Design Visual and Engaging Meetings Using MethodKit — Webinar Recap
By Emilia Åström
We love meeting people, but let’s face it: meetings can be hard to get right. They either lack structure or are too structured. People don’t feel their voices are heard, and it’s hard to reach consensus. And running remote meetings is even harder.
There’s a better way. Cards can help you focus the discussion on the project and be confident you won’t leave anything out. It’s easy, flexible and engaging.
We had the pleasure to have Ola Möller as host for our latest free webinar. Ola is a researcher and designer that founded MethodKit. The 23 kits released so far address everything from urban planning and public health to app development. Users can be found at Apple, Google, Spotify, Ikea and Volvo.
Using the MethodKit for Workshop Planning, we showed you how you can use cards to design dynamic meetings that hit the sweet spot between structure and creativity.
A CHECKLIST FOR YOUR PROJECTS
The principle is simple: most projects have recurring steps. Don’t recreate them each time. Instead, use cards to focus the discussion on the project and be confident you won’t leave anything out. It’s easy, flexible and engaging.
A checklist is usually only made up of words. Some people work better visually. All cards has a visual symbol that represents their topic. Be visual!
CO-DESIGN WITH CARDS
Cards makes it easier to co-design your meetings or projects. Often during meetings you can find the participants taking notes on their own. Maybe there is one person that summarize all comments and sending them out in an email afterwards.
Instead of having everyone take their own notes, cards can facilitate the process of everyone creating notes together in a shared space.
FLEXIBILITY VS. STRUCTURE
On one hand, you have the totally unplanned meeting where the participants just show up without planning anything in advance. Holding a meeting without any planning in advance is similar to starting from a white canvas. In this situation cards can help provide structure and guidelines rather than start from scratch.
On the other hand, you have the rigid meeting where there is a strict agenda that can’t be altered. Cards can be found in the middle of the spectrum. The content of the cards provide a starting point for discussions, but they are flexible to order during the meeting.
DYNAMIC CANVAS
In other words, cards can be combined to create customized and flexible canvases or frameworks. While a canvas is useful in situations where the same process is always repeated, cards allows you to alter the structure depending on the situation.
CO-CREATION IN ACTION
One example of how cards can be used to make participatory design possible in big groups is a workshop that Ola did with a group of students at the University of Gothenburg. During a workshop the students used the MethodKit cards for Workshop Planning to plan a workshop.
First, they prioritized the importance of the topics on the cards by placing the cards on a table. The most important topics were on one side and less important on the other. In a few hours, the students managed to prioritize and define what they wanted to get out of the workshop and plan their effort.
RESOURCES
During the webinar we did a live demo in MURAL with the MethodKit cards for workshop planning to show how cards can be used in a remote situation. As an example Ola, Jim and I generated a couple of ideas for a project kick-off meeting.
The MethodKit for Workshop Planning are available as a downloadable PDF. We added the cards to a mural as PNG images, so that you can try them out yourself.
TEMPLATE
The mural with the MethodKit cards that we used in the webinar to plan a workshop is available as a template that you can add to your team. To start working with the template, click on the button in the middle of the embedded mural template. To access the template, you will be asked to log in. If you don’t have a user yet you will be asked to register.
In this Mural we have recreated a couple of examples of different ways to use Workshop Planning cards.
In the top of the Mural you have all the 60 cards in the MethodKit for Workshop Planning. You can duplicate these cards using CTRL + D to use them below. Here is how the mural is arranged:
- To the left,we have an activity called Pick and Discuss to help you decide what cards to discuss first. A sort of card sorting activity.
- In the middle, we have Sticky Clusters where you can use the cards as themes to ideate tasks for.
- To the right you can use the Selection Grid to prioritize cards or ideas.
- Below you find a Timeline to start planning.
- And finally, in the bottom left we have a Gallery of the team members and a Task Board.
Here are the instructions to how you can kick off your meeting by doing Pick and Discuss followed by Sticky Clusters. You can find links to the complete instructions for all activities in the end of this post.
1. PICK AND DISCUSS
The first thing to do when entering the mural is to go through all 60 cards at the top. Do a quick voting session where all participants get to vote on about 10 cards they would like to work on. Before voting, see if there are any cards you need to clarify before.
To start a voting session, go to the top of the screen and click on the dot voting icon. In this case we will have three votes each. While in the voting session you can’t see what anyone else is voting on. Before ending, ask if everyone are ready.
End the voting session by clicking on the voting icon again. Now we can see what cards got the most votes. Duplicate the cards that got the most votes and placed them in the WHAT WE COULD TALK ABOUT area.
Now let’s do a new quick round of dot voting. Duplicate the new winning cards and move them over to WHAT WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT.
These cards can be used to start generating ideas for the workshop. Duplicate them and move them over to the Sticky Clusters area.
2. CLUSTER STICKY NOTES
Work with any card you feel most engaged with. Write down the first ideas that come to mind. Encourage wild ideas. Defer judgment. Think about the participants needs. Focus on the topic. Go for quantity. Build on each others ideas.
Timebox the activity to limit the time you spend doing the ideation. Recommended time 5–10 minutes.
When time is up you can let the group share any highlights they see among the ideas. In a very short time you will notice that you generated a selection of relevant ideas for your meeting or workshop.
Next we could use the SELECTION GRID to prioritize the cards or the ideas on stickies.
Then,do a TIMELINE to see when the tasks have to get done.
Finally, we can also divide some TASKS and start working.
These were just a few examples of how the MethodKit cards can be used. The possibilities are endless. As I mentioned before we will share this mural on our blog after the webinar so you can try it yourself.
FRAMEWORK
If you look in the Tool menu to the left when you are inside a mural, you will find the MethodKit framework for Workshop Planning in the Frameworks section under the Business tab. The Workshop Planning framework contains a selection of the cards in the kit for rapid planning sessions.
Here are the slides from Ola’s talk.
LEARN MORE
