RTC: Return to Collaboration

There's a lot of talk about where work should happen. Less about whether the building was ever doing the work in the first place

Having sat in several meeting rooms and hundreds of calls this year, (and having a brain-cell), the answer is, obviously, not. The room does not do the work. The building never collaborated with anyone. People do. The conditions are better when someone protects the time for it to happen - wherever that is.

So while everyone goes on about returning to a place, I'd like to make a case for returning to a practice.

A room won’t solve your problems. Sorry.

I took over a problem that had been sitting, unsolved, for years. Not weeks. Years. It became one of those things people mentioned with a small (but visceral) sigh. I ran a workshop. We solved it. Took under two days.

It's not because I'm a magical unicorn, and not because two days in a shared physical space contains some kind of collaborative fairy dust. It's because I knew the problem wouldn't eventually resolve itself through enough Slack messages and short-context calendar invites. It needed protected, structured, undistracted attention from the right people at the same time. That's all.

For contrast: earlier this year I spent a full day, (too, in person) in a room with a group, on an entirely separate piece of work. By the end, the time-to-outcome ratio was, frankly, shocking. Same ingredients on paper, a room, a group, a day, and none of the structure underneath it. It could have been thirty minutes done properly - wherever we were. The building was right there. We were in said building. Shocklingly, it didn't bring anything to the table.

Make workshops work again

Three things I do when I run workshops.

Outcome-first design. I decide what we need to leave the session with, and work backwards from there. Not "let's discuss X," which is how most meetings die a slow and painful death, but "we leave here having decided Y." If you can't tell me the decision you're going for, you're not running a workshop. Who needs to be in the room, and at which point, only becomes obvious once you know the journey to that outcome, not before. You invest the time before the workshop even starts: gathering pre-reads, setting context, designing the day around the outcome you actually want.

Phased structure. Context first, so nobody's wondering why they're in the room. Divergence next, where I want as many ideas and objections on the table as possible, especially the annoying ones. Then convergence, where we actually narrow it down and commit. Skip the phasing and you get a) total chaos or b) premature agreement, - premature agreement dangerous because, more often than not, it comes back to bite your behind.

Deliberate interactivity. There's a running joke around extended teams. "Lakhi's got her Miro board out again," said with the specific fondness reserved for someone's slightly predictable habit. I keep doing it anyway: a Miro board forces people to put their thinking somewhere visible, in real time, instead of nodding along and staying quiet. I don't go in with blanks either, I've templated and boxed what I need at the point I need it. Information that happens on a sticky note (digital or physical) is information you can work with after.

Email and documents: a decision made over voice is fallible

Somebody agrees to something informally, verbally, in passing, and everyone proceeds as though it's settled. It isn't, though. It's simply a version of an agreement that exists in a person's memory, has no context for anyone who wasn't there, and will be recalled with total sincerity with three interprations by three different people the next time it matters.

Someone articulates a strategy that's meant to govern execution for cycles to come. It morphs by interpretation and by time. Like Chinese whispers, you set out to build a car and a TA-DA! you deliver a sandwich.

Whether you come to consensus in the room or on a call, write it down and make it available. Not because we can't trust people, but because nobody should be relying on memory for anything that costs money or time later. A written ask is a small act of respect for whoever has to act on it without you in the room to clarify.

Meetings: before you join a call, decide what you're taking out of it

Context is a resource. Treat it like one.

My leader told me something that stuck this year: it's entirely acceptable to open a call by saying, "I need a few minutes to get situated on this before we get into it, I'll be cameras off and muted for a tick." I thought at the time it was a bold thing to say to open a meeting. I now think it's one of the more useful sentences in professional life, because it does the same job outcome-first design does for a workshop: it forces you to know what you actually need, or how you can support, before you spend anyone's attention getting to it. Twenty-five minutes of valuable discussion beats a meeting that could have been an email (or indeed was). Meetings fail because attendees don't know what the outcome should look like before they dialled in. Or, indeed, walked into the room.

No mandate needed

It's collaboration that you design on purpose, not something that happens to you because you're all sitting near the same kettle. Though it’s sure nice when Wendy walks by and offers you a cuppa. You can protect focused time in a company office. You can protect it from your home office. The setting was never the variable that matters.

Return to whatever place you like. Just don't confuse it with returning to collaboration.