How Stranger Things and Computer Vision helped connect my distributed teams
This story was originally written as a follow up to my Medium post, “The Portal…or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Brother”, during my stint leading the AI Analytics division of Cisco Emerge in 2018 . However, I never posted it. As much of the world has been forced into remote work over the course of the pandemic, I felt it was worth sharing now (maybe a little too late).
Over the winter of 2016, I conducted a self-experiment aimed at making distributed teams feel more connected. It was simple: I set up a very large flat- screen monitor in my home office in Northern Virginia, complete with a good quality camera and speaker system connected. I did the same at my team’s base office in San Francisco. I committed to keeping this video/audio connection continuously streaming 24/7, straight into 2017. After a few weeks of awkwardness, the experience began to feel natural. I would have casual chats with my boss when he first showed up in the mornings. If someone had a question for me, they would just walk up to the screen and ask me. When I arrived in San Francisco in January for my usual monthly visit, I went to shake my team members hands as usual. This time, it felt unusually awkward and unnatural. As I stuck out my hand someone said, “but I just saw you yesterday”. The experiment had proven fruitful, and we ended up turning this always-on video experience into a real Cisco product, TeamTV. Most of my department’s distributed teams started using it. Now, everyone had equal opportunity to collaborate with each other. It was great!
Now, everyone had equal opportunity to collaborate with each other. It was great! Except when it wasn’t.
Except when it wasn’t. While everyone praised their virtual seating arrangements with our teams on the West Coast, East Coast, Texas, London, and even Norway, I heard different feedback during my one-on-ones with the team. TeamTV was an always-on noise generator…a symphony of office noises from around the globe…a source for perpetual imminent distractions. I agreed. I had found it increasingly difficult to get any “deep work” done. TeamTV didn’t solely provoke the problem we had focusing, either. In addition to email, we all use Spark, Cisco’s collaboration platform. Both are sources of continuous notifications, with one level of sound and visual alert for EVERY event…regardless if it’s a funny cat GIF shared in a group chat room or somebody alerting you that your car is on fire.
How could we continue this awesome source of serendipitous connection with our teams, while eliminating distraction and somehow reducing the heaviness of notifications? Connective collaboration was so important to our team…as was deep work. I went back to self-experimentation.
Drawing somewhat from Stranger Things, I hung twelve Hue light bulbs from the ceiling of my home office.
I had been reading how our brains are excellent at learning various patterns and transferring one sense-domain (eg. sight) into another (eg. taste). Could my brain learn to interpret various passive signals over time and derive their meaning? Drawing somewhat from Stranger Things, I hung twelve Hue light bulbs from the ceiling of my home office. Starting with some simple logic and using the Hue API, I quickly built a lightweight web server to expose access to my lights and generate various patterns, colors and brightness based off different event types. These events included differentiating between generic chats in Spark and direct messages, or understanding @mentions and topics that I may find interesting.
This helped with the notification-heaviness problem, but what about all the serendipitous moments I would be missing with TeamTV turned off during long focus periods of deep work? On another project, my team had developed some facial recognition technology that could consume video streams and identify persons by looking up these vectors in our people-graph service. Using that service, I added some new events to our event bus when members of my team were recognized (I added a few VIP persons, too). Additionally, as matches were found, I could update their physical location in the graph.
A bulb in my office would softly pulse a color that was mapped from the face vector of the person
Whenever a face was recognized, a few events would be triggered which might initiate a handful of actions. First, a bulb in my office would softly pulse a color that was mapped from the face vector of the person. Secondly, if that person hadn’t been seen at that location recently, a Spark notification would be posted by a bot I created into our team room to let everyone know this person had just been spotted. This allowed me to continue having casual chats with my boss and others as they arrived. It also kept everyone conscious of the location distribution of our teams. Finally, at anytime, one could query the Spark bot about a particular user’s location. If they had been seen recently, the bot would respond. As a fun easter-egg, I made my lights go through an entire color cycle if our SVP was ever spotted (this actually proved useful later on).
As a fun easter-egg, I made my lights go through an entire color cycle if our SVP was ever spotted (this actually proved useful later on).
We’re still feeling this experiment out, but currently I have experienced a significant positive balance between being “always on” and “deep work”. At times when TeamTV is off, I have developed an almost spiritual sense of what was going on 3000 miles away by the color patterns and hue intensity in my office. I started connecting with people more often, when it mattered. Other members of the team began begging me to build them a similar kit for their home office.
Remember that easter-egg I included for my SVP? It turns out, knowing when he is in our area is invaluable. One day, he was roaming our area while everyone was out to lunch. My lights started cycling through all the colors as he walked past the camera. I jumped on TeamTV to say hi. He said he had been hearing a lot about this TeamTV and wanted to stop by to get a demo. My response? “You’re already in one.” He fell in love with the idea and ordered his staff to start using TeamTV right away. That response, alone, was worth it.
