Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
One difference between in person and video calls interaction is, a video call is a performance. This is better explained in Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman, but let me attempt.Imagine a TV show where a political candidate is asked a question, and instead of answering, he remains silent. The camera pans on him and zooms in. 3.5 seconds later, we switch to a close up from the camera on the left. The guest is still silent. 3.5 seconds later, the camera switches to the host who is also starting to look confused. A whole 11 seconds has gone by and the guest is still silent, his eyes looking up. Right before the host is about to halt things and go on a commercial break, the guest breaks his silence with a single word. "No".Even without knowing what the actual question was, you know this candidate is not going to win the race. It was a bad performance. But what if I tell you, he was asked a difficult question that he hadn't thought of before, and he took all of 15 seconds to consider it before giving a sound answer?That's the problem with video, any time spent thinking on screen can be perceived as  incompetence. 3.5 seconds is the average length of a shot on TV. And it makes silence look awfully long. Brainstorming requires doing some silent thinking.In my previous job, I used to spend hours in a conference room with my colleague after we had plotted our plan on the whiteboard. Then, we would just sit down and look at the board in silence for long period of times. With the occasional "what if... no never mind." When covid hit, we tried to do that via zoom. Didn't work.Silence does not work well on camera.