• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I spent the past weekend attending a conference that I had helped to plan. As is now often the case, this was a hybrid conference; you could choose to attend in person or online via Zoom. Although it involved a long plane ride, I choose to attend in person. It could be because -- as a planner -- I wanted to see how the event played out. Also, it’s been a long time since I attended a conference away from my home. Or maybe it was just FOMO.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I was there, in the room.

This was a very small conference planned on a shoestring budget. We didn’t have money for extensive IT support or AV equipment. We were dependent solely on a laptop and whatever sound equipment our host was able to supply.

We knew going into the conference that this would make for a less-than-ideal experience for those attending virtually. Even accounting for that, I found there was a huge gap in the quality of the experience between those who were there and those attending online.

After the past two days, carefully observing what was happening in the room we were all in, I have a better understanding of what virtual attendees missed out on: the vague and inexact art of creating a real bond with another person.

The bonding didn’t happen at the speaking podium and very seldom happened during the sessions we so carefully planned. It seeped in on the sidelines, over warmed-over coffee from conference center urns, overripe bananas and the detritus of the picked-over pastry tray. The bonding came from all of us sharing and digesting a common experience. You could feel a palpable energy in the room. You read the body language and tune in to the full bandwidth of communication that went far beyond what could be transmitted between an onboard microphone and a webcam.

But it wasn’t just the sharing of the experience that created the bonds. It was the digesting of those experiences after the fact. We humans are herding animals, and that extends to how we come to consensus about things we go through together. We do so through communication with others – not just with words and gesture, but also through the full bandwidth of our evolved mechanisms for coming to a collective understanding. It wasn’t just that a camera and microphone couldn’t transmit that effectively, it was that it happened where there was no camera or mic.

As researchers have discovered, there is a lived reality and a remembered reality and often, they don’t look very much alike. This is due to how our evolved sense-making mechanisms operate. We make sense of reality both internally, through a comparison with our existing cognitive models, and externally, through interacting with others around us who have shared that same reality. This communal give-and-take colors what we take with us, in the form of both memories and an updated model of what we know and believe. When it comes to how humans are built, collective sense-making is a feature, not a bug.

I came away from that conference with much more than the content that was shared on the speaker dais. I also came away with a handful of new relationships, built on sharing an experience -- and, through that, laying down the first foundations of trust and familiarity. I would not hesitate to reach out to any of these new friends if I had a question about something, or a project I felt they could collaborate on.

I think that’s true largely because I was in the room where it happened.