How to take insightful notes as a team — and make them actionable

Solaria Labs — a Liberty Mutual endeavor

Teams of smart people are not necessarily smart teams. re:Work by Google has published insightful research on the dynamics of effective teams, highlighting psychological safety as a critical ingredient, but there are also basic team mechanics in which easy adjustments lever big improvements. One example is note-taking as a team.

Here is the process my team and I used to take notes while using the outcome-driven innovation methodology. We had one block of secondary research, followed by four blocks of five interviews apiece. Regardless of what type of research each block is dedicated to, this approach helps distill the key insights. When the blocks are dedicated to primary research, we consider a block to be five interviews. When the blocks are dedicated to secondary research, we consider a block to be five “learning units”, e.g, listening to a podcast about the topic, reading an industry white paper, et al.

For each interview or learning unit

1. Collectively create a question guide that prioritizes the group’s most important unknowns using the KJ method
2. For each interview or learning unit, everybody takes notes individually on their computer. The method is to each person’s preference.
3. At the conclusion of the interview or learning unit, each person self-edits their notes for clarity and completeness. They write down 5–10 key insights onto post-its (one per post-it). Everybody should use the same color post-it (you’ll see why later.) They also enter those insights, as well as verbatims, into a group spreadsheet, where the rows are each contributor and the columns are the research sources.I recommend Airtable as the collaboration tool for the team — it has many different field types for including pictures, attachments, checkboxes, etc. This spreadsheet will become the living, evolving documentation of your team’s research.
4. Adhere everybody’s post-its to a big sheet of brown paper, with the name of the research source at the top. Do a light thematic organization of the post-its on the sheet, and remove duplicates.
5. At the conclusion of each block of five interviews or learning units, the team should have five big sheets of brown paper, each with post-its of a different color. (e.g., one sheet has all blue post-its, one sheet has all yellow, etc). The team should also have a spreadsheet with five columns of insights, verbatims, and other material filled in per each contributor.
6. Hang up all the brown sheets of paper in one room and organize all the post-its thematically (KJ Method guidance applies here). The process is dynamic — everyone can move any post-it. The process doesn’t stop until there is stasis. Then, everyone should name each thematic group with a noun-cluster than describes it. Vote for the most descriptive names so that there’s only one remaining per thematic group (and if there’s disagreement, that’s a good sign that perhaps the group needs to be split.)
7. You should now have thematic groups, each with one name. Examine them as a group. Which are ‘rainbows’ — with post-its of all five colors? This suggests broad relevance. Which are more concentrated? Conduct a what, so what, now what to debrief the findings together.
8. Update the question guide with another KJ Method so that your shared learning compounds for the next block of research.