Challenge:

I work for an International Organization within a team of around 12 people, as part of our internal  communications activities we have one-hour weekly meetings to provide updates and relevant  information about our work.  These meetings have been in place for around 2 years and some of the team  members have been expressing that these meetings were not very useful and that this time could be  better invested in other type of team building activities.

I have realized that some actions needed to be done in order to identify what would be the best  communication and/or team building activities that could fill the expectations of the majority.

Selection:

I decided that Mind Mapping tool, could be a good option to help with the mentioned challenge, as mind  mapping will help us to generate ideas,  group these ideas, establish  common links and needs from our  team through a collaborative and cocreative process.

Application:

As part of the process, I initially did an online survey to get initial feedback from team members on the  way our meetings were being handled and to use this dat, a as based for our mind mapping process.

The survey included information about the objective of the meetings, length, content, agenda,  participants, etc . The survey was anonymous so people could feel free to express their opinions

The information obtained allowed me to identify the key areas to address during our mind mapping  process, which were: the objective of the meeting , the  content and the time and frequency.

I decided to do internal meeting to discuss the findings of the process and identify the patterns of the  team. I have used flipcharts and post it notes and asked the people 3 questions:

•  What would you expect from these meetings?

•  What could you suggest to improve these meetings and fulfill your expectations?

•  What other suggestions do you have to improve team communications and effectiveness

People wrote  their thoughts on pot it notes and stick them on the flipcharts and at the end we were able  to group them, discuss them and extract common ideas and suggestions to move with the following steps  of the design process

Insight:

It was a really powerful, sincere and productive cocreation exercise. I believe that one of the most  important insight was that we found out that team wanted to have time to connect with each other during

these meetings and take advantage of the opportunity that we were all together, people were interested  to know how the other team members were besides to the professional side.

A lot of great ideas came out like: rotating the facilitator, establishing criteria to determine what could be  considered a relevant update to make, using more participatory techniques, etc

With all the information captured , we have been improving the meetings, now the meeting are  managed  every week by a different facilitator, the initial half of the meeting is for work related content and the 2nd  one is used to connect with each other, opportunities for coaching, personal sharing, fun and games have  been introduced too.

I have started to feel that the team is more connected and willing to participate in the meetings.

Approach:

I think that I could also have used the learning launch tool, I mean, based on the information gathered  from the survey , I could have made initial changes to the  way the meetings were handled in a certain  time line and  get results and feedback from the team once done to prove/refuse assumptions.

But I believe this is something that we are actually doing, even that we have not conducted a formal  process every week I’m analyzing what new options has been added to the meetings, what have worked  and what not and use this information to improve the following ones meetings.

