Collaboration brings joy and empowerment. Transformation challenges are often similar and many experts with curiosity and forward-thinking minds are willing to share experiments and tools.
In April and May, I had the chance to participate in Collab#01 with three joint meetings and additional unofficial gatherings. The Collab was organized by Whitmore’s Karoliina Luoto and Miika Kuha, and Miikka Leinonen from Ghost in a very insightful and warmhearted way. The participants with transformation challenges were from different companies and organizations, with over 20 experts. The idea was to nurture experiments and solutions by understanding communities and embracing collaboration.
Karoliina, Miika, and Miikka shared their experiences and many frameworks and tools. It was a combination of mini-lectures and participatory actions with the whole group, and then conversations and ideation in groups of five people. In the first meeting, you also had a chance to get a personal sparring partner. In the spirit of collaboration, the lectures, and tools like the Moonshot and Motivator match, were shared with all on Youtube.
The conversations in the smaller groups were only for the Collab since otherwise, you wouldn’t have the courage to share genuine challenges that organizations are facing on their transformation path. It happens quite often that when there are people with challenges alike, you get energized from the fact that other people are struggling with very similar problems and that they are solvable. It’s so much easier to see the forest for the trees from a distance.
Collab encouraged everyone to experiment between the meetings, to take small steps all the time. Experiments should be ambitious enough, but such that can be pulled through in one week. Helping to structure the experiments a tool inspired by Toyota-Kata was introduced in the first session. The tool can be found also on the above Youtube link.
My experiments were about how to proceed on the path of increasing data sharing within VTT and how to accelerate joint cloud transition and enhance transparency. I tried to keep in mind taking steps small enough and that was reminded in the Collab also. I did several experiments and I felt the most successful was a workshop with seven experts and stakeholders refining the objectives and the work we need to do. I emphasized the importance of the use case point of view, and with the experts from the Mobility services team, the use case from traffic data was evident.
Before the workshop, I tried to think of new frameworks and was a bit puzzled over how to get further. Then I decided to use some canvases from Futurice’s Lean Service Creation toolbox and they worked very well. It was a good reminder that quite often you don’t need to invent the wheel again, just use and modify great existing tools to suit your needs.
In this experiment, the success was bringing people together to form a joint understanding of the challenge. So just what the whole Collab was about. Of course, one workshop doesn’t solve everything, there had been many conversations before and there will be after, but an hour and a half of intense work in Miro can have very beneficial implications also. Again, it was good to have a minute by minute timetable and I had sent the link to the Miro board beforehand so that people had the chance to go through the canvases before the workshop.
In Collab we also talked about the importance of writing down your goals and how are you going to measure success. Continuous learning can happen unnoticed, even from yourself, if you don’t write things down beforehand. It’s also a good idea to critically assess whether the experiment is ambitious enough. Having the right questions and tools will help you to stay on track.
For me, the important outcome from the Collab was the joy of spending time with bright-minded and forward-thinking people with transformation challenges. The energy you get out of inspiring conversations with your sparring partner and the group, and the delight of seeing enthusiastic people! Especially in these times of remote work. I’m hoping we can see each other soon in real life, the work with transformations continues.
The key learning of course from Collab is the importance of sharing and being inspired. I hope you’re inspired as well, and if you have ideas for collaboration, please don’t hesitate to contact me on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, or here. Special thanks to Karoliina, Miika, and Miikka for the Collab#01!
Small experiments and inspiration 