Freestyle Visual Collaboration
In recent times there’s been a lot of activity in the visual collaboration space. Lots of new tools, techniques, canvases, and remixes have appeared, gaining a lot of momentum from the pandemic-driven move to remote working and digital tools like Miro.
I think the effects have been very positive. More of the meetings and workshops I attend are more productive and collaborative and it seems that people are now more warmed up to the idea of participating in visual collaboration as well.
However, I’ve realised that in a lot of my most productive workshops, I’ve been applying bits and pieces from various techniques in ad-hoc ways, trying to best adapt as the workshop unfolds. I refer to this as freestyle visual collaboration.
Having to quickly think on the spot and improvise during workshops is quite difficult. Sometimes I do it better than others, but it’s definitely an invaluable skill to me and one I would encourage you to build as well.
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Sticky-note Scribing
One of the techniques that I started using at the start of the pandemic, and have continued to hone since then, is sticky-note scribing. This has been one of the techniques that helped to build my freestyle skills, as well as being a genuinely useful technique.
Sticky-note scribing is a pretty simple idea. You try to capture the conversation with sticky notes on the Miro board in real-time as a meeting is taking place. As you do this, the board gets messy so you need to start using colours and shapes, grouping stickies into clusters, and so on to make your visual notes easier to comprehend.
This technique is good freestyle training for a few reasons. The first is learning to build your own notation. For example, here’s the notation produced during a recent scribing session. This notation was designed based on the types of information arising during the meeting:
Sticky-note scribing is also good practice for workshop multi-tasking. You simultaneously follow the conversation and think about how to take and organise the visual notes.
In freestyle workshops, you’re usually part of the workshop whilst also (re)designing the workshop in real-time at the same time. It is necessary to get good at multi-tasking and thinking under a little pressure.
I would also add that sticky-note scribing, and freestyle workshops in general, are a lot easier when you have someone to help facilitate so you don’t have to deal with too much pressure. I always try and facilitate with at-least one other person.
Freestyle Remixing
During freestyle workshops I rely heavily on existing techniques like canvases and modelling notations. I don’t try to design custom notation from scratch in every workshop when I don’t need to. Accordingly a good freestyle facilitator still needs a toolbox of structured techniques.
A couple of my freestyle gotos are Impact Mapping and Event Storming. What I mean is, during a freestyle workshop, if we’re discussing work items or business goals, I’ll default to using the Impact Mapping notation to represent that part of the discussion and add a little bit of structure. It won’t suddenly become a full-on Impact Mapping workshops, and I may not use all of the Impact Notation exactly as intended, but I’ll remix it to the current situation.
Likewise, for anything that feels like a timeline, I’ll usually default to some of the basic Event Storming notation and principles, and remix to varying degrees.
In a freestyle workshop, there can be a lot of changes of direction. One minute it might look a bit like Impact Mapping, but then once the key piece of information is gained or something comes to the surface, the workshop will look more like Event Storming. And then after that we might reach for a canvas (which might also be slightly bent out of intended shape). And then we might jump back and forth between all of these things.
Freestyle Your Next Workshop
Time, practice, and patience are the ingredients for improving at freestyle visual collaboration, so I recommend taking every opportunity to try it out. It’s a really useful skill which I’m sure you’ll find it to be a good investment of your time in the long-term.
Sticky-note scribing and freestyle remixing have helped me to improve my freestyle facilitation skills. In particular, they’ve helped me to practice creating ad-hoc notations and to effectively facilite workshops where the focus keeps jumping around.
I believe that being a good freestyler also involves having good knowledge of a wide range of structured techniques, too. Impact Mapping and Event Storming are some of my base flavours, what could yours be?
