I feel I need to make again and again this argument.
I am getting upset seeing whiteboards in meeting rooms. Whiteboards are making any meeting/conference room remote unfriendly.
This realization first happen almost 10 yrs year ago, when the ceo of my company, right after I returned back from my annual vacation to my home country, greeted me with a smile telling me (thinking that he took an initiative that all engineers would love) that he installed wall to wall whiteboards in all the conference rooms so as I can stop writing on the walls with markers ( i had done that). I tried to fake a smile and a thank you saddened with the realization that we just made one more major step backwards in my efforts to make our "head-quarters" more remote friendly.
Remember how many times you have been in a meeting room with a few remote people on the hangout when one of the "local" people, often the manager. gets up, grabs the marker and tries to illustrate a point on a whiteboard, or even worse try to present a whole idea/solution by sketching it out on the whiteboard.
So, whats wrong with that? Let me count the ways
1. the remote people cant see what you are writing
2. the speaker moves away from the mic and he becomes harder to hear
3. the rest of the people on the table turn away their faces from the mic making them harder to hear harder to see
4. attempts to keep the remotes in sync (taking photos and sharing links, pushes the remotes out of the active loop at best - they can no longer be active participants in the discussion
5. remote people cannot grab the marker and do what the local people can, they are second grade citizens. they can not "sketchout" "present" their solutions. They have no whiteboard
6. the local team is trained at looking at a whiteboard as opposed to an online real time collaborative document
7. the only way for the remote team to get access to this important information is to ask the local team to remember and get a photo. They are at their mercy
8. in heated discussions there is no better way to establish " I speak now" status but to get up and wait and then grab the marker.. even if you just intent to point to the whiteboard (or write unintelligible scribbles - my favorites) Remote people, who always find it harder to jump in, be heard, cannot "grab the marker". Again they resort to a listening role.
9. the person that often uses the whiteboard is a person of a certain authority - which means the remote people wont even complain every time this happens
I can keep in going on for ever on this.
But my cofounder would say.... I love white-boarding. I cannot even think of a group or solo brainstorming session without a whiteboard. (he even considered/tried to do a startup for a better digital whiteboard at some point). So my position (throwing whiteboards to the junkyards) was either an anathema or just another argument in the direction "Ok. lets stop using whiteboards for the benefits of remote work and make the rest of us less productive in the process".
So several years later - I find it so surprising how easily we got to believe that lie that we actually need sth that we don't.
Whiteboards are as needed for brainstorming as the smell and feel of real paper is needed when you want to write a long essay. They are just a problematic habit in the outopian new all-remote world, they are a paper book whose place is on a fake bookcase they are a horse in the highway.
It has been years since I have used a whiteboard. And definitely I have not stopped brainstorming. And I have done that in spite of still having lots of whiteboards around me still littering the walls with dried up ink and markers. Group brainstorming happens in hangouts where everyone presents both camera and screen. My whiteboard is my own laptop's shared screen , where I hop around a webpage to showcase designs issues, or a spreadsheet to show cells, or a google doc where both me and others are often typing and talking over each other. My solo whiteboard was evernote and is now workflowy, my newest toy, allowing my to capture my infinitely nested bullet-list thinking.
Whiteboards are dead and the world is much better from it.
Now I said it :-)
I am getting upset seeing whiteboards in meeting rooms. Whiteboards are making any meeting/conference room remote unfriendly.
This realization first happen almost 10 yrs year ago, when the ceo of my company, right after I returned back from my annual vacation to my home country, greeted me with a smile telling me (thinking that he took an initiative that all engineers would love) that he installed wall to wall whiteboards in all the conference rooms so as I can stop writing on the walls with markers ( i had done that). I tried to fake a smile and a thank you saddened with the realization that we just made one more major step backwards in my efforts to make our "head-quarters" more remote friendly.
Remember how many times you have been in a meeting room with a few remote people on the hangout when one of the "local" people, often the manager. gets up, grabs the marker and tries to illustrate a point on a whiteboard, or even worse try to present a whole idea/solution by sketching it out on the whiteboard.
So, whats wrong with that? Let me count the ways
1. the remote people cant see what you are writing
2. the speaker moves away from the mic and he becomes harder to hear
3. the rest of the people on the table turn away their faces from the mic making them harder to hear harder to see
4. attempts to keep the remotes in sync (taking photos and sharing links, pushes the remotes out of the active loop at best - they can no longer be active participants in the discussion
5. remote people cannot grab the marker and do what the local people can, they are second grade citizens. they can not "sketchout" "present" their solutions. They have no whiteboard
6. the local team is trained at looking at a whiteboard as opposed to an online real time collaborative document
7. the only way for the remote team to get access to this important information is to ask the local team to remember and get a photo. They are at their mercy
8. in heated discussions there is no better way to establish " I speak now" status but to get up and wait and then grab the marker.. even if you just intent to point to the whiteboard (or write unintelligible scribbles - my favorites) Remote people, who always find it harder to jump in, be heard, cannot "grab the marker". Again they resort to a listening role.
9. the person that often uses the whiteboard is a person of a certain authority - which means the remote people wont even complain every time this happens
I can keep in going on for ever on this.
But my cofounder would say.... I love white-boarding. I cannot even think of a group or solo brainstorming session without a whiteboard. (he even considered/tried to do a startup for a better digital whiteboard at some point). So my position (throwing whiteboards to the junkyards) was either an anathema or just another argument in the direction "Ok. lets stop using whiteboards for the benefits of remote work and make the rest of us less productive in the process".
So several years later - I find it so surprising how easily we got to believe that lie that we actually need sth that we don't.
Whiteboards are as needed for brainstorming as the smell and feel of real paper is needed when you want to write a long essay. They are just a problematic habit in the outopian new all-remote world, they are a paper book whose place is on a fake bookcase they are a horse in the highway.
It has been years since I have used a whiteboard. And definitely I have not stopped brainstorming. And I have done that in spite of still having lots of whiteboards around me still littering the walls with dried up ink and markers. Group brainstorming happens in hangouts where everyone presents both camera and screen. My whiteboard is my own laptop's shared screen , where I hop around a webpage to showcase designs issues, or a spreadsheet to show cells, or a google doc where both me and others are often typing and talking over each other. My solo whiteboard was evernote and is now workflowy, my newest toy, allowing my to capture my infinitely nested bullet-list thinking.
Whiteboards are dead and the world is much better from it.
Now I said it :-)
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