Global Flipchart #12

By Zena-Gabrielle Hailu

Ten participants in a meeting room in Cotonou, Benin. One participant in Bogotá, Columbia. One in New York. Two in separate offices in Tbilisi, Georgia, and one in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Ninety minutes to exchange good practices on the topic of applying the human rights approach in a systemic manner throughout the participants’ organisations. I might have to facilitate such a meeting from my home office in Cologne, Germany, without having met any of the participants face-to-face.

Facilitating online is a learning-by-doing process for me these days, and I am thankful for the multiple online and print resources that are helping me with the technical and group dynamic aspects of facilitating in a virtual space, in an intercultural context, in different time zones.

But I found myself having to go through a reframing process in order to facilitate online without losing my patience within the first five minutes of a meeting. My frustration was linked to what I pictured in my mind as I facilitated. I imagined myself and the participants in a virtual room set up much the same way as a room in physical space. And then some technical glitch would force its way into that room in my head, and I suddenly found myself thrown back into my office, feeling cut off from my participants, and angry I couldn’t run the facilitation in the same way as a face-to-face meeting.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy helped me to reframe my perception of virtual facilitation. The trilogy is set in the distant future, in an area of space conquered by the Ratch Empire. The story describes how Breq seeks justice for a wrong committed to her twenty years in the past. Breq is an ancillary - a human from one of the civilizations conquered by the Ratch Empire. She has received implants which connect her to a ship’s AI, turning her into an extension of the ship’s consciousness.

In Leckie’s books, ships and space stations are also connected to their non-ancillary inhabitants through AI implants. Both the ships and stations care for and protect their inhabitants, regardless of whether the inhabitants happen to physically be present or in another space/time.

The idea of the AI implants bored its way into me as I read the trilogy. A few weeks ago, I found myself facilitating a virtual meeting. And something clicked into place. I couldn’t name it. I felt sharper, more present somehow. I enjoyed the meeting.

I reflected on the facilitation later with a colleague. “What was different this time?” she asked. “I’ve translated the idea of the AI implant somehow,” I said. “In my mind, the implant has become a metaphor for virtual connection. I don’t visualise that one imaginary meeting room anymore. Instead, what I see is a network of people in their own versions of space and time, connected through technology.”

From technology as a separator to technology as a connector, that is the reframe that is giving me the agility I need to facilitate virtual meetings. Participants feel the change in my attitude and virtual meetings are a lot more fun. Of course, the glitches still pop up. But when don’t they in facilitation and in life?