2023 Experiment Details

Current Phase: Scheduling 

Background

We are experimenting to learn:

• How might we best engage teams in creative problem solving?
• Can we achieve equally awesome results when meeting online? In-person? In hybrid environments?
• What are the differences in the quality of the results we can achieve in each setting?
• What might we discover when diverse teams all follow the same meeting process?

Teams from around the world are signing up to run the experiment. Our goal is to gather data from 500 meetings.

Here’s the plan.

The Groups

• Each group will consist of 5-24 participants, 1 facilitator, and 1 support person.
• The facilitator selects whether the group will meet online, in-person, or hybrid.
• Participants must be 18 years or older.
• Participants must be comfortable communicating in English.
• Participants must consent to being recorded.
• Individuals can participate in ONE experiment meeting, and may facilitate/support many experiments.
• Groups may consist of intact work teams, community members, or public volunteers.
• Facilitators participate in an experiment and attend a mandatory orientation before leading the experiment.

The Challenges

Groups will work with one of three challenge statements related to global sustainability and the future of work.

Experiment facilitators see the challenge in advance, but participants do not. 

The Meeting Process

Groups will be assigned one of two possible meeting processes. Each process takes roughly 90 minutes:

• 15 minutes: Complete consent forms, pre-meeting surveys, and tech check
• 60 minutes: Run a scripted creative problem-solving meeting
• 15 minutes: Complete post-meeting surveys and distribute debrief materials

The Data

Experiment data will include anonymized survey results and audio/video recordings, hosted on secure servers supervised by Reiter-Palmon, PhD and Joe Allen, PhD.

The data collected will cover topics such as:

• Meeting configuration: the process, setting, and technology in use
• Group type: volunteer, intact team, community, etc.
• Individual ratings for meeting satisfaction, psychological safety, meeting load, and demographics
• Meeting content: the ideas generated during the meeting
• Audio and/or video recordings

Data Access

The advisors and premier partners will conduct an initial analysis and share high-level experiment results at a hybrid festival in early 2024. Then, the corpus will be made openly available for additional research inquiries.

Access to video and audio recordings will be dependent on the availability of funding and/or qualified volunteers who can complete initial coding of these files.

Authorship and sharing guidelines will be provided to ensure all contributors are represented in the appropriate manner.

Organizations hosting 5 or more experiment groups may request a private report summarizing results from these groups. Administrative fees apply.

Privacy and Security

• Survey data will be de-personalized and anonymized as part of the research preparation process. Authorized research teams will work with anonymized data when conducting their analysis.
• All publicly distributed reports and publications will share aggregated and anonymized information. So, for example, the report might show that 50% of hybrid teams rated their meetings as super awesome, but wouldn’t show ratings from any one team.
• The experiment topics are not specific to your organization nor designed to discuss sensitive issues. Instead, experiment teams will discuss challenges with broad societal implications that are intended to be interesting, but not controversial or political. This reduces the risk of anyone saying something that would cause problems should it leave the room.
• Data will be stored in encrypted, password-protected servers. People with access will include a known list of researchers who are all certified in the ethical treatment of research data.

Possible Risks:

• Individual people and locations may be identifiable from video recordings. These recordings will only be available to researchers; they will not be shown publicly.
• We could be hacked before all the data is scrubbed for identifying information.
• People on your teams could share something with others publicly that you’d rather they didn’t. This is an inherent risk to every meeting.