Collaboration 3.0
Workbook
September 2023
Last update - 5th March 2024 by Carrie
Module 1
Creating strong foundations
True north
The culture our team is aspiring to is:
[add your content here]
[add your content here]
[add your content here]
Goals for Collaboration 3.0
How might we…
[add your content here]
[add your content here]
[add your content here]
Experiment 1
How might we…
What we’ll do / change / try
Actions
…
…
…
Experiment 1 - log
Experiment name | |
Meeting experiment owner: | |
The problem I was trying to address: | |
The changes I made | |
How I felt it went: | |
Meeting scores out of 10 (Q1) | [or team feedback if not a meeting] |
Meeting feedback: most valuable (Q2) | [or team feedback if not a meeting] |
Meeting feedback: what would improve (Q3) | [or team feedback if not a meeting] |
Key learnings for our team | |
To do list after module 1
Update ready for module 2
Done so far | |
Learnt | |
Blocked / need something | |
Module 2
Redesigning a key meeting
Reflecting on your meeting
Ask yourself
The foundations of the meeting
1 | Purpose | In human language, what sums up the real purpose of this meeting? Bonus idea: What bigger goals does this meeting feed into that you can link to? |
2 | Meeting questions | What questions would help break your meeting into help stages? Questions sometimes go in sequence:
|
3 | Decisions | What decisions will be made today? And how? Is it a democracy? Or is there a final decider? What help are you asking attendees for? |
4 | Roles and behaviours | What behaviours will be particularly important? Or rather… what are you afraid the personalities you identified earlier might do or not do, left unchecked…?! Here are some examples of things we typically want to encourage:
And to discourage:
And things that vary in usefulness based on context
|
5 | Will do and won’t do | What is the right scope - a realistic volume of issues and decisions? What do you want to head off from the start? What expectations can you set? |
6 | Session name | What energising, memorable name could set the tone? |
Stages / questions | Scaffolding |
| |
| |
| |
To do list after module 2
Update ready for module 3
Done so far | |
Learnt | |
Blocked / need something | |
Module 3
Harnessing smart async to reduce meeting load
Goals for async
Async can help with:
What are your team’s main goals for shifting to async? | What are the main challenges you think you’ll need to overcome to shift to async? |
| |
So rather than designing a complete solution and presenting it back as ‘here’s how we’re doing it now’, the approach is to try some experiments and get feedback on how they went / how they could be improved.
A reminder: this is an experimentation phase!
Technique 1: async meetings
In a nutshell: shift some meetings, or parts of meetings, some or all of the time to a Teams chat.
Which meetings or parts of meetings, might this work for? | |
How might this technique best serve your goals? | |
What would your concerns be about using this technique and how could you do some simple experiments to explore how best this could work? | |
Technique 2: scannable emails
In a nutshell: use well signposted summary emails to keep your team and others up to date (and reduce pure info sharing in meeting time)
Which meetings or parts of meetings, might this work for? | |
How might this technique best serve your goals? | |
What would your concerns be about using this technique and how could you do some simple experiments to explore how best this could work? | |
Technique 3: 5in5 videos
In a nutshell: take out ‘presented content’ and share it before the meeting as a short video e.g. 5 slides in 5 minutes.
Which meetings or parts of meetings, might this work for? | |
How might this technique best serve you? | |
What would your concerns be about using this technique and how could you do some simple experiments to explore how best this could work? | |
Techniques 4-7
Document sharing - reviewing and commenting on someone’s thinking in real time in their doc | |
Project management HQ - so tasks, roles and other core info is always available | |
Wiki / knowledge base - richer content is self service so meetings handle the exceptions or more complex issues | |
What goes where - establishing some norms about which channel is used in which way for which type of comms. Plus any expectations about response type or timing. | |
You might want to run quite a few experiments and log them here?
# | Meeting/collab | Summary of experiment changes | Owner | Learning |
1 | | | | |
2 | | | | |
3 | | | | |
4 | | | | |
5 | | | | |
6 | | | | |
7 | | | | |
8 | | | | |
9 | | | | |
10 | | | | |
11 | | | | |
Update ready for module 4
Done so far | |
Learnt | |
Blocked / need something | |
Experiments
Meeting experiment log Copy/paste and complete one per experiment
Meeting name: | |
Meeting experiment owner: | |
The meeting problem I was trying to address: | |
The changes I made | |
How I felt it went: | |
Meeting scores out of 10 (Q1) | |
Meeting feedback: most valuable (Q2) | |
Meeting feedback: what would improve (Q3) | |
Key learnings for meetings in our team | |
Summary of our meeting experiments
# | Meeting/collab | Summary of experiment changes | Owner | Learning |
1 | | | | |
2 | | | | |
3 | | | | |
4 | | | | |
5 | | | | |
6 | | | | |
7 | | | | |
8 | | | | |
9 | | | | |
10 | | | | |
11 | | | | |
Further resources
Big Three Questions
Measuring each meeting
These questions should be used at the end of each meeting during the test phase.
They can be:
The trade off is convenience for the responder (and therefore response rate) vs ease of admin for the Amplifier.
BIG THREE
1. This meeting was a great use of time - hugely valuable. � 1 = strong disagree 10 = strongly agree
2. The most useful thing that happened was…� [free text]
3. What would improve this meeting next time / another time is…� [free text]