A Digital Ceremony that Brings Us Together: Team Building and the Productive Power of “War Rooms”
What comes to mind when you hear there’s a “war room” to work on a project? You probably associate it with those movies about the end of the world, where a small group of people sit in a bunker to decide how to save humanity. When it comes to projects, war rooms are a digital space where teams meet and interact. They look like neverending video conferences, but they’re much more than that. At In All Media we use them all the time on internal projects to create a centralized space where teams and stakeholders can meet and visually communicate activities. War rooms are a fundamental part of our work life.
Mariela Walentowicz, In All Media’s Talent Management VP, has been working with our teams since 2015. Mariela is an engineer by trade and admits the war room dynamic took some getting used to. However, she says that now she can’t imagine working any other way. In an Agile environment, the goal of the war room is to bring the entire team together in a single location for ease of communication, problem resolution, risk mitigation, and status reporting. Mariela describes them as workspaces where maximum collaboration takes place.
Does the concept of a war room resemble those meetings of top commanders we see in the movies?
The war room emerges from a moment of crisis. It’s created for times when complex decisions have to be made quickly. For example, in the United States, all the heads of government, the Navy, and the Army come together to make a decision that probably involves the security of their territory. These are the kind of conversations where everyone brings their knowledge, collaborates, defines, and executes.
What’s the work dynamic in a war room within an organization like In All Media?
We work remotely but side by side at the same time, collaborating on every piece of a project. You could say it’s like working in a virtual office, where we can simultaneously join the room to brainstorm around a topic and define next steps. This room is permanently open. You go in with your team, discuss issues, make agreements, document the decisions, and then execute actions toward its implementation.
Not so long ago, these meetings took place face-to-face. How would you compare those in-person war rooms with the ones that you have today?
It was a significant change because when we started implementing the war room, everything had to happen there, absolutely everything. Our first war room was a physical office where we spent the entire day cooped up together. With improvements in video chat and digitalization, we moved into a digital workspace that was more immediate and also more specific. I also think we saved a lot of time by not having to move between different physical rooms, if you were part of more than one war room.
From your point of view, has digitalization improved this type of work methodology?
We’ve gotten really used to the dynamic. If someone’s talking about a topic that doesn’t directly involve me, I can go on working on other things on my own, just like side conversations in a room. At the same time, my brain subconsciously continues to absorb the information being passed around, and I can interject with relevant data or opinions.
Was that adaptation difficult?
I’m an engineer by training, so I’m quite structured. I like function, order, and planning, so the disruptive nature of a war room was an abrupt change that completely shook up my work cycle, my day, and my organization. It was really difficult to adjust. But now, after some adaptation, I feel like I’ve been working this way forever. I do everything automatically. Sometimes I even join the war room alone and wait for someone else to drop by. It’s become second nature, a necessity, because there’s no better way to collaborate and find out what’s happening around you than when we’re all together. Today I can’t think of another way to do it. It would take forever.
What do you think the benefits of a war room are?
Synchronization in terms of what needs to be executed on a project is one of the benefits. There’s no way someone won’t learn, unless they don’t have the appropriate skills or the person in charge of knowledge transfer isn’t in the room long enough to do it successfully. A war room allows you to transfer knowledge almost by osmosis because you understand what needs to be done and you just do it. Everyone becomes aware of issues at the same time. There are no hierarchies, only different responsibilities, and everything is discussed openly by everyone. There’s no secrecy because we’re all in the same session all day. I find it really beneficial.
Do you think that working in a war room makes the relationships between members of a community closer?
Yes, but you have to commit to it. If we all join a digital war room without using our cameras, that already shows a distance you’ll never be able to overcome. That’s why we insist on always turning the camera on, so we can see each other while we talk. We’re people and we have to work together. If you only join once a day or sign on for ten minutes for a daily meeting with your camera turned off, you can’t bond… or really achieve anything. We need to see ourselves as people and be evaluated beyond how many lines of code we produce or the role we have.
Thank you, Mariela, for your time and valuable insights!
At In All Media we believe in the power of the Digital Environment to bring people together, no matter the distance. But what comes naturally in a physical space requires some work in the online world. War rooms are the way we found to best build our community and bring us closer. A new digital Renaissance is possible!
