Face-to-Face is Key To Solving Your Most Complex Challenges

Our brains are wired for face-to- face contact

The biggest challenges leaders face today are complex in nature; issues such as how to double the growth of a business, transform a culture, offer a world-beating consumer experience, comply with new legislation, or stem an epidemic. To crack these challenges, leaders must assemble a diverse group of people from within and around their organization – and they must meet face-to-face to have tough conversations about the challenges they face and what potential solutions might look like. To crack complexity, you must bring people together in person. Full stop.

But you might be wondering – as work becomes increasingly virtual, is it absolutely necessary for all of them to get together physically, especially when it’s so easy to do virtually? We can verify through our experience that nothing—no current technology certainly—satisfies the very human need to get people into the room together if they’re going to have any sort of substantive conversation. And a great deal of research has been done on the science of human connection and concludes that yes, it is necessary.

Start by thinking about traditional snail-mail, email, or text—these communication platforms are great for talking at each other, for carefully thinking about what to say, checking and rechecking that you’ve expressed it well, keeping a record of what you said, and sending it only when you’re sure you’ve nailed the message. But there’s no real discourse, and there are no signals beyond the written word to discern tone, intention, or real meaning.
 
If you need a winking emoji to let someone know you’re kidding, it’s pretty obvious that you’re dealing with stifled and potentially ambiguous communication.
 
Via telephone, you can discern more meaning in communication through tone of voice, hesitation, and words inadvertently blurted out without thought. Clearly, though, we’re still missing body language and facial signals that convey so much emotion and meaning. Plus, there’s the mute button, judiciously deployed to filter out the genuine reactions and commentary going on in each disparate room.
 
So that’s obvious: face-to-face clearly trumps no face at all.
 
Videoconferences are the answer, right? With that medium, you can hear voices, see faces, study body language (at least the parts that are visible on screen), and get the full picture. Right? No, not in our experience. There’s more to communication than that, and there’s much more to human connections than that. On top of these issues, technology can be plagued by bad connections.
 
We connect with each other in so many subtle ways when we’re in the same place, and while it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why, it’s borne out in research. In-person interactions, too, facilitate focus and a drive for results in a way that other mediums can’t.
 
We are wired to connect. But not all types of social connections are equally impactful; some types matter more when it comes to effective problem-solving.

In 2012, psychologists led a research project to understand the impact that different meeting environments had on creative thinking. They tasked pairs of participants with a problem to solve in 10 minutes (e.g., “Think of as many improvements to this product as you can”). They were divided into three conditions: face-to-face, videoconference, and phone. Each pair had to generate as many creative ideas or solutions as possible to the problem at hand. All pairs were evaluated on the number of ideas generated, the originality of ideas (how statistically infrequent they were), and the variety of ideas. The results? Overall, face-to-face pairs produced 30 percent more ideas than virtual pairs; their ideas were also moderately more original and diverse than virtual groups.
 
Two years later, a researcher at Northwestern University came to similar conclusions. AkshataNarain distributed a survey to people who work in face-to-face teams and people who work in virtual teams, asking them to rate how creative their teams were, to assess how frequently each team member expressed their thoughts, and how many teams members’ expertise and skills were utilized. While some respondents suggested virtual settings reduced inhibitions for some when it comes to sharing information, overall face-to-face teams were rated more highly in terms of being creative, more communicative, and more fully engaging of each member’s expertise and skills.
 
Why are in-person contexts more effective for group collaboration? A 2012 study conducted by researchers in Beijing Normal University may shed some insight. Researchers found that it’s only when two people connect face-to-face that their brains experience “neural synchronization.” Participants who talked face-to-face experienced synchronized brain activity in the same area of their brains, which researchers believe resulted from the communication of “multimodal sensory information” (e.g., facial expressions, gestures) as well as more continuous turn-taking behaviors. These results are significant in light of Google’s massive, internal study of what distinguishes high-performing teams from low-performing ones: Not team cohesion, motivation, or average IQ, but rather a frequent turn-taking in conversations and high social sensitivity toward what team members are thinking and feeling. Pairing Google’s insights with Beijing Normal’s study, if face-to-face interactions indeed increase communication of multimodal sensory information—which will naturally help people become more socially sensitive to others—and promote turn-taking in conversations, then working together in person will inevitably have a positive impact on how groups perform and collaborate together.
 
The truth is that although much of our modern work experience is mediated through digital tools, our brains are still wired for face-to- face contact. Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer researcher of body language, found that when people communicate, the impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal, 38 percent vocal (e.g., tone of voice, inflection), and 55 percent nonverbal.
 
Communicating via technology, then, eliminates at least one, or even two, primary means that we use to convey our messages. Solving complex challenges requires bringing all the right people together, not for a virtual video conference but for a physical gathering. For only when we gather face-to-face can our beliefs, ideas, and feelings be fully conveyed and understood.
 
Fast progress and mobilization require face-to-face interaction. The group must convene in the same place and sit in the room together or their interactions – or what we call “collisions” – won’t be effective. If they’re not in each other’s physical presence, they won’t listen as deeply and consistently, they won’t get as passionate about their beliefs, and they won’t challenge others with whom they disagree with the same finesse and vigor.
 
Adapted/Extracted from CRACKING COMPLEXITY: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast, by David Benjamin and David Komlos, published by Nicholas Brealey Publishers, 2019. All rights reserved.