I’ve blogged previously about how I’ve worked collaboratively with my team during this pandemic and the challenges and opportunities of how society uses technology going forwards, so I thought I’d share these tools that I’ve found useful to facilitate different types of online sessions.
Developing your team
It’s even more important when you’re not working together face to face to develop with your team the values and rhythms & rituals that underpin how you work, as well as how you communicate, how you make decisions, resolve conflicts, feedback with each other and priorities. Here are different tools you can use to develop these.
You could develop a theory of change for your team or programme and its objectives and results. You could explore how the pandemic has affected your team and its objectives and how you adapt. You could get members of your team to share what motivates them and what they’re good at. You could create stories where you put yourself in your shoes of the people you serve. You could get visual and storyboard of what experience you want colleagues, customers or partners to have. You could show the different roles people have and what you delegate as a leader.
Helping people use online collaboration tools
You can’t expect people to immediately jump into a design mindset when they’ve been brought up to work in a very linear way, so having a design sprint which helps people immerse themselves step by step in different ways of doing design.
Likewise, it can feel complicated to come up with systemic ways to tackle issues, so actually starting with issues that everyone can relate to like identifying ways to transfer liquids or putting out fire are good entry points to identifying ways to think of systems change. Likewise using prompts like thinking of something that called your attention recently, a piece of data that shocked you, something you’d like to reduce, eliminate or amplify or something you can’t believe has been solved yet, and then identifying ideas that come off the top of your head, that can be implemented tomorrow, or that make use of underutilised resources.
Of course, you may need to onboard people in how to use a platform like Miro or Mural.
Getting people warmed up and energised online
Meeting online is very different to face to face as we’re not using all our senses or energies, so it becomes even more important to use icebreakers, even if the team knows each other well.
You could do a different icebreaker each week to get a better understanding of each member of the team in a fun and playful way. It’s a great conversation starter, in particular for people on a team who don’t know each other so well.
or these energisers or icebreakers like drawing your colleague’s face.
You could also create a thank you board so people can celebrate each other’s work or a bookshelf to see what everyone’s favourite books are.
Identifying issues to focus on
Have you found yourself in a meeting where there’s a great discussion that never ends and you come out not having agreed on what the project will do next?
You can use different ways to help people share issues they’re facing, from how might we’s to using liberating structures, or barriers they need help to unblock like Houdini’s Locks or provide them with prompts from how others have innovated to inspire them to identify actions to problems.
Coming up with ideas to develop
I always find it easier to help people come up with ideas face to face as you can get people moving, writing on post its, drawing or even making things and as well as re-organising and clustering.
You can do some of that online, like helping people quickly come up with eight ideas on a problem, getting them to pass their idea to the next person to build on the idea so the idea is continually enriched by each person on the workshop, or mind mapping ideas in a way that you can see the connections
You could even get them to come up with the worst solution and then identify how to prevent it from happening.
Of course, it’s important to help people prioritise what ideas they’ve come up with.
Learning lessons to improve
Finally, it’s really important to create the space for teams and projects to reflect on the last week or fortnight to be able to continually iterate.
You could enable teams to do a retrospective on what went well, what could be better and what they can do to make positive changes.
Another way of doing this is to ask people what they’re celebrating, what they’re stopping and what’s revealing itself on the horizon, what’s working well or not or how people can be more aligned to their work
You can enable team members to give each other constructive feedback on what they appreciate most about the other and what they’d like to see more from the other. You could even get people to use metaphors and imagery to describe how they are feeling about their work or a challenge they’re trying to solve. You could also get them to reflect on how effective the conversations and ultimately relationships we have and how we can improve them
Methods to use at a peer coaching clinic where people help each other problem-solve.
Without forgetting not just doing a post-mortem, but a pre-mortem to anticipate potential risks.
There are also good tools for designing and synthesising workshops, developing service blueprints or kicking off projects.
What online collaboration tools have you found useful?
How do you use them? What’s worked? What hasn’t?
