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Archive for the ‘retrospection’ Category

Weekly Online Brainstorm Retrospection

For the last couple of months we have been experimenting with Weekly Online Brainstorms.  The purpose was to give us a way to practice coming up with ideas in more accessible way than meeting together in person.  After doing this for a several times I asked for feedback.  I got plenty of nice comments.  I certainly appreciate those and they inspire me to keep finding better ways to do this but, I am more interested in the criticism.
I boiled it down to the following comments.  I think these are very good and actually give a good profile for where this process is weak.  It really breaks into two groups of comments.  The choices in the process itself and then how to improve the process to allow for more input. Comments regarding the process.
  1. Doesn’t always have to start on Monday.
  2. Once a week is a bit tough, because some weeks are very full.
  3. maybe let each one run its course, pause a few days, and start another one
  4. I don’t think they are as effective as face to face.
  5. put more constraints on the topics. IE, instead of ” What do you make of kinect”, do something more focused. That would lead to more actionable ideas.
  6. I think there are ways to do this that is better than email.
The general sentiment is that the choice email probably isn’t the best.  I would tend to agree with this.  But, it is the most approachable way and it is pretty easy to setup a filter or ignore it if it is too busy.  More complex solutions tend to loose people quickly except if they are willing to learn the new medium. With the timing of these, I have noticed that once a conversation has made it to Friday, it rarely leaps the weekend and restarts the next week.  I think its just something about the human mind and how we naturally work in cycles.  I do like fitting a weekend in there though.  Many people save up more social emails like these until the weekend when they can put some real thought into it. What I found really interesting was request to do this in a more collaborative way.
  1. I prefer to provide feedback when I have valuable feedback to provide. I may noodle something for a few weeks, or have a flash of brilliance, and would like to have a place I can go and put my feedback then.
  2. I wonder about how to place this process into the ecosystem/continuum, in  a way that it leads to changes and new products and new jobs etc….
  3. What we need is a hierarchical Discussion Group. So things can break into related topics, and they are persistent.
  4. I would rather be doing this in a co-editing space of some kind
  5. I wonder if there is room for more deliberation on the back end to help the refactoring.
  6. I think that there is an opportunity to actually take some of these further
These were really interesting and I wonder if a product could be designed for it.  If nothing else, just using a google doc might work. But, this leads me back to the problem of adoption.  It is possible to do this, but, is this a good idea?  On one hand people can add to it and refactor as we go.  On the other hand some people do better to just send email into a list in a more conversational way. So from all of this feedback I think I’m going to make a couple changes.
  1. I am going to start this on Wednesday, right in the middle of the week when people need some distraction.
  2. If the conversation still seems active the next week, I will just let it ride.  I don’t think this will be the case but, we will see.
  3. After posing the topic, I will wait until the weekend and then dump the information into a google doc to share with others.  It becomes a sort of brainstorming wipe board.  If anyone wants to brainstorm and refactor with me, they are certainly welcome to.
  4. For face-to-face discussions folks will just have to wait until idea nights.  Although I am somewhat interested in doing some sort of breakfast but, I think I would loose too many people who are busy with morning work.  Maybe I will try that some other day.
I do want to point out that many of the ideas have been put into trydea.com so they can be grown there.  I haven’t been promoting it much because we are still working on it.  But, I think it will help to allow groups to vet ideas and to form groups. That should do it for now.  We will do more another retrospection in a couple months.
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Posted by paulin to Weekly Online Brainstorm, retrospection on July 5, 2011 at 9:49 pm