This week, I collaborated for the first time with new colleagues on a new project. It's a very large project for a financial institution in France, involving marketing, social media, information architecture and design, mobile interfaces, customers services, etc. The size of the project is (almost) overwhelming.
So, a couple of days ago the team decided to work together for a couple hours in order to build for ourselves a better understanding of this multidimensional project. My first thinking was that we needed large paper boards and a series of good thick color pens for this kind of exercise (if you're used to Design Thinking methodology, you know that working on walls is key). But when I got into the meeting rooms, my colleagues (project managers and client director) were all sitting facing their laptops… ;-) !! And their first reflex was very typical of the PowerPoint Thinking : "So, what are the different categories of subjects we will have to manage. Can we first come up with 4 or 5 categories ?" (it's incredible how PPT can damage our fellow workers' brains…;-)
This is exactly what you DON'T want to do : looking for organization first.
I didn't say anything and started to install a series of 4 large paper boards on the wall in order to create a large working area in the room. And then, I started to write down (with large and legible characters) whatever subject came to my mind about this project, and invite my colleagues to do the same. First, they were a bit reluctant but I didn't pay attention to their mood and just continued writing down subjects as it went. They were soon caught in the fun of generating ideas about the project : "and add this, and add that, and what about this one…!". Of course, in about 20 mn we came up with a huge list and everyone agreed on the fact that it was probably 95% exhaustive.
And that's the key, when you work on a list, it HAS TO BE exhaustive, otherwise it loose all its value.
The list was a chaos but it didn't took long to find similarities, groups, differences, so we could see the organization emerging from the chaos. The whole thing took us about 1h30. Simple, hun ?