Beyond virtual meetings

Are you now cruising the cyberspace with remote work and online meetings as a default mode of collaboration these days? Then you shouldn't be surprised to see that you can stay an equally productive organization and conduct business almost as usual. We live in exciting times. Thanks to the Digital Revolution we are fortunate to have reached a stage in our civilization where nothing prevents high-quality decision-making in teams regardless of physical presence. Today, you can be equally effective at working online. This book proposes that virtual meetings can become a regular part of the organizational collaborative flows, where simple tools such as Teams, Zoom or WebEx are all part of daily support for ad-hoc collaboration, along with other collaborative web-based tools that provide a unique opportunity for engaging your valued customers as well as your workforce in a participative planning process that is required to thrive in today's business environment. While there are many ways to work remotely in our newly emerging world, this book offers an insightful and useful guide for how to do that in the most effective way possible. I was lucky to have found four digital collaboration druids - Elise Keith, Ilkka Mäkitalo, Jeremy Lu, and Kelvin McGrath - whom I have convinced to contribute a chapter each. I was even luckier to have found a twin soul in what concerns the art and science of meetings, a colleague consultant and PhD - Martin Duffy - without whom this book would have not been possible. Last but not least, the guest preface by Maarten Vanneste, the founder of Meeting Architecture as a discipline and a permanent source of inspiration in these book series. This book caters equally for any of these 3 groups of readers, albeit with different levels of relevance and importance:1) If you are a meeting professional, you should definitively read it as your clients will be perceiving you as a source of improvement of their meetings and you might want to learn more about them in order to enrich your professional offer. 2) If you are an executive or team leader you may find some of these tools too advanced for your current needs or maybe not. The latter would be the case if your company is already in an advanced digital stage and doing business in a heavily competing environment. These tools can provide you with a sustainable advantage in the way your company runs meetings. 3) Finally, if you are a learner or influencer, you may find that AI-powered technology is going to make serious inroads in the world of adult learning and group facilitation, and you might as well be conscious of their impact by reading this book. As Maarten Vanneste says in the preface: "This book will give you several ideas that can make such real interaction, conversations and collaborations reality."