My postcard series around the topic of good collaboration has become very dear to many people. The series has grown to 20 phrases about collaboration within the last six months, and in the meantime I have created more phrases that have yet to be printed. The collection is growing, who knows, one day it might even be a book. You can find the whole collection here.
The purpose of the series is to give people who collaborate with others (and who does not?) the chance to think about the ways we can improve collaboration and team work. What is important for good collaboration? What are the things that go wrong often? What rituals, rules and methods increase good collaboration, and what makes collaborating hard and painful? How can each person in the team contribute to a good team climate and to a stress free environment? These are just a few of the topics that are important for every team I have met so far.
Inspirations for the postcard content comes from various sources. For one, from my own experience as a project person over the last 26 years. But also from thinking schools and methods that think hard and good about collaboration, for instance from LEAN management (from this category I also took my favorite method, kanban) or from agile project management (a method that has been formed around 15 years ago in software development and has since entered many different industries and topics). I dislike «recipes», but I use elements from various methods to help teams improve the way they collaborate.
I use the postcards as an icebreaker for all the topics that are important in collaboration. The phrases help teams put an anchor to each idea and to remember it later when the issue comes up in «real life».
In the last few months, a lot of people have talked to me about the postcards, and I noticed that each of them understands and interprets the phrases on the cards in very different ways and has other stories or anecdotes to tell around it. I found this exciting and decided to organise «Postcard Talks», where a few people meet with me in an informal atmosphere to discuss around three postcard phrases and to deepen the understanding around the phrases in a discussion.
I conducted the first talk on July 24 in Zürich (in German). I will publish the results here in a short while.
The next Postcard Talks in Zurich and Berlin can be found here, feel free to subscribe and to join the discussion.
In addition to the postcard talks I plan to start a podcast in English where I talk to an expert about collaboration. The podcast will be called «Collaboration Booster». In my first talk I will speak with Claudio Perrone (www.agilesensei.com) about his new method, «Popcorn Flow», which gives teams the ability to experiment with hypotheses and helps them take better decisions. I am looking forward to sharing this with you, but the podcast is still in the development stage.
See you soon!
The scene of the very first «Postcard Talk» on July 24 in Zürich at Café Noir.