 Hey everybody, people have been asking us what it's like for us to run workshops or meetings completely remotely. Well, instead of telling you, we decided to show you, we're going to give you a peek inside one of our internal workshops, one of our internal problem solving meetings that we're doing completely remotely. So you can just see exactly how we do this at AJ & Smart. What you're about to see is a digital remote version of LDJ. LDJ is called Lightning Decision Jam. We've done a ton of videos on it. It's like a one hour problem solving workshop that you can really use for everything. This is a completely digital version of that. Tim Hofer, our head of product at AJ & Smart, he's going to facilitate the workshop. So you're going to see him facilitating. He's the main facilitator and he's going to bring you people through step by step. I'm going to hand you over to the team so you can see exactly how that looks. And I'll see you on the other side of this video. Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a product design director at AJ & Smart Consulting. I will be facilitating this remote retro session. Hi, I'm Ryan and I'm on the AJ & Smart Digital Experiences Team and I take care of customer and community support. Hi, my name is Cal and I'm a videographer at AJ & Smart and I'm here for the purpose of recording this remote workshop. Hi, I'm Britta. I'm a product designer and I'm working in the sprint consulting team at AJ & Smart. Hey, my name is Steve. I work on the consultancy team at AJ & Smart and I'm looking forward to taking part in this remote retro. So let's start with the sailboat exercise and I'm going to set the timer to six minutes for coming up with positives, things that worked well for you today and this week. Don't worry about negatives just yet. We'll come to that later. For now just think about everything that worked really, really well. Maybe some team members you want to give a little shout out and write as many as you can in six minutes and please no discussions. So let me just set the timer six minutes and we start off. And while the team is collecting their positives, just as a quick explanation of the purpose of this exercise. So we really like starting off workshops with just looking at positives and setting a really nice stage for the rest of the work because usually things can get quite intense and detailed and thinking about challenges is also quite exhausting sometimes. So we just really like starting off with everything that went well. And we will be presenting these back to the group once the timer is over and I'm also going to start contributing my own. Okay I'm just going to stop the timer now. I'm happy to go first. Mine's this pile in the top left of the paper here. So the top things that work for me are it forces innovation because we can't do things in any usual ways. There was no commute so I had time to do a different walk this morning. I go next. So I got 35 minutes more of sleep because I didn't have commute in the public transport which saved me of being getting angry that my translator something. I could perform a bit better on tasks really required quiet focus time and I could do some laundry while working. So for me I was able to start work a lot earlier unlike Bretter. I started at 10.7 this morning already which was quite nice for me. I was able to get grocery shopping shortly after that as soon as the shops opened which was really nice. I had to work from the office today so it was cool having a sort of focused working environment and fewer distractions and made progress and some more tasks than I would maybe normally have on a Thursday. So I had a look at a new product. Bretter is currently working on which is shaping up quite nicely. Okay. So these are the positives. Thank you very much for sharing. Now we're moving on to things that did not work so well and again I will give you six minutes and just like last time try to collect as many negatives or obstacles as possible and then we will also take turns presenting them back to the group. Okay. So if everybody's ready then I'll start the timer now. So what's happening now is that the entire team just as they collected positives is now looking at everything that didn't work well and yeah this is usually where things get a bit more granular and detailed and it's also the base and the foundation for a lot of the exercises that will follow where we will then figure out like what are the biggest problems for us to solve. So there are a couple of dots here. I would like to ask you to just copy a dot and then use three dots in total and vote on the challenges or problems that you think are most urgent to fix now and I will set the timer to three minutes should be enough. Yeah. So we get three dots each Tim yeah. Yeah but just copy I mean I trust all of you I mean I'm sure that you will go over. So maybe just for the purpose of this retro should we just focus on the top four. So we have so I'm just going to copy these over here and this is now where we are creating our how my dreams. I'm just going to move these down here. So we have the first one being lots of video calls where text and audio would suffice. Tech is not 100% reliable. Reacted to urgent requests by compromising my agenda for today and like notifications stressed me out because we don't have the digital first personal communication hierarchy anymore. Okay so I think we can turn these into how might we quite easily without without necessarily workshopping this as a group. Okay so just for the purpose of this to show how this exercise works remotely then we will focus on this one here that but we both so lots of video calls where text and audio will suffice and does anyone have any suggestions how we how we could phrase that as a how might we. So I mean I think if we look at this the problem is that we are using a very like we're using a solution that is quite complicated and and powerful for something that is I mean we're how might we ensure that all our remote communications are appropriate. Perhaps another thing maybe we can just leave out remote I think like it should be like a general communication issue right. I might we ensure that communications are appropriate. Okay I like Tim's but I think it's a nice how might we anyway because it fits to it fits to these two here I think. Yeah so I think for yeah for now that's fine. Okay cool. Okay good yeah so now we have reframed some of the problems as a challenge. So usually usually in a proper retro of course we would have a bigger variety of challenges to work on but for now just to show you how it's done we'll just do it with this how might we how might we ensure that communications are appropriate for the purpose and respectful of each other's time so everybody happy with this one. Yeah yeah great cool then I'm just going to move this over here again and now it would be great if for six minutes everybody could capture as many potential solutions for this challenge as possible so you see these red sticky notes here don't worry about describing it you know like in great detail just the big picture ideas fine and as usual we do this in silence and together alone so I'm just going to set the timer to six minutes now and then we start ideating solutions. So take your time to look through all of the ideas everybody now has five minutes so that we have a chance to look through all of the ideas as usual you can vote for your own ideas if you want to have people pay attention to it or and you can vote on really good ideas several times so you don't yeah you can just place all your stickers on one idea if there's one that is really really good I'm just going to start the timer off now and please no discussions so we will leave these here for later because they're all all great ideas so let's let's just very quickly go over these so the top voted one is define urgency status with team so you know when to resort to what medium of communication the next one is if everyone access to each other's calendar and allow people to define no comms and focus times next one is set a specific time in the day for team huddles next one is message someone before calling and the last one is default to asynchronous decision making allowing for better thought through this that's thought through I guess right thought through decision making this will cut comms volume okay great so let's start with the top one we have here the effort impact scale and what does everybody think like how like how much effort is this and how much impact will it have on the challenge sorry before you start I'm just going to copy over the challenge again so that we have it right here probably middle middle effort because it's going to take a lot of time and effort just to define what urgent means because that's just a objective thing and also I don't think the impact would be that great either because we're just dealing with one piece of a thing and urgent things don't happen very often yeah so we have done the effort impact scale and based on these four quadrants we have identified the highest impact solutions that would take the lowest effort to implement so we have three really interesting experiments to run and in a workshop we would also map out like specific steps that the responsible person for each of these experiments should take to complete them sometimes it's not necessary sometimes it helps if it's a bit more complex these things here that are outside of the the yellow zone are things we are kind of like parking for now I mean there might they might be great ideas but I mean in this case here the impact the effort is really low it's easy to do but the impact might just not be high enough to to try this and in this case here the effort is quite high and the impact is low so this is kind of like the exclusion criteria like criteria we have here so yeah great we have three potential solutions for our helmet we yeah so we we're taking the the experiments with the lowest effort and highest impact and yeah then we execute on them so what we usually do in in the workshop as well as basically have everyone do like a little user test flow exercise where we like define the specific steps that need to happen to complete the action and then the group votes again and the person that gets the highest voted action steps would also be turned into the responsible individual to execute on these things or if there's a volunteer to do it I mean usually the person who had the idea is happy to take take over the execution but it can also be delegated so from from a very broad challenge we distilled three very specific things we can run as experiments and see if it fixes the problem great and we've done it all remotely super easy hey Jonathan back again thank you so much for watching that video if you enjoyed it leave us a comment down below leave us a like hit subscribe I know we're very needy but we're trying to grow this channel got a ton more videos videos every single week also don't forget to check us out on linkedin AJ and smart on linkedin loads more videos over there even more than on our youtube channel thank you so much for watching see you later peace