Zoom-ing Is Like Driving
This blog is about my experience of facilitating an online research project: Sexuality Education through Systems Practice (SESP) from March to June 2020
Hesitantly and without complete preparation, I held an online learning space for the past four months. The purpose was to explore the landscape of sexuality education in India using tools of systems mapping. It started before COVID became as serious, and yet, because the team who had agreed to join me in this exploration were living in 5 different states of the country, we ended up practicing this form of zoom-team-work a few months before it became the trend.
Some of the lessons that unwrapped in front of me, helped me develop skills of online facilitation, face the trivial-looking-but-humungous challenges of doing so, and also continuously tackle them with the help of authentic feedback from my team members and experienced guidance from some awesome mentors from the world of facilitation. I am not going to keep this as the punch line for later – we did complete the process, and this is the end of the road from where I am speaking.
I was not giving my team-members any certification on sexuality education, no monetary compensation or even any kind of wisdom/knowledge from my tiny frame of experience. It was only a space where everyone was coming with their personal goals in mind. My promise was of holding the space and learning with them. But ensuring a continued participation while not dragging anyone to the endpoint, was a very difficult challenge. I just had to drive the vehicle and if anyone willed to get off in the middle of the journey, I would have to let go. If we got lost on the way, I’d have to keep driving until we were found again. If we ran out of gas, I’d have to take care of refueling before the vehicle died down. And when the only thing I was providing was the driving, I had to learn good driving to be able to do it!
I better be a silent Uber driver
In this online space, keeping everyone constantly present was very difficult. Whatsapp was the medium that was chosen to communicate and my long messages on the group with all the plans, summaries of meetings and nudges, were mostly left on ‘read’. Were people not in sync with me? Was whatsapp the wrong medium of communication?I remember once one of the team members had even talked about this with me personally. They expressed how the energy and motivation might just die down if no one replies. I tried to make the messages more entertaining, used video messages, audio messages and pictures to keep it alive, and the responses were just as rare with only the needful confirmations. Eventually, I let it go and left it upon time to fix it for our group. What happened was, I became used to the silence. Now the whatsapp group is a unidirectional forum where people put up whatever they have got and no one replies to anyone as much. It’s uncomfortable initially, but becomes the norm. And though it sounds like a failure, I don’t feel like it was. It’s okay if people are not responding. They are receiving and not being held accountable to reply. It was sort of relieving. Perhaps that was the kind of driver I had to be. The silent Uber driver who is not asking you to constantly engage with them in a conversation.
Shifting seats in a travelling vehicle
The time the team devoted was a gift, for themselves and us altogether. Everyone was coming from different spaces and I would hardly be able to hold on to their presence if I pulled on them too much. We started with 5 core members and 3 peripheral supporters, but ended up in exactly the opposite proportion with 3 of us becoming core and 5 becoming peripheral. Even from the 5 peripheral members 3 of them had gone so far out of the circle that I was only politely inviting them for two months with no-show. And yet, their presence did make the team intact, none of them left the whatsapp group and just stayed in the process in whatever role possible. Having that presence was actually keeping us accountable to complete our tasks, they were watching and they were hoping too.
Rules for the road
We set out with some foundational values that should have been followed throughout the entire time, only talked about it in the first month and somehow some unsaid values replaced them over the course of the subsequent months. Of the many that did survive, let me write about a few that proved crucial to hold us together. Authenticity survived with everyone being completely true to the process and content with what they came with. Humour survived, where we all became quite comfortable laughing with each other. Respect for each-other’s time developed where we all tried to be present in the meetings and not causing a clash of all times by giving reasons for being unavailable.
“Omg Omg, we’ve taken the wrong turn!”
There was a time mid-May when I felt like the road was becoming extremely foggy. There were two things that were happening with the team. First, we had made a big mistake in the route to our destination. We had taken the wrong road and ended up being lost. And at the same time there was a flood of online sessions that were being offered for lockdown-sufferers. This created a sort of an online-sessions fatigue. I didn’t want to attend sessions anymore, let alone hold them. It reflected in my dumbing down effort of decorating our online meetings with games or beautiful slide decks. It was just the right time to take a break from our process. We decided to re-start after a week. Frankly, I feared that this break would be the end of our project. What if none of us recovered from this? What if everyone became disinterested and demotivated during the break? But I think something brought us all back and I would like to believe that it was our connections with each other that did it for us.
Singing along the way and becoming road-trip buddies!
Over the 16 two-hour sessions we had already done by then, we had developed a connected web which provided us with a safe space to talk and work together in the self-quarantine times. Our check-ins were becoming more open for everyone to talk about the week’s highs and lows, and it was being missed in this break. I needed us to come back together even if we still had no idea about reaching our destination. That motivated me to gear up and start driving again. One of the teammates then did something wonderful. They figured out where we had gone wrong. The break became the opposite of what I feared. Just identifying that mis-step helped to retrace back to that point and start again.
Am I supposed to keep driving, when everyone else seems to be enjoying the wind from the windows?
Often I would be sitting in front of the laptop listening to my teammates talk to each other, make fun of each other, share some joy together or go into depths of their experiences, and I felt the weight of being the one who would be steering the vehicle back onto the main road when we did trail off in these diversions. But it was difficult, sometimes I would just be listening intently, not wanting to be the one to steer us back. The wheel was in my control. When I did let us trail off completely into the woods, we had suddenly started talking about a deep-experience which was closely related to the topic of sexuality. Then in a minute of pondering in the middle of the session, I realised that sometimes I would have to even let go in directions I hadn’t planned. My job was not to always completely stick to the map, but to safely travel together with the team where we all wanted to go. It worked wonders, beautiful insights came up that day and it was a turning point in our journey. Ownership was distributed, and I wasn’t the sole whatsapp messenger. Closeness and warmth resulted in much kinetic energy.
Don’t throw the head, heart and hands out the window!
In all of this time what was completely in sync with the challenges, was the inflow of online tools that kept coming my way from different sources. Improvising on offline games, connecting it with our spicy-enough topic of sexuality and continuously doing energisers became the tools to integrate the team together, getting joy in the space. Forming a virtual ‘circle’ to distribute the ownership of the space, inviting all who were in the meeting and sharing some really beautiful landscapes from our own backgrounds helped us to be even physically present with each other. Forming buddies even in the small 4 people group was something to get us interacting on a one-to-one phone call, and providing a whole expansion of space for offline-brainstorming.
Vote of thanks?
This journey has been so enriching that I just can’t fit it all in this blog, what I am going to do is write sequels! :D At this point now I am so very grateful for the learning that boomed in our zoom sessions, the presence of all the team members and their openness to let me experiment with the space!
