniture around in your house. But that’s okay because you’re expecting to be stuck at home for a long time. Unfortunately.
When you have a window behind you, it makes it hard for your audience to see you. But if you have a lamp that can light your face, it can look quite nice — and it makes your video feel literally “daytime.”
The professional scenario on the right (below) is called “Three-point lighting” and it’s how most interviews are lit. An extra bit of magic happens if you put a not-too-bright lights behind you in frame to create more dimensionality.
Two common nighttime (or if you have no windows) lighting scenarios while on Zoom, etc. for giving more of a professional impression (versus a less professional one) are presented below. With just two lamps it’s possible to look great on video. It means you may need to move your furniture around in your house. But that’s okay because you’re expecting to be stuck at home for a long time. Unfortunately.
The further away you position a light, the less impact it has on brightness. So placing your lamps is a way to more carefully light your frames. Be sure to use LED lighting to be safe when tweaking how you are lit.
Note that in the “professional” case it’s possible to do get the multi-point lighting effect with just two lamps by crafting a reflector out of foil and a used packing envelope (larger is better). Just bounce the main light off of your reflector.
This presentation as a pre-release PDF is now available 👇. The appendix on Remote and Distributed Work comes with the mailing list signup further down.
Sign up for the Resilience Tech Briefing with no more than 2022 characters, zero images, and all in plain-text.
#mc_embed_signup{background: none; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; width:100%;}
/* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */
Third time’s a charm — this is a 30-minute walk through of the appendix to the 2020 CX Report. The full report will be out at the end of May 2020.
To receive a copy of the report as a PDF, sign up for my mailing list so I know you’re out there. Thanks! —JM
Sign up for the CX Briefing with no more than 2020 characters, zero images, and all in plain-text.
Key takeaways:
Remote work isn’t the same as distributed work.
Placemaking forms the grounds for work-making.
Ch-ch-change is always an emotional journey.
Collaboration is better than just cooperation.
Future’s so bright. Gotta wear XR/AR/VR shades?
Business ownership of Experience is by COO, CFO, CIO, or CMO. Also the CPO, CGO, CDO have arrived in larger organizations and that’s creating ownership questions as well …
The idea of a CXO isn’t tenable when everyone owns the experience. And because everyone “owns” or uses technology in some shape or form, it’s unclear who is accountable versus who is in charge.
As for who should own CX, it’s clear that everyone does and by that token nobody does. And that’s both a good thing and an unfortunate thing as well — esp. for the customer.
Erika Hall’s made me sufficiently skeptical of surveys but nonetheless with what I’ve gathered from the 2020 CX Report Survey so far this year has been helpful when reading the free-response entries. They’re incredible!
The 2020 CX Report is delayed to May 2020, but the one unchanged conclusion is the shift to intrinsically “Computational Experiences” as the root cause for confusion today.
In How To Speak Machine, I lay the foundations for understanding how computer science works in practice today. And when armed with that computational mindset, then the products that you make will become fundamentally different.
Contrary to Gibson’s point on the future as not being evenly distributed …
“Distributed reality is here. #dr is the new #vr.”
—Wendy Johansson / GVP Publicis Sapient
Working remote-ly isn’t the same as working distributed-ly.
It’s easy to confuse remote work with distributed work. The former means working remotely; the latter means getting work done in a distributed fashion. You can be working alone, remotely; but need to work in a group to be distributed.
The Notion of “Place” Has Changed
The definition of “same place” was once limited to only a few means of connecting, but now we’re faced with many options — especially with modern technologies.
Creating a sense of place is the starting point for work to happen. Built upon a stable foundation, it becomes possible to make that work become much more than just a “job.”
Wendy Johansson: “Without psychological safety, no matter what conditions and tools are set for working together, not a lot will get done. Consider the people first.”
Design thinking and rapid illustration expert Dan Roam refers to three kinds of people that anyone can draw. These three archetypes embody three classes of experiences. There’s three human contexts for the “place” where an experience happens to you: where your mind is, where your body is, where your tribe is — and some combination thereof.
These three modes are now blended because of the way that smartphones, AR/VR, IoT, and other connected paradigms are blurring how an experience hits your mind, body, and tribe. Or, “Alone together,” as Sherry Turtle says.
Change has happened! You’re now stuck at home! And you need to get work done, while also balancing your family, roommates, and/or mental health. WFH = Work From Hell?
Change is something that we all talk about as “exciting” but the way it can actually feel will differ — because it usually starts out somewhere in between “wow” and “oh no!” And sometimes it can turn out really great. There are 5 steps for managing organizational change that I’ve found useful over here.
Mind The Emotions
Different people manage changes differently. Management Coach Maria Giudice describes the process of experiencing change as similar to how we manage and process grief.
The way we handle grief is not dissimilar to how we manage through changes that happen in our environment. Taking a model from Kübler-Ross and Jobcentre Plus results in a figure where you can point to how you feel.
Cooperation is about working with another party at arm’s length, whereas collaboration is about having arms hugged around each other.”
The practices utilized in this distributed reality will determine whether companies will evolve to “distributed collaboration” instead of being stuck in “distributed cooperation.”
The tools we use are levers for leaders and followers to shape, preserve, or break culture. There is a deep connection between tools and culture, so be sure that they both align with your organization’s values.
When considering collaboration tools, the question is one of solving problems by exploring for information versus exploring for solutions and the way we use networks and place.
Jesse Shore et al in “Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces” shared research on how dense clustering can be superior to network clustering.
Part of the reason why the density of a surrounding network will matter is because of the degree of psychological safety that is often more possible in a sparse one.
Interpreting Jesse Shore et al in “Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces” in the context of how trust forms and matters within networks.
Don’t forget that by limiting your contacts through highly optimized distributed work environments, the opportunity for serendipity also decreases. Focus isn’t always good.
Ian Wharton: “When you remove serendipity, you remove the opportunity for by-chance encounters.” Digital presence lets you drop into many different tribes with low friction, but it’s still a concerted effort to do so.
When you start working in a fully distributed environment, you quickly realize how easy it is to get distracted on your computer from all the notifications that come at you.
A wall that prevents you from learning isn’t good; but a wall to protect you from too many distractions is not a bad thing when you absolutely need to focus to get work done. You are the one who controls your wall’s permeability.
Remote employee managers’ top concerns are their employees’ productivity, focus, and getting work done. They’re least concerned with their loneliness, overworking, and careers.
“We found that 38% of remote workers and 15% of remote managers received no training on how to work remotely.”
As Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky famously wrote in 2014, “Whatever you do. Don’t F up the culture.” Making a regular workplace culture hum is one thing; a distributed one is another.
Wendy Johansson advocates for “the efficiency triad” to be used in advancing distributed collaboration. “Each bit of effort to remain at the intersection of the efficiency triad enables your organization’s machinery to gain momentum.”
Emotions are the means by which we prepare ourselves to manage events around us, that depending upon the predictability versus volatility of our surrounds, will differ.
“Emotions are discrete, automatic responses to universally shared, culture-specific and individual-specific events. …These affective responses are preprogrammed and involuntary, but are also shaped by life experiences.” —Ekman (2011)
When going online at scale, the training wheels you need are often not just the shiny new digital tools. Instead, how you show up in distributed reality as a human matters more. Use the Publicis Sapient Community Code of Conduct to start.
Time becomes a place for you. And as a result you need to learn how to manage what works well across timezones and different cultures — which is usually NOT synchronous meetings.
Time is like a place that needs different rooms where you do different things. It needs a door and window curtains for you to function well in your house of time. Check out Raanan Bar-Cohen’s: “Make time for light stuff.”
Like anything in life, it’s not perfect. If you think you’ve discovered a new paradigm that beats everything else in the past by working distributedly, in some cases you’re right.
Proponents of working in a distributed fashion are understandably proud of their way of life. If you’ve ever seen the impact on a young parent and their ability to spend more time with their children, then you get it in a heartbeat.
What about VR/AR/XR and this moment where telepresence has now become a mandatory aspect of surviving our distributed reality? Is 3d collaboration within “our grasp”?
In the 2016 Design in Tech Report, VR was approaching its 50th birthday: “Almost 25 years ago, Ivan Sutherland developed, with support from ARPA, the first surprisingly advanced VR system.” —Nicholas Negroponte (1993)
The acronym CSCW stands for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and was coined in 1984 by Irene Greif and Paul Cashman. As a branch of research, its roots are in … email.
Professor Hiroshi Ishii is the Douglas Engelbart of our times. While at NTT, Ishii long foresaw an era when realtime video communication combined with the ability to annotate and collaborate would someday become a reality.
What’s happening right now is that the accountability for operational leadership and customer leadership is separated, and now needs to become more integrated.
The Publicis Sapient approach to Digital Business Transformation integrates operational leadership with customer leadership to drive high efficiencies and customer happiness via strategic application of technology and design.
Participate
The 12-question survey remains open to May 12, 2020. If you participate there’s an option to put your name into the final report.
