(2020-04-15) The Remote Magic Of Collaborative Notetaking

Remco Snijders: The (remote) magic of collaborative note-taking. Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone, including yourself, was eagerly taking notes but you failed to see any results of people’s effort?

Now imagine a completely different approach to note-taking. Imagine developing part of the content of a meeting during the meeting. Imagine developing that content collaboratively and having a process of refining rough notes into concrete decisions or ideas. (Don't call it Content!) (cf technography)

Google Ventures’ Design Sprint does exactly this. To be fair, all content of the Design Sprint is collaboratively developed during the ‘meeting’. But the inventors came up with a specific approach to note-taking: How Might We’s.

the notes are shared with the whole group. This allows for a process of categorizing the notes, prioritizing the categories and prioritizing within categories. The notes thereby become the basis of your project’s scope and priorities.

Less known than the Design Sprint, the Lightning Decision Jam format is ideal for turning a process or product that can be improved into actionable tasks within an hour. It is invented by a company called AJ & Smart.

In this Jam, your whole meeting is turned into structured, collaborative note-taking. First problems, then challenges, then solutions and finally tasks, everything is turned into notes!

shows some serious benefits
It reduces discussion to a minimum
It stimulates creativity
Notes are rough, which makes them easy to create
Notes can be voted on
Notes can be prioritized
Notes can be connected and thereby evolve into new notes
Notes are visible

your daily reality of remote meetings? While the above two examples are ready-to-use problem solving formats, you can easily come up with a light weight and tailor-made approach to increase the productivity of your meeting.

think about the following things.

Define the end... What are you trying to get out of the meeting? Do you want to decide, create, prioritize, inform, collect feedback?

Set your starting point

Fill the gap with milestones

• Where are you now? If you want to decide something, have you already identified your options?
• The defined end is the goal, the starting point is your current reality. Now it’s time to add some milestones in between.

split the workshop into several sub sessions that allow you to reach milestones.

Diverge and converge

Develop trust

Especially in remote meetings, it can be hard to develop trust among the attendees. A lack of nonverbal communication makes it a lot harder to understand and trust verbal communication.

This lack of trust can be mitigated by using transparency, which is exactly what collaborative note-taking does

The real magic is in good facilitation. Facilitation is composed of preparing your meeting’s structure (start, milestones, end) and using the right tools, but also of explaining the approach and empowering your audience.