Actionable Methods To Help Your Remote Team Work Creatively Together

Are you anxious about how you are going to keep your team working collaboratively together as everyone is sequestered at home?

If you are in a creative business, or if your team does a lot of collaborative problem solving, you probably have some process in place for when you are working together in the same space, such as clustering around a white board or a conference room table.

But how do you keep your team solving problems together when everyone is separated and working from home?

As with my last two posts, the key to keeping your team working together collaboratively and productively is to replace unstructured unfocused rambling discussion with clear process.

Clear, effective process for remote team problem solving

One highly effective tool for team collaborative problem solving that can be used remotely is the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ). An LDJ is a structured process that enables a team to identify, map out and develop solutions to open ended problems that have no obvious answers or ready solutions in a 30-60 minute timeframe.

The Lightning Decision Jam comes from AJ & Smart in Europe, a product design company that has also been popularizing the Design Sprint methodology originally developed at Google Ventures.

Why does the Lightning Decision Jam process work?

All of these methods, including LEGO Serious Play, have something in common in that they level the playing field and provide a more equal footing to get everyone to contribute, plus the structured nature of the methods has been shown to produce richer, more varied and detailed ideas, which is just what companies need to win the innovation battle.

Most people have heard of brainstorming and sometimes try to implement it in their businesses, but brainstorming as a method has been discredited now and proven in studies that it is ineffective and doesn’t work. The reason is, as with a lot of unstructured group interactions, typically a dominant individual will grab the marker and control the whiteboard, and therefore will control the discussion. Then, as I have seen in a lot of sessions in my career, as people try to suggest ideas they get shot down very quickly.

So, successful groups use a structured process that allows everyone to have input, and allows a multitude of ideas to come to the table. The cool things is, you never know when someone’s suggestion might spark another idea or connection from someone else in the room and this creates a multiplier effect as one idea leads to another.

Using structure for creative problem solving

When we have unfocused discussion, we waste a lot of time and don’t get any decision or results to move forward with. The structure of the LDJ process allows a team to:

1. Identify and define a problem quickly

2. Develop lots of solutions

3. Find the best solution, including evaluating the effort required and impact of various alternatives

4. Arrive at clear action steps to jump start implementation.

In addition, using a structured process gives a defined way for your team to work together while being separated alone at home, and provides a method for collaborative problem solving that stops the unfocused discussion, and gives you a positive way to get started. In my book, any action is better than indecision and no action at all. Plus the process really facilitates a way for a team to be intentionally creative, as compared to relying on random inspiration.

How does a Lightning Decision Jam work?

The basic form of the LDJ is a set of cycles of Noting, Posting, Voting and Prioritizing.

For a given stated problem, we go through a 10 step process:

Step 1: The team spends 10 minutes writing down what is working in the problem area, so everyone is working separately without discussion.

The results are posted up so everyone gets to see what everyone else wrote. This levels the playing field and importantly gives everyone a voice.

Step 2: The team spends 5 minutes noting down what’s not working or holding them back.

Once again these results are posted up so everyone can see.

Step 3: everyone gets two dots to vote on what they think the most important problems are.

Step 4: The moderator pulls out and prioritizes the top voted problems.

Step 5: The team reframes the problems as How Might We statements.

So, for example, if one problem read “No knowledge sharing”, we would reframe this as” How might we make sure that everyone stays on the same page during the project”

Step 6: The team posts the HMW questions up for everyone to see, then works alone to write down responses and potential solutions to those questions.

Step 7: The team votes again for what they think are the top solutions

Step 8: The top solutions based on voting are identified and pulled out

Step 9: The top solutions are then placed on a matrix that has two axes, impact is the vertical axis and effort the horizontal. Therefore each of the top solutions is placed on the matrix depending on what impact it might have and how much effort is involved.

Step 10: The team takes solutions from the top left hand corner of the matrix, ie the solutions that have the highest impact and least effort, and writes a plan to make those solutions actionable.

Conducting a Lightning Decision Jam for a remote team

To set up a Lightning Decision Jam for a remote team you will need two pieces of technology:

1. A video conference tool, such as zoom, skype, or teams

2. A shared whiteboard tool, such as Google docs, Mural or Miro.

Plus you will need a moderator to lead the process and watch the timing.

If you want to use Google docs, I have developed a free template that anyone can copy or download to get them started. Miro and Mural have free and paid components, and they have templates available as well.

Lightning Decision Jam: An ideal solution for a remote team

The reason a Lightning Decision Jam works so well for a distributed team is that the team interactions are highly structured, and laid out in a way that gets everyone to contribute on an equal playing field. There is actually very little discussion, so that limits the opportunities for the extroverts to dominate, and allows the introverts and quieter team members a place to really shine.

If anyone would like help implementing their first Lightning Decision Jam, I am happy to help facilitate and can be your trusted adviser to help you plan, implement and execute these processes in your business. Call me at 443-254-7711 or email [email protected]