Category: Glossary

Introductions: Capturing Critical Context in the First Few Minutes

9/29/2017

”Tell us a little about yourself and what your organization does in the overall process.”

It passes so quickly that you’ll miss the opportunity if you’re not paying attention.

It’s that initial moment in the process when a person introduces themselves, shares who they are and what and their organization does.

That moment is rich with potential and it goes by quickly.

What To Listen For

Be prepared for the moment in advance by having your co-facilitor serve as a scribe, recording the person’s name on a single sheet of paper or in a note-taking tool like Evernote.

Then your scribe should listen for and record any of the following items that the person mentions:

Nouns

Their name
Their organizational role name
Workproducts (things they or their organization produce or services they deliver)
Collaborators (people they work with or interact with to get things done or do things for)
Systems or applications they use to help them
Things they respond to

Verbs

What they do or produce
When they do it
Triggering business events that they respond to

Pain Points / Opportunities

Problems they describe

Example

“I’m Juanita and I work for the Finance Department. We use Dynamics to produce final paychecks when an employee departs and work with Legal and Procurement and Travel to ensure that any garnishments are taken out prior to their final paycheck and that any reimbursements for travel expenses are also included in their last paycheck. We also produce W-2s for departed employees at the end of the year. It’s a challenge and a very manual process to get all of this done thoroughly in a short timeframe, particularly when an employee departure occurs quickly.”

Nouns

Juanita
Finance Department
Final paycheck
Expense reports (travel expenses)
Reimbursements
Garnishments
W-2
Legal Department
Procurement Department
Travel Department
Dynamics application

Verbs

When employee departs: Produce final paycheck
At year-end: Produce W-2 for employee

Pain Points / Opportunities

Getting the final paycheck done thoroughly in a short timeframe is a highly manual process.

What To Do With This

Hold on to them. They will come in handy in the structured conversation that will unfold in the hours and days that lie ahead.

Nearly every one of these nouns are added to a Glossary. Many of them will eventually be placed around a Circle of Interaction (COIN) diagram that clearly summarizes the process, collaborators and deliverables on a single page.

Why This Matters

When it comes to facilitating and producing a clear understanding of a domain under discussion, if it hasn’t been written then it hasn’t been said. To say it another way, if it’s been said, but hasn’t been recorded, then it will not have the potential to be added to design documentation.

Anticipating this rich time of sharing that naturally occurs at the onset of a structured conversation helps you to seize the moment as a facilitator.

When it comes to facilitating and producing a clear understanding of a domain under discussion, if it hasn’t been written then it hasn’t been said.

Being intentional to listen for and record things that a stakeholder mentions serves the stakeholder and the conversational process well. It keeps things agile. It serves the stakeholder well by respecting their contribution to the conversation. It serves the process by maintaining velocity, by creating a corporate memory of what was mentioned and by listening for those things which will be part of the future-state design documentation.

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How Words Affect Your Solution

8/4/2017

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As a facilitator leading a collaborative group in pursuit of a solution, the misunderstanding of words surfaces time and again as a velocity-killing pitfall.

Ambiguity and uncertainty impede progress, whereas clarity and sureness accelerate it. Here is a simple and effective technique that I use to help avoid this predictable pitfall in the collaborative process.

Risks and Delays Result from a Lack of Clarity

To describe this pitfall, imagine that you are leading a series of working meetings comprised of a dedicated group of people who meet regularly. You all are tasked with designing a solution to a problem and communicating it to stakeholders at specific points in time to vet and approve your design.

Here are a few examples of what the pitfall might look like:

The Memory-Lapsed Facilitator
You preside over a learning and discovery meeting comprised of the perfect collaborative tribe. Good natured, synergistic, well-read and knowledgable, every person is a domain expert who contributes openly and actively. It's a joy to lead this group because of their willingness to be present and fully engaged.

As the meeting unfolds, the group discovers problems and envisions solutions at a rapid clip. There is high energy and a high pace of sharing. However, as you facilitate, you are struggling to record the key concepts being discussed.

At the end of your meeting, you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to use your own memory to reconstruct the conversations and record them somehow for the purposes of corporate memory. Despite your best intentions and efforts, you ultimately produce a summary document with unintentional omissions and a lack of clarity regarding what was discussed. When the document is distributed to stakeholders, it causes delays and additional follow-up meetings to reconstruct what was missing or inaccurately recorded.

The Overwhelmed Reviewer
Ashwin is a busy domain expert, a business stakeholder who represents an organization affected by your solution. Your team is engaging him in a socialization effort to help vet the solution you have envisioned.

Ashwin is unable to attend a review meeting due to his demanding schedule. He has requested the solution documentation to review. The document contains jargon and colloquial phrases that have unclear meanings to him. After giving his only available 30 minutes to the effort of reviewing the document, Ashwin quits his review efforts, frustrated because he is unclear about the meaning of the words being used.

At best, from a velocity perspective, he "approves" of the document without a high degree of certainty because he has no more time to allocate to reviewing your work. This introduces risk to your work effort because of the low quality of vetting. At worst, the work effort is delayed while the team and Ashwin find a meeting time in the future to work out their differences in understanding.
The Disaffected Decision Maker
Regina joins a review meeting as a decision-maker. As a cameo participant, she is uninvested in the words being bantered about in the meeting. As a result, she challenges their meaning and spends a lot of time seeking clarification. Various people from your dedicated group offer explanations. But, their meanings don't converge leaving Regina with more questions than answers.

As the meeting proceeds, Regina's confidence in the group's understanding of the problem and solution is not reinforced. The work effort stalls. At best, a delay in progress occurs until mutual understanding is established in the future. At worst, the work ends permanently.

Be Intentional: Build a Glossary

As a collaborative facilitator, if your approach does not emphasize the necessity of capturing key concepts and their meanings, you are unintentionally building in delays in the process of getting your work done.

A glossary is an effective accelerator in any collaborative design. It takes focused effort and intentionality to produce one.

Ambiguity and uncertainty are impediments to progress whereas clarity and confidence accelerate progress.

However, in my experience, having a glossary available to collaborators is worth the effort because it serves as an accelerator an work effort accelerator whereas the absence of a glossary causes delays and other negative side-effects.

Here is an approach I use and recommend while facilitating collaborative meetings;

Prepare: Make sure that someone (you or a designated person in the meeting) serves as a scribe to record words and their meanings. When meeting in a room, I suggest having 8" x 6" Post-it Super Sticky Notes and a Sharpie permanent marker available at all times. When meeting virtually online or over the phone, I suggest having the Evernote application open at all times.
Listen: While facilitating the collaborative conversation, listen for concepts or notions that might not be easily understood by others not as invested in the conversation. When the you hear a word or phrase, stop the conversation briefly, "Let's capture that idea as a glossary term."
Record: Typically there is one person in the conversation who can authoritatively verbalize the glossary term. Have that person state it while the scribe records it.
Confirm: Have the scribe read it back to the group to get confirmation. Record any refinements and then move on with the meeting.

For example, in a recent cross-functional human resources effort, our team came up with these terms. One of them had a single meaning. Another had multiple meanings stated in separate sentenced.

exit interview – A final meeting to collect specific assets from the employee. A survey conducted with an individual who is separating from employment.

involuntary – The condition upon which separation occurs that is not initiated by the employee.

line management – A set of managers in the lower layers of the management hierarchy (e.g., team leader, supervisor) that manage employees who have no supervisory responsibilities.
Publish: Long after the meeting, because you were intentional you now have the corporate memory to reconstruct what was said by publishing the recorded glossary terms in whatever form is appropriate (e.g., appendix in a published document, page on a collaborative website or wiki).

Making your glossary accessible to all stakeholders provides a clarifying reference resource that accelerates understanding and positively affect the progress of your collaborative work effort. I hope this has been a helpful perspective for you.

- Chuck

Subscribe to my free blog updates to receive content that vividly describes the techniques and leadership skills that embody the practice of agile design methods. The blog contains not only my ideas on the topic, but the insight of others who actively work and thrive wholeheartedly in the realms of collaborative creativity.

I look forward to you joining us.

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Introductions: Capturing Critical Context in the First Few Minutes

What To Listen For

Example

What To Do With This

Why This Matters

Want More?

How Words Affect Your Solution

Risks and Delays Result from a Lack of Clarity

Be Intentional: Build a Glossary

About Chuck Boudreau

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