In the past few months, what have you been experimenting with and learning from it, Collaboration Gardener, co-founder at Flowa, Antti Kirjavainen?
COVID-19 mandated remote working has caused worrying trends. One of them is the rising amount of time spent in meetings. The second, is the lack of deep discussions, particularly on the future and improvement.
That is why I have been experimenting with remote retrospectives at Flowa. Retrospectives are the backbone of continuous improvement work. We don’t suffer from meetings overload ourselves. Our focus has been on customer work, which means less time for our own improvement discussions. In addition to addressing this challenge, I want to discover practices that could help others.
We’ve experimented with alternatives for online meetings for our retrospectives. One thread of experiments has been individual preparation work before the retrospective. We have tried this both in Miro or Google Docs and on Slack through workflows and automation. We have also tried splitting the retrospective into many short sessions with individual work in between.
What I’ve learned so far
Individual preparation work before the retrospective has not led to better discussions in the retrospectives. I have some ideas on how to improve on this, but I think this part needs some more support from automation with NLP and/or better user interfaces.
Working individually to generate insights has been proven very helpful. A good example of this is when we did a causal loop diagram on Miro on the theme we decided to work on. We did this asynchronously, each one adding elements to the diagram when they had time and new insights.
I had a hunch that this might be a productive way to work together to create shared understanding. What I did not anticipate was that after that, everyone asked for more time to discuss the findings and create ideas for possible next steps, as the discussion felt very meaningful and effective.
Thank you, Antti for the interesting and also surprising learnings, that individual work is beneficial before collaboration, but not in every form!
Small experiments and inspiration 