 So the agenda for today is, we already started by saying hi. And the next thing that we're going to do is Yuri will do a small introduction to sketch noting. So if you want, you can sketch note the whole talk from Jeff. But also, if you do not feel that confident in sketch we will say which parts are sketch noting friendly. So you can sketch note only those three parts. Then we're going to have a talk from Jeff about team mastery and a small exercise at the end from Yuri about preparing a template for one of the things that Jeff will talk about. And we will finish by asking you to give us feedback about this session. So that's the plan for today. And also, if you would like to share some of the notes and pictures along the way, you can just share them in the upload photo to the Meetup group or on Instagram, for example, use one of these hashtags as well. But other than that, I think we'll just get started. So that means over to you, Yuri. Hello, everyone. I'm Yuri. Can you hear me? Yeah. OK. I'll start by setting a timer for myself and I need to share my screen as well so you could see what I'm doing. Let me know if you can see what I'm doing. Can you see what I'm doing? Yes. OK, fantastic. Let's get going. I'm going to introduce you to the basics of sketch noting in 15 minutes, which is quite a challenging task to do. I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Yuri. What I do is I am an agile coach. And that's my full-time job. And when I have some spare time not being an agile coach and not spending time with my family, I do a lot of visual thinking and sketch noting. That's my passion. And I guess I qualify well for the honorable title of Visual Agile List. And thanks, guys, for having me over. It's an honor to be here with you. And the way we're going to discover the world of sketch noting and, in my understanding, the best way to talk and discuss the topic is to demonstrate instead of just talking. So I'll be sketch noting my talk. My talk on sketch noting, right? And first thing you want to learn about sketch noting is that you don't need to be worrying much about you being slow. So right now, I'm writing down the title of my talk. And most commonly, people get stressed because you don't write or draw as fast as you speak. And sometimes it's intimidating. It makes people feel uncomfortable. But you just need to get used to that and be OK with that. You don't have to be super fast, as long as you're affecting. So that's first thing you learn about the technique. It's not to stress you out, but to help you out and to help you have fun and enjoy the process. So as I said, sketch noting is a technique. So we will start by talking about what kind of a technique is that. So I'm using a smaller writing here. And I will be talking about the technique in this part of the paper. And as Pavlo said, feel free to just follow along and copy what I'm doing. It's also a better idea to learn sketch noting by doing. So how this technique works is that there is a person, hopefully you, if you like the idea of sketch noting, holding maybe a pencil, a pen, a marker, whatever allows you to leave a mark on the surface. And that person is probably leaving the marks on paper like I'm doing right now. But that could also be a digital device for that matter. Any material that allows you to create a spatial representation. And I will get back to spatial many times representation. So what that means is that something that allows you to create an overview of things on the two-dimensional space. And when do you use this sketch noting technique? Is when, for example, you hear something, like you are in a meeting or you are attending a conference or a training session. So you're hearing a lot of information. And that information is received by you in a linear format of a language coded message. So it's a lot of word after word after word. And then your brain translates that into meanings. So you hear that information. You try to arrange the things that you hear about on that two-dimensional space by just sketching and drawing. Well, I will use the word sketch. So we try to avoid a word draw as much as possible because a lot of people might say, well, I cannot draw. So we will not talk about drawing. And then when you organize stuff on paper or digitally, what happens is that you now additionally to hear on this information, you begin to see this information. So you see this information. And inside of your head, something is happening. So your brain is processing a lot of information. There is a lot of thinking and processing happening. And now you are enhancing the process by hearing and translating that into meanings and then seeing that. And suddenly, this process becomes more effective, more robust. And if you do it right, if you do not put too much stress on yourself, it also becomes more fun working this way. And if we look closer into what constitutes a sketch note, if we just double click there and try to peek into what a sketch note could be, basically, it's anything that is organizing information on a piece of paper or digitally where you have different types of concepts organized in a way that you can, by looking at things, understand how concepts are related to each other. Basically, this here is my sketch noting of explaining the technique, which is nothing more just a spatial organization of how different pieces of information appear here. And I was drawn as I was talking, but equally so, I could be not taking in this manner someone talking about this topic. And I arrived at this spatial representation of what I heard by combining drawings and pictures and texts together. And right now, if it's the simplified version of what you see here, where you can see buckets of pieces and pieces of information that now you can analyze in an order that you prefer. So basically, that's the sketch noting. And I use the sketch noting to explain the sketch noting. And now we will reverse engineer the main components that constitute a successful sketch note, basically. And I already showed you these components, but I will go through them one by one components so that we can talk about them individually and maybe learn a trick or two additionally. So the first main component we want to talk about is the spatial organization. And what that means is that the sketch note is always something that is spreading information in a two-dimensional space. And it always comes with the fact that you just simply start drawing things on paper or digitally, as long as you even randomly put concepts on the two-dimensional space that triggers a different way for your brain to operate. There are some theories suggesting that the way the brain works is that it operates so-called mental models, which is nothing else, but just a graph. So basically, when you put something on paper, like five circles here, you trigger a different mode of your brain operating where it's probably operating with the more natural representation of information. Instead of just hearing the artificial coding in language, you just tap into the inherent functions of your brain directly by showing something that is close to probably how the information is represented inside of it. So the first main component is just to place stuff on a piece of paper, even if it's a totally random organization. This fact alone triggers your brain to start working a bit differently. So that does the trick itself alone. So some people say, well, I don't know which composition should I use, what kind of organization on paper? And they get so stressed, and then it stops them from using sketching them because they have this fear of getting things wrongly, choosing the wrong composition. What I'm saying right now is that don't worry about that. Just even if you put stuff randomly already there, gain some value for yourself. Now, the next step is, or not step, basically, a component. The next component is using all sorts of connections. So if you remember that statement about mental models, which are graphs, graphs are the connection between, it's a combination of concepts interconnected. So if you place stuff on a piece of paper, our brain will start thinking in terms of patterns, trying to understand, OK, how do these relate to each other, which parts are more important? And you can help it by either explicitly or implicitly suggesting connections. So there can be an implicit way of connecting things. For example, in this case, we just place in a person centrally, and then organizing other parts around that person, you can kind of suggest a certain natural connection between these things. So we know that a thought bubble coming out of the head is probably a thought, and then the audio waves radiating is probably something related to hearing. So these are just implicit connections that allow us to hold these meanings together. But you could also use explicit connections, for example, dotted, dashed, solid lines, arrows of all sorts and styles in order to explicitly establish connections between the meanings that you put to paper. So for example, you can say, OK, these two things are feeding into my head, and the product of my brain processing is something else. So keep in mind that the sketch noting is heavy about connections. And don't forget to use them. The next thing we're going to talk about is using the texts. So a lot of people getting into visual thinking and sketch noting in particular, they start drawing more than writing down, because writing down is looked down at, because yeah, it's all text. We want to get away from text. We want to draw more. But then a text can be a visual token, which is easier and faster than a drawing. So we shouldn't just cast that aside. And what is important about the text is that the meaning is translated by using the different size of text, but also sometimes using different style of text as well. So for example, you can drive attention to meanings and their priorities by just shifting between the size of text and their style. So in this case, there will be less importance with this text, while there will be more perceivable importance with this text. The next big component to sketch noting is icons. Icons are very important, and that is probably one of the hardest parts for newcomers to this type of technique, because a lot of people who work in so-called uncreative jobs, they state, I cannot draw. But there is a hack to it. You don't need to become an artist. You just need to learn how to draw several really simple icons, like a human to represent a person. Stack of you people denoting a team. You can just use simple shapes like squares and circles and just slightly update them and turn them into smileys and buildings. And you can turn a triangle into a milestone icon. You can turn a diamond shape by just drawing some extra elements in order to create a pseudo 3D shape for a product. And sometimes you need to map emotional aspects. And all you need to do is just to remember what combination of simple strokes manifests a certain emotional expression. And then you can also remember that visual thinking and sketch noting in particular is also effective through the use of frames and borders. So frames and borders. I will show you what that means. In my case, while the sketch noting demonstration is almost done, it starts to mess up, because there is a lot of information. And now it becomes a bit difficult to navigate. Yes, I remember how the narrative developed. But for a person who sees that for the first time, it can be a bit difficult to understand what that is about. And then you can use frames and borders in order to alleviate the problem and make it easier to navigate through this visual clutter. So for example, if I draw a simple border like this, it will suggest a certain division between the meanings that were placed on the two-dimensional space. Drawing borders around titles gives them more visual meaning and value. And this is like an auxiliary technique, but it's very powerful allowing you to organize the information that you're trying to share. And finally, when you work with digital media and when you work with paper, if you use some fancy tools I'm going to show you, you can also engage with colors to further allow you accentuate certain meanings. I use two colors when I work with paper and digital media where you can choose colors. I use gray for shadows and I use brilliant yellow for the highlights. I'll just quickly demonstrate you what that allows you to do. First, I use shadows when the sketch noting is done and I just want to accentuate the meaningful parts of the sketch note and my rule of thumb is that I would apply shadows to everything that is presumably material, like a drawing object. Text is super abstract, I wouldn't give it a shadow, but if it's something like an icon, something that has a materialistic representation in real life, I would grant it a shadow. And I do that by just simply drawing a kind of a following shadow on the side, something like that. And sometimes I even give that to things like boxes and frames. So what happens if you see what happens, it is as if the entire sketch note kind of popped up and it's now making it easier to navigate because it allows you to separate meaningful parts or material part from the abstract parts like the notes and the titles. And it's easier to navigate, but also makes it more, what you call an Instagrammable because now you can take a snapshot and then impress your friends, right? And then highlights allows you to solidify the priorities by guiding the person's site through a predefined sequence. For example, if you want them to start here, you would place like more color here and then they will guide to smaller titles and then eventually to smaller color pieces. And that is what exactly I would like to happen when I am reading this information or someone else is reading. I want to help them navigate and therefore I use the color for that. So I know I overspend time a bit and that was not planned, but that is pretty much the demonstration of technique. And I hope it gives you some good ideas about how you could use that. I also hope that some of you chose to follow along and maybe created your own versions of this sketch note in demonstration. And I'm going to use these techniques when we get to just talk. And I hope that I can keep up with his fantastic presentation and create a nice sketch note in for that. Cool. Super. Thank you for that, Ui. And then we move on to Jeff's talk. And while we do that, you are welcome to, if you like to try to sketch note the whole thing and if you are new to this, you can also, we will point out the parts that are more suitable for sketching. You can follow two cameras. You can follow either the presentation here or you can also follow Ui's sketch noting. In view options you can, in Zoom, you can choose which screen you would like to follow. And if you have two screens, you can follow both at the same time. Mind blown. Okay. Thank you. I guess I'm up then. So yeah, thank you. So I'm here to talk a little bit about a book that I've recently written around teamwork. And I think it's really important. I think it's even more important now than when I actually wrote it. Because dealing with complex situations requires great collaboration. And collaboration that isn't managed from a micro management perspective. I will, so as has already been said, you can either watch the slides, you can watch the sketch noting, or you can watch both. You can switch between the two. I'm going to do something, a couple of times during this talk, you'll see something flash up on the screen like this, which is a bit of a visual signal that that's an opportunity for you to play around with sketch noting. But you should see that a few times. So I'm aware that we're coming from lots of different places around the world. And so we've all got our different lockdown situations. I think in the UK, we're still pretty bad. We still haven't got a lot of things open, like hairdressers and pubs and things like that. And we're not going back into the offices. So I'm going to have to get you to engage your memories a little bit. And at any point, you want to add some questions to the slide, the little code will be at the bottom of all the slides. The, remember the times when you could actually meet up in person and you didn't have to stay a certain distance apart from each other. And you could see their lips move without wearing a mask. Well, one of them, back in those, what you might call the good old days, there was a team that I was working with who were in a product backlog refinement session. So some of them were there in person, some of them were there on video call, because as we all know, remote working was still a thing before COVID-19. And so they were with their product owner and they were looking through some of the upcoming items, the stories that they were thinking about working on and planning in the next sprint. And in the room, as well as the product owner, there was this new, what they call, I think a job title was a business sales lead. We'll call her Karen, just to be kind. And Karen was really excited because she's got some new clients that she reckons she's this close to landing. If only the development team could just knock out a few more features. And there was a bit of tension in the air. So as a coach, I'm quite new to the people, so I don't really know the dynamics, but I've seen a few similar situations and I could almost smell the tension, if you know what I mean. So after the session had finished and Karen had gone and the product owner had gone, one of the team members said to the rest, are you thinking what I'm thinking? If I'm being brutally honest, that wasn't exactly what they said, but because I don't know who's gonna be listening, I'll stick to that rather than what they actually said just for safety. And so after they asked this question, they all got up and they all left the room. And they all met up at a coffee shop. Again, hopefully some of you can still remember what those are, those nice places where you could meet and chat with friends or work colleagues. And they went right straight to the back, straight to the back of the coffee shop where they'd obviously gone before, considered it sort of their table, if you like. And the first person there had already ordered the drinks for the team because they knew what everybody was gonna have. There was a cappuccino for Ashlyn, there was a soy latte for Rashmi and I drink a black Americano which they'd already picked up on. So the drinks were already on their way. And even the remote people were there, so someone had brought them on the laptop. I think it was actually a tablet, but they were there. And it was this sort of, again, it wasn't the same tension, but there was a degree of unease around the team. And eventually once everybody had sort of settled down, one of the team members, Wally. Now in the picture, that's the person standing up. As you can see, it's a lady, not an usual name in England for a lady, Wally. And it wasn't actually her real name, but we'll come back to that later on. And she started off the conversation, she stood up and she was quite animated. Just from her demeanour, you got the impression, or at least I got the impression that she was pretty angry with Karen. And she's saying things like, I knew this was going to happen. You give them an inch, they take a mile, things like that, which kind of gave the impression, the world's going to end, everything's terrible, we're doomed, kind of thing. And she had a little bit of a monologue until someone else in the team stood up and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, Miss Purple. She called Wally Miss Purple. Could we get a yellow perspective? Now for me, I didn't know what that meant, but they obviously did. And Wally was still quite emotional. But she took a comment from Lindsay, I would say, in good humour. She had a little bit of a giggle about it. So, oh yeah, I get your point, I get your point, that kind of thing. And she said, okay, let's bring Lindsay into the conversation, who apparently was going to give us a yellow perspective, whatever that meant. And so here's Lindsay, she was joining virtually. And Lindsay said, well, I don't really know Karen very well yet. She's quite new. But she probably wants to make a good impression. She's here, she wants to hit the ground running. She probably wants to add some value pretty quickly. Yeah, she's probably feeling under pressure actually, because the organisation needs some new wins, if you like. And she's seen these opportunities, not just to win these new clients that she's talking about, but also she's seen the opportunities to get some features out there that would actually get us some cash, all right. But to build some of the other stuff that we really want to build. So I think she's seeing all of this stuff. And I don't think she's actually trying to do us any harm. I don't think she's being a bad person. She's doing a job, and I think it's a good job. So that was Lindsay's impression. And I was interested in what they meant by this purple and yellow thing. And so they talked me through, here's your first sketch notes of the opportunity, people. They talked me through a little bit of what you might call a personality profiling tool that they went through. Now I'm not going to sit here and give you the name of the tool, because the tool itself is not important. It wasn't that it was a good tool or the right tool. It was just something that they did. Now anything that tries to assess your personality is going to be flawed by its nature. It's impossible to do that, because we're all so unique and we're all so different. And so the team did this little exercise with, as we say in England, a pinch of salt. So they didn't put too much emphasis on it. They didn't put too much faith in it. But they laughed along the way because there was some really basic oversimplifications of people's personality, but there were also some really quite telling truths, if you like, that people recognized about themselves. So there were four personality types that this tool was talking about. And just remember, it's not about, this is the right tool. But they were the reds, okay? Now the reds, these people, they're really very driven. High achievers, they want to get stuff done. One of the ways that they like to get stuff done is by making sure that they're in control. We've got to do it right and there is a right way. And I will be responsible for making sure that happens. In order to do that, they're quite comfortable making decisions. And they're more than happy speaking up. And this is a couple of people in the team thought, yeah, okay, I can see myself in that a little bit. And you probably recognize a few people. And it's, none of these colors are good. None of these colors are bad, okay? So it's just about thinking about them. The yellows, so like Lindsay, they're very optimistic by nature. They, instead of seeing all the things that could go wrong, they see how we could make successes of things. They tend to look for the more favorable interpretations, if you like. They see a glass as being half full rather than half empty, you know that type of person. They're happy to talk, really nice to be around, great conversation lists, always bringing people up, telling a joke, looking for the positive, that kind of person. Again, not good, not bad, just is. The blues, okay, so we had a couple of blues in the team. Now they would describe themselves as realistic as opposed to naive. So the blues might look at the yellows and think, yeah, you're naive. People are gonna take advantage of you in your optimism. You're not really living in the real world. Whereas the yellows might look at the blues and think you're quite cynical, pessimistic. And that's that kind of tension there, if you like. But there's other aspects to them. So these blues, if you like, they're very analytical. So they're very good at identifying risks. They're very good at identifying cause and effect. They can see patterns in things. They really like detail, making sure that we've really thought things through. They quite often don't talk a lot. So they're often in a meeting or something like that. They'll sit back, they'll watch, they'll observe, they'll think, they'll make notes. But when they do speak, it's usually something that's not trivial. Again, not good, not bad. Just a different personality type. And then we've got our greens. Now the greens referred to as very, very calm and logical, easygoing. Don't really like conflict. They wanna make sure that everybody's okay. There was a high degree of tolerance there. You wouldn't see them making judgments, the greens. And those are the four basic colors. Now, obviously there's a lot more to this. And I said it's a very simplistic model. But I'm interested in, we've got, I think, I can see 97 participants at the moment. The interest to see what kind of mix we've got. So if I bring up a poll on the screen, you should see the opportunity to say which color you most associate with based on the really basic overview that I've put out there. And remember, none of these are good and none of these are bad. Let me see the scores coming in. I don't know if you can see the scores coming in or whether that's just me, but we've already got almost half of you voted, which is good input already. Two thirds of you have already voted. So there'll be times when you think of yourself a little bit more perhaps green and times when you think of yourself a little bit more red, but just what you most closely associated with. It's not that you're gonna be in one box forever. Give you a couple more seconds for the last few people. So get your vote in quickly. Stop it there. So the people that did vote, these are the results. So pretty even, really, a pretty even mix. A little bit more greens, but only marginally. I'll share those results then and make sure you can all see them. So very, very close mix. And that's not necessarily a good or a bad thing either, but what I have seen in teams is, and what this team found, the most useful thing about this exercise was not, oh, we've got too many reds, let's get rid of one red and bring in another yellow. It was just a greater awareness of how people think, their default thought processes, the strengths that they bring to the team and where we might need to balance out certain aspects of our team to have a more rounded view of certain things. So that was interesting for them. They'd found that they'd been able to relate with each other better. They'd found that they'd been able to collaborate better. They found they'd been able to even have a bit more fun. They could see people's actions and where they were coming from a lot more. So back to our team, I mentioned, well, it wasn't me actually, it was one of the team members who called Wally, Miss Purple. Now, Purple isn't the color on there obviously, but Wally, when they did this, they decided that she was very on the borderline between red and blue. And so when you mix red and blue, you get purple. And the team had taken this model and sort of made it their own, if you like, which I think is probably the most important thing for any team with a model because all models are wrong, but some can be useful. And the way the team starts taking ownership of something, that's generally a really good sign around team development, team growth. So this team then, what do they do? They invited, they actually started using this in other aspects of their work as well. So like daily scrums, they'd start talking about that I feel quite yellow today or I feel quite ochre today or I feel that kind of thing. They'd also done some other things. So this is a screenshot of my attempt at some kind of sketch-noting, if you like, this is me sketch-noting out my journey line. It's an activity that you might have come across before. And I took from Lisa Adkins his great book, Coaching Agile Team. So this is my journey over my career. And this team had done that. They'd done their own journey lines and they'd shared their journey lines with each other. So they'd told them about the previous jobs they'd been out, their achievements outside of work. They'd had kids at this time. They'd been a redundant here, you know, anything like that. And again, that sharing of information with each other about themselves proved to be really, really useful in bonding. Now I'd seen journey lines before, here's your second sketch-noting opportunity. I'd seen journey lines before, but I hadn't seen this exercise before. Now what this team had done is they created what they call user manuals. Now you might have seen this before. Basically what it was is how does Jeff work? All right. So what you've got on here is a load of symbols. You heard Yuri talk about icons. There's a lot of graphical icons on here to explain each member of the team. So you've got a splash of green up there to indicate that I was very much a green personality rather than a red or a blue. I liked sport, you know, I liked my music. And then there were the specific skills that I brought to the team. So I might be a good listener, for example. I might be quite creative or innovative and I might be quite brave. Perhaps that's a useful skill that I bring to the team, knowing my strengths. But there are a few things that if I was on your team you'd probably want to be a little bit aware of. So I've got a little, I can't show you my cursor, but under the warning sign there are three icons. And they represent the fact that if people are late, that really does bug me. I really like starting on time. I don't like finishing late. And I also like balance. So I find myself taking the side of people that I don't necessarily agree with. But if I feel they're being bullied I'll generally back them up even if I don't believe in them. And that sort of, my buttons get pressed if I feel a sense of imbalance. And I've got defects. So I've got some dodgy knees and I also get nosebleeds now again. And that can freak people out if they don't know about them. So just letting people know what they can expect. My operating instructions there, now I'm quite slow at picking up new technology. And don't try and contact me on weekends or after four o'clock. And if I'm in a boring meeting, I might fall asleep. So just beware. And then the one thing that I really, really liked about this user manual is they shared their troubleshooting aspects. So I'll give you some examples here. So the troubleshooting question if you like the frequently asked question might be, I've got an email from Jeff and it seems like he's mad at me. And the response in the troubleshooting, well, he's probably just rushed it. You know, he's quite quick impatient. He probably just rushed it. Why is Jeff really quiet? Well, he's probably thinking tired or leaving space for someone else. And why does Jeff look upset? So this, these user manuals, they've done this and they've shared this with their teammates. And not only that, but they actually introduced the business sales associate. I can't remember the job title now, but Karen, they introduced Karen to this concept and she got involved in it as well. And the idea behind it, now I was brought up and it's probably a British cultural thing, but it's probably quite universal to a degree. I'll be interested in your opinions on this maybe. It's, I was brought up with, you know, treat people as you would like to be treated. That was kind of a rule for life that little Jeff was given when he went off to school. And I think that's a pretty good rule. But what I found with the great teams is that they don't treat people as they want to be treated. They treat people as those people want to be treated. And it's a subtle difference, but it's quite a powerful difference. Finding out what works for your teammates and then playing to those preferences rather than playing to your own is a massive difference between the good teams, just in my experience and the great teams. So this is the team sharing their user manuals with each other and Karen got involved and she shared her user manual. It was a voluntary thing. They didn't ask her to do that, but just by learning about the rest of the team, there was almost a sense of obligation on her part because human beings tend to operate on a principle of reciprocity, I do something for you. You kind of feel like you should do something for me as well. It's just a kind of natural human thing. So Karen submitted and shared her user manual. And when the team looked back on this time, they saw that in hindsight, in retrospect, as a bit of a rite of passage as sort of you're now part of the team. Like I said, it wasn't something she had to do, but that level of trust, it's like they crossed the line in terms of, okay, yeah, we trust her now. We trust her intentions. And that I think was a really big shift in the relationship between Karen and the rest of the team. So I think it's an optional thing. All right, I think for me at least, great teams there is an element of, I have the option to be here and I have the option to not be here. I'm not here because I have to be. I'm not here because people have told me that this is the formation of the team, these are the members of the team. But I buy in and I consciously subscribe to the team's culture, the team's rituals, the team's agreements, values, code, if you like. And part of that is developing our own language because as well as the general business jargon that you pick up and the three-letter acronyms and all that kind of stuff that you pick up, teams generally develop a verbal shorthand. The great teams do anyway. And that's part of that is a little bit of what you might call what we call over here meaning a banter, a little bit of jokingness, a little bit of playfulness, light-hearted, good-natured teasing and self-teasing. And this is where I'm gonna go back to Wally because Wally wasn't her real name. Her real name was Eve, but there was someone else in the team already called Eva. And so rather than have an Eve and an Eva where it might have been a little bit confusing, Wally had shared the fact that she's a big fan of Disney films and Eve is a character in Wally. So she took on the nickname of Wally. Now, again, this is difficult for a translation aspect but Wally in English is kind of a derogatory term. It's kind of a nice way of saying idiot. And so for somebody to voluntarily take on the nickname of idiot shows an element of self banter. Being able to have a little bit of a joke at themselves and be prepared to be a little bit teased. Now, that's a dangerous, dangerous thing. And I was warned about writing about that in this book because banter can easily become bullying and great teams don't do that. But I have yet to see a great team where they don't have fun together, where they don't tease themselves. So I couldn't really bring myself to ignore it and leave it out, but it is a risky area. After a while, you don't even need to use words a lot of the time. And I don't know whether you have this thing, as well as your little codes and your little inside jokes. It's a big part of feeling belonging. There will also be times when you don't even need to speak, you just know something that the rest of your team is thinking. And I used to freak my wife out. So my wife and I have been together for 25 years now. And so we know what we each other's, but it feels like we know what each other's thinking, but we don't. So we'd be driving along in the car and I would say something and she said, I was just thinking that you would get out of my head, Jeff. She said, that's freaking me out. And it's not that I can read her mind. Obviously I can't read her mind, but because we've been through the same kind of things so many times, we've picked up on each other's patterns. And that happens within great teams as well. So there are times when actually we don't need to speak in a great team. We can kind of just give each other a look or we laugh at the same thing. Again, I don't know whether you've experienced that, but it's quite a cool thing. It can be a little bit freaky to begin with, but it's quite a cool thing. And this is where the team in this story, they knew that, right? So when that person said, are you thinking what I'm thinking? What they actually said was a code word. It was a word that I can't share with you because it was a little bit rude. But they said, and they knew what that meant. That word meant, let's go to the coffee shop and have a chat about it. And so they knew what they were thinking. That's just part of being together for a while and experiencing things together. Now, apparently I didn't realize this. So I saw this with a team, but I didn't realize there was actually a thing. And as with most of the really clever and profound things in the world, they seem to come from Japan. I think it's because they have fancy calligraphy and it looks cool. And the words sound cool as well. Apparently this is also known as Ishin Denshin. And again, I wasn't aware of this until I started writing the book when I was introduced to this term by a guy called Tony Richards. Now, what Ishin Denshin refers to is unspoken mutual understanding. And I think the Japanese used the phrase, what the mind thinks the heart transmits. And it does feel a little bit like telepathy. And it's not necessarily something I'm suggesting that you should aim for, but it is a good sign in my experience that this team has been through something together. They have that collective experience. They have similar experiences together. And that builds bonds, it builds trust, it builds rapport. So, I say summary, but I am gonna give you a little bit after this, just summarize what I've said so far. From my experience, great teams, they do develop this respectful, safe and fun common language. The word safe is important there. It's respectful, it's safe and it's fun. They learn how each other's minds work, not so they can manipulate each other, but to build that sense of common experience, to develop that shorthand so they can get through, they can solve problems, they can have conversations, they can reach resolutions, they make decisions quicker and more in tune with each other's preferences. Great teams know without needing to be told. They understand where people contribute to the team. And they're also careful that they make sure that those people know that their contributions are valued for the team. And great teams put the team's goals above their own individual goals. And that's, for me, one of the big ones because it's often unspoken in a lot of the teams that I've seen. That to be part of a team, you actually have to give up a little bit of what you want. You have to sacrifice a little bit of your selfish objectives to be part of a great team. And that's not a bad thing. It might feel like it to begin with, but what you're hopefully getting is you're getting a trade. And as with all trades, in order for them to be effective, both parties need to benefit. So I've got a lot of resource A, you've got a lot of resource B. If I give you some of resource A, you give me some of resource B, we're happy. We're happier than if we just had all of our original resources, that's a mutually beneficial trade. But it's not spoken about very often. And so I see teams making, having issues that they could easily avoid if they were to have this conversation and acknowledge that they're opting into this and letting go of something to get something else in return. Your third sketch noting opportunity is this acronym that I've built the book around, which is squad. So while each team, every team that I've seen is unique, absolutely, there are a few common patterns that I've noticed and that great teams, they do have a habit of self-improvement. They want to get better, not because someone tells them to, not because they get a bonus if they improve, but because actually getting better is something that's a value to them. They enjoy the process of getting better. Quality is another thread, doing something properly. We used to sort of have a joke at the company that I used to work out, which was if you're not happy to put your mobile number in the release notes, you're not proud of your work. So quality is important. Unity, that sense of togetherness, that sense of bond is there in every great team. All of the great teams that I've seen and been part of are audacious. They're brave, they challenge things, they take risks, they're open to failure, but they don't forget that they're there to deliver. So yes, we're getting better. Yes, we're doing things well. Yes, we're having fun and being a great team and trusting each other and getting on well and we're taking risks and we're risking failure, but we're also shipping something, we're delivering something. And all of the great teams that I've seen anyway have those five things in common. But there's no process. There's no maturity model, I believe, for a team to get to great. I think every team finds their own path and a lot of it is based on their circumstances and the challenges that they're facing and where the individuals in the team are right now and where the team is right now. But there are a number of things that you might look out for as your team. And I mentioned one with regards to this idea of the user journey and developing that sense of bond and that sense of trust, sharing something with other people that user manual with bringing Karen into that process. Where at the time, they didn't really think it was that important, but when they look back on it, they thought actually, yes, that was something quite significant. Now I use the term milestones for that with the team, team milestones. And largely that's because I recently had another baby and I was introduced to this concept of milestone cards. Today, I had my first bath or today I took my first steps for today I threw up all in mummy's hair, whatever it is, there was a little card you could take out of a pack and you could take a picture next to the baby and save it for when they're a little bit older and embarrass them or celebrated on Instagram, whichever you prefer. And so I was sort of inspired by those and thought, well, actually, teams don't really get the opportunity to celebrate the tangible milestones of their growth very well. They'll have retrospectives, but did they really celebrate we are now a stronger team than we were before because we did this? Or in some cases, look at some of the milestones other teams have achieved and thought, do you know what? Yeah, that, we would like that as our team as a team, we would like to work towards that milestone now. So I captured quite a few and it's not a case of every team needs to go off and tickle 50, all right? And there's certainly not a start with this one and then go to the next one. There are a number of milestones that you might find along your way as a journey towards being a great team. So one that I've got on here is we appreciated each other, okay? And that just means saying thank you or saying well done or I appreciated what you did there. And a lot of feedback in organizations focuses on what we could do better. And that's really helpful. It's really helpful. But sometimes it's nice to know that actually what you're doing is valued. It's useful. It's recognized and appreciated by those around you. And so taking a little bit of time out to say thank you what I call catching your teammates doing things right. Okay, it's very easy to catch someone doing something wrong, but we don't really spend a lot of time catching people doing things right in my experience. And certainly for the Brits we find it a little bit embarrassing when people say well done, oh thank you, that was really good. But we kind of like it really. And so that's one milestone potentially. And so the book has stories about the one I told you about the team there. And it also has a number of these milestone cards in the back that you can tear out and you can take a picture with. So maybe we developed our own language or we made work fun or we put the team first instead of our individuals or we found out something really important about ourselves and us as a team. And on the back, there are a number of different things around those milestones. So everything that we try, everything that we do, everything that we work towards always has a risk. There's always a risk that it doesn't quite work out or it has a slightly negative side effect. And as a team, knowing what might go wrong when doing something I think is important to before you jump into something. So if you're finding out something about yourselves and your teammates, that's vulnerable. And if I'm gonna share something with you about my nosebleeds or my career or how I might not really like it when you turn up late, you now have something over me. So if you wanna upset me, you now know just turn up late. So I'm putting myself at risk by sharing this information about me. And that could go wrong. And so aware of that. And maybe it's something we work towards in a step-by-step way. But there should be something beneficial, right? So if we found out something about our teammates and what's important to us as a team, that's gonna be useful to us. So what rewards can we expect from hitting this milestone? And are there any rituals that we can put in place to increase our chances of hitting that milestone or making the most out of it? And for each of these cards, there's a set of resources that I've curated and pulled together over the years. But also I'm inviting the community. So anybody who's reading this book now has access to all of these pages and they can add their own resources, videos, articles, exercises, retrospective tools, books, anything that they think, you know, this could be helpful if a team wanted to achieve this milestone. And I'm going to, because I think I'm out of time, just a quick check, I've got 30 seconds left. So I kind of touched about all of these things here. So I will call it time there. And rather than throw more information at you, I'll invite Steen to open up the Q&A. Is that all right? Yeah, just a second, I'll find it here. So I will stop the share and you can gather what you would like. How is that for you, Yuri? I was a bit stressed. You were a bit stressed. Yeah, I will not, you know, play it with the deception. Yeah, it's tough, but... It looks great. Thank you so much. It's the second page because you have the other one as well. Yeah, I filled two pages, but it's also very rewarding. And when you do this, you really are following the speaker because I really lost the sense of time and I was never threatened by phasing out or just getting rambling into my own minds. I really followed the talk so it really helped me to stay focused and really follow deeply your narrative. So yeah, there is a price to pay, but the reward is so much greater. So I feel good. It looks like our first question is for you on that actually. How do you remember everything that's mentioned? Because I think I would be similar to Lena here. While I'm sketching something, I'm worried that I might miss something that somebody's talking about. So how do you do that? And yeah, I think I can refer to these situations. There were several times when I was still catching up with the previous part while you were on to the next one, but I cannot say that I wasn't listening. I think even though I was still finishing off my previous module, I was still following you. So that in a way helped me to stay concentrated as if I was holding a fiddle tool in my hand. So I was drawing writing even though it wasn't really directly pertaining. So I don't think it's a big risk here because you're still doing something with your hand stimulating your brain activity. I wouldn't be worried about that too much. So you're kind of putting down the main points. Exactly. I think there's an element for me, maybe of trusting my subconscious that the other stuff that I'm saying while you're doing that is going in somewhere and you can bring it back from the hooks that you've got on the paper, is that right? Yes, absolutely. And also I don't want to change something like ideal. There is a part of me trying to get there leaving me stressed, but I want to work with myself constantly reminding myself that it's not the intention to have the illustration. The intention is to have a good experience to engage with what you're talking about and being able to concentrate on what is essential. And then this lack of time actually helps me because it forces me to choose the juiciest parts of what you're talking about and finding a good visual representation for those. That's a really interesting way of putting it actually. For me, I think if you hadn't said that, I would have probably been thinking, yeah, I want to capture the talk on the paper, but actually what you're saying is it's the experience and it helps you remember stuff by doing the visualization. Yes, and right now if you, for example, try to refer to a part of your narrative, for example, to reiterate or maybe put more details, I would even have a visual memory of where we need to navigate back to. That I think talks about the efficacy of the method when it comes to memorizing material and organizing that for yourself. Cool. Super cool, yeah. Then the next question from Lena as well. Where would you put the user manuals for a team? Is it something that should be visual for everyone or just for the team? I wouldn't put them on the wall visible for everyone. Necessarily, but because I think one of the biggest things in getting value from them is a sense of safety. So what I have seen teams do is, and I haven't really seen, I've seen different variations and they call it different things. So there's like the, trying to think of what they were called now. One of them was definitely called a journal, like a team journal or a team archive. So it was like a big book type thing really and they would keep them in there and every year, or every project or every release, they do sort of summarization. So it was somewhere they could go. Quite often they'd be in the password protected part of the team Wiki or something like that. But I think I'm going to tie that into Yuri's point here if you like and say, well, actually it's the sharing of it rather than the artifact itself that's more important. So I'm pretty sure you'll remember a couple of things about that user manual, even if you can't remember all of them. And to be honest, if we were in the same team and you just remembered one or two things and I've known that you've remembered those one or two things, I'm immediately thinking more favorably of you. We've immediately got a stronger bond. We've immediately improved something, even if I don't expect you to be the perfect teammate and I don't expect you to expect me to be the perfect teammate. But if we're trying to help each other, then I think that's the good thing and you'll pick a few things up. I have known a few teams who have felt safe making them public and I would suggest that the more visual they are, the better. Because the icons mean something more once you've had the discussion about them. So Yuri's icons mean more to him than they do to other people because he's made that association with that icon and what the icon represents. If I hadn't explained those icons to you and just shown you that user manual, you might have interpreted some of them the same but you might have misinterpreted some of them. But I feel safer because all you're doing is making your own suppositions which you will do just by observing my behavior anyway. If that makes sense. I should open chat ready and see if Liam is saying, yeah, that's answered my question or not. Yeah, let's hope that answered the question. Okay. Next one. How often do you experience that team members? Oh, sorry, I need to move this. Can actually select if they want to be in a team or not. I think it's a very rare case. Yeah, I would agree with that. It is rare. But again, just having the conversation and the explicit conversation of you can opt out. All right. I think just having that conversation of am I okay with this? Is better than just saying we are part of this team. We've got to make it work. So I have seen people select out of the team a lot more than I have people see people say, yeah, okay, let me join this team. Let me join that team. And by not opting out, you are effectively opting in. And I think that choice element is important but it doesn't have to be that everyone is in charge of which team they're on. Again, that might sound like I'm contradicting myself but there is a subtle difference there. And so just by having the conversation, what would I need to be? And I'll tell you what I see more of is once we have in the conversation about am I okay being part of this team? We also need to have a conversation about well, what is being part of this team mean? So what are my teammates' expectations of me? What are my expectations of you as a team member? And am I prepared, am I okay with meeting those? Well, do we need to have a bit of the negotiation? And if we can't have a successful negotiation then we're not gonna be a successful team. So we either accept that we're gonna be together, stuck together, but we can't really be a team or we work out a way of if we can't negotiate a successful resolution then we work out a way of changing the composition. Yes, let's move on to the next one. Can you touch upon the leader manager aspect? I have personally seen managers destroy teams so they can be in a leadership position. I have to. However, I don't see it very often now or certainly see it less often now because I think the expectation of leaders has changed within organizations. So for a leader to be seen as successful in an organization that's operating in say a complex domain or where you would be using agile teams, it's pretty well known now that it enabling as a leadership trait is much more stronger than directing, much more valuable than directing. And the expertise is less likely to be found in one person. So when you're operating in a relatively simple environment or at least a complicated repeatable environment then leadership has historically been put into the hands of someone who's known the most or been there the longest and has the most expertise and experience. But problems are so complex now that you can't rely on one person to have the most expertise. We need a team. And if I'm running an organization or if I'm representing the shareholders of an organization and there's someone in there who is just looking for power, looking for control and looking for to run other people, I know that's going to be a less effective way of working. That's going to cost us money. It's going to cost us people. It's going to cost us talent. And so leaders higher up don't stand for that. I see that a lot more often now than I see egos destroying teams. This does still happen. And I see people leave the organization and go somewhere else. But that sense of waste and loss is so keenly felt within organizations these days. It's less of a risk in my experience. Okay, I think it's time to move on to the final part. Thanks for answering the questions. If you have a few additional smaller questions, you can post them in the chat. I will stop sharing here. And then Yuri, we are next on the agenda for guiding us through some of the templates. Yeah, let's do that. I'm really blown away with this idea of operating model. Is that the correct term I'm using? User manual is the one that they use. User manual, I'm sorry about that. But that's the thing I was referring to at least. I used their own name. But user manual, I really like the idea. So I'm just thinking maybe we could use this time now, how much time we have but then 15 minutes stops. Maybe we could just play together by creating a user manual for each individually and learn this by doing. And if you like the tool, maybe we could bring that technique back to our teams and maybe use that as our next retrospective exercise or maybe team building exercise and maybe incorporate that practice back in our working environment. And by doing that, we will also learn a few more tricks about sketchnoting like icons and use of white space and all of that stuff. So what do you say? Sounds good, Yuri, let's try it. Okay, so for that, you will need an A4 if you are a physical drawing person or you could do that on your drawing device like an iPad or a Windows device, it doesn't matter. And they are creating new document electronically. Or as I said, just pick a piece of paper. A4 is the most fitting for the purpose because it holds enough space. And if we have people using a different format for paper, it has the analog called a letter size. So a letter size or an A4 size. Put a title somewhere in the top, a user manual and put your name below. So user manual for Yuri Malashenko because I'm going to create one for myself and you will be creating one for yourself. So first thing first, we can decorate it really quickly and we will also learn a technique for drawing nice looking faces without putting too much effort into it. It's really simple. So drawing oval and then when you're done find the middle part, put a couple of dashes for the eyes. After that, put a kind of a nose here and just an arch for a smile, a couple of brows, upward looking so it's a positive expression on the face. Then find the game that line that divided the face into halves and put ears. And the most difficult part is the hairstyle but don't overdo that. Just put a few lines to resemble your hair basically. And if it doesn't look super nice, it's okay. It just has to be close enough to what your hairstyle looks like now and don't just spend too much time on it. So I will do something like that. Something like that. Just keep it simple and quick. We don't want to spend too much time. A couple of lines for the neck, just a slight line for the shoulders and that is your portrait out there. If you wear glasses, put the glasses but again, keep it simple and just like that. And now you have a face there. So if you do the exercise with your entire team, of course the faces will be different but that even being far away from how you look in reality, I promise you that will be identified almost immediately. We've done a similar exercise with teams before not in the context of user manual. That's totally new for me but some people would even use those as their avatars in the systems later on. It doesn't matter that it's not super nice. People like it because they've done that themselves. So I might need your help, Jeff, here because I might not remember all of the parts but as I remember, we had skills, warning and defects here. Yeah. So for that matter, just let's use this part here and roughly divide that in three equal parts and it's okay, it's okay to mess up. It doesn't have to be super ideal. So write skills here. Skills, here we will write down the warnings and the defects here. Now we could leave it like that and it's totally fine because it's already a nice template without further beautification but we could also just top it up a notch by for example, using range icon for skills and just start with the equal sign at the angle then the houses here, like the houses roofs and then end it with a move like that. So that will be our icon for skills. For warnings, we could use, for example, as a simple icon as an exclamation mark inside of a circle and for defects, I don't know, maybe a broken glass, like a martini glass with a crack in it. I don't know if it's a good icon or not. I'm totally winging it now but you can choose whatever you feel works better for you. So, and then we will leave these parts empty for now because then we also want to create the placeholders for four more sections. The operating instructions and somewhere here, the troubleshooting, okay? So operating instructions. I would just go ahead and draw a clipboard. You start with a rectangle here, leaving an open space in here and then the clip goes here and then a couple of two or three boxes with the lines kind of a checklist. So that's a possible icon for the operating instructions. The troubleshooting, well, I need your help. What could be an icon for troubleshooting? Anyone? A gun. A gun. It's a very aggressive troubleshooting, but that's fine. We can draw a gun. A syringe with a vaccine. Okay, so it will be a gun crossed with a syringe or okay, it's still late for me to turn that into syringe. So I'll just have a gun, okay? But if you haven't drawn the gun yet, yeah, draw whatever works for you. And then superpowers. So here we can write down superpowers and we respectively hear the kryptonite section and for superpowers, maybe as simple as letter S inside of that diamond shape and a kryptonite, maybe something like those crystals. And usually crystals are drawing something like, looking like directional signs with the facets and something like that. So that gives you a nice playing field and it already is enough to host the collection of the interesting facts that you would like to share with your team. And you could do it two ways. You could just continue writing things down and even use some combination of icons and words if you want to, but just bullet the text will do the trick as well. And sometimes if you use sticky notes of this size, you could do that on the sticky notes so that for example, you could change your mind later on. If you think, okay, I should probably put it differently. So you could populate your template with sticky notes if you like or you just draw directly on paper, whatever you prefer. And how much can we set aside for filling the template out? Stina, how much time do you think we could give for finishing off the template? Not much, a couple of minutes. Okay, so what if we do this? What if we do this? We don't do it now, but that's a homework to fill it out at your preferred pace. And if you feel like you just shared that through the preferred channel, what's the regular way for sharing stuff within the group? And yeah, and that could become like an offline dialogue around that, because I think two minutes is not enough to fill it out. Probably not, but it is a super cool template we just made. And I think it's super useful with our team, something we can take back as you mentioned and work with. Okay, cool. So yeah, I guess. Was it just a few questions to what markers that you use for the highlights? Oh yeah, that's a very popular question. I use Neuland markers today. And basically I'm an ambassador of this trademark in Denmark. And if you're interested to purchase some of their products, I can grant you an ambassador's discount as well. I can share that through Stina with the people on the group. And the ones that I used for this session in particular is the technical pen for lines and drawings and texts and brush pens of different colors called the fine ones. My preferred colors are light gray for the nuanced shadows and a couple of neutral colors like light blue and yellow that do not convey a particular meaning they just highlight just to make it stand out make it easier to navigate meanings. So that's what I've been using. And if you're interested, I can share some nice discounts with you if you want to purchase that from them directly. Sounds good, Yuri. Maybe you can just hear your sketch noting from Jeff's talk. Absolutely, I will photograph these notes and share that with everyone who participated. And also if there are others that would like to share what you have done today, maybe you can either you want to show it here now, just a few or then you can also upload photos on the meetup groups and on Instagram. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I can do that. There will be a link for, we will add for feedback. And I hope you all enjoyed this really cool event where we combine two really cool topics. I think we apologize for the confusion in the beginning with the password. We were trying to avoid the cases of Zoom bombing, but hopefully we managed to let people in who are interested in joining. Did anyone show anything? You can go to gallery view, then you can see people. Yeah, maybe you can stop sharing. So we'll exactly, you can see them in the gallery view. Super cool, see here from Julia. Ah, there are some really nice ones already. That's really nice to see, very cool. We will share the link to the recording as well. Are you sharing the link to the feedback as well, Pavel? It's already in the chat. It's already in the chat, cool. Otherwise from here, I'll just say thanks for joining and hope you had fun.