Building a Home: Stabilizing a Distributed Team through Turbulent Times with Management 3.0 Practices and Miro.com — Personal Maps (1/7)
In this seven-ish-part series, I delve into experiences within a medium-sized business, exploring how Management 3.0 techniques and Miro.com played crucial roles in stabilizing a distributed team amid turbulent times.
TL;DR: This article chronicles a journey in a medium-sized IT company where Management 3.0 practices and Miro.com played crucial roles in stabilizing a distributed team during organizational changes. The author, Nils Hyoma, reflects on challenges, including structural shifts and a lack of teamwork, leading to the adoption of Personal Maps for remote collaboration. The article details the first step in breaking the ice with Personal Maps, highlighting their importance, the why, how, and the positive impact on team cohesion and collaboration. Practical insights are shared on setting up Miro Boards, facilitating sessions, and the transformative effects of embracing Personal Maps in building trust and fostering a collaborative environment.
Management 3.0 is a management approach focusing on agile and adaptive leadership practices. It promotes employee empowerment, continuous feedback, and collaborative leadership to address the challenges of the dynamic and complex modern workplace.
Management 3.0 is not another framework, it’s a mindset, combined with an ever-changing collection of games, tools, and practices to help any worker manage the organization. It’s a way of looking at work systems.
Hi, I am Nils. Find my Personal Map here:
My background is in team sports, specifically water polo, with up to seven training sessions a week and a match every second week. In such an environment, High-Performance Teams naturally emerge with no special tools or practices.
Working directly with my agile teams at the customer location and receiving direct feedback resulted in a similar experience. Team members supported each other, fostering collaboration.
However, I desired to work in a team of agile coaches within a community of practice or guild, so I switched to a medium-sized IT company where the Practice Area (PA) coordinated work with four-week-long Scrum Sprints. In this PA I was just a normal member, without any special responsibilities.
Challenges and Changes
After operating for several years within distinct PAs, each led by designated Heads of Practice Areas (HOPAs) overseeing up to 15 members, the medium-sized IT company decided to consolidate these teams into a unified guild. (Unfortunately, it was more a department than a guild or a community of practice from a Management 3.0 point of view) The company replaced HOPAs with People Leads (guiding the members) and Directors (responsible for topics, not for the guild), marking a singular structural change: the removal of single points of responsibility.
In my observation, the number of team members, the absence of allocated time for teamwork, unclear future goals provided by the directors, and incentives not supporting guild work hindered the guild from transitioning beyond the storming phase. Achieving commitment to a common way of working seemed elusive, except through an unstructured and non-mandatory weekly call lasting one hour every Friday after/during lunch.
Furthermore, new people joined the company and the guild. Without a clearly defined way of working, onboarding, and knowledge transfer were almost impossible.
After a few months, the company hired three new lovely Spanish colleagues and placed them in the guild. I pulled the task to onboard the new team members and bring some liberating methods and structures into the guild. For me, people are more important than roles, so I remembered my Management 3.0 class and started to host Sessions for the onboarding…
Setting up a single Miro Board for the guild
Based on the focus on customer projects, a solution was developed to support the guild with asynchronous communication and a single information radiator. The team's communication happened only in the weekly call and asynchronously through Slack and email. However, some members were overwhelmed with Slack and its various channels.
Since experiments in the guild failed to work with a backlog or with OKRs based on the focus on the customer and not the guild itself, a basic move was to set up a single Miro board as a single place for information, co-creation, and collaboration.
1st Step —Breaking the Ice with Personal Maps
As an Agile Coach, I identified challenges in remote collaboration within the guild, stemming from complex communication and the absence of non-verbal cues. Recognizing the pivotal role of establishing a personal foundation for stronger connections, I initiated a concise 60-minute session with three new team members, aiming to create Personal Maps.
Why Personal Maps? I had experienced the effectiveness of the Management 3.0 technique before and believed these visual representations could become an essential aspect of our collaborative journey, offering key benefits that significantly contribute to the team’s cohesion and effectiveness.
Ongoing Understanding: Introducing the concept, team members embraced the idea of creating their Personal Maps. These maps, capturing individual preferences and interests, proved invaluable for ongoing understanding. The plan included encouraging regular discussions about the maps during our weekly guild meetings and coffee dates.
Asynchronous Insight: The decision to utilize Personal Maps stemmed from the need for asynchronous collaboration in our distributed setup. These maps transformed into dynamic information radiators, providing team members with the flexibility to explore and understand their colleagues’ preferences at their own pace.
Building Trust Across Cultures: In a diverse team that welcomed new Spanish colleagues, Personal Maps played a pivotal role in fostering trust. As a facilitator, I aimed for these visual representations to effectively bridge cultural gaps, providing a shared language for understanding individual differences. This, in turn, cultivated a culture of appreciation and trust, proving instrumental in creating a cohesive and collaborative environment, especially across diverse cultural backgrounds.
How to fill out a Personal Map?
There are various approaches to filling out a personal map. I have two favorite approaches:
1. The Pair-Based Creation
Perfect for groups, as in this Story described. Let two individuals create each other’s Personal Maps by asking questions. Let the participants fill out the Personal Map of their partner. I observed less communication when the Artifact was created for the participant. In that case, the presentation felt a bit mechanic and less personal
Each pair then presents their partner’s map in front of the whole group, with the group encouraged to ask questions for clarification. Allocate 20 minutes for engagement and 2 minutes for presentation, adjusting the total time based on the group size.
2. Individual Creation
For my own Personal Map (see above), I prefer to create it without time pressure. I typically use it to break the ice, especially when joining a new project, team, or company. After introducing myself, when time is limited, I simply share my map in the chat channel. This allows people to explore it in more detail at their own pace, offering more insights than the brief overview provided in a meeting.
Even if only one new member will join, I will let him/her pair with somebody else and then use the Pair-Based Creation approach.
Other options are:
1. Group Contribution
Put an empty personal map on the wall and let the group fill it, timeboxing this part to 1–3 minutes. The individual then corrects and adds to the map, explaining discrepancies. Allocate 5 minutes for correction and explanation, adjusting total time based on group size.
2. Comparison Exercise
Individuals create their Personal Maps, then compare them with the group-created maps. Allow 10 minutes for individual creation, 1–3 minutes for group creation, and 5 minutes for comparison and explanation. Total time depends on group size.
How did I run the Session?
The process kicked off with my initiative to conduct a focused 60-minute session, aiming to facilitate the creation of Personal Maps for the three new team members and me.
I prepared a board and copied the Miro Template of the Personal Maps on it and invited the three new guys.
Here’s how I executed the session / my facilitation plan:
This structured approach helped foster a meaningful and productive session, ensuring that participants felt comfortable, engaged, and valued throughout the process.
What are my learnings?
The experience with the session was insightful and positive. The smooth execution demonstrated the effectiveness of Miro as a facilitating tool for Personal Maps sessions, seamlessly integrating with platforms like Zoom and Mirrorsoft Teams for breakout sessions.
The facilitation plan, tailored for four participants, proved highly effective in maintaining engagement and achieving the session’s objectives. For more participants add 2 more minutes for each human.
As the new joiners explained their Personal Maps, the impact went beyond the session itself. In the next weekly meeting, the results were explained again and started coffee dates and other team-building remote meetings.
In my opinion, the asynchronous use of Personal Maps is a powerful communication tool, facilitating communication with the new joiners and older team members. Of course, synchronous sessions are much better…
Following the success, the team extended the practice to include Personal Maps sessions for everyone in the next weekly meeting and started to adopt a single Miro Board as a base for communication and collaboration.
My conclusion?
Personal Maps have proven to be a game-changer in our team’s collaborative landscape. By capturing individual preferences and fostering ongoing understanding, these visual representations have become an indispensable tool for building trust and bridging cultural gaps. As we extend this practice across the team, the journey with Personal Maps marks a significant step towards creating a cohesive, inclusive, and resilient collaborative environment. The trust and insights gained through Personal Maps serve as a foundation for our team’s continued success in navigating the challenges of remote work.
