Live vs. Online Creative Work
By Peter LloydContrary to common sense or, more accurately, contrary to our current prejudices, collaborating online might be even more effective than doing so in person. Early adopters of online collaboration have known this for years. And now academic research has caught up and taken notice.
In “Web-Based Creativity: Can Working in Virtual Communities Be More Effective Than Face-to-Face Cooperation?” Science Daily reports on the work of Piet Kommers of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. The article reports “growing evidence that working in virtual communities and using online tools together can be even more effective in some areas than face-to-face cooperation.”
In this age when so many people have shifted so much of their social lives to online networks and mobile media, it’s no wonder that businesses have moved to reach them there. New product developers have learned to collaborate with their customers and already do much of their work online. Marketers stage their consumer research online and then reach their target markets with digital media and interactive relationships in place of traditional advertising and public relations.
The creative people who create everything from products to promotions have been brainstorming online, generating ideas, as well as evaluating and selecting them online. They’ve found that online collaboration trumps its live rival in many ways. But before we abandon the heat and volume of the live brainstorming session, let’s compare the virtues and drawbacks of live vs. online idea generation and problem solving practices.
Since you have to get the ideas before you use them to solve a problem, let’s look at idea generation first.
Idea Generation Live and Online
Online brainstorming cannot deliver the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. Live brainstormers give each other instant feedback. Your live facilitator and session experts can provide instant answers to spontaneous questions from other brainstormers, experts, and the facilitator. It’s not easy to beat the excitement of a well run live brainstorming session. But let’s count the drawbacks.
Like all live meetings live idea sessions immediately introduce scheduling issues. Online sessions like Brainline allow all participants to generate ideas when they have the time and the inclination to work.
All of us do some of our best thinking alone. Not all of us are at our creative best when a particular brainstorming session happens to be scheduled. So an online session not only collects the work of people who shine when working alone, it also includes the work of those who shy away from live sessions. Some shy away for good reason. Without expert facilitation live sessions can end up showcasing the wizardry of your most vocal players and shut down those who don’t speak up around big creative egos. As a private activity, an online session eliminates the negative influence of those who tend to dominate or even silence others in lives sessions.
Even the most vocal will hold back their most outrageous ideas in front of their peers and superiors. In online sessions that keep participants anonymous, everyone participates more freely and contributes ideas they might be afraid to offer in a live session. All ideas stand on equal ground with no preference or disadvantage attached to them due to the rank of the person who submitted them. In “Tainted Innovation, Tempting Innovation” Drew Boyd summarizes research of Tanya Menon at the University of Chicago and writes, “An idea stands a better chance of surviving if it is not attributed to the individual who conceived it.”
All online ideas are recorded, nothing gets lost in the idea free-for-all, and every participant can see every idea entered. Good online facilitators encourage all players to build on the ideas already submitted.
While live online sessions cannot deliver live clues such as body language and vocal inflection, you can design them to include synchronous phases that, with the right exercises, deliver much of the excitement, stimulation, and instant response of an online game.
Finally, you can introduce creative people from all around the world in your online sessions with no travel expense. You can hire experts, creative outsiders, and even crowdsource ideas from the general public or specific sectors of your target market.
Problem Solving Live and Online
Brainstorming session, live or online, end when a sufficient number of ideas have been generated. The real work begins when you have to use the pile of raw ideas to begin solving a problem.
The same dynamics of work for idea-generation apply to solving problems online. The second just happens to be a lot more complex and often requires highly specialized creative experts.
You can introduce all kinds of problem solvers, expert or naive genius, to your live or online session. But again, the online alternative lets you do so without hiring anyone or bringing them from their base to your problem-solving site.
Finding the right problem solvers, training them to work online, scheduling them, and transporting them comes with all sorts of headaches and expense. That’s why you might want to turn to a group like IdeaConnection to do all that for you.
We’re still some ways from the days when absolutely everything happens online. In the meantime, weigh the alternatives before you commit to live or online work.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.