Mural - when all you have is a hammer ..

Way back an year ago, one of my BAs in ThoughtWorks went gaga over Mural, I thought she was over reacting. How can one virtual tool be so interesting & different? Hidden within this view was my laziness, rigidity in the mental model that virtual tools are useless and they can never ever replace the face to face human connect.

Enter Covid.

I was resisting Mural for sometime and was trying to manage with slides, docs, ideaboardz with lot of success, if success can be defined as completing meetings than accomplishing things. It took a 5 week workshop, an external can't-escape-event to make me use Mural. I never turned back and inspired by another BA who is a master in Mural, I started creating left, right & centre ( like Tamil Nadu Elections ). It made my meetings have some outcomes, structure the meetings, facilitate better and more importantly visualize how the meeting would go & represent the plan in the meetings.

Of course, this has to kick in. I noticed that Mural became that hammer that I started using everywhere with sub optimal results. Virtual boards are good for capturing ideas, but by virtue of their limited space don't serve as good tools to expand the thought process, that wandering mind which writes creatively to converge later, neither is it a tool that serves as a dump of your thoughts which is very useful to unfold your thoughts to get some insights.

This insight struck me when I was trying to create a strategy for the 2021 year, after revisiting 2020. My instinct led me to Mural and I was already in the Frozen state after a minute. That's where I threw the Mural out, took out the doc and started writing what happened in 2020 with details on the goals, bets, where we failed. It was such a relief not to use Mural and use simple docs to unwind your thoughts, then translate it to sheets for a structure and hen finally use Mural to present things.

My love for mural continues, but am aware that its not the only hammer I have, as what I see around are not all nails !