The Future Of Meetings (TFOM) is a group exploring how technology is changing the ways we meet one another.
I met the group recently for a pair of discussions held in Walkabout Mini Golf and gleaned some insights about the evolution of meetings from ancient times, when humans gathered around a fire to eat and talk, to modern day meetups organized via calendaring across time zones or held in VR.
Across 46 minutes, organizer Vanessa Moss and I discuss the value of “digital first” meetings and the ways people can be disadvantaged by wearing a headset or trying to join a meeting in multiple ways. Moss points out that the “this isn’t a solved problem, it’s an exploratory space…people often say online meetings, they’re so awful…we’re still trying to figure out what the etiquette is, like a lot of different companies, organizations are trying to come up with these rules of engagement. We’ve had like tens of thousands of years to figure out in person and arguably we’re still kind of bad at it sometimes, right? So yeah, online technologies are something that are still very exploratory…there’s excitement in the unknown.”
