I'd like to officially welcome you to Experience Point's latest webinar. We'll be talking about best practices for designing meaningful, compelling, and long lasting virtual learning experiences. We know this topic is resonating with a lot of learning and development professionals right now. We hope that you walk away with new information and inspiration that you can bring back to your work. I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself and my colleague, Tom. I'm the Director of Customer Experience here at Experience Point, which in a nutshell means that I lead the team in charge of ensuring that all of our clients receive best in class experience when working with Experience Point. And Tom is one of our master facilitators. Tom, can you please introduce yourself? Sure, Tanya. Thanks so much. And it's a pleasure for me to be able to deliver with Tanya. And she often serves as the angel on the shoulder of our clients. It's a delight to have her taking care of them. I'm a master facilitator with Experience Point, been in that role for just over a year prior to that. I see a number of you from Cincinnati and Ohio. So I was a professor and a provost, associate provost at Xavier University in Ohio. So great to see so many Ohio people, and people from all over the world, actually. Awesome. My background is in design thinking, and super happy to present some ideas to you all today. I know a number of instructional designers, so I love working with those folks when I was in my role at the university. Great to have you here. Before hosting this webinar, or before kicking it off, I want you to note that we'll be hosting a Q and A at the end of the webinar to respond to any questions that you might have. Of course, don't hesitate to engage with us in the chat throughout if there are questions that come up along the way. Back to you, Tanya. Thanks, Tom. So let's begin with a quick overview of what we do at Experience Point. This will form the basis of our discussion. So at Experience Point is an innovation training company, and we believe that innovation is a skill that can be learned and mastered. When I say the word innovator, you might think of luminaries like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and sure, those people thought of a few clever ideas in their day, but it's our philosophy that anyone can learn how to innovate no matter their job function, industry, or organisation. So that's why we exist. We offer a suite of experiential, digitally driven workshops that train people and organisations in the problem solving methods of human centred design. Another question you might have is what is human centered design? Tom, can you explain this concept? We know that this is something that everyone can use in creating better learning experiences. Yeah. Thanks, Tanya. You know, we could spend a lot of time talking about human centered design, but we've also provided everybody with the e book, so if you'd like to dive a little bit deeper in the topic if you're not familiar with it. But in a nutshell, human centered design is an approach to problem solving that puts people and their needs at the center of its practice. Often, we make assumptions about the needs of our employees or our customers or any kind of end user for that matter, and we don't actually know what they want or need because we haven't taken steps to get to know and understand them, to empathize with them, to ask them questions or to observe them in their natural setting. So oftentimes, products or services are built without truly understanding who we're building for and why we're building for them. In short, human centered design is more than an innovation tool. It's helped students find careers, companies devise new products, and manufacturers create new systems. At its core, human centered design solves problems where people are at the center of the problem. All right, Tanya, let's kick off our discussion on virtual learning. Thanks, Tom. Today we're going to dive into the methods and techniques of human centered design, and we're going to ask you to participate in the chat. We want to learn more about your unique challenges and circumstances, so be prepared to participate. Let's actually do a quick practice round. Warm up those chat fingers, and please answer in the chat what was your favorite meal as a child? Getting mine entered here. Lots of Wow. Coming to oh, enchiladas. Thank you. I had those Sunday night for my birthday. Chicken parm, love it. Lots of pizza, of course. Yep. Great. So let's talk a little bit about the present day. Recent events have forced us, many of us, to dive into new territory, both in a virtual and a real world context. That certainly has been the case for Experience Point. Tom, what do you think has been Experience Point's biggest challenge since COVID-nineteen? Well, Tanya, that's an easy answer, as you know. As some of you know, prior to the COVID nineteen pandemic, Experience Point offered almost entirely in person workshop options, and it quickly became apparent that in person meetings, let alone workshops, were no longer an option. So the past six months have forced us to rethink the way we teach and the way that our clients experience our products. We've effectively transitioned the majority of our products from in person to virtual experiences. Yeah, and there have been a lot more than just a few lessons learned along the way. That's why we're here with you today. We want to share some of the challenges that we've come across, how we've overcome each, and show you how we've pivoted to create exceptional virtual learning experiences. Towards the end of this webinar, we're also going to give you a taste of one of our highly engaging and collaborative workshops. So we'd love to hear from you about this in chat, and I love seeing all the participants chat. Thanks so much. Keep it going. What, in your opinion, is your single biggest challenge when it comes to virtual learning? Let's see some responses in chat, please. Thanks, Raj, being inclusive. Seeing lots of engagement. Yeah, absolutely, folks. Participation is a big one as well. Thanks, Cindy. Learner engagement, yeah. Omari, interesting focus. Yeah, maybe a subset or a parameter of engagement. Sarah, interesting, transforming. I can't keep up with it, they're coming in so fast, thanks. Yeah, we see a lot of answers around engagement. And Heather, sure, eye contact. Isn't that interesting, where we're so used to in real time that we can actually look and respond to people in real time and look them in the eye, and suddenly we're now looking at a camera or a screen, and there's something, maybe not false, but one or two steps away from how we read. And yeah, also body language, whoever just posted that in, absolutely. Yep, so lots of different this is so great, folks. I capture this chat so we can use it to build. These responses are great to see, and some of them, actually many of them, are similar to what we've experienced as well. So let's compare your virtual learning challenges to those in academia. Chances are we're gonna see some interesting overlap, and I know that we are based on the responses that I'm seeing. In this June twenty twenty survey of four sixty four parents of high school students who were receiving remote instruction during the pandemic in the US, some of the top concerns they reported were poor content or few opportunities for collaborative learning or inconsistent instruction, maybe poor instructor preparation and limited knowledge of educators. And I'm here to tell you my wife is a high school vocal music teacher, and I just remember days and weeks in March when she had to convert to totally virtual. And I lived and felt every moment of every response we just got there. As Tanya mentioned, the past six months of Experience Point have been a bit of a whirlwind. We've been working around the clock to reimagine and rebuild our workshops from in person experiences to virtual ones. And while doing so, three main challenges or opportunities as we like to see them have emerged. The three that we'd like to share with you today are related to technology, to the way our workshops are delivered. And finally, we're gonna talk about challenges around collaboration and engagement. Clearly, you all, that's top on your list as well. And our efforts to create experiences that are just as immersive and effective as our in person workshops have always been. Over to you, Tanya. And in human centered design, we always start a problem solving journey with a question, don't we, Tom? Yep, we do. We start with an open ended question using a how might we framework. We define a user and a benefit for them. So how might we help the tech team, the users, create a best in class experience for our participants, the benefit? So let's dive into talking about how we tackled our first challenge around technology. Tanya? Yeah, so technology. This is a picture of me supporting a workshop from the comfort of my laundry room. Why do you ask? When the pandemic first began in our office and our whole team was suddenly working from home, my laundry room, believe it or not, was the best spot in my house for a stable internet connection. Please note my feet resting comfortably inside the dryer. You're supporting a workshop with fifty people depending on you. You can't afford to have unstable internet connection. Yeah. And just like we've seen, we've met people's spouses and children and pets on Zoom video calls or whatever your platform of choice. Tanya, you look, pardon the pun, right at home in that photo. So yeah, the challenges of technology between glitchy Wi Fi, finicky software, and trying to keep up with new programs and operations, I'm sure everyone has faced their fair share of hurdles in this new reality. No exception, of course, on our end as we've worked to pivot our learning experiences. One of the first things we did at Experience Point to tackle these challenges was to make sure that all of our facilitators or workshop hosts had the technology required to create a seamless user experience. Our IT team provided all of our customer support team and our facilitators with IT team kits. These kits consisted of internet stabilizers, additional computer screens, microphones, video cameras, and green screens. What did you think of the kit that you received? You know, as a facilitator, I felt a lot more confident hosting our workshop sessions as I knew I had the best possible setup to do my job. And another thing it did was create consistency across all of our workshops. For example, the video and sound quality is the same no matter which workshop you attend or who your facilitator is. And green screens also enable us to create backgrounds with our video conferencing platform. I just saw a comment in the chat about it'd be great to see us. I know that. We often do that. You can see myself here behind the green screen and then this great background that we created. It was on camera right now, you'd see it now. You'd see this nicely polished office environment. Back to you, Tanya. Another step that we took beyond distributing IT Team Kits was making some decisive moves around video conferencing platforms. Tom, when it came to video conferencing platforms, can you talk a little bit about Experience Point's journey to Zoom? Yeah, sure. So I'd argue that Experience Point was actually already well positioned even before the pandemic to host virtual workshops. We have employees that are dispersed in different parts of North America, Canada, and Europe, and we were already a customer of Zoom video, so we were well accustomed to working virtually and with the Zoom platform. But when it came to delivering workshops virtually, we knew it would be critical to have the right video conferencing platform in place to enable a seamless and interactive experience. What we really like about Zoom is its ability to host hundreds of participants, and Zoom knows that there's a steep competition for their type of service in the marketplace. As a result, Zoom has been very quick to respond to customer feedback, address security issues, and even apologized publicly and took personal ownership for issues when things went a bit off track. Also, we found no better service to manage breakout rooms. We just upgraded to the Zoom Enterprise account to be able to host more participants. Now, we know that there are other platforms out there like the Adobe one that we're on right now, or Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Skype, etcetera. I'd be interested to know in the chat, what video hosting platform do you all use? What's your go to? Let's see some responses in chat, please. Teams, Zoom, yep. Webex, thanks, Adobe Connect. OBS, yep. GoToWebinar, thanks. We've also tried BlueJeans as well. Haven't seen any BlueJeans. Looks like Zoom, GoTo, Webex. Yep, there's a BlueJeans out there. Microsoft Teams. Yeah. It seems like we, users, virtual users oh, interesting. UberConference. Yeah. Adobe Connect. Yeah. Go to training. Yep. Seen seen a lot of a lot of the same ones. And I should add that we're when we're running our workshops, we do our best to work with teams and utilize the tools that they already have in place so that we aren't creating any unnecessary friction. And that's why we customize our workshops to a certain degree depending on the client's needs. What I would stress here is that using a video conferencing platform that enables you to deliver a seamless experience is critical to successful virtual learning. Tanya, let's move on to the next point. Yeah, so the next technology change we made to our workshops was the creation of a brand new role at Experience Point. This is the role of a production manager. Internally, we refer to production managers as PMs. This position has turned out to be absolutely critical in ensuring a seamless workshop experience. We're now scaling this role in our organisation as it's in high demand. The role of the production manager is to ensure that all technology is in place to run the workshop and then this person is the angel on the shoulder of the facilitator in the workshop to help with the delivery. The PM helps coordinate breakout rooms, technology issues, and is there to answer any questions that a participant might have. Tom, can you share a story with me about this new role? Yep. As a facilitator, I'm a huge fan of the PM role, the production manager role. So I was recently facilitating a session at the beginning of pandemic, and we had about thirty participants. Three of them were not comfortable or familiar with any of the tech. My PM that day actually had to get on a phone call help one of the participants resolve their issues. I would have never finished that session on time or maybe even at all if my production manager had not been there to help troubleshoot. As a matter of fact, just before the webinar today, I was delivering another session, and same thing, had a production manager that made everything run smoothly so that I could deliver a great session. Fantastic. So now moving on to our next virtual learning challenge, which is around our delivery method. Tom, what do you think is the biggest change that we've made when it comes to delivery method or format? So in those two or three months where we were building out the virtual versions of our workshops, we of course borrowed a page from Human Centered Design, always making sure that whatever we were building had the participant in mind, the people who were actually going through our work. We had to take the pacing and timing of our workshops into account. So when we designed the virtual experiences for our participants, one common phrase we've heard repeatedly in recent months, and likely you have too and have experienced it, is Zoom fatigue. And according to a recent HBR article, this relatively new expression is popping up more and more on social media and has been steadily increasing in Google searches since March. And I saw a lot of people putting that in the chat as well earlier. So Tom, why is it that we find the video calls so draining? Yeah, that's the million dollar question, Tanya. So in that same study, HBR cited three main sources of fatigue. First, using a video conferencing platform forces us to focus more intently on conversations in order to absorb information. And second, video calls make it easier than ever to lose focus. We're surrounded by competing apps and messaging systems, family members, pets, you name it. As one of our clients recently said, I love my kids more than I love you, and my boss has more important things to say to me than you do, so please keep it simple, neat, and concise. And finally, video conferencing can be particularly draining because we're constantly showing face to those we're conversing with. Let me ask you, how often do you stand within three feet of a colleague and stare directly at their face? Probably never, or they might think you're a little weird. When we engage in a constant gaze mode, this can make us tired, uncomfortable, and cranky. So what are some of the ways that we can combat this fatigue? I'm glad you asked. In that same HBR article, the HBR researchers had these suggestions. Number one, avoid multitasking. So just like Gary asked us all to do at the beginning of today's webinar, shut down those competing apps and just have one area of focus. Building breaks, as much as I say I'd like to have a break in today's webinar, ain't no time for a break. Hope you get one afterwards. Reduce on screen stimuli, shut down the Skype or the chat app and just have one area of focus. If you're hosting a virtual event, make that video an opt in rather than a must do, and you can always go, I can't believe I'm saying this, old tech, and just pick up the phone and call somebody. So Tom, in getting back to our workshops, what are some of the ways that we fight video fatigue? Yeah, great question, Tanya. Excuse me a second. One thing we changed almost immediately was the timing of our workshops. Knowing that participants experienced video fatigue, we broke up several of our workshops into smaller chunks or modules, as we've been calling them. So instead of a workshop running for over four hours, we've broken up the workshop into two two hour chunks or four one hour chunks of time. From our research, we found that people start to lose interest at between sixty and ninety minutes. So we also ensure we insert a break between that time frame to allow folks to turn off their camera or step away from their computer. And finally, we found that the more variation that you're able to introduce in the way that participants interact with one another and the facilitator, the experience will be better overall. You'll get a firsthand look at how we do this in just a little while. Thanks, Tom. The last challenge we want to talk more about is around collaboration and engagement. There's this myth that you can't collaborate effectively over video and we feel like we've done an excellent job at maintaining a very similar experience to our in person workshops and there are a number of ways to ensure your learners can engage over video. So Tom, let's talk about some of the things that EP has done to create collaborative and engaging virtual experience. Absolutely. And again, if we bring our problem back to human centered design, we need to think about our end users, and in doing so, develop empathy for their situation. As we all know, these unprecedented times have forced all of us in situations that are less than ideal for most. It's important that we remember work and personal life have become blurred for many of us, as we each try to navigate our professional lives while surrounded by the distractions of home. This is one reason we always like to start off our workshops with an icebreaker. A question we may ask is, what is one thing you did over the weekend that brought you joy? This icebreaker immediately opens up the lines of communication between those attending the workshop and acts as a tool to get people comfortable with each other and the virtual platform that they're using. And icebreakers can be conducted over chat or video. And Tom, all of our workshops require some element of a team brainstorm. Can you talk a little bit about what we've done to create an effective brainstorm session? I can, and in just a moment, we're gonna take part in our own brainstorming session because it's our philosophy that when we're learning something new, it's more effective to learn by doing. Today, we'll be giving you a taste of an experience point brainstorming session in the chat. But when conducting workshops in their entirety, we've also found that sometimes breakout rooms can be an equally effective tool for these activities. The function allows for teams to break off and collaborate in independent virtual rooms and to be called back to the main room when that section of the session is over. By providing learners with the opportunity to collaborate among a smaller group of people, much like you would in an in person workshop, it gives people a chance to speak more openly, have more time to contribute, and still feel like they're connected to their team. Tom, in human centered design training, you often see sticky notes and brainstorm sessions happening with lots of physical items. How do we emulate a physical in person brainstorm in a virtual world? That's a great question, Tanya. Sorry, need water. Throat is dry, this is my second session of the day, folks. Through trial and error and by testing a number of different collaboration platforms, we settled on one called Mural, a virtual collaboration tool. As you can see, we can quickly create sticky notes, drag and drop the sticky notes, write, draw, do pictures, and almost anything that you would normally do if you were in person. There are other platforms similar to Miro. Google has one called Jamboard or Trello, to name a few. We found that even in a virtual space, people still like to feel like there's something physical and tangible to work with, and this creates more engagement overall. Absolutely. My team just finished using MURAL for our retrospective a couple of weeks ago, and it's such a fun and easy way for people to engage and collaborate. Okay, so the last point we want to make around engagement is related to simulation. Tom, can you talk a little bit about our simulations and what makes them so engaging? Absolutely. Let's talk about what a simulation is first. Simulation in the context of what we do is when we use technology to evoke or replicate substantial aspects of what we might do in the real world. Simulations allow teams to fail in low risk situations and to explore counterproductive behaviors and provide scaffolding around new concepts before embarking into high risk territory. A recent study conducted by researchers in education found that seventy percent of information retained by learners is gained through experience, showing that simulations, especially in a distance learning scenario, are crucial to both retaining information and accelerating problem solving in an immersive and thought provoking way. In the same way that we don't learn to ride a bike by reading a book, innovative habits and reflexes are honed and permanently embedded by doing, not just by reading or listening. And what better way to tell you what we mean by an engaging experience than to show you. Tom is going to give you an exclusive sneak peek into one of our newest virtual workshops called Spark by Experience Point. This is one of multiple episodes that we offer, and this one teaches participants how to effectively brainstorm. Tom, let's take it away. Alright, Tanya. Thanks so much. Yep. Let's get started. So I've got a question for you. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word brainstorm? Let's see some answers in chat. You all are chat champions. Ideas, fun, Post its, creative, anxious, dead. Thanks. Wow. I love it. Creative. Yep. Ideas, collaboration, whirlwind, lots of ideas, chaos, interesting. Interesting. Crazy. Like a middle earthquake. Oh, I love that, Dario. Thank you so much. Get it out. Yep. So clearly there's some folks who have had some great experiences with brainstorms, but I think a couple of you also with a less positive view of them have already heard the news that brainstorming is dead. In the popular press and academic journals, researchers have at various points over the years come to the same damning conclusion. If you want ideas, ask smart people to come up with them individually because group ideation is just another word for groupthink, and brainstorming is a waste of time. There's just one problem. Nearly everyone whose job it is to come up with game changing ideas, experts from places like IDEO and Procter and Gamble here in Cincinnati and Pixar, brainstorming is a go to technique for them to generate novel ideas. Now this is a really strange disconnect. What's going on here? So let's get to the bottom of the mystery. Why is there such a disconnect between a vocal group of credible critics telling us that brainstorming doesn't work, but people whose job it is to innovate insist on using it? We'll start back at the beginning by taking a quick trip back to the 1940s. And I'm gonna let my slide person get up to the Alex Osborne slide next here. Thanks. So meet Alex Osborne. If you don't know him, he was an advertising executive from the 1940s of BBD and O fame. Osbourne worked with a lot of people to come up with winning ideas for lots of companies. While doing this work, he realized that the really hard part of coming up with a winning idea is creating something original. As his quote suggests, Osbourne thinks it's easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up something original in the first place. So he experimented and he found four rules that when enforced correctly lead to more wild ideas. He came up with this list. So the first is judicial judgment is ruled out. Note that he's not saying criticism has no value. He's just saying it's temporarily withheld during the brainstorm. And secondly, wildness is wanted. The crazier the idea, the better. Thirdly, quantity is wanted. The more ideas we have, the more we diverge, the better amount of things we have to choose from when it comes time to choose. And finally, combination and improvement are sought. We want to build on the ideas of others. If you know the improv comedy technique, yes, and, we always wanna say yes, and to an idea. Well, many people became interested and started adopting these rules for their ideation sessions. And almost immediately, another group took interest, my colleagues in academia, who are trained in extremely rigorous methods of critical evaluation. And these academics instantly grew suspicious that this, brainstorming, is the best way to come up with great ideas. And so they set up experiments. The first controlled experimental study of brainstorming happened at Yale University in nineteen fifty eight. It was funded by the US Navy. The researchers assembled a group of ninety six undergrad students and randomly assigned half of them to work on their own and half of them to work in small teams. They read each group's Osborn's four brainstorming rules and gave them problems to solve like, what could you do with an extra thumb? They wanted to see if people came up with more unique ideas working alone or working in groups. And the study found that individuals working on their own were almost twice as efficient at producing ideas. So the academics claimed that group brainstorming doesn't work. It's a waste of time. It's better to come up with ideas for yourself. Now, you might be able to start to see the problem here. This is essentially like giving people who've never driven a manual shift car a written list of instructions saying, all right, now go drive around the block without a driving instructor and having only read the instructions, and maybe observing that people who are actually walking around the block are doing it faster and in a safer way and making fewer mistakes than the person who's never used a clutch before. And since that first study, there have been dozens of others, and the analyses of those studies all came to similar conclusions, but none prevented professionals from flocking to this method. So what's going on? Well, these studies are rigorous, but Bob Sutton, who's a faculty member in Stanford's D School, points out that there's some challenges that these studies miss. They don't look at the process when performed by people who are skilled at brainstorming. Furthermore, most didn't include a facilitator, a crucial role, and they treated brainstorming as a single event, divorced from any sort of overarching process. Now regardless, these studies are rigorous and they are accurate for the specific questions they're answering. If you just thrust people in a room together and say, come up with an idea, it's not likely to go so well. And let's be honest, that's often how this works in organizations. Things often don't go well, so we should care about what these studies are saying. What we think the studies show very clearly is that brainstorming is a difficult skill, and here's why. When you put people together in a room, instant barriers are formed. We're social creatures, and there are some psychological things that occur. Let's say you want the group to generate wild ideas. Well, no one wants to look silly in front of other people or even their boss, and everyone has some fear of being judged. Loud voices can dominate. People will often get prematurely fixated on an earlier idea someone shared, so everyone's just thinking up variations on one idea. There are also mechanical issues. People can be unclear, misunderstand each other, talk over each other, be long winded, maybe like I'm doing. And all of us have experienced this. Humans are messy and so are social interactions. There are lots of things that can go wrong. But as anyone who's done great work in a team knows, fantastic things can happen when people work together. A group gives you various perspectives and a bigger pool of experiences and memories. And these can spark many more associations when compared to an individual who might be working on their own. So you have the potential to produce more unique options. And group work builds shared understanding and a commitment to a problem. You're less likely to dismiss a good idea because you have a higher chance that someone will see the potential value that others don't. And doing good work with other people just feels awesome. And that positive energy can be contagious, and that's worth a lot just by itself. When you pull people together in a group, there will be gains and losses. We think the truth behind those studies is actually that the process losses are going to win the tug of war if you simply put a group of people in a room together. The left side of this graphic is more likely the default winner. So how do you win this tug of war and get the most out of a group? There's a lot of preparation and skill that goes into running a productive brainstorm. And let's pay special attention to numbers five and six here. So first of all, have a facilitator to get ideas flowing, to offer the right stimuli and enforce ground rules. And then number six, which is about following those brainstorm rules, the most important of which is defer judgment. The more skilled people are at this, the more productive it's going to be. And a reminder, the reason we brainstorm is to come up with as many different options as possible to delight and surprise our users. And these specific words are important. Delight, because at this stage, we're concerned with what would be awesome for our user, not our company, and many and different because ideation is a numbers game. The more number of different options you have, the more likely you are to have a great idea in the mix. This is something everyone agrees on. The way to win the game of brainstorming is not to come up with the most practical or profitable solution. All of that happens later. The way to win the game is to have as much quantity and variety as possible. So now let's meet the biggest enemy of quantity and variety. And this is it, evaluation. And let's get one objection out of the way right now. Even the biggest fan of brainstorming will tell you, of course, some ideas are silly and can't work, but there's no reason to point out that an idea is silly right now when you're in the middle of ideation. Evaluation is an extremely important activity later. Evaluation during a brainstorm is how we lose the game. And when we say evaluation, we're actually talking about two things. The first is a sneaky little problem evaluating your own contributions, being apprehensive about what others will think. And here's how this usually goes. Say we're brainstorming ways to make our workspaces more interesting. And I might think, wow, we could have a work from Mars day, but a little voice in my head says, man, don't say something dumb or people are gonna think you're just being silly. So I end up watering down my idea until there's no flaw and it's offensive to no one and end up with something boring like, let's do an open office concept. Not so great an idea. So censoring our own contributions is a great way to sterilize a brainstorm. And of course, the reason most people censor themselves is because people evaluate other people's contributions. Most of us are rewarded in our careers for our skills in analysis and diagnosis. So this one's gonna be hard. In the worst case during a brainstorm, somebody might say, yeah, that would cost too much or that wouldn't work. But much more likely, people will disguise those concerns as maybe innocent questions. Oh, interesting. How much do you think that would cost? Or cool idea. So how would this work for our user? None of this adds any value to an ideation session. It becomes useful much later in the process. So we've talked about two things, evaluating others and evaluating yourself. And there are two simple drills or warm ups that we can use to help counter these tendencies. And let's get ready to participate in chat in drill one. Drill one is called unfiltered, and it's all about giving yourself permission to drop your filter of self evaluation. We all wanna look smart, so our instinct is to think through the ideas before and then and factor in all the objections and scrub out questionable aspects. But now I want you to try sharing your silliest ideas, the ones that you think might not be practical or cost too much or sound dumb. It's the antithesis to our Instagram age of filters. Alright. So here's the question. Please share some of your ideas in chat. How could we make our workspaces more fun? How could we bring our workspaces more fun? Slides, thank you. Toys, yoga chair, dogs, beer, I love that answer. Bringing a live band, Confetti. Puzzles. You guys are amazing. I could I could not even keep up this. Band music. I see another one have a band play instrument. Yep. Musical instruments. Bubbleheads. Free time. Continuous kitten videos, thank you. Snacks and drinks, paint, not pens, I love it. Aromatherapy, thanks Paul. I am too, actually. Roller skates, tickle me elmos, awesome, awesome. All right, music, kittens, great, great ideas, folks. Stupid human tricks. Thank you. Yeah, let's go back to kindergarten rooms, cocktail making. I love it. No bosses. Yeah, Google tried that once, Dario. I don't know if you hear about that. They got rid of all their managers as an experiment once. That time, great. Thank you all. This is so great to see all the responses in chat. So remember what Osborne said. It's easier for us to tone down a wild idea with some nugget of potential than it is to think up a new one. So let's look at drill number two. And I'm I'm sorry, everybody, but you should have never let your guard down and trusted me because drill number two is called the Terminator. So I'm gonna call one out of the great ideas that we shared earlier, and you're all now going to be on your worst behavior. Pardon me, Gary, but we're gonna let loose on the worst behavior now. Tell us all the reasons why this idea is dumb and won't work. And bonus points if you can disguise your criticism as a question, as an innocent little question. Here's the idea I saw several people have it. Let's have a live band at the office. Let's terminate that idea. Let's have all the reasons why we couldn't do that. Bonus points if you submit it as a question. We don't have money for that. Why would you think that, Alexandra? Thank you. Well, and of course, would management like this Sue, how might we ensure music is at the office? I love it. The band would be too noisy. Would it be too hard to focus? You guys are pros at this. Points to everybody that's getting their criticism as a question. How would people concentrate? I love it. How could we think? How would we choose what type of music we could do? How can we agree on a genre? Oh, man, I'm right there with you. It's too silly of an idea. You guys are perfect, everybody. Fantastic. That was fun. Thanks for playing along. And the value of this worst behavior exercise is that it lets everybody into the brainstorm model and see the type of things that we're trying to avoid. So someone's less likely to display a terminator behavior. And if somebody does, it's easier for everybody to say, hey, Tom, are you being a terminator? Now, in addition to these drills, let's look at some antidotes to evaluating yourself and others. These are little hints that we can use. The antidote to judging others is building on their ideas. Say yes to their idea and add something useful to it no matter what. Improvisers and comedy writers everywhere use the yes and technique. And the second is about encouraging wild ideas. And in a second, I'll show you some brainstorm stimuli that you can use to make this happen. I'll give you a new question now. How might we help people maintain social distance? Think about that for a minute. No responses yet. And I want you to type in the wildest ideas that you can and build on others' inputs as much as you can, and then we'll look at some stimuli to help stretch our thinking. All right? So here we go. How might we help people maintain social distance? Let's see some ideas. Thanks, Jolene. Six foot bubbles, a two meter stick. Yep. Give everybody a tape measure. Fine people oh, I love it when they get too close. Hoop skirts, inflatable belts. Tom, thanks. Don't bathe. I love it. I love it. Hula hoops. Yep. Sumo wrestling, pool noodles. I've actually seen, very large hats with pool noodles on them. I wanna take a page, from Tom's response. Now let's come up with ideas, that incorporate smell. What are some ideas that we have that could incorporate smell? Katrina, next slide, please. What are some ideas oops, two sorry, go back a little bit. Thank you, there we are. What's an idea that incorporates smell Carrie Mace? Yep. Yeah, tie athletic socks. Garlic, I love it, garlic. Sue says incense. Thanks, Phyllis. Deodorant is right out. And Adina wants to have pepper spray. Paula, bacon would actually not make me wanna stay away from people, but get closer to them. Smell o vision, I love it. Harvey says, Body odor, yeah, maybe we're going to bathe once a week into once a day or whatever our habit is. Kim, yeah, let's all have pet skunks and if people get too cloak too close, I love it. All right, so here's another one. Let's look at another one. How about an idea that incorporates Her Majesty the Queen of England? How would Her Majesty help us keep a six foot difference, please. What would her majesty might have us do? I see we're still on the smell. Thanks, Erin. Yes. Her majesty could issue a royal decree or encourage everyone to wear ginormous hats. Would not let anyone near her anyway. Thanks, Tracy. We can all get bodyguards. I love it. And Lee, unleash the corgis. Thank you. Kindly ask people to maintain that six book. Oh, Chris, maybe a six foot scepter that we could carry with us. I love it. We could all get palace guards. I love it. Carry a purse. Alright. I see we're doing this. Thank you, Raj. We must bow. Yeah. We all ride horses. Oh, I love it. Look at where all these ideas have taken us. Thank you for making truly wild ideas. Let's do one more. Let's enter, please, into the Potterverse. And so let's imagine how Katrina, next slide, please. Yes. What would Harry Potter do? So how would the Harry Potterverse solve our social distancing question? Cast a spell, of course, Harvey says. Yep. Communication stations, Cheryl, thank you. And of course, Rick, we're gonna fly around and not walk around. Oh, interesting, Sonia, an auto autobounce spell. Kelly, yes, we're gonna issue everybody a magic wand. And Karen, a six foot distance spell. We'll have to look up our Latin and find out how to say that in Latin. Fly on a broom. I love it. Use e brooms. Thank you, Raj. We're gonna get Kathy's magic potion. Annie, yes. We're gonna make everybody disappear. I love it. Anash, truly a Harry Potter fan. Yes. We're going to increase that six feet to nine and three quarters. I love it. I love it. Let loose the basilisk. I'm sure Hagrid's going to make, an appearance here somewhere. Alright. Awesome. Awesome work everywhere. And I I love it, man. Gary, if there's a way to save this chat, look how many ideas that the three sixty of us have come up with in just like four or five minutes. I would bet we've got somewhere close to a thousand ideas. Some, of course, silly. Some, of course, wild. But what a great pool of ideas to choose from as we move through and begin to make sense of all the ideas. And so there you have it, folks. You've just become personally acquainted with one of our newest and most dynamic offerings. That was a Spark episode. We call it Spark by Experience Points. It's a series of digital and interactive episodes of virtual learning designed to both establish and reinforce human centered design and its daily practice. Each episode combines compelling bursts of learning with hands on application like we just did, offering a fitness plan, if you will, for innovation that empowers anyone, regardless of their level or function or industry, to harness innovation and drive success on a repeatable and scalable basis. And you may have noticed the flow of the Spark episode. We open with a compelling story, we introduce the theory behind the practice, and then we give an opportunity or two practice what we just learned, and then we provide a tool which we provided, Gary showed you that earlier, to be able to practice it on your own. You may have also noticed the different ways that you were required to react. Watch the visuals of the slide, listen to my voice, respond and chat, and respond to others in chat. Did that entire episode seem like fifteen or twenty minutes? Our typical response from a Spark episode is that people can't believe that fifteen minutes just went by that fast. And that's what happens when you engage participants on multiple levels. We so encourage you to reach out if you'd like to find more about Spark by Experience Point or any of our virtual products for that matter. Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions you have in the chat or reach out to Tanya or myself anytime after today's session. Back to you, Tanya. Thanks so much for that, Tom. So as we draw to a close, it's important that we look forward with a sense of optimism. Human centered thinking teaches us to find opportunities in every challenge. Tom, let's quickly chat about why virtual capabilities is creating a great opportunity since we know that it's embraced by the global learning community. Yeah, and we've got the global learning community here judging by what everybody announced their profession to be. I think we're all aware that virtual learning is now officially here to stay, despite our possible or hopefully soon returns to the office or in person environments. And I say that because in the past half year, the delivery of virtual learning by numerous organizations has proven that it can be done at a global scale. In some ways, the current pandemic has required us to be extremely isolated, but in other and important ways, never have we been so fearless to connect across countries, cultures, and clients in this new and virtual way. And we can reap enormous financial savings for learners and facilitators and organizations who've come to realize that many of the processes of the past can exist and thrive in the virtual space. And it also opens up the possibility for more diverse perspectives, as learning is not inhibited by the geographical limitations of bringing a diverse group of people together. And finally, when we provide a more structured setting in which social distractions are minimized and learning and retention are made more efficient, memorable and immersive experiences can happen through the use of simulations and other digital platforms. And these are only a few of the opportunities that have been afforded to us through virtual learning and why we know this method of delivery is here for the long haul. We're excited to continue iterating on own best practices in this space and hearing much more about yours as you continue your virtual learning and journeys. Back to you, Tania. Thanks, Tom. So that wraps up our webinar for today. Before we get to answering your questions, I'd like to invite you all to visit our blog, The Prototype, where you'll find a range of relevant and timely articles related to innovation and human centered design. Yeah, and we'd also like to invite you to follow us on Medium, or even better, get in touch with me personally. Don't hesitate to send myself an email or connect with me on LinkedIn. We're happy to answer any questions you may have. And Gary, I believe this is where we're going to turn the mic back over to you and help us answer some questions from the audience today. Indeed it is, Tom. And we've got some questions that we've been collecting. So we'll get right to those. First, I want to invite everybody to go ahead and put in your thoughts and comments to Tom and Tanya in the chat there if you like. And also be sure and answer that question, what did you learn in the session that you can apply in your work? So we'd love to know the answers to that. Now we don't have much time, Tom, but we'll get right to Dave Goodman's question. He asked, What new skills do facilitators, instructional designers and so forth need now that we're all Zooming and teaming and so forth? Yeah, great question. Thanks, Gary. I'll tell you, the first skill is, and it's going to sound silly, but really it's management of I have a ginormous monitor and a laptop monitor and learning to manage all of my windows so that if I were on camera, it would look like I was just talking to you, and I would have all my participants in view. I saw some comments earlier in chat that wouldn't it be nice to see each other's faces as we do this? I totally and one hundred percent agree. Often, our instruction when we're in a session is our default mode is we love to have the participants' video cameras off and microphone on. Sorry, backwards. Camera on, microphone off, so that we're at least seen and interacting with each other in a visual way. And then I, as a facilitator, might ask someone to come off mute and talk so we can manage the flow of conversations so it's not chaotic. So sort of managing of the technology in a new and different way is probably the first one. And the second one, and we talked about it earlier, really is timing, knowing when a group might be getting fatigued, knowing when to call a break, how much of a break to offer if you're doing a I wasn't sure if it was me or if Tom is gone. Maybe I could take the next question. Paul, what is an ideal virtual class size? We feel like twenty is a really good virtual class size for multiple reasons. One of them being like when we use Zoom, as mentioned earlier, you could actually see twenty people on one screen. But it also allows folks, it's not too big where people feel shy to pipe up and speak. It's a good size for chat as well, so if you've got lots of people asking questions in chat, it's more manageable. So we feel like twenty is a really good size. We have another question here from Paul. What are effective ways to brainstorm virtually besides the chat box? As mentioned earlier, we use MURAL. So MURAL you can quickly double click on sticky notes create your own little sticky notes. You can also draw on Mural. There's lots of other collaboration tools out there. I think someone also mentioned in the chat earlier that they use Miro. Jamboard is another one, so there's all kinds of great collaboration tools out there that you can use to brainstorm. By the way, see that Tom has logged back in, so we're going to go ahead and make him a presenter. He'll join us in a minute. In the meantime, we can take some more questions if we have them. And it's nine fifty nine a. M. Oh, here we go. Daria wants to know what's the Internet stabilization? What should we do to have it? Is it a hardware piece or a software or what? It's a hardware piece. So it plugs in. It's like a hardwired connection that plugs into your modem, and then it I'm upstairs, my modem is in the basement. It plugs into my modem. I have a hardwired connection there, and then it runs over your electrical outlet. So I plug the other one in upstairs, and then my computer is hardwired. All right. Thank you very much. And had earlier somebody else had asked a couple of questions about equipment. Are there plug ins for platforms that you recommend? Sorry, video conferencing platforms? For example, Adobe Connect has various plug ins that you can use, accessories that you can download, timers and various other things. Are there some of those that you recommend for some of the platforms that you've mentioned today? I don't have any. I don't know, Tom, if you have any to recommend. Honestly, no. The platform we use most often, and apologies for dropping off, I got the spinning color wheel of death on a Mac and had no recourse but to reboot. Zoom really has all that built in, so there aren't really any modules. When I was at my university and we were using Canvas or Blackboard, of course there are lots of different units that you can build into that. But for what we do, we find Zoom to be the best tool out there. All righty. Well, we've gotten to the top of the hour, but we have a couple of more questions. So if you don't mind, I'm going to go ahead and throw them at you anyway, Tom and Tanya. Sure. Sure thing. All right. As a facilitator of a virtual learning session, what can you do to encourage or entice more learners to participate regularly? Yeah, it's actually, you know, going back, I I don't know when I cut off, and I apologize for that. But it's actually going back and encouraging people to keep their cameras on. We also make use of the thanks, Randall. Yes. Bribes do work well. We also make use of all the emoticons that you can use in Zoom, like raise a hand or make a reaction. And we also find that sending people to breakout rooms frequently to make them work in small groups, either one on one or two or three or four. Five is about the biggest that will make a breakout room. Also really helps people engage in a different way. They may be more comfortable to talk in a smaller group than they are in the plenary session if you have somebody who's a bit more introverted. And so we find that breakout rooms also really help with engagement. And it's less of a, it's more on the individual learners. Like if they know they have to work in their individual room, especially if it's on one on one, you kind of have to show up. Okay, well that's great. And can virtual learning replace traditional learning methods outright? What do you think? I think it's inevitable that we're going to have something that's different but does the same job. I think virtual learning work is virtual work, and in person work is in person work. I think at the end of the day, we all want our learners to come away with understanding of what it is that we're trying to get across to them. So I don't think we would if we were designing a virtual course from the ground up, we certainly wouldn't design it in the same way as we were an in person class. So that we want to really find a way to engage our learners in the virtual environment with the same impact and outcome that we would in an in person environment, but understand that virtual is just different. And so we need different tools and processes in the virtual environment. Well thank you very much, Tom. And Tanya, thank you. We are out of time, and I appreciate you going over a little bit. Hope we've answered most of the questions. By the way, I've just uploaded the chat. All the chat that's occurred right up until now is there in the handouts pod for you to download if you'd like to have them. So Tom and Tanya, hope we can have you back again. More brainstorming exercises and so forth. We'll have to ask Experience Point to make a point of doing that. Now I'll provide everybody a link to some of our past webinars with Experience Point and with Tom. So thank you very much everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Tom, Tanya, any final words? Just thank you, Apologies for the technology blip. Happens, we all know, and I was a victim of it today. So great to be with you, Gary. So much appreciate your help. Thank you. Very good. Well, next time maybe we'll turn on the webcams that are available in Adobe Connect so that we could have that same experience. Good. Thank you very much again everybody for coming and Tom and Tanya and Experience Point. And Katrina thanks for pulling all this together. Hope you all have a great day. We'll look forward to seeing you next time. Speaking of Zoom, there's a great webinar with Ray Jimenez at noon Pacific today. That's in two hours. If you haven't already registered before, you should go to Training Mag Network, get registered and prepare to log in. We'll see you all pretty soon. Take care everyone.