Successful collaboration hinges on the quality of relationships. But building relationships and discovering shared interests or goals takes time. In addition, participants don’t always know the people they are meeting with and, as a result, important context is either missing or gathered during the interaction itself. In the worst case, this discovery never takes place among team members and can lead to poor team synergy, a lack of engagement, and subpar outcomes.
Further, the problem is exacerbated as meeting size grows, with participants unable to put faces to names and even leaving a meeting without not knowing who one or more participants were. This is a missed opportunity for all professionals and, especially, external-facing professionals (executives, sales people, marketers, etc.) whose very effectiveness relies on quickly understanding who they are meeting with and the ability to access quick and easy talking points to connect with individuals in order to move an initiative forward. As communication is a foundation of collaboration and productivity for all organizations, this frustration constitutes a broad opportunity for improvement.