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AMA ft. Douglas Ferguson - Distributed '22

  • 17 November 2022
  • 9 replies
  • 125 views
AMA ft. Douglas Ferguson - Distributed '22

Douglas Ferguson is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision-making and design-inspired facilitation techniques. He is the author of Magical Meetings, Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything, and Start Within. 

Ask Douglas About... 

  • Maintaining playfulness and exploration for remote employees

  • Creative tools that innovate build real, meaningful relationships, and foster connection

  • Design-inspired facilitation techniques

  • Being a founder & author 

  • Miro tips + tricks

🔗 Missed Douglas at Distributed ‘22? Watch his session recording here.

💡 Make sure to check out more from Douglas with Voltage Control’s Miro templates and the podcast.

 

Question, comment, and like below👇🏿

9 replies

D
Userlevel 1

Howdy! Good to be here. 

I’m teaching today so there will be chunks of time when I’m unavailable but will check in throughout the day and the evening as well!

Manouska J
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

While Douglas is teaching comment your questions below! We can’t wait to see what questions you have for him! Ask a question for a chance to win! We will be gifting 1 person who asks a question in this thread exclusive Miro swag from our Miro Swag Shop 😎

xManouska @Miro
B
Userlevel 1

Hi Douglas!

 

I’m curious how important you find community based communication forums (like Slack or Geneva) when working alongside different brands and companies. Do you find these kinds of forums crucial in helping to build diverse communities from a relational perspective?

 

-Berto

Max Harper
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

@Douglas Ferguson 
Excited to learn more about your work.

What does ‘design-inspired facilitation’ techniques mean to you?  What techniques are you mixing in that palette ? 

Think visually. Work brilliantly. || visualthinking.tools || Creators of 'PowerPack', 'Clusterizer' and 'Totally Random' Miro Apps: || max@refractivestrategy.com || Support Community Miro Plug-In Creation: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/refractive
M

Hi Douglas! I’m new to Miro, but I work in Education + Knowledge Management and I’m interested in how you view the relationship between Miro and a knowledge hub. It seems to me that Miro is a project management and collaboration tool where really meaningful work (and play, per your discussion) can be done in realtime.

 

After that realtime collaboration and learning, I’m interested in how to you might distill that information into sustainable resources for the team. Can you speak to how you view the relationship between Miro as a collaboration/learning tool, versus a team-wide knowledge hub that serves as a wiki for ongoing and steady resources?

D
Userlevel 1

Hi Douglas!

 

I’m curious how important you find community based communication forums (like Slack or Geneva) when working alongside different brands and companies. Do you find these kinds of forums crucial in helping to build diverse communities from a relational perspective?

 

-Berto

 

Community of Practice is critical. People learn through practice and repetition. This builds competence and confidence.  All of our change programs include community of practice. I personally don’t worry too much about the technology and instead thing about existing patterns of behavior and what will drive adoption.  If folks are active in slack, then let’s do it there or if folks have an existing platform for ERG? Then use that! The important thing is to gather folks on a consistent cadence and facilitate them through a dialogue about their journey, their wins, and their losses. 

D
Userlevel 1

@Douglas Ferguson 
Excited to learn more about your work.

What does ‘design-inspired facilitation’ techniques mean to you?  What techniques are you mixing in that palette ? 

 

Lot’s of Design Thinking stuff out there from IBM, Curdale, Luma, etc. We are big fans of GameStorming, MG Taylor, Librating Structures, and Appreciative Inquiry. Lot’s of links here: https://voltagecontrol.com/blog/workshop-methods-activities/

 

Also, lot’s to discover on my podcast: https://voltagecontrol.com/podcast

 

 

D
Userlevel 1

Hi Douglas! I’m new to Miro, but I work in Education + Knowledge Management and I’m interested in how you view the relationship between Miro and a knowledge hub. It seems to me that Miro is a project management and collaboration tool where really meaningful work (and play, per your discussion) can be done in realtime.

 

After that realtime collaboration and learning, I’m interested in how to you might distill that information into sustainable resources for the team. Can you speak to how you view the relationship between Miro as a collaboration/learning tool, versus a team-wide knowledge hub that serves as a wiki for ongoing and steady resources?

 

It can vary based on internal collaboration culture of the organization and working norms, so we always start by understanding what’s in place and then designing from there.  Generally speaking, Miro is a great place for ideas to flourish, team members to inspire each other, and decisions crystalize. From there it can depend greatly on the team and the type of project. Some teams/projects might harvest tasks from the miro board and place them into Asana, for other teams it might be more relevant to update a Notion page and link to the miro board. When we run training workshops we usually lock the miro board afterwards, export it to pdf and share via email so that they have a snapshot in time, guaranteeing that nothing is deleted and they have a indelible artifact of their experience. 

 

One thing to keep in mind, some uses cases call for a quick impromptu board (could be totally blank) or a simple template (such as the many we offer at our website https://voltagecontrol.com/downloads/) other times there is more design and thought put into the experience the board might be quite involved, with various templates, potentially spanning multiple meetings, asynchronous work, etc. Some may even be evergrene, meaning you come back to them regularly. For instance our marketing war room is created in an evergreen aways evolving board that we keep updating and coming back to. 

Manouska J
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Thank you to those who participated in our Distributed ‘22 AMA! We have selected winners for this thread and will be contacting them via DM. Please continue to use this thread as a source of inspiration and to ask questions of our community experts! We’re so happy you’re here :)

xManouska @Miro

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