Collaboration Techniques

One of my favorite books on building better products and having high performing teams is by Luke Homan. He wrote this book called Innovation Games. It's been around a while. Highly recommend it, very much worth, worth spending time on this book. But what he suggests is that innovation is not some step by step process that we can sort of assign and follow through. You know, like follow these six steps and you'll be, you know, innovative. No, it's, it's more of a creative process, certainly more art than it is science. I've been on teams where we practice innovation and we have sprints dedicated to innovation. And it is a creative sort of process. Well, in this book, in this book he talks about a set of different games you can introduce to your teams and help them to sort of unlock those creative, that creative thinking, if you will. One of my favorites is called the Speedboat Game. It's this idea that you think about your product or your service as a speedboat. I love boating. I love all things on the water. So think of it as a speedboat and with a series of different anchors. And these anchors might represent those things that slow you down, those things that your users and your customers as well don't like about your product. Think of those as anchors slowing your speedboat down. But the point is that this game sort of gets you out of the paradigm of just thinking about your product in a single way. There's a bunch of recommendations in the book and what I want to introduce to you now is a game. And so I'm going to introduce you to what I call the artist exercise. In a moment, I'll describe to you a piece of art, something that I've created, I'm proud of. It's a work of art. I'm just going to describe it to you verbally. I'm not going to show it to you, I'm just going to describe it to you. What I want you to do is to draw it out. So I need you to grab a pen, pen and pencil, pen or pencil, piece of paper and you can just pause the video right here if you need to, to go get that. And when you come back, I will, I will describe the work of art. I want you to draw. Art is my life. My life is my art. And my latest work I'm going to describe to you now using just words. So if you have your pen and your paper ready, let's begin drawing together. Here's how I have it envisioned and what I want you to draw. There are really only two contrasting colors here. A Dark gray and a light gray. We have a vertical line down the middle and then a series of horizontal lines coming across that out to the left and right of this drawing. Now, they're not perpendicular to each other. They're not on the exact same plane as each other. They are at angles. And they go sort of from the left to the middle going down and from the right to the middle going down. But, but, but, but, but the whole drawing isn't like that because at the bottom half of the drawing, or third, one third of the drawing, that vertical line disappears. And now we just have a horizontal line going across multiple horizontal lines. One dark gray, three or four light gray, one dark gray, three or four light gray. But it's at an angle so that the bottom gray disappears into the corner of the canvas. Also at about the top, right, middle, right side of the vertical line is a. What looks in my mind like a mirror. Now, this is just an artist effect of reflecting back. I want, I want the experience of reflection in this work of art. So in that bottom right third, that's going to have a triangle shape that reflects the right, bottom left third of the drawing itself. So you've got your gray lines and your white lines coming into each other almost like a series of planks, if you will, that reflect each other. So the reflection actually now changes the angle and then ends abruptly on the right, revealing a small sliver of the horizon. Yeah, yeah. This is going to be a wonderful work of art. I can't wait to see what you draw. Okay, well, there you go. There was our artist describing that work of art. So how'd you do? Let me, Let me put up, Let me put up the piece of art here. Now this is, this is what you should have, should have drawn. This is what the, the artiste. This is what the artiste had in mind. So take a look at what we have here on the screen for you. How'd you do? Does yours look like this? What I found over the years is that it typically does not look like this. Typically, it's very difficult to sort of draw a piece of art from just words alone. So. So let's talk about some of the things that this, this game can demonstrate. Well, number one, it can demonstrate that collaboration is hard. And somet sometimes just verbally describing things isn't enough. We know already that just writing things down isn't a great way to collaborate either. Collaboration is not a shared document. So getting to shared understanding is more than just writing things down. It's more than just verbally Describing it. What if instead the artist had shown you the work of art and then verbally described it, like combining both the visual and the auditory, like combining those things, you. He would probably have a much better drawing. How about this? What if you had an opportunity to seek feedback from the artist on a regular basis? Sort of. Is this what you were saying? Is this what you're saying, showing that piece of work? Well, one way that we do that on our teams, at the team level is in that daily standup. That's a place where we're getting feedback from our product owners. We certainly do this at the Sprint review, the retrospective. These are Scrum events where we're getting that feedback, sort of. Is this what you want? Feedback? So very important to understand. Shared understanding and collaboration is difficult and it takes more than just one set of tools to do that. And so I wanted to share with you another way to do it, and that's to introduce games. Introduce games into your. Into your team, to think differently and get those creative juices flowing, to build better products, to have. To build better teams as well. All right, gang, I want to introduce you to a tool I use all the time. It's called Trello. Trello is a collaboration tool. It helps really organize your projects into what are called Trello boards. In your board, you create columns for each of the maybe its processes in your workflow. And then for each activity or each piece of work you're doing, you create a card. And you can move the cards between those columns to show progress of work. And within those cards, you can. You can open those up. They can be assigned to people. You can set due dates, of course, have all the details of the card. You can add attachments. I use Trello quite a bit on multiple teams. It really helps me know who's doing what and what I'm responsible for. It helps other people know what I'm working on. It allows everyone on the team to have access in one location to all the work that we're working on. It really leads to less email, fewer meetings. Like, who's not for that? Woohoo. Fewer meetings.