Your tools shape your teams
In the past few weeks I have been working with four large traditional companies, helping them with the design of a joint event that will be happening in September. The team is formed roughly by two people from each company. We work on biweekly design sessions, with standup meetings in between to solve any blocks. This is a very neat example of teaming (one team, one goal, one deadline) and we have learned a few things about how our tools can dictate how we work.
More and more, we are teaming beyond the boundaries of our organisations, and our capacity to do good and effective work depends on our ability to collaborate on whichever platforms that make sense for us.
Of the many things that teams do, I want to highlight two aspects of my experience with this team and this project: online meetings and co-design.
- We use Skype for our meetings and, for one reason or another, it was not possible to share our screens, something about admin rights. Furthermore, after all these weeks I don’t even know the faces of my fellow team members. Some of them don’t have cameras, and even if they have them, it’s not in their culture to have them on in video calls.
- We use a Word document to capture the design decisions, which we then share around as an attachment to an email. We tried to create a Google Doc but hardly anyone else in the team had access to the G Suite (their IT policies don’t allow them to). Furthermore, they were unable to create a live and shared Word document.
The consequence of these two problems has been a slower and linear design process.
During our meetings we could not break up into smaller and iterative working teams, and we all had to listen to the dominant voices in the group the whole time. Often we did not address the opportunities and ideas around the team. I wish we could have had blocks of 20 minutes in smaller groups (the only tool I know that can do this is Zoom), seeing each other‘s faces, I am sure we would have felt much safer to speak up.
And to add to the difficulties, we could not all work on the same document. The number of emails, meeting minutes and attachments got out of hand very quickly. If you ask me, I am not sure which one is the latest version or whether it contains all the decisions. We have zero chance to think laterally, we are barely keeping up with executive mode and knowing what’s going on.
And this happened because of the bloody Microsoft jail!
The Microsoft Jail
Up until 2016 I was working almost entirely within the Microsoft suite (Outlook, Office, Skype, SharePoint, and yes, ghastly MSProject). Since I quit my corporate job my toolkit has now exploded and I use the best-of-kind for whatever I need to do. It’s been an exhilarating experience and I am a much better worker now — better at creating, cooperating and collaborating. In short, I am much better at teaming.
Every now and then I work with teams who use Microsoft Suite, and I ALWAYS encounter the following situations:
- People trapped by the Microsoft jail always complain about their tools.
- Their IT policies make it difficult for them to use tools outside the jail
- Many of them use other tools in their “personal” life and they wished they could use them “at work”.
Why don’t companies allow their employees to choose the tools that make sense for them?
My Suite of tools
I am not making the case for one suite versus another suite. I am making the case for us choosing the best-of-type tools out there, and what “best” means changes from person to person and from team to team.
Here are the tools that make sense for me and in this particular period of time.
Loomio
Freemium
We use Gold [39 USD/month for up to 100 users]. This means as cheap as 3.9 USD/user/month…
I am not sure whether our network would even exist if it wasn’t for Loomio, the platform we use for collaborative decision making. We are a distributed and emergent network, meaning there aren’t bosses, so you can imagine how important it is for us to make decisions collaboratively, transparently and fast.
Google Docs and Slides
8 EUR/user/month for business edition.
At first I missed some of the functionality of Word and PowerPoint, but nothing beats how easy is to share and co-create reports or presentations with the Google Suite. To be honest with you, when I need a powerful spreadsheet (not very often), I still use Excel.
Microsoft Excel
Office 265 costs 8 USD/user month for businesses.
It has been around for a while, but MSExcel is still the industry standard. Long live the King of spreadsheets! But watch out, Airtable has been steadily displacing Excel in my work flow…
Typeform
Freemium (Free is more than enough for me)
I didn’t realise this at first, but collecting data has turned out to be very important and useful. Here is an example to obtain feedback and this one to provide an experience.
MindMeister
Freemium. We use Business [13 EUR/user/month]
I am a big fan of this app to do our knowledge management. I use here the term ‘management’ for want of a better word. We generate, capture and share knowledge from the individual and share with openly with mindmaps, for anyone to explore and use at will.
Trello
Freemium — Free is enough for me.
Another tool that I could not live with. Agile team work on canvan is irrepleaceable. Full stop. By the way, in one of my projects we use Planner (the client is in the Microsoft jail) and it’s just horrible.
Airtable
Freemium — Free is enough for me (so far)
This app totally blows my mind. It’s something like a spreadsheet combined with a database, all in the cloud, very intuitive and it allows many integrations and automations. For now I only use it as a CRM, but I have big plans for building automations across our network.
Zapier
Freemium — Free is enough for me (so far)
I could not talk about Airtable without talking about Zapier, another amazing app which allows you to interconnected all these apps and automate the crap out of your workflow. I get notifications on Slack for stuff that matters to me and I create automations of the type “if this happens, then do this”. I feel Zapier and Airtable are going to be very valuable to use in the near future.
Eventbrite
Fee per ticket, free for free events.
Organising events is complex enough on itself, so I really appreciate a tool like Eventbrite to simplify the ticketing part of it. Events could be something as small as an online workshop for 5 people. I find Eventbrite quite expensive for paid events (did it go up during last year?), but it’s free for free events.
Freemium — Free is enough for me
The flow of information is mind-boggling: great articles, ideas shared over coffee, people I follow on Twitter, tools people recommend, etc. I have an account with Pocket that allows me to save all those links on the fly — across devices of course. It is extremely useful for the monthly best-reads newsletter we send out.
Mailchimp
Freemium —I believe we have the Standard subscription at USD15/month
Dead-easy to use, Mailchimp is my mailing app of choice. I wonder how much longer will ti make sense to send out newsletters, but for the time being seems to be working fine. By the way, I was at a workshop the other day and one of the attendees, the youngest person of the group, told us that the only newsletter she reads is one that she receives on Whatsapp…
Slack
Freemium — We use standard [7.5 EUR/user/month]
In the last three years the number of emails received has decreased a LOT. I now communicate with a range of apps, and Slack is my prefered app for communications in a project. One thing I particularly like is that I can automate many important notifications on Slack channels, as opposed to by email.
Telegram
Freemium (I just discovered) — Free works for me
It’s like Whatsapp but better. I use it for instant messaging and for light group discussions. Maybe it’s becoming too popular in my network (meaning, there I some discussions that I think should be on Slack or Loomio instead).
Zoom
Freemium — We use the Pro version at £12 month/host
For me, the unrivalled platform for remote meetings. The free version was enough for a while but recently we had to admit we make intensive use of this tool, so we went Pro. Before buying the Pro subscription, we were also using Appear.in, which is very nimble and great for meetings with up to four people.
Inkscape and Gimp
Open Source
The open source equivalent to Illustrator and PhotoShop. Really really good tools!
Workflowy
Freemium — Free is more than enough for me
I use this tool to list my tasks. Dead simple and powerful. Before I was using Wonderlist for years but it was clear that Workflowy is better…
About me
I’m an organisational transformation facilitator who works with organisations seeking to empower their teams to innovate and transform business strategy. My focus is on collaborative and agile practices, knowledge management and collective intelligence. I’m fascinated by networked organisations, distributed leadership and innovative governance models, and their ability to transform traditional companies into adaptive and purposeful organisations.
You can contact me at manel@greaterthan.works or simply check out our work at Greaterthan.
