25 years of meeting software: from Fata Morgana to “Silver bullet” Meetingwizard 4.0.

Yuri Bobbert PhD and Hans Mulder PhD | March 15, 2021

Meeting “fatigue”
Kayser defined meetings as “a gathering where people speak up, say nothing, and then all disagree” . The effectiveness of meetings has been widely described worldwide.

Clear lack of efficient control, balanced involvement of participants and the law of decibels, chaotic meetings that lead to frustration. Frustrations because people feel unheard or are annoyed by people who talk a lot but say little. Or because they are irritated by managers who obstruct the problem analysis and thus frustrate good quality decision-making.

Core tasks of the facilitator:
- Prepare, determine and stick to the agenda.
- Stimulate a “free flow” discussion.
- Facilitate all participants to provide input.
- Clarify everyone's insights and points of view.
- Address difficult subjects (elephants in the room).
- Ensure participants to stay 'on track' in the discussion.
- Ensure that the response is captured in the GSS system.

To overcome these difficulties in group work, group support systems were designed. In the 1990s. Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) had the primary purpose of facilitating decision making. One of the leading GDSS was MeetingWorks. MeetingWorks was created by Kathryn and Neil Lamka from Seattle (USA), who based the design of the work of Professor Floyd Lewis, PhD. Lewis published his PhD thesis 'Facilitator: a microcomputer decision support system for small groups' in 1982. In 1996 Hans Mulder, Aad van der Niet and Ed van der Pijl introduced Meetingworks in Europe.

The downside of this second generation of group support systems was:
- Technical knowledge to operate the system is a barrier.
- Having a local network of desktops (later laptops and iPads) makes participating from another place or time zone difficult, if not impossible.
- The group size is often limited by the size of the room, the number of laptops and / or the number of simultaneous sessions.

From GDSS to GSSIn the 2000s, the third generation of GDSS was developed in the scientific and business domain. In 2013 Gert Jan de Vreede and Gwendolyn Kolfschoten published a ground-breaking paper, namely ‘15 years of GSS research in the field; “A comparison of time and national borders”’. They researched hundreds of organizations regarding the effects of GSS on team outcomes, satisfaction and time savings.

Is GSS 4.0 the Silver Bullet?GSS allows people to work in parallel and to see the contributions of other participants (group memory). Unlike manual face-to-face meetings where only one person can speak at a time and the other participants listen and wait for the speaker to finish, GSS enables parallel communication by allowing participants to work simultaneously. The new generation of GSS software (version 4.0) is cloud based and supports multiple devices and offers “Security by design” and “facilitator in a box”.

Facilitator in a boxIn the article “The Fata Morgana of Group Support Systems” the authors Gwendolyn Kolfschoten, Hans Mulder and Erik Proper explore the different generations and forms of collaboration tools. This article describes the limitations and possibilities of new generation GSS software and formed an important basis for the redesign of the GSS software Meetingwizard. For example, the need for technical training in GSS for facilitators was still a barrier to the widespread adoption of GSS within government and industry. Eliminating this limitation was the motivation the redesign Meetingwizard. An important concept introduced by the authors of the article is “Facilitator in a box”. This concept is based on the design principle that the GSS software should be as simple as possible to use so that everyone understands it.

You can easily create an agenda in the user-friendly interface of the latest version of Meetingwizard. A “library” allows the facilitator to import standard pre-defined agenda such as a SWOT analysis, risk analysis or a agile sprint retrospective. This also changes the role of the facilitator, he / she can pay more attention to the participants and their input instead of operating the tools. Meetingwizard works seamlessly with video conferencing software. This library function can be viewed here.

A practical example of Prof. Yuri Bobbert: I experienced the power of the new generation Meetingwizard software myself during my 25 focus group sessions in 2020. I wanted to use customer input for innovation and capture this input from participants around the world in one database (group memory). By using the new generation of group support software I was able to give more attention to the participants and as a facilitator I hardly had to worry about the tool. During these sessions I also used multiple visualization tools such as PowerPoint and MIRO. And through COVID19 I did all this through conference tools such as ZOOM or Microsoft teams.

The newest generation of GSS software, such as Meetingwizard, supports concepts such as “double loop learning” and ‘estafette’, a concept in which the knowledge from the first group is passed on to the next group and so on. As in a relay race, the best outcome is achieved by having multiple perspectives (multiple groups, people) when assessing the matter and, through the collective brain of the group, leads to better results.

Double loop learning requires more than just one iteration. One iteration is possible with tools such as Mentimeter, Polls or Zoom Poll, but several iterations on the same data set are limited. We see a need for several rounds of brainstorming, organizing and decisions making in for example the mediation process in which two or more parties try to achieve the ultimate goal of consensus. The use of Meetingwizard in combination with Zoom and Teams can be seen here.

In addition, partly due to COVID19, collaboration in distributed teams “different time, different place” has become the new normal. If we look at the major advantages of technology such as Meetingwizard (cloud-based GSS) with these trends, we can conclude that the following shortcomings from previous years are largely overcome by the new generation of GSS systems:

- Virtually no specialist is needed anymore to facilitate a basic meeting with GSS software. Soft competencies as described in part 1 remain in force, taking this checklist to heart before you start a GSS session may be sufficient. The simplicity of the technology enables a user of any Meetingwizard.
- Virtually no technical system knowledge is needed anymore to operate GSS tooling. Just like an iPhone, the Meetingwizard interface is super user-friendly and pleasant due to minimal buttons, clear instructions and pleasant visualisations. Generating a report has never been easier.
- You can participate in a meeting, research or acceleration room anywhere in the world from any device (telephone, laptop, iPad). Thanks to highly scalable and secure cloud technology, many parallel sessions can be run, and one is no longer limited in space, device or simultaneous sessions.

Is this new generation GSS software a silver bullet? You can try the Meetingwizard 4.0 now a month free of charge and without obligations.

Request your free license here: https://www.meetingwizard.nl/en/pricing.

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