How can Virtual Reality be even better than face-to-face in delivering world-class professional development events?

Ridiculous. Not possible. After all, if you want to change performance you must change behavior. To change behavior you must change thinking. And to change thinking you must change beliefs.

And that is why we go to the trouble and expense to design and deliver face-to-face professional development education – to have belief-changing events that begin the journey toward significant changes in performance. I can think of five aspects that form the “Wow!” factor in world-class face-to-face facilitation that drive the “new performance through new beliefs” results we seek:

    1. Psychological safety

    2. Behavior experiments

    3. Perceptual reframing

    4. Feedback and reflection

    5. Bonding with a support group for ongoing development.

Could virtual reality possibly be even better than face-to-face in these critical aspects?

Well…

Psychological safety

In one VR event I participated in recently, during the debriefing a woman said, “My avatar is tall and thin – and I am not! I felt like I could try some things that I might not have been willing to try face-to-face.”

VR by definition lends itself to simulation in a fail-safe environment. VR is being used to simulate business experimentations and outcomes that would be far too complex and costly to replicate “in the flesh”. VR is also being used to simulate health care situations in the training of doctors, nurses, and EMT personnel that cannot safely and realistically be replicated in real life. It provides a safe world in which professional development is enabled through trying – and perhaps failing – at new endeavors.

Behavioral experiments

In another recent VR event designed to simulate a complex engagement for IBM, the participants were from an intact team based in Beijing, China. Lack of experience and some cultural hurdles limited their willingness to engage in conversation with their client executives. When the VR situation forced them to do this, they experienced the positive results, and thus it created a deep learning experience. In a face-to-face situation (and in a face-saving culture such as this), they may well have retreated into paralysis rather than tried something new.

Perceptual reframing

Some educators have developed VR experiences in which one’s avatar perceives the environment in ways that normal people in real life cannot. Two such environments that I have heard about involve psychotic breakdown episodes (to teach what it is like to suffer a severe mental illness) and the reactions of an autistic child (to sensitize parents and educators to an autistic child’s world view).

I also learned my own lesson about VR perceptions and their transference to real life. In one VR event, even though I knew who the people were behind their avatars, and had previously worked with them face-to-face, I found myself reacting to their physical appearance and beginning to make presumptions about them on that basis that in real life (upon reflection) I knew to be erroneous. It was a deep learning for me that I needed to listen to the human being and avoid stereotyping based upon appearance – a great lesson for those hoping to enhance their multi-cultural competence.

Feedback and reflection

It is not enough to try something new – the learner also must get feedback on how they did, and be given time to reflect on their own reactions. Although this is the basis for powerful learning, face-to-face events tend to be limited in this area by the need for an affordable number of facilitators and a relatively few learning objectives (and hence a homogeneous set of participants).

The VR events that WTRI has been able to design are able to capture the interactions between a participant’s avatar and an artificially intelligent “robot” avatar that relate to different learning objectives for different levels of participants. These can then be fed to a facilitator for a debriefing with the participant that is tailored to their professional development objectives. For example, a team analyst might get feedback on their response to 10 separate situations in which they were required to gather information through a client interview process. A team leader or the project manager would get feedback from a different set of interactions, in which they should have displayed an entirely different set of behaviors, relevant to their roles. The technology available in a VR simulation makes this variety and extent of facilitator feedback far more practical than in face-to-face venues.

Bonding with a support group for ongoing development

Professional development events don’t immediately take the business performance of an individual to a new level, but they can jump start that journey and be an important accelerator in career advancement. A significant enabler of the continuation of that journey is the support network formed from that event, although interactions among that network almost always have to happen virtually, due to the fiscal constraints imposed on learning budgets these days.

Not only are VR event participants already equipped and ready to reconnect inside a virtual world, but preliminary pilots with WTRI on behalf of IBM learners indicate that even participants of face-to-face events are more engaged in reconnecting in VR than they are in other forms of virtual connection such as teleconferencing and instant messaging. Participants find that the atmosphere created in VR is more “intimate” somehow, and is emotionally engaging enough to momentarily shut out the distractions of the real world in order to focus exclusively on their colleagues.

So is Virtual Reality always better than face-to-face in delivering world-class professional development events?

Perhaps not always. But in many circumstances, it is much more than merely “as good as” face-to-face. It can also be much less expensive in terms of the total costs of design and delivery, especially for geographically disperse organizations.

And one last thought. More and more of the work force – the millennials especially – will expect to see it offered by employers of choice.