Making the journey and progress of the meeting visible
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Why virtual whiteboards?
The key to effective participation and engagement in virtual environments is to use tools where everyone can contribute equally and concurrently.
The tools offered in the meeting toolchest enable this to happen, but they need the virtual equivalent of a wall they can be pinned on, and sticky-notes that people can add in themselves. These environments are known as virtual whiteboards.
Virtual whiteboards of individual tools can be accessed in seconds, and this is great for ad-hoc participation around isolated topics. However, the real power of these templates in virtual meetings or workshops is connecting them together to form a journey of insight, understanding and conclusions which carry the team through to its goal.
Laying out the meeting process
The advantage of the virtual whiteboard is that it enables you to lay out the participative tools you plan to use in a pattern that reflects the overall flow of the meeting – like a map of the journey that you will be taking together.
In this way, the logic of what is happening is always evident, and the contributions build to create a story board that can be used to reinforce the conclusions, and to bring other people up to speed.
Good virtual whiteboards have the capacity to map out the largest of processes (many are effectively infinite in size) and to retain the picture for as long as the team needs it.
Our own current whiteboard preference is for ConceptBoard, and we have created a number of resources in support of this. However, if your own preference is different, this should not be an obstacle – the resources we have created (even those currently within ConceptBoard) can be copied and pasted into other Whiteboard environments also. These resources are listed (and linked) below.
How to do this in practice …
To use the tool templates we have made available we would propose the following steps:
- Select the right tools for the job, and familiarise yourself with their use. You can use the meeting tool selector to guide you in this, and read the guidance by searching for meeting tools in the clinic.
- Since you will be bringing the various tools together into an overall flow, we recommend that you avoid the individual tools (not least because you will begin to clutter up your account with all the ’empties’) but that you adopt your own copy of our template library – you can start out simple, or feel free to go the whole hog.
- Set up your whiteboard and copy and paste your chosen tools into it from the library. If you wish to use ConceptBoard for this, you may find this guidance helpful.
- Create a sample post it note to get a sense of scale, and then adjust the size of the templates by dragging a corner until they are big enough to handle the likely volume of post-its required by your size of group
- Annotate the template with relevant headings, and include any relevant guidance on the tool from the meetings clinic
- In some whiteboard tools (such as ConceptBoard) you will be able to set the template as a section, and then set that section as the start section – this will help to corral your attendees into the right location
- Where possible, pin the template and guidance/annotations into place so they do not get accidentally moved or misaligned as a result of overzealous activity in the meeting. You can also pin helpful graphics to aid the sense of flow in the meeting.
- Copy a link to the board and send it out in the meeting invitation or place it at the end of the preceding activity
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.