In my podcast I recently talked about my purpose to starting using virtual worlds together with my customers as a platform for collaboration to reduce the need of real-life meetings. In this podcast I elaborated which meetings I usually do with my clients, which of them I could do in a virtual world and which requirements those meetings would have.

One of these meetings are brainstormings. The last week I started to do some experiments with Qwaq and had a first client, who was determined to do a brainstorming within Qwaq about how (or even if) we could use virtual worlds for those kind of meetings and we came up with the conclusion, that it could really have some great advantages compared to a real-life meetings - even apart from avoiding traveling!

Small Introduction and Six Hats

In the past ten years I have done hundreds of brainstormings (or other kinds of group meetings) in real-life, know at least a dozen different methods to do them and therefore have a lot of own experiences how the conditions must be within a group, so that it really works.

We all have this brainstorming experiences, in which we sit in a conference room, nobody is really motivated, everybody has “more important” things in his mind and when you start brainstorming, it quickly happens that you step in the trap to start discussing and criticizing way to early.

People quickly become demotivated, disappointed or even start “trolling” your meeting and it is lost. What do you do in real-life to avoid those situations?

First of all you of course work with a moderator, who knows some nice methods and who explains the rules before the meeting and who tries to actively moderate, so that the risk of a fruitless meeting is reduced. But even with a moderator the mood within the group can tip over into a non constructive and non creative situation.

Another way to further more support a brainstorming is parallel thinking. That means that the whole group passes through different phases, which is representative for different thinking strategies. Edward de Bono has developed the Six Hats method, which you can not only apply for brainstormings, but also for all kind of other group discussions.

To come back to virtual worlds: What we came up with during our first experiments is that virtual worlds are perfect environments to strengthen the positive effects of the Six Hats methods.

Six Hats explained briefly

Let me briefly explain you the Six Hats method. First of all - forget the hats - it’s just a metaphor for different roles or phases. The idea is that the whole group passes through six different phases, which are all representative for different thinking strategies. Every “hat” has a different color:

• White hat (Blank sheet): Information & reports, facts and figures (objective)
• Red hat (Fire): Intuition, opinion & emotion, feelings (subjective)
• Black hat (Judge’s robe): Criticism, judgment, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)
  
• Yellow hat (Sun): Praise, positive aspects, why it will work (objective)
• Green hat (Plant): Creativeness, Alternatives, new approaches & ‘everything goes’, idea generation & provocations (speculative/creative)
• Blue hat (Sky): “Big Picture,” “Conductor hat,” “Meta hat,” “thinking about thinking”, overall process (overview)

What I have done in real-life in the past was to make a presentation which had six different charts, all with a different background color and the name of the respective phase in the center. Having just this chart displayed in the meeting room was an easy tool to make everybody aware of the phase we are actually in - and of which role everybody has to play now.

The positive effects of this method is, that everybody quickly learns what every color means and starts to behave in the right way. It’s even pretty close to role-play, which in this case is really an positive effect and supports to think very extensively about the topic.

Six Hats in a Virtual Worlds

The idea we now came up with was to use the possibilities of a virtual world to interpret this colors in a three dimensional way. Therefore we started thinking about which locations/scenarios would also represent the different colors and thinking strategies.

White (objective)

An infinite white room with a few chairs in the middle and a whiteboard. (remember Matrix?) The room is absolutely silent, clean and nothing is there which diverts you. Everybody starts to concentrate, is focused on what we want to do and we can start thinking together.

Red (subjective)

A living room. Very cosy and intimate, a fireplace in the corner, some bottles of good wine on table, nice background music and everybody sits in armchairs, lies on the sofa or even on the bearskin in front of the fireplace.

Well, we thought about a place in which it would be easier to talk about emotions, where you feel comfortable and also would speak more openly in real-life. It should be a situation to make it everybody easy to speak about the emotions.

Black (objective)

We all immediately thought of a court in which everybody can stand up like the public prosecutor, to tell the jury what the negative aspects of this topics are.

We thought that the metaphor of a court comes really close to what should happen in this phase and this metaphor and the public prosecutor role-play also support the way of thinking you need in this phase.

Yellow (objective)

The Yellow phase is the one in which it usually get’s pretty funny, because everybody has the role to praise the ideas you had and to find the positive aspects. We decided to chose a beach/holiday scenario, where we can sit all together (or even dance together) at the beach, watching the sunrise at the horizon and praise the awesome ideas we had.

Green (speculative/creative)

Of course we thought here of a very green, nature, outdoor environment like a forrest. Maybe a small glade inside a forrest, where you can get together (after the exhausting dance at the beach) and start to think again in a very creative way about what you have talked before. Find new approaches, new ideas and so on.

The environment is very fresh, lively, everybody can walk around, maybe search for a nice place to be alone for a few minutes or do whatever he needs to do to come up with a few new thoughts.

Blue (overview)

The roof garden of a skyscraper in New York City. You have an awesome overview over the whole city and it gives you the feeling of being above all the things you have discussed so far. It’s time to get everything together and watch everything from a meta-perspective.

Well - that’s basically it and I can imagine that you also get now a better idea of the advantages of a virtual world in this case.

The Advantages

The six different colors of the hats are of course already a metaphor, which should support the respective thinking strategies. But it’s still pretty abstract and maybe to far away for some of the group members.

Extending this metaphor in a three dimensional environment in which people immerse and are even present with a avatar, helps people to understand the phase they are in and it helps to get started with this role-play.

With using this virtual environments we try to use existing conditionings from real-life situations to get people quicker into the respective mood, to make them behave appropriate and to avoid disturbing the meeting, by jumping from one phase to another.

The virtual world enables us to “leave” our desks during that meeting and to visit virtual places which helps us to be more creative, objective, subjective - to praise ideas, to criticize them and to get in the end a top-level few on them  in an appropriate way. It also helps switching between those phases, which sometimes is quite difficult for some of the group members. 

Therefore I would not only say, that virtual worlds can be a great way to avoid traveling for attending meetings - but even more, that they can be a great way to do group meetings in general, because they can solve a lot of problems, which especially occur, when a group sits together in one boring meeting room.

Well - this experiment will for sure be continued. For me the next step will be to really think more about creating those environments in an for those meetings apropriate world.