Face to face ➡️ Online How did you change

As many face to face workshops and meetings shifted online over the past year, it’s curious to look back: What did you change? 

If you’d planned an agenda, how did things need to adapt? 
Did you change the duration? 
Or the time between breaks, or length or number of breaks? 

Did you change what was planned?
What about group activities and collaboration? 

Did you accelerate and make things faster? Or did you need more time, multiple meetings instead of one? 

Many meetings and workshops that went online, only changed mode: sadly, they remained as disengaing and unproductive as ever!

But now as more hybrid arrangements begin - some people are online, some people are mobile or onsite - we need to consider, adapt and change things again. 

How did you first adapt meetings and workshops that moved online? 

Better ways for who

Imagine if your team started trying some newer ways of doing things... 

How might it impact customers? What additional value might you all bring? 
How might some frustrating customer problems get solved? 

The dramatic value that can be delivered to the customer, member, patient, user, client, can get forgotten. 

Perhaps it gets drowned out because the changes WE have to make are tricky and challenging for us. You know ... change!! *Groan* “It’s hard...”

Every team that tries some new ways of working gets a boost : 
🔅productively
🔅collaboratively
🔅effectively
🔅creatively.

And customers get a boost too!

Services become easier to use, sooner. 
Products get into their hands quicker. 
Interacting with the business becomes less frustrating or complicated... and things generally make more sense and work better. 

Better ways are available to us in how we go about:
🔆Thinking
🔆Understanding 
🔆Acting...
everyday. 

It’s not about using a new app or trying a new tool. There are new ways available at all levels of how we think about work, why we do it and how we do it. 

This is why adopting new and better ways is a cultural shift. 

Yes, it might take awhile. But your customers are waiting on you. 

Hard work is too hard on us

Burnout, overwork and the drive to ‘do more’ can be a never ending and dangerous loop. 

There are clever and ingenious solutions - or hacks - available to us, if only we’d take them up. 

A hack is a smart short cut, a streamlined process or focused advice to make things easier. 

So, if you knew of a better and easier way, would you take it? 

Some people like to see others do it first ... to see if ‘it works’. 

That’s what the diffusion of innovation curve is all about. There are always some trailblazers and early adopters who take a risk and trust their ability to cope with the new. 

And then come the early and late majority ... once the idea has been ‘proven’. By that time though, the trailblazers are often on to something newer, and easier. 

There’s another hack someone has uncovered or discovered!

Rather than waiting until more people have tried it and your risk is lower, jump in a little earlier. 

Play on the easier side of the curve for awhile.

You can wait to see how something turns out for others ... or run your own experiment, play your own game and live your own experience. 

It could be easier at the other end of the curve. 

What’s the box you’re thinking outside of

‘Be innovative ... but not too innovative,’ said the team leader. 

They wanted creative and innovative thinking, but not too much, not too ‘out there’. 

The need to generate clever and creative ideas is often called ‘thinking outside the box’. 

So... what’s the box? 

And how do you know you’re thinking beyond it or outside it? 

With the team, we identified their current ways and types of thinking, their usual ‘inside the box’ thinking

This helped identify what would be out there... or waaaay out there. 


Being more creative and innovative gets easier the more you do it. But the early days of a team thinking beyond their usual ways can mean taking a big step indeed. 

Courage, risk taking, speaking out, throwing in crazy ideas... and collect a heap of them. 

These are all good practices for extending your thinking beyond your usual boundaries. 

Take a step or two - once you identify what your ‘usual’ thinking is. 

Then you’ll be able to step out, out out of the box of your routine and habitual ways of thinking. 

Do you know how you solve problems

It’s a curious question because we can often blaze ahead problem solving ... without being aware of our process for how we’re actually doing it. 

Perhaps we’re on auto pilot, not conscious of what we’re doing or too busy in the details of the problem solving task to think about it. 

We can’t get better at a critically important skill like problem solving if we’re not tuned in to it. 

The World Economic Forum suggests problem solving is right up there in the skills we need for today and even more frequently in the future. 

So how do you solve problems? 

▫️Do you get all the information you can? 
▫️Assess your options? 
▫️Generate some alternatives? 
▫️Try out some solutions? 
▫️Experiment a little?
▫️Consult with respected peers? 
▫️Try a Google search to see what others have done? 
▫️Or phone a friend? 

Each of these is part of a suite of problem solving tools and techniques. 

As you work through solving your next problem, challenge or tricky situation, make a mental (or physical or digital) note of what you do... and how you do it. 

There’s greater 
▫️possibility, 
▫️efficiency and 
▫️creativity 
on the other side of our awareness.