Braided Meetings – Braided Space

Braiding is powerful, easy to use and refreshingly different

Do I belong here?

“I have always been included at work but I rarely felt like I belonged. Especially in meetings. I am autistic and meetings have always been painful. Listening to multiple loud voices competing against background noise is exhausting. Neurotypical communication through inference and implication is a huge effort to decipher. A geniune barrier. I have many good and novel ideas, but traditional meetings make it nearly impossible to share them in a live discussion.”

Drew Smithsimmons, Co-Founder, Braided Communications.

The power of diversity

Diverse teams think differently and solve problems. They are more productive and underpin organisational resilience. So smart businesses bring together people of different genders, cultures, backgrounds and thinking styles to unleash the power of diversity. But meetings still use legacy techniques optimised for neurotypical extroverts who tend to dominate live group discussions, often (inadvertently) suppressing the contributions of colleagues. For many neurodivergent people, engaging with traditional meetings requires suppressing their communication preferences. Masking who we genuinely are, especially our communication strengths, blocks full participation in meetings and can lead to burnout.

Braided meetings has been used by a wide range of neurotypical and neurodivergent people with comprehensive confirmation that it enabled them to fully participate in the meeting, something most of the neurodivergent people identified they could not do in traditional face-to-face meetings by video or in-person.

Everybody belongs in a Braided Meeting

Braiding a brand new tool for virtual collaboration. The host can invite as many participants as they wish and those participants can be internal to their company or external. The host also specifies the topics for the meeting and these appear as individual panels, or braids, on a rotating carousel.

During the meeting everyone sees the same carousel, but at any one point in time each person will be looking at a different braid. They can read and respond to previous comments without interruption. After a specific time (set by the host) the carousel will rotate one ‘stop’ and each person will move to another braid with fresh content to which they can respond.

In this way the discussion on all the braids gradually develops during the meeting. Each person gets the chance to contribute fully on each topic. No one with an important point to make is prevented from doing so and the discussion remains focussed on the selected themes. At the end of the meeting the host has a full record of the discussion which can be downloaded.

Your team will certainly find it different initially – remember this was built to help the first humans get to Mars, there is nothing else like it on Earth! But very soon you will find that people who previously said little will flourish. And those who previously felt they carried meetings will say less but add much more value. Everybody benefits, neurotypical and neurodivergent people alike.

Security & Accessibility

Braided Meetings is cloud-based SaaS hosted on the industry-leading Microsoft Azure Apps service, delivering best in class security and accessibility. Braided Communications is fully GDPR compliant.