Teamwork Innovation: How to build teams that thrive Post-Pandemic

While the first couple of minutes we still have people dropping in, we had almost 3,000 signups today, which means we're gonna have something like a thousand people joining us live. So it takes a while until everybody gets into zoom. So welcome, welcome, welcome everybody. First I want to thank Gab behind the scenes who actually made the webinar possible. And Artie, welcome to St. Stefano, who I'm going to introduce into a second. Gab is going to capture questions and is also going to answer some of your more strategize related questions after the session. So what do we have today? We have a great menu. We're going to talk about teamwork, innovation, how to build teams that can thrive post pandemic. And we're obviously all waiting for post pandemic good signs on the horizon still, you know, we'll see where that, where this is going to take us. McKinsey says it's probably going to go until Q3 until we really get back to some kind of normal. I hope you're all doing fine. Great that you're joining today. We are going to make it also fun. So a lot of educational good stuff from the master of teams and project management, Stefano. Big takeaway is good. Going to be some of the lessons from the pandemic in relationship to teamwork. I'm not going to talk about that. Not my specialty area but Stefano will. We're going to discover the new team tools. Some of you know, some of the tools like the team alignment map. But we are going to publish a whole series in our new book and you're going to get understand a little bit this balance between online on site and remote work. Like how is that going to look in the future when we're not all remote like today. And with that I'd like to introduce new Strategizer author and very good friend Stefano Mastro Giacomo. So professor, consultant, coach and author. I've known Stefano for how long? Like I don't know, 50, 50 decades. We've been at least we've been working together for a long time. And you know, I learned a lot actually from Stefano around simplifying. He initiated me to consulting and coaching back when I joined the company that he founded which you know, had some similarities with strategizers called Arvica. And I'm super excited that Strategizer was able to get Stefano on board as a Strategizer author, which will be the topic for today. We're going to talk about our new book in the content high impact tools for teams and My name is on the book. But the heavy lifting has been done by Stefano. So that's a good strategy, as you know, you get somebody to do all the work and then you take a little bit of the credit. Now, I helped with some of it and like making jokes of it, but definitely the expert here in the room around teamwork is Stefano. At the end, I'm going to show why we believe this is important for Strategizer to bring this topic and a leading author on board. So team challenges, teamwork, challenges. Before the pandemic, teamwork, you know, is something that the team whole kind of team configuration spread became important, the project orientation of more and more companies. So teamwork is not a new thing. But what happened through the pandemic is that some of the challenges that we faced actually we're just emphasized. I like to call like a radio where you connect or music where the sound was turned up. So these are not new challenges we're going to talk about. But the pandemic did accelerate or emphasize or just tune up the sound more. So they became more visible, which also has its positive effects that we learned from it and we adopted technology a lot faster. So when we go back, we can probably benefit from the best of both worlds, the physical and, and the virtual world, which we were thrown into immediately. Strategizer has always been in the remote world. But Stefano likes to tell me, alex, Alex, you need to open your eyes. Not every company is as remote and as virtual as Strategizer, and he's going to show us that. With that, I'm going to throw it over to Stefano while I'm going to try to elegantly launch the Mentee. Paul. So I'm going to be the poll master and maybe jump in every now and then with some words of experience. And with that, we will start first, Paul, I'm going to run the first poll simply to get you onto Mentee, which is important because we're also going to have a quiz and you can win a signed copy of High Impact Tools for Teams. So you probably want to join us here. So go on to Menti, you go to menti.com, you use the code 833-2430 and that will allow you later on to participate in the competition as well. So with that, we only have 69 people, so we need a couple more who join. You'll have the opportunity to join later as well. Gab will also post. I can't see right now. The chat window will also post. Yep, did that already. So please join us in the poll for later on. This was a warm up question if you believe teamwork will significantly change post pandemic. And we see a lot of you say yes a lot. So no surprise there. Stefano, over to you.

Okay, Thank you, Alex. Hello everyone and welcome to our session. It's a pleasure to have you here and I hope that during this session you will gain very practical insights on how to improve teamwork over the next years. So we've all gone through a year of intensive remote teamwork. Typical synonyms of that are distributed teams work from home or smart working. For us, it's all the same. It's working over distance together. Now, I took this screenshot yesterday on cnn. The vaccination campaign has started and as Alex mentioned, chances are that in the near future we will be able to get back to a decent social life.

Now.

In that, waiting for that, we all work in teams and we want to be successful contributors in these teams. And teams have been a bit shaken in this recent period with a pendulum constantly shifting between the opportunity to meet and work face to face or work using digital channels. Now the question for us is what are the implications and how can we get the best of teamwork knowing that this pendulum will continue to shift like that for some time and as well after that when we can completely come back to a normal social life, what will remain from this period? So let's start our journey with two facts we discovered during the pandemic. And Alex, I hand it over to you for the next question.

Okay, so that is the cue that I go back to Menti. See, Stefano is testing my technology, my remote technology skills. So in the meantime, we do have three hundred and forty people joining, so that's perfect. So please, what's the most effective communication channel for team coordination and collaboration? So let's see what your opinion is there. So you just go back to Menti. If you have it on a separate screen on your phone is actually most ideal. So when we get to the quiz, you want to make sure you can rapidly switch if you want to get this copy of the best business book of the year of 2021. No, no humbleness there. No, no humbleness.

Touch wood.

Stefano, what do you think of the poll here?

I mean, just impressed by the 18 people who voted short messages. Obviously I'll come back.

Probably engineers, I would guess in software development.

And we will address that later on in the presentation the impact of using short messages or chat rooms on team performance. So I think I can continue from here. So, okay, So of course, and if you want to learn more about that, just Google Media richness theory. The most impressive and the most effective communication channel for team coordination is face to face. And we just lost that during the pandemic. So we lost the richness and the agility of face to face. The amount of information we can convey when we're together as compared to what is conveyed through short messages is just phenomenal. So we lost that first package. A second fact is that most teams in the world had to transition extremely fast to new technology. So these technologies were there, but they weren't used by the quantity of people that are using them today and especially the number of teams and also the rapidity of, of that transition. So now if you take these two forces, the fact that we lost the power of face to face dialogue, plus the fact that we had to transition very quickly, that led us to see three challenges for teams during that last year. The first challenge, we called it mutual clarity. And to explain that, let's take the example of a coffee break. This is what a coffee break looked like before the pandemic. And this is I don't know for you, but for me that's the case. What a coffee break looks like during the pandemic. Now we lost key subtle alignment moments. And we realized how important these moments were. To align and share key information spontaneously that enabled to create new opportunities for team or to stay aligned with the rest of the team by having side information coming to us. So we lost that. And that information, we realized how crucial that was. The second challenge we have seen is related to trust. I don't know you, but I made, and I still make that experience to talk to black squares. And the question we see, and I particularly live that is how far can we trust that the people behind these connections are really connected and working with us, solving the issues at hand. The third challenge we've seen is technology itself. And I'm going to show you here a little video.

No, don't touch the computer. Turn the whole metal part of the screen, the monitor itself.

Don't use the mouse. Okay, now wait a minute. It says mute. Stop video.

No, I don't want you to do anything on the chair screen. I don't want to do anything on the computer. Stefano. That reminds, I wonder who else in the audience has done this with their parents trying to get them on Zoom or on Skype. This is a phenomenon that we all know or our bosses.

Right, Exactly. So that brings us to the third finding. The third challenge for teams is that not Everyone is as efficient as the geeks we are in using these online technologies. Many are still on the learning curve. So if you take these three challenges and the experiences we made in trying to overcome them, working with real teams in real projects. Well, this is the key three takeaways we will develop throughout this session. We believe that the best team members post pandemic will one, actively maintain clarity in the team activities. Everyone will contribute to that. Two, they will actively contribute to build trust by defining the team rules and behaviors. And last but not least, three, they will actively contribute to the setup and the mastery of mixed environments that allow seamless transition between online and offline. Now, the temptation is always to go and jump into technology first. No, we are not going to do that because technology is a means to an end. And if you don't get the teamwork basics right, that technology will not release its full potential. So we will now see point by point what we mean by that and suggest a concrete tool or concrete approaches and ways to of making that happen. So actively maintain clarity in the team activities. The problem, the challenge here we have noticed is what we call mutual clarity or a better or more technical term is common ground neglect. Typical symptom is that we attend to too many useless meetings because of lack of preparation and information available. Among other symptoms of that lack of common ground. I'm going to use the technical term now. It's unclear who does what priority skip changes and no one can figure out why or project. The famous project duplicates and overlaps you might see maybe in your organization or around you. Now, concretely, what is mutual clarity or a team common ground? Well, an amazing scholar called Herb Clark, we will share in the chat a link to his work, spent years understanding what mutual clarity means, developing this notion of a team's common ground. Technically speaking, a team common ground is about shared knowledge and shared information. So let's take Ann and Bob and it is considered that the information X is part of Ann and Bob's common ground. If Ann knows the information, Bob knows the information. But it's not sufficient for that information to be part of their common ground and hence deserve the label of mutual clarity. We need to go to a second order. Bob must also know that Ann knows the information, but and Ann must also know that Bob knows the information. If you wish in plain English, it would be something like what every team member knows that the other members also know. And now Alex, I hand it over to you for our first test to visualize common ground together.

Okay, so we have a challenge I'll leave this up. I'll leave this up for a second, Stefano, because I can't put it on the same. I'll show the vote in a second. But. So let's go to the vote. But remember what was on the screen. Okay, so let me share.

Look at this picture and we will ask you what did you see on that picture? What do you see?

Okay, so question is, what do you see? And we already have people voting, so I love it how fast everybody here is. So we have technology wizards here in the room. Okay, what's a. Okay, you said a Rorschach test. Okay, good. First saw a Rorschach like. Okay, interesting, interesting, interesting.

So I see you can see that there are many different interpretation. Look at the survey results based on our individual perception. So I bring back the control.

Okay.

So this was Oklahoma. Okay.

Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. Once you've seen it, it's impossible to unsee.

Okay, so this was actually a cow. Now, I hope everyone sees it. And I'm going to remove the drawing again and come back to the original picture. Now, I imagine everyone is seeing the cow. What we've been doing here with that example is illustrate what is a team's common ground. We had many different perceptions with that picture, but now we know that there is a cow here. And because we are all very attentive in this webinar, we also know that everyone else know, all other participants know that there is a cow in this picture. So now the cow is in the webinars. Participants, common ground. Now, it's a joke, but the implications of that are just immense. I've been testing the efficiency of common ground on task performance for teams for many years now. Hundreds of participants, and you can expect a median and also an average of an improved increase in performance of four times, which is 400%, and certain teams going actually up to 12 times faster for performing the same task. So common ground, it's our engine for collective power. I'm not going to debate too much on that now, but it has to deal with the coordination and the prediction mechanism that take place between us when we coordinate in practice. Well, we designed a team specifically to boost any team's common ground for almost any type of project. It's called the team alignment map. And you will have a link to download that right after that webinar in the chat room. That poster helps create mutual clarity in four key areas required for a team to be effective in doing any joint project or activity. It Helps align very quickly. The stakeholders clarify the roles, negotiate resources, for example, and reduce risks. All these components led and guided by that framework you put on a wall or on a shared screen. Let me show you an example very quickly. So this is an innovation team that wants to run an innovation project. So let's call the project Innovation Project three the period. And this is the result of their conversation as we discussed. We add the different post it notes so that it's visual and everyone can see the same information. And that increases the likelihood that it's in the common ground if we participate. Now the discussion goes on and the team agrees that to do that they will run experiments, design and run experiments. That teams will have to be coached on the innovation process and that they will have to ensure that the team is set up and is driven forward. Now objectives are set, but now who's going to do what? And the discussion continues. Everyone agrees to participate in the first objective, which is to run and design experiments. The second objective, coach teams. A strategizer coach is present in the room and agrees to take that part and ensure that things are in place. It is agreed by the executive sponsor the that he will particularly take care of that now.

Good.

We have a mission, a period, objectives. We know who's going to do what. We've been discussing that. Now it's not finished. You see, we have to continue filling in these columns because every project, every activity in the world consumes resources. So what is needed to run that project? We need the Strategizer app, which is available. That's cool. So that's why we put that post it note in green. Now we also need 15 man days and we don't have them. So let's have that note in red. And we need a budget of 10k that is also missing. We continue the conversation together by identifying what could prevent us from succeeding. Those are the risks. And two risks are identified. The first one, that we can't contact customers for designing and running our experiments, for example. And two, that we will not dedicate enough time to this project. Now this is a typical example of an alignment session with a team alignment map. But it's not finished yet. This first part, which is filling in the poster from left to right, is called the forward pass and give the big picture of the collaboration. But now we have to perform a forward, a backward pass. Excuse me. To address the challenges in the last two columns. We can't really expect to be successful in this with missing resourcing, missing resources and risks open. So let's address them immediately. For example 15 man days. Now we start the backward pass. 15 man days. Okay, we missed them. Well, the executive sponsor agrees to validate and allocate mandates and budget. And we just transformed a problem into a new objective with a new commitment. As we look at our post its we realize that that new objective and that new commitment also manages the problem of the budget and not dedicating enough time. So we simply remove them. Their presence on the board is not required anymore. One last example to finalize the backward pass can't contact customers. Well, we create a new objective. Ask customer success team to book clients time ahead. And the executive sponsor commits to do that. You see, that makes a world of difference. To enter into a project with a visual understanding, shared visual understanding of what we have to do together than not having that image, the same image for everyone and presuppose what other people will be doing. That changes a lot. And that addresses for us that challenge of mutual clarity that we tend to lose when we're not together.

I'll add to that. So by the way, when every time at Strategizer when we didn't use the team alignment map, either as our team or with the clients, it tends to go south because you have nothing to come back to. So I can just guarantee you from our experience, because we didn't invent the team alignment map that was Stefano. But when we work together as a team, internally or with clients, every time we don't use it, it tends to become a little bit of a mess. So we use a lot of tools, but when we don't use this one, team alignment usually goes south. So we always learn the lesson afterwards and then we remind ourselves, gee, we didn't do it. Once again, it's hard to do this ritual of a team alignment map.

And thanks Alex, for that. Just to mention that the hospital of Geneva and I owe this example to Alain Giannatazio who facilitated the exercise transformed the hospital in a dedicated COVID 19 center in just five days, starting with a team alignment session with the operations of the hospital and all the key department included. So when we mentioned the scalability of the tool, here is a recent example I have to mention successfully. Now this is for the first lesson learned. The second lesson learned is actively build trust by defining team rules and behavior and kind of stop presupposing them. The problem is what we describe as trust or psychological safety neglect. The typical symptom of that is when there is fear in the air and it's difficult to speak up other Visible symptoms. That there is a psychological safety neglect is internal competition. We should be collaborating disengagement or working in silos. We'll be immensely grateful forever to Amy Edmondson who developed and made this concept accessible to the vast majority of us, the Fearless Organization. Her last book, what is psychological Safety? It's just a variation of trust. It is the belief that the team is a safe place for interpersonal risk taking. And just to be more precise, it's the confidence that we will not be punished or humiliated if we speak up with new ideas, questions or concerns. Why does that matter so much? Well, when psychological safety is missing, well, no one wants to look ignorant, so we don't ask questions. No one wants to look incompetent, so we don't admit weaknesses or mistakes. We don't want to look intrusive, so we don't offer ideas and so on. Google impression management if you want to learn more about that. And the number one consequence of that is that we enter into a low team innovation spiral because we don't put our ideas in common and we don't leverage the creativity of all of us. We kind of cut the cooperation signal with this information that is not flowing between us and does not enable first the creation of our common ground that I just mentioned and does not help us enter into so called learning behaviors that are those behaviors in a team that help us solve complex problems, which is typically what we do when we innovate. Now don't misunderstand what psychological safety is. It's not being nice. It's not a trade off between being nice or having business pressure. No, for a team to perform you need both. There has to be a challenge, you see on the horizontal axis. There has to be some challenge in the air, some business pressure for results, but also we must feel safe on the other axis that we can experiment and fail while we find and seek solutions. And that is what makes our team enter into that famous quadrant on the top called the learning zone. I let you discover the other ones. By the way, this is very well explained and documented in the Fearless Organization. Now this is not some nice talk about psychology. It's super important. And there is an important organization called Google that realized that and made that their number one HR principle. We will share in the chat room a link to an article that explains the project they had internally to try to identify and measure, you know, how important data is for Google. Measure. What are the criteria of the most effective teams internally at Google? And the number one finding was that this was psychological safety. And they built their HR practice on that for us and the majority of us. Why not give a try to the team contract? The team contract is another tool presented in high impact tools for teams that helps anyone in the team facilitate an exercise to increase psychological safety by setting the team rules of the game, making the values explicit and behaviors. And that helps minimize also future conflict. As we have noticed in practice, what is usually an example. So this is a consolidation of what we typically see in this exercise. So at the top you add the name of your project or the name of your team example of what is in. So this is negotiated by team members together. Be on time. Do mistakes. Always seek to understand first. Come to meetings, prepare a classic headphones on means no interruption. No meetings on Fridays. Listen to each other, be open to ideas and so on. Respect the levels of confidentiality, etc. So these are typical things teams negotiate when they establish their rules of the game. And the same is true for what teams agree not to do. I'm just going to read one or two, apply procedures blindly, belate playing politics and so on. Okay, Alex, I hand over it over to you for the next question.

Yeah, and just one example. We actually had a company call at Strategizer and we use the team contract to define the behaviors in and out when it comes to accountability. So really powerful for our team to actually do that in the context of accountability. So really recommend you play around with this extremely simple tool. Right there's in and out. Couldn't be more simple. So I had this on the screen already. That's why many of you already voted or said voted actually made your behavior explicit. Do you define team behaviors and rules when you start a new project or when you start with a new team? So now you've seen what Stefano means with the team contract. So good to see the blue ones. A lot of you always define team behaviors and rules when you start, which we would want to go and verify that and see how honest you are. Let's benefit of the doubt. So we'll assume that you are defining the rules of the game at the beginning of every project. Not just once a quarter, once a year, but at the beginning of every.

When there is a new team, when there is a new team, when there's.

A new team, when there's a new team. So quite often. So pretty good, Stefano. Seems like we have a very knowledgeable group here.

Excellent. Congratulations to the participants.

Okay, I'll let you take over again.

No, I guess it's time for the quiz.

Okay. Okay. So time for the quiz so you can win. Now before we get to the last part with the, you know, technology and often online. Show it again. Show it in the screen. We want to see it. Wonderful. Okay. It's heavy, it's heavy. It's heavy intellectually and physically. So please get ready for the games. Let's let the games begin. We have 300 participants. Okay. So quite a few of our 700 participants. We have 340 who are going to compete. I'll give it, you know, two more seconds for everybody to join. Maybe some more of the 700. Stefano, what was your biggest insight related to psychological safety? You know, working with teams, for example in the context of hospitals, etc. Just maybe while people are logging in, biggest insight, psychological safety.

Again that a lot of team, we work in cross functional teams across departments and so on. So many of us have different perspectives as we assemble these cross functional teams. And my main takeaway is really that there is a lot of, we presuppose a lot of things in the air. You know, we don't make things explicit basically. So a lot of the problem with cross functional teamwork, if you want to break down the silos, it's all about like doing what matters first, which is again create the good conditions for everyone to feel like confident that it's going to work. And this is something again that still strikes me that level of presupposition that everything is going to be okay when we start working with people from completely different departments.

And I like what you said about assumptions, right? Assumption seems to be the biggest, the biggest killer because people assume and they don't verify and don't make explicit. Okay, so let's get started. Just one thing. When you answer, speed matters. So the faster you answer the more points you get. Okay, so pressure's on you. Let's go start with first question. Steveno, how many questions are we going to have?

We have five.

Okay, five. So first one answer fast, get more points. What's a team's common ground? Information every team member knows. Information every team member knows that others members also know. I'll let you go through it. Time pressure, Time's up. Whoa. Good. So people paying attention. Excellent, excellent. 179. Got it. Right. Okay, so that was number one.

Maybe a little comment. Oh no, too late.

Yeah, sorry. Oh, I was too far.

No, I will do that later.

Second, what's the median increase in time performance for teams having a high common ground? I remember that one actually very impressive number. This one is when you play the game Stefano in workshops, he plays this game that is really, really cool. 400% people paying attention. Did you want to make a comment now from before and now?

Yeah, just before those who answered the first answer. Information everyone has, it's not sufficient. You have to have that information, but you must also know that the others, they have it too.

Excellent. Okay, so question number three. The second most effective communication tool for teams is channel. Channel. Sorry, I get so excited when we do these quizzes.

The second, second best.

Video conference. Okay. Yeah. And by the way, Stefan, a lot of people were saying, wow. But you know, face to face has a lot of secondary things that you can't, you know, with scheduling and all, that's costly to travel around the world. So there's some comments there, almost religious comments. Right. For remote teams. But I guess the best is physical with all of the downsides. Of course it costs money, it's hard. But as a coordination channel, it's the best. Right.

We are fans of distributed tools and working with this amazing technology. We love that. But this is not actually a question of debate. It's like that conversations. Being physically co present presents numerous advantages as compared to being working remotely. One thing I like to say to people who are on the extreme of digital is if you had a serious challenge in your organization or in your company and that you had to set up a task force, would you prefer to have everyone in the same room or solve complex problems for your own organization remotely? I mean we kind of get a.

Sense of what you'll and what you'll talk about after is it's the combination of both. Right. That's most powerful. You use physical and physical works. And when you can afford to travel. Sometimes you can't afford to travel if you're a startup. Right. So you just live with what you make the best of what you can. Okay, so let's move to question number three. Or are we already at four? I kind of lost track here. Getting so excited. One key thing great teams will do. Post pandemic. Let's see. I won't disturb you reading this. Get vaccinated before March 2021. I like that. There's some debate around that. Okay.

Several correct answers. You all got them. Excellent.

Okay, wonderful. So you can see not all of not. There's not only one. Right question. Is this the last one? What is psychological safety?

Oh, we still have two.

I'm sorry, two more. Okay. Okay. So a nutritional supplement that helps teams perform. I'm going to eat a lot of psychological safety for breakfast. I love that. Okay. Of course, of course.

Excellent.

So the speed was right. Those who started reading from the right hand side had a competitive advantage. Last but not least, Who developed the concept of psychological safety? That's an easy one. Is it Stefano or me? Donald Trump. Okay, we're getting political here. Edmund Harrison. Amy Edmondson. Okay. Oh, some. Some believed you were. That's good. Okay, let's see. Let's discover who the winner is before I'll hand over to Stefano for some more serious ending. The winner is. Oh, Hubert, you already won something in the last thing I did, so you can't win again. Eve. Eve Upton. Okay, Eve, please send us a message. Gab, how is Eve going to communicate with us? You can. I'll post my email address in the chat and you can just send your coordinates. Okay. Very, very courageous. Gab is going to get a lot of emails from admirers as well now. So with that, Stefano, back to you.

Okay, so let's continue. Now we come to the third lesson learned, which is about technology and that the best team members will actively contribute to the setup of mixed environments so that we can transition seamlessly between online and offline work. The problem here, we call it collaboration environment neglect. And the symptom is when technology is painful and makes work slower, which should be exactly the contrary. So if you experience that, you might have a collaboration environment neglect around you. So what do we mean by collaboration environment? Basically, three things. One, it's the online environment, Two, the physical environment, and three, the ways of working or the methods you use to collaborate. Let's start with the first and before I start, just understand there is no one size solution fits all. It's a unique combination for each team to find the right balance between these different topics. So, online environment, basically what we do online, it's mostly communicate, managing tasks, sharing files and documents. And the new entrant for the majority is solve problems together online with visual platform like Strategizer, Miro and Mural. So you see all the different tools available out there. It's just a joy to see the richness of the platforms available today and what they allow us to do. Now, what we've seen during the pandemic is unfortunately that many teams use forks to eat soup. So there is a kind of tool mismatch in the usage. Now, not only there is a tool mismatch, but also sometimes there is the old habit that are so much anchored in the behaviors that they make things more difficult. So if I take for example problem.

Solving.

Still too many PowerPoint files where content is co Created that transition from one mailbox to the other. Why wouldn't you consider shifting or trying experimenting or working with an online shared space like the three you see there to co construct, solve problems together in a space where everyone can see what everyone else is seeing. And you see where I'm going here. So very quickly, this is for us, Alex, a very quick survey before I continue.

Okay. Yeah. Surveymaster over here. Launching the question. Does your company officially support an online shared product board system like Strategizer, Miro or Merle? And there are many out there these days and they all have different objectives.

We're almost half.

Half, yeah. Interesting, right? And sometimes what's interesting is you see teams that go gorilla. They use it, but they don't have official, you know. Okay. From the IT department. Right.

That's why the question was framed the way it was framed. We see a lot of courageous people. We know organization have security constraints, but I think it's a no brainer that we need if we have to balance and seamlessly transition between online and offline. Actually we have to work this out. It's not even a question. Once you start experimenting these things, there is no way back for project management and task management. Also great tools out there and here I'm not talking about the professional tools used by professionals in IT or mostly or in other departments, but I see too many activities still and projects logged in Excel and these Excel files navigating from desktop to desktop. Why not consider one of the tools I mentioned there on this page. These are easy to use and they provide really a shared view, a shared awareness of what's going on in the team and they are kind of designed to be used by everybody. So if you are a professional, of course you have the tools we know and in particular Jira, who's an amazing tool, but really you have to be in that area of IT to benefit from it. Other tools are for the rest of us. Another example of improvement to transition better between online and offline is communication tools still. Opla. Sorry, I see a lot of emails transitioning through the mailbox. Why not move to a communication channel like Slack, Microsoft Teams or hipchat so that everyone. We have dedicated channels per topic, per team and we can keep track of the rest of the conversation, particularly in our absence. Another topic that might seem trivial, but it's not at all. It's the screen size. This is too small, like a laptop. If you connect from home and you want to benefit from these great platforms available out there, don't expect to have A pleasant experience with a screen that big. I mean, we need large screen estates to see things and collaborate with people remotely. Very quickly, Alex, question is, how many of you can connect to work using a large screen?

I have six screens in front of me for the webinars. Six. So I have one really large screen. But it's pretty crazy, right, that very few, you know, in particular established companies are, you know, they work on laptops. It's very, very hard to do visual work on boards with small screens. Right?

Exactly, exactly.

So.

Be aware for those who don't have that possibility for now, that this is going to change your experience of remote teamwork with the adoption of these new shared tools. Okay, now quickly, three big mistakes we have noticed during the pandemic. Mistake number one, start new things, new projects, new teamwork, asynchronously by email, using chat rooms or sms. This is a big mistake because when a team is assembled or a new project starts, we all have different perceptions. So that's where the need for alignment is the biggest. So you might want to use a communication channel that conveys a lot of information and not a communication channel that has low bandwidth. An example I had is head of technology calling me, asking me to audit his department and in particular why the majority of their projects were significantly late and significantly over budget. What is the first question I asked him? I let the doubt for one second. I just asked him, can I participate in a team meeting or a project meeting? You know my bias for meetings. And he said, what meetings? They said, you don't have meetings?

No.

So how do you start projects then? Well, we start them through email or using the chat room. And I said, don't worry, we don't need to do an audit. I have, I think, an idea why your projects are late. When we start projects, we need maximum power to inflate the balloon of the common ground. So take advantage of the new, of the face to face, the power of face to face, or at least video conferencing. Now, another big mistake maybe Alex, you can also help me on this one, is that we see the other extreme also, if you narrow down some teams that are so into remote that they mostly rely on chat messaging and that causes problem too, because a lot of the coordination is done through low bandwidth.

Yeah. One thing I'd add here is something we actually learned, that it's more efficient to then take a synchronous video call. You'll save so much time rather than sending messages back and forth. In particular, when it's at the same Time. So sometimes we see people synchronously chatting rather than quickly opening up that second best channel, which is video communication. So it's unbelievable. The other one, when it comes to asynchronous, we're starting to use video recordings like LOOM as a platform because you get a lot more energy wise, it's better than a chat, you can summarize things a little bit faster. So something, you know, we really just started recently, a couple of months ago to systematically do loom messages. But there then the problem is you should probably also summarize some of the video messages with a small text. That brings it down to three bullet points. So there's also the blah blah phenomenon when you talk too much. No more summaries. Right?

And with that let's share the third big mistake is to use the richness of meetings just for updates. No, meetings is where we should solve complex problems because that's when we benefit from the greatest bandwidth in terms of channel for communication. So let's recap what we've learned during the pandemic in terms of. And the trademark is just for fun, we call that smart channel selection. Post pandemic. Please use synchronous channels whenever you initiate new activities and projects, or to solve complex problems, or when performing creative tasks. By synchronous channel, we mean face to face, physically co present or by video conference, and to a lower extent, audio conferencing. Now use asynchronous channels to notify about changes, cook, edit documents or share updates and report. Or if you work with people you have been knowing for a long time and you're doing something you've been doing frequently. Okay, so keep in mind this idea of smart channel selection as we will have to multi channel more and more in the future. Quickly, a note on the physical environment. The classic office space setup won't do this. We've been long convinced, Alex and I, but now more than ever we need mixed. We need spaces that are visual, work friendly, that enable the continuity of the work between online and offline. So at least a whiteboard where we can work physically if we're in the room and connectivity so that we can access rapidly, not in hours, a shared screen where we can access the team resources and visualize all the same things and also integrate those of us who will be working distantly in that meeting. I conclude with ways of working. And this is bringing to the end of our webinar the methods. So we believe that the best manager in the world is not one person. It's the team and that it's the collective responsibility to manage the team. That's why we developed and tested and and also use these five tools we presented in High Impact Tools for Teams. We've seen two today, that's what we could do in one hour. But there are three more presented in the book. These tools, you can see them as teamwork plugins anyone can use that help do both things infuse clarity in the team activities and build trust. And they work online and offline of course as they are two of them are shared spaces and the others are more behavioral tools that make us becoming better contributor. They integrate, they're just plugins. They beautifully integrate with any existing project management method you might use. And I hand it over to you Alex for the conclusion.

Yeah, a couple interesting comments. We don't have time for questions but somebody was saying be interested in the post Pandemic Office. So I'm going to put this up while maybe one or two words on what the participants were saying. So a lot of great thank you Stefan. A lot of great comments and a lot of people with strong beliefs. But a really good conversation. But might be actually time then for a follow up on the post Pandemic Office. So we'd absolutely go into that because time has run really fast. We also had fun with our little quiz. So just drop a line in what you thought about the presentation. Insightful. Interesting. We won't be able to go deeper today, but we will have the opportunity of course in the future to go deeper in future webinars. With that I'll show two last slides before handing it back to Gab. Let me see if this has worked kind of the way. I'm not used to this anymore. So we brought Stefan on board with high impact tools for teams because in innovation in transformation, there's no way you're going to succeed with a dysfunctional team. It's basically the atomic unit of innovation success or success in general. It's the team. No individual is going to succeed nor in innovation, nor in strategy, nor in transformation. So we believe it really emphasizes a lot of the It's a new job, it's a job to be done that you'll find in all of the activities that Strategizer supports. And with that summary we've seen this challenge to create more clarity with visual tools, something that Strategizer really believes in. And that's why the team alignment map from Stefano is such a strong kind of addition to the toolbox, including other tools that Stefano really bought and I think brought on board and merging psychological safety and team management from a more coordination perspective is something unique. Amy Edmondson even pointed this out that blue and red together is what's really new. And then the last one we went into the mixed environment which I think we heard Stefano evidence from the participants. We need another webinar on the mixed environment so I'm going to convince you and with that I want to thank everybody for joining today. It's six o' clock in Switzerland. We will finish on Swiss time. Stefano and I are in Switzerland and with that I'm going to hand over back to gab to you know, answer any questions that may come up. But first of all, thank you for everybody joining throughout the world.

Thank you for joining us.

We have people from Thailand and India in the middle of the night. So awesome that you joined.

Thanks.

The whole globe was present so thank you Stefano. Awesome. And this won't be a last one. See you soon.