How to run an Unbound session
Once we take away our organisational borders — let’s see what we can achieve!
Unbound brings people from different orgs together to work in the same location. We can work on our own work, or work with others at Unbound.
Curious about how and why Unbound was born? Want to see a session in action? Read more here.
This post offers some suggestions for how to run Unbound, together with responses to Frequently Asked Questions.
Step 1: Find a location. It could be an office, or it could be somewhere even more creative. ‘Workplaces’ take many shapes and sizes. Maybe a beach, maybe a park, maybe a boat, let your imagination flow…
Step 2: Plan a very loose format that be adapted. Decide up to how many people you’d like to host. Think about what time people can arrive from and stay until. People might work on their own things all day, or might choose to work together on something for a portion of the time. We’ve found it helpful to do a round of intros once everyone’s arrived, asking people to include what would make this day worthwhile for them. Here’s an example:
09:30 — 10:00 Introductions
10:00 — 12:00 Free working (either on your own work or work with others at Unbound)
12:00 — 13:00 Lunch (bring or buy our own — there are lots of places nearby)
13:00 — 15:00 Free working
15:00 — 16:00 Group activity (we’ll decide on the day)
16:00 — 17:00 Free working
17:00 onwards — Drinks at a local bar (buy our own)
Step 3: Raise awareness. Post in the Unbound LinkedIn group. This makes it easier for us to shine a light on it, and we even used LinkedIn as a way to organise London and communicate with attendees (rather than having a bunch of email chains flying around). Tweet that it’s happening using the #WeWorkUnbound hashtag. Again this helps people retweet it to raise awareness of it to people in your location. It might help to send a calendar invite to those interested in attending.
Step 4: Enjoy the day! Encourage people to take photos and tweet with #WeWorkUnbound hashtag. This will help spread and raise interest so more people might want to host an Unbound in their offices that you could go to.
Step 5: Share what happened. Create and share a story of how the day went. Storify seems a pretty cool tool (others exist ☺). Here’s the Storify of the first Unbound event.
Frequently asked questions:
More will be added here. Feel free to suggest some by adding a comment.
Q. Did Unbound cost money to host? Nope. People just invite people in, nothing special has to be put on. This also helps people get a true sense of the organisation’s culture.
Q. What should attendees expect and what’s in it for them? A different environment to work in for a change. Potential to meet interesting people. The best will probably be the unexpected stuff that happens!
Q. Why does the hashtag have an underscore at the front? To make the hashtag unique, to help people follow.
