When Did Starting a Meeting Become So Complicated?

Why the next generation of workplace collaboration should give people more freedom, not more decisions.

Contemporary meeting room

I can still remember travelling to Belgium when Barco introduced the original ClickShare Button.

At the time, it felt like one of those wonderfully obvious ideas that makes you wonder why nobody had thought of it sooner. You walked into a meeting room, plugged a little button into your laptop, pressed it and your content appeared on the screen.

That was pretty much it.

No hunting around for the right cable. No working out which input to select. No complicated instructions stuck to the meeting-room table explaining how to make everything work.

Just plug in, click and share.

Having spent much of my working life in the AV industry, I can tell you that making something genuinely simple is often considerably harder than making it technically impressive. And what struck me about that original ClickShare experience was that it solved a problem everybody recognised, without asking people to understand the technology behind the solution.

It changed expectations of what meeting-room technology could feel like.

And yet, looking at the increasingly sophisticated collaboration environments we're installing today, I sometimes wonder whether we've wandered a little too far away from that original simplicity.

We now have meeting rooms equipped with thousands of pounds' worth of extraordinary technology. Intelligent cameras, sophisticated microphones, dedicated conferencing systems, cloud-based management platforms and displays that would have seemed almost unimaginable when I started in the industry.

Much of it is genuinely brilliant.

But somebody can still walk into one of these rooms, open their laptop and ask how they're supposed to join their meeting.

And I think that tells us something.

We've spent years making meeting rooms more capable, more connected and more intelligent. But have we always made them easier to use?

The problem isn't the technology. It's the assumptions.

Organisations have very good reasons for standardising their collaboration environments.

An IT department responsible for meeting rooms across multiple locations needs consistency. It wants familiar interfaces, predictable support requirements and technology that can be secured, monitored and managed without every room becoming a separate engineering exercise.

Standardising on Microsoft Teams Rooms, for example, can make considerable sense for a business already operating within the Microsoft ecosystem. Employees benefit from a consistent experience, IT teams can manage devices more effectively and organisations can establish sensible policies around how their collaboration technology operates.

None of that is particularly controversial.

In fact, I'd argue that consistency is one of the most important qualities of a well-designed workplace technology environment.

The difficulty arises when consistency becomes confused with restriction.

A business might operate almost entirely on Microsoft Teams, but its customers, suppliers and partners won't necessarily do the same. A consultant visiting the office may arrive with a Zoom invitation. A supplier might use Webex. Someone joining remotely may prefer Google Meet, while a colleague simply wants to share something from their laptop without starting a formal video meeting.

These aren't unusual exceptions to the way people work. They're an entirely normal part of modern business.

Yet meeting-room technology has sometimes been designed around the assumption that one organisation's preferred collaboration platform should determine how every meeting takes place.

The result can be an odd contradiction.

We've made the technology more sophisticated in an effort to simplify collaboration, only to discover that the experience becomes complicated again whenever somebody needs to work outside the expected process.

And that raises a question worth considering.

Should the purpose of standardising workplace technology be to make people follow a particular way of working, or to make it easier for them to work in whatever way the situation requires?

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

When I think back to the original ClickShare, what made it successful wasn't that it offered an extraordinary number of features. It was that it removed a familiar obstacle.

The technology adapted to the person using it, rather than expecting the person to adapt to the room.

Perhaps that's a principle worth rediscovering.

Perhaps flexibility is becoming the new simplicity

This was very much on my mind recently when I had the opportunity to take a closer look at Barco's latest ClickShare Hub solution.

I'll admit that I was impressed.

Not simply because it brings together some clever technology, but because it reminded me of the thinking behind that original ClickShare Button.

The circumstances have changed considerably since those early days. Meetings are no longer just about putting a laptop presentation onto a screen. We're collaborating with people in different locations, using different conferencing platforms, sharing content from multiple devices and expecting meeting rooms to support all of it without unnecessary effort.

What was once a relatively straightforward presentation challenge has become a much more complex collaboration challenge.

And that's what makes ClickShare Hub interesting.

It brings together two requirements that have sometimes been treated as competing priorities.

On one hand, organisations want the consistency and management benefits of a dedicated Microsoft Teams Room. On the other, they need the freedom to accommodate different meeting platforms and the laptops people bring into the room.

ClickShare Hub combines a native Teams Rooms experience with wireless BYOD collaboration, allowing users to work with the room's audiovisual equipment through their own devices when the meeting requires a different approach.

That might sound like a relatively straightforward development, but I think the thinking behind it is significant.

Rather than asking an organisation to choose between a managed, standardised meeting-room environment and a more flexible approach to collaboration, the technology is beginning to accommodate both.

It recognises that the needs of the IT department and the needs of the person using the room aren't always identical, but they don't have to be incompatible.

And that feels like an important step forward.

Of course, Barco isn't alone in recognising the challenge, and there are other manufacturers developing approaches to cross-platform collaboration and more flexible meeting-room experiences. The capabilities, compromises and practical requirements vary between solutions, and choosing the right approach still requires a proper understanding of the customer's environment.

But what appeals to me about ClickShare Hub is the continuity of the idea.

The original ClickShare made presenting easier by removing the obstacles between somebody's laptop and the room display.

Now the challenge is broader, but the principle is remarkably similar.

People want to walk into a room and collaborate. They don't particularly want to know how the room has been configured, which platform is running underneath it or why one type of meeting requires a different process from another.

They simply want it to work.

And perhaps the real innovation isn't about introducing another feature that people have to learn.

It's about reducing the number of occasions when people need to think about the technology at all.

For years, much of the discussion around meeting-room design has focused on making interfaces simpler and providing better training so that people understand how to operate increasingly sophisticated systems.

Those things remain important, but perhaps there's a more fundamental opportunity.

What if the technology became better at accommodating the natural unpredictability of a working day?

A room could still provide a familiar, consistent experience for the organisation's preferred collaboration platform, while recognising that not every meeting will follow the same pattern.

People wouldn't need to make a conscious decision between different types of room before booking a meeting. Visitors wouldn't necessarily have to adapt their normal working practices to fit the host organisation's technology. And IT teams wouldn't have to sacrifice the benefits of standardisation simply to provide a reasonable degree of flexibility.

That strikes me as a much more useful definition of simplicity.

Original Clickshare Button and Tray

Standardise the technology. Not the people.

There is a broader issue here that extends beyond any particular manufacturer or product.

As workplace technology has become more sophisticated, we've naturally developed more sophisticated ways of managing it. We've introduced standards, preferred platforms, approved devices and increasingly detailed requirements around security and support.

Much of that is necessary, particularly as audiovisual systems become more closely integrated with wider IT infrastructure.

But there's a danger that the processes we create to manage technology can gradually begin to shape the way people are expected to work.

Sometimes that's entirely appropriate. Organisations need consistent approaches to security, information management and business systems.

But collaboration is a slightly different challenge because it rarely happens entirely within the boundaries of one organisation.

Meetings involve customers, suppliers, partners, colleagues working remotely and people using devices and platforms that may be completely outside the control of the business hosting the meeting.

The more connected the workplace becomes, the less realistic it is to assume that everybody will operate within a single, perfectly standardised environment.

And perhaps the most effective technology is the technology that acknowledges that reality rather than trying to eliminate it.

This doesn't mean abandoning standards or giving everyone unlimited freedom to connect whatever they like to the corporate network. Security, management and consistency remain essential considerations, and flexibility needs to be delivered within a properly designed and supported environment.

In fact, this is where the development of more capable enterprise platforms becomes particularly interesting.

In our recent Insight, The Most Important AV Technology Is the Technology You Never See, we explored how developments in device management, security and the underlying architecture of connected AV systems are changing the industry.

Microsoft's Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, was one example of that shift. It reflects the growing importance of enterprise management and security in device categories that have historically been treated rather differently from conventional IT equipment.

ClickShare Hub provides an interesting connection between those two conversations. Its use of MDEP illustrates how enterprise-focused technology foundations can sit behind a collaboration experience designed to give people more freedom.

The technical complexity hasn't disappeared. In many respects, the systems involved are becoming more sophisticated.

But that sophistication is increasingly being used to make the experience simpler.

And perhaps that's how progress should be measured.

Not by the number of capabilities a system offers, but by how naturally those capabilities accommodate the different situations people encounter during a normal working day.

There's also an important distinction between offering flexibility and simply providing more options.

A meeting room with numerous different ways of connecting can still be a frustrating environment if nobody understands which one to use. Adding more buttons, more applications or more instructions doesn't necessarily improve the experience.

Good design should remove decisions wherever possible, while ensuring that the flexibility people genuinely need remains available.

That's a rather different challenge from simply selecting the product with the longest feature list.

It requires understanding how an organisation works, who uses its spaces and what happens when the meeting doesn't follow the expected pattern.

Designing for the meeting that wasn't in the specification

One of the things I find interesting about working in AV is how often the real test of a solution comes after the installation is complete.

During the design process, we can establish the customer's requirements, understand their preferred platforms and develop a solution around the way they expect their spaces to be used.

But no specification can anticipate every situation.

A room that works beautifully for the organisation's regular internal meetings may be used differently when an external customer arrives. A space designed primarily for video conferencing might suddenly need to support an informal workshop. A senior executive may decide to join a meeting from their own laptop because the information they need is already open on it.

These aren't necessarily failures of planning. They're reminders that workplaces are occupied by people rather than processes.

And people adapt.

The question is whether the technology can adapt with them.

At Collab AV, we believe the best way to understand whether collaboration technology is genuinely simple is to experience it in your own working environment. That's why our Try Before You Buy programme gives organisations the opportunity to explore solutions from manufacturers including Barco, with the ClickShare family forming an important part of that offering. Rather than relying entirely on demonstrations and technical specifications, we can help you experience the technology with your own people, in your own meeting rooms, and discover what really works for your business.

Sometimes a dedicated, tightly managed room system will be entirely appropriate.

Sometimes a more flexible BYOD approach will make greater sense. And increasingly, solutions that combine the benefits of both may provide a better answer.

There isn't a universal solution, and there probably never will be.

That's why opportunities to experience technology in a real working environment are so valuable. Something that looks impressive in a demonstration doesn't always reveal how well it will accommodate the interruptions, last-minute changes and unexpected requirements of an ordinary working day.

It's also why we encourage customers to explore solutions before committing to a wider deployment. A practical trial can reveal far more about the suitability of a collaboration system than a lengthy comparison of technical specifications.

Because ultimately, the most important question isn't whether the equipment can perform a particular function.

It's whether the people using it can achieve what they came into the room to do.

People collaborating

Perhaps we knew the answer all along

Looking back at that original ClickShare Button, I don't think its success was really about wireless presentation.

It was about removing an unnecessary complication from something people did every day.

The technology was clever, but the experience was wonderfully ordinary.

You walked into a room, connected your laptop, pressed a button and got on with your meeting.

Nobody needed to understand what was happening behind the scenes, and that was precisely the point.

We've come an extraordinary distance since then. Our meeting rooms are more capable, more connected and better equipped to support collaboration across different locations than ever before.

And I wouldn't want to go backwards.

But perhaps, in our enthusiasm for all the things modern technology can do, we've occasionally lost sight of what made that original experience so appealing.

It was simple.

Not because the technology was unsophisticated, but because the sophistication was hidden from the person using it.

That's the principle I think we should be working towards again.

The challenge today is undoubtedly more complicated. We need to accommodate different platforms, increasingly demanding IT requirements and far more varied ways of working.

But those are challenges for the technology industry to solve, not complications we should expect the end user to manage.

If anything, the growing sophistication of our systems should allow us to become more ambitious about simplicity, not less.

And perhaps that's what excites me most about the direction solutions such as ClickShare Hub are taking.

They suggest that we can preserve the consistency and control organisations need while giving people the freedom to collaborate in ways that suit the situation.

We don't have to choose between the two.

Because the objective of workplace collaboration was never to persuade people to use a particular piece of technology.

It was to help them communicate, share ideas and work together.

The meeting room shouldn't get to decide how people meet.

It should be clever enough to accommodate them.

And perhaps, all these years after that first little ClickShare Button, we're rediscovering something we already knew.

The cleverest thing technology can do is make something complicated feel simple.