Thank you team Openlab

Today was our very first official scribing since that first week in March when events had to go into quarantine. And we couldn’t have been more grateful than this. Exploring digital, visual engagement via zoom and working with an innovative, kind and professional team on an important topic: equality and diversity to foster innovation.

Nikki, Mina (Simply) and Marie, Ida, Karla (Openlab)

Openlab is a creative space that brings people together to find innovative solutions to challenges we face as a society. The event series ‘Share, Mingle and Inspire’ is centred around open innovation and will give guidelines how to share. Openlab is in favour of open innovation because we believe business and innovation are going in that direction and that we are also forced by societal and technological change to do so.

During these past two months we’ve participated in various digital meetings ranging from smaller groups of 10 up to bigger ones with some 100 participants. It’s been a good transitioning period letting us ease into the zooming and taking part of digital facilitation methods for teams, workshops and larger groups.

Our key learnings have been that

1. preparation gets even the more important in the digital realm. Which in the end means easier flow during the meeting, and usually more clarity for participants.
2. the organizing team is at it’s best with at least three people involved and the roles clearly defined. For example host (who guides and moderates the session), co-host (who supports and take questions for example), technical master (who gets everything done in the backend. especially when it’s time for breakout sessions)
3. participant engagement needs to be promted clearly. Which creates more qualitative output.
4. it’s awesome for people to be able to ask questions in the chat and the organizer/facilitator to pick them up one by one. Ok, one option could also be to “raise hand”. Guess there’s a choice to make there. The facilitator has more control by asking for questions in the chat, and it’s kind of nice that everyone can see the questions coming in. However, if you ask people to raise their hand instead of writing in the chat, the facilitator won’t know the question in advance. Makes it a little more exciting perhaps? And then the participant can ask the question with their video on. It might make it feel a bit more personal.
5. it’s also awesome that participants can start chatting with eachother in a private message just like that. That could never happen so easily in real life.
6. muting everyone is a great funcionality makes it more efficient for people. Imagine that in real life ;)

The Openlab team did an excellent job hosting this very first digital edition of their Share, Mingle and Inspire-events. We’re so grateful to have been a part of this journey together.

Here’s a 1 min insight behind the scenes: https://www.instagram.com/p/CAND9JgHh9d/

It was an incredible experience for us to support with visual facilitation and explore how it works. We had some good backup a few days in advance from our visual practitioner friends in the Graphic Facilitation group. Thanks Roy Blumenthal, Anna van Der Aa, Jana Skřivánková, Vanessa Koster and Richard Zultner. We went for Anna’s suggestion with Mirroring360. And oh, the Masters of Zoom should be the most important Facebook group created these past weeks (!).

Not sure we’d normally be sharing the behind the scenes, getting to know stuff-process, like this. Usually you just figure it out and do it. But we think the testing and learning how stuff works is also valuable to share. Especially in these times when we are so many paving out new ways. We’ve discovered and learnt a whole lot of great things that could benefit other visual practitioners in their zoom-beginnings and will be looking forward to sharing more of that ahead.

So tomorrow morning we’re fine-tuning the last parts and all the visual landscapes will then be shared by Openlab to the participants. Meanwhile here is one version summarizing the highlights from the speakers to give you an idea of the results.

Next week we’re having a debrief with the Openlab team and we’re looking much forward to that :)

It felt like we found a seamless way of switching from speaker presentations and the live scribing that Nikki was working on live in the moment.

If you reading this and participated it would be so cool to hear what you thought about the live scribing. Did it help you? How was your experience seeing the visuals grow live like that? And do you think you’ll remember more after seing the visual metaphors?

Thanks greatly for now and we’ll be back with a new summary next week. And here’s the 1 min live video clip Mina captured via FB Live.

Love,

Simply

If you speak Swedish, there’s a blog post with cool meeting tricks on Mina’s blog you can check out: minalegnered.com/2020/05/05/nara-samarbete-pa-distans / If you think it should be translated to English and posted on the Simply-blog. That shall be done too ;)