thebuilding blocksofCOLLABORATIVE DESIGN

WORK TOGETHER

When everyone on the team creates and presents their ideas in tangible form, commonalities emerge, hidden divisions become obvious and teams overcome assumptions about what they’re doing and where they’re going.

Discussions can drag on forever, often with team members arguing about arbitrary wording of what they already agree on. Having the team create and then present, helps them see what they actually agree and disagree on. It allows the team to build on each other’s ideas and push their project rapidly forward.

WORK TOGETHER AND APART – There’s an art to determining when everyone needs to work or present on the same topic, and when it would be best to have each team member focus on a separate area and bring their results back to the group. A balance of both helps keep a team on its path while also supporting individual creativity and growth.

RECORD YOUR COLLABORATION – This is a great way to see ideas emerge that nobody had anticipated It helps build team culture by establishing visible and often humorous points of reference, and also helps the team remember where they’ve been and where they’re going.

SHOW – Scrums that don’t work well are often the result of team members not showing what they’ve done. It’s easy to say something is “almost finished” if you don’t have to show it. Showing what you’ve done and are doing is important for collaboration to work effectively.

MAKE IT TANGIBLE

TANGIBILITY DOESN’T MEAN CREATING AN ACCURATE VERSION OF THE FINAL PRODUCT – It can serve as a way to explore analogous representations of the product’s core concepts. How do you make “simple” tangible? What about “fun,” “innovation,” “safety,” “excitement,” “enjoyment,” “health”?

MAKE IT TANGIBLE AND MAKE SURE IT STAYS VISIBLE TO THE TEAM – Visibility helps align team members towards a common vision, minimizing miscommunication. After a team goes to the trouble of making a concept tangible, don’t hide it away. Keep it out where all the team can see it everyday.

TANGIBLE OBJECTS ARE NOT JUST FOR PROTOTYPING – If your final deliverable is an abstract concept or system that is difficult to articulate, tangible objects help solidify the ideas in a person’s memory and make the path to the goal easier to follow.

Make everything visible in whatever way possible - draw it, build it, grab a photo of it, code it. Take ideas out of the intangible realm of words and into the physical realm.

This not only helps teams push their debate further into specifics, but it can also expose useful metaphors and connections that aren’t describable or visible in words.

Tangibility creates a visible, active language that everyone can understand. Physical objects or visuals make ideas and systems stick in our minds.

TIME IT

MAKE TIME CONSEQUENTIAL – Random deadlines don’t inspire anyone. Use deadlines and time limits that lead to a logical conclusion like a product launch, contest, conference or even just lunch.

WHEN TIMING DURING WORKSHOPS, DON’T WAIT UNTIL THE LAST PERSON IS FINISHED – If you do, you’ll always have other people sitting around waiting and the energy drops. If time is up, move on and emphasize that the point of the exercise wasn’t to make a polished product.

A time-limit focuses a group or individual and helps everyone tap into their intuition. With too much time, people tend to over-think, erase, redraw, rationalize, and get anxious about what they’re doing. And when they get anxious, they fall back on what they’ve done in the past.

Rapid iterations with time limits and deadlines can greatly improve productivity by tapping into “crunch-time” energy, when people act because they have to.

EXTERNAL FORCES

WHAT IS THE EQUATION OF THE PROBLEM? – If X+Y-Z= BIG SCARY PROBLEM, then solve or mitigate X,Y and Z first.

ESTABLISH WHAT YOU WANT TO BE AND DON’T WANT TO BE – If you’re making something “fun”, figure out what isn’t fun. Understanding where you don’t want to go with your venture helps clarify where you do want to go.

S.T.E.E.P. ANALYSIS – What are the social, technological, environmental, economic or political forces affecting your venture?

Explore the external forces affecting a problem to narrow down the scope of the issue. This can work for any problem and helps turn seemingly large and scary problems into a manageable series of much simpler ones. When anything and everything seems like a possibility, it helps to remove some of the possibilities.

HUMAN-CENTERED

WHAT IS THE USER’S DAILY JOURNEY AND POINTS OF CONTACT WITH YOUR OFFERING – Map out the user’s journey to understand challenges they have interacting with your offering and how you can better incorporate it into their lifestyle.

WHAT DOES THE CUSTOMER VALUE? HOW WILL YOUR PROJECT CONNECT WITH THOSE VALUES? – Don’t just think about features the user might like. Think about what it will mean to the user to use your product.

HOW DO YOUR POTENTIAL USERS ACTUALLY BEHAVE? – This is not about how you hope they’ll behave.

It’s easy for a team to focus on features for the merits of the features - “the technology is new”, “it’s the programming language we know”, “3-D looks cool”, “this is what’s in the budget”, “that’s what we scoped for” - instead of focusing on what the user needs or wants.

We often fall back on what we know or what we think we want to know and assume. Bring the problem back to the user, the customer, the humans that will interact with the offering. This requires observation, interviews, multiple viewpoints, play-testing and empathy.

Focusing a problem around a specific user can illuminate potential solutions and expose new territory to explore that a team might be unaware of.

LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO HAVE USERS BUILD PROTOTYPES FOR YOU – This opens up new perspectives and shifts your thinking closer to the user’s interaction with the product.

ITERATE

MIX ITERATING INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY – Working collectively helps keep a team focused and on the same path, while iterating individually can help innovation flourish outside the constraints of the group.

ARRIVING AT THE RIGHT SOLUTION SHOULD OPEN UP MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO ITERATE – Even after the product ships, the next iterative cycle should already be building on the previous. If it’s not possible to continue iterating on the previous idea, then perhaps it wasn’t the best solution.

Rather than aiming for a single, far-off deliverable, iterate on any idea quickly to tap into a team’s intuition, and tangibly to make goals and problems visible.

The purpose of iteration isn’t to come up with the perfect finished product, it’s to come up with the right idea, see that right idea emerge out of many others, and be able to grasp why that’s the right solution.

When teams iterate together - for example, with every team member creating a customer journey in ten minutes – they are able to prove why a specific direction is right or wrong and understand why. This understanding provides the segue into the next iteration, enabling the team to scrap ideas that don’t work, validate ideas that do, and continue iterating towards a final goal that makes sense.

GOALS

GOALS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE – Make sure the format by which you display goals is modular and easy to change. Milestones and goals need to adapt quickly. Goals shouldn’t be so precious that the team is willing to sacrifice the user’s needs for the sake of meeting a goal they didn’t want to modify.

SIMPLE MATH! – All completed tasks in a cycle should add up to the upcoming milestone. All completed milestones in a project should add up to the final goal.

KEEP GOALS TANGIBLE AND VISIBLE TO THE ENTIRE TEAM – It’s easy to slip off the path when you can’t see where you’re going.

The goal often gets lost when teams encounter a problem - immediate needs begin to outweigh the long-term, core needs of the project. This often happens when the project goal is vague but the immediate problem is clear and specific, which makes it easier to tackle.

Set specific goals with very clear, unambiguous descriptions. Drawing or prototyping something tangible works best. An unambiguous long-term goal can offer a razor that exposes solutions to short term problems. Breaking that long-term goal down into smaller, very specific milestones, can further offer potential solutions to a team when they might otherwise feel lost in the middle of the ocean.

Even on short exercises or small projects, determining a goal and laying out a clear path to that goal help the exercise or project run more smoothly. Otherwise, a lot of time is wasted with people asking, “Why are we doing this?”

WHY

ASK WHY FIVE TIMES – Don’t just ask why once and let the topic rest. Take the answer to the first question and ask why again. Keep going. Our true motivations are often hidden to ourselves and rarely what first pop into our minds.

ASKING WHY HELPS GET TO A USER’S TRUE VALUES – What a customer likes isn’t always as relevant as why they like it. Technology will change, but the values that compel users to connect with specific features, rarely change.

Ask why. Why is often the simplest way to begin tackling a problem.

It can quickly get to sensitive areas at the core of the problem, expose personal barriers to achieving success and completely change the direction of a project. A conversation that begins with asking why, can often end in tears, so it’s important to keep an open mind and listen carefully to what’s actually being said.

Asking why can often induce anxiety and many people try to deflect the question. Even when the answer might lead to an uncomfortable outcome, it’s important to be honest and open. Questions that make people uncomfortable often get to core issues that could derail a project if not tackled.

SILENTLY & LOUDLY

ACTIONS CAN SPEAK MUCH LOUDER THAN WORDS – Pay close attention to body language when working silently or loudly. If someone is stepping back and not saying much during verbal exercises, try a silent exercise to allow them the chance to make their ideas visible to the rest of the team.

SILENT COLLABORATIVE EXERCISES OFTEN LEAD TO STARTLING RESULTS – Be ready to seize on innovative ideas that emerge and translate them into actions.

Collaborating silently on a prototyping, sorting, or drawing exercise helps inspire intuitive leaps in a team and forces them to try understanding what their fellow team-mates really mean, without allowing verbal miscommunication to get in the way or a single team member to dominate. Collaborating silently is a great way to make sure the team hears everyone.

At other times, it is imperative that a team collaborate vocally and loudly. This often works best with exercises that are meant to engage the team, have them tell jokes, to begin understanding what different words mean to each team member, and how the team can build its own language.