The (remote) magic of collaborative note-taking

✍︎Photo by Nathália Rosa on Unsplash

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? Perhaps worse, you haven’t even looked back at your own notes?During these days of remote meetings, people’s note-taking is even less visible. The other attendees of a meeting might or might not write down which ideas are shared, which questions are raised and which decisions are taken. It’s not that we do not want to share our screen, it’s because we prefer to share a screen that has been carefully prepared.

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.

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.

How Might We

So what are these ‘How Might We’s’? During the Sprint, all participants take some post-its and write down their thoughts, concerns or questions, preceded by HMW. The notes can be written while interviewing experts, but also when discussing a to-be process or the priorities of the new project. This leads to questions such as:

• How Might We attract new users?
• How Might We visualize this and that data?
• How Might We comply to GDPR regulation?

Note that (pun intended) people have to rephrase their thoughts in order to fit the format:

• The notes focus on opportunities, not on concrete solutions.
• The notes are optimistic. Instead of phrasing a concern as a potential disaster, it suggests that there is a solution.

In addition to these two significant benefits, 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.

The Lightning Decision Jam

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 and thoroughly explained here.

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!

Since the format is very effective and efficient, it shows some serious benefits of making note-taking the central part of your meeting:

• 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

The combination of these benefits enable a facilitator to come up with a process in which everyone creates and builds upon the creations of others. In doing so, the team collaboratively develops very visible end-products.

Improve your remote meetings

So how to implement this into 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. To make that approach effective, think about the following things.

Define the end

As with any process, you can only support it effectively when you know why you’re doing it. What are you trying to get out of the meeting? Do you want to decide, create, prioritize, inform, collect feedback?

Set your starting point

Where are you now? If you want to decide something, have you already identified your options? If you want to create something, have you already compared and prioritized alternatives?

Don’t make any assumptions here. If you’re not sure you have identified all options you want to discuss, you want to first validate that.

Fill the gap with milestones

The defined end is the goal, the starting point is your current reality. Now it’s time to add some milestones in between.

Both the Design Sprint and Lightning Decision Jam teach us the value of having milestones. Instead of directly working on the goal of the workshop, both approaches have split the workshop into several sub sessions that allow you to reach milestones.

Being able to split a problem statement into milestones is one of the most important skills in creative problem solving. It seems difficult, but usually involves some simple steps:

1. Validate your starting point: make sure there’s no assumptions in the knowledge on which you will base your next steps. Example: list all potential solutions to the problem.
2. Define the criteria of your end goal: understand the elements that constitute your meeting’s end product. Example: to come to a decision, we need to assess the impact and effort of every potential solution.
3. Identify the missing information: decide whether the participants have enough information to assess the criteria. Example: to assess the effort of a solution, we need to have a point of reference.
4. Repeat: if step 2 & 3 lead to a complex milestone, define criteria of the new milestone and again identify missing information.
5. Diverge and converge: start with stimulating creativity, end with stimulating decision making. Both phases can consist of multiple steps. Example: diverge by listing potential solutions. Converge by voting on those solutions, before assessing the impact & effort.

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. In an early stage of your meeting, ask participants to share their thoughts. Get them used to presenting what they would normally write down just for themselves.

As an example:

What do they want to get out of this meeting?

Once your meeting is ending, you can go back to those notes to verify whether you touched upon everything.

Facilitate!

When we at Quatronic explained How Might We’s to Design Sprint participants for the first time, we saw many confused faces and very few notes.

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.

Expect some discomfort, start with easy steps and always set the right example. Having a buddy that is pro-active in creating notes certainly can help.

Most importantly, just start doing it. Collaborative note-taking is fun and, even when it doesn’t run smoothly, makes your meetings much more productive!