How do online whiteboards enable us to curate richer deeper documentation through insight landscaping?
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Living canvasses that maximise insight and understanding
Our future is a richer human working experience; roles will be less and less about the routine, and more about relationships.Consequently, our discussions with others will increasingly migrate from the tangible to the intangible. From numbers to values; specifications to user experience; transactions to aspirations.
In other words, our monthly dialogue will be less about the electronic numbers, and more about the neural influences that drive them to improve.
seeing more creative and insightful connections
And all of this new understanding will have deeper, more complex connections. Our opportunities will lie more and more in how we see these connections. And in how we use our creativity and insight to make new ones. Our brains will be full of this potential.How insight landscaping enables a better sense of connection
But as complexity and connection grow, the reporting and communication methods that served a more numeric, rational, predictable business world are in danger of failing us. Isolated reports, in separate documents, held together only by file structures, will place more and more onus on holding all of the connections in our heads.
bringing it all together for everyone
People’s minds weren’t designed for this. They struggle to retain everything; can only process one thing at a time; and lose connections.To illustrate this, ask people coming out of a meeting how much they remember about the meeting before that one.
Maintaining the big picture
As Einstein put it “Perfection of means and confusion of goals characterise our age.” As the information they connect with delves more and more into isolated detail, people tend to lose sight of the overall picture. We focus on the ‘what’ and forget the ‘why’, and as a result we become disconnected from purpose and meaning.
pictures, and stories, and flow
But our minds love pictures, and stories, and flow. They can retain images and meaning much more easily.To utilise this phenomenon, we have been working with a global software company and some large international consultancies to develop Insight Landscaping of their partnerships. Online whiteboards support giant graphical backgrounds that hold all that is important in context with each other. Linking everything back to the potential that their partnership has for making a real difference. For delivering something that makes them proud.
insight landscapes hold different aspects of meaning together
Like horticultural landscaping, Insight Landscaping is about creating a vista that holds everything together. Where we place things in the online whiteboard has meaning and impact, and, as a result, our minds follow that meaning. Consequently, we can see new data in context, and we can immediately see its relevance and implications.The value of this at the CEO level is obvious. But it also has value for everyone else to see how their work fits in and links together. It enables people at all levels to immediately see how their context might be changing, and the opportunities that provides.
a shared brain for the team
These Insight Landscapes are an integral component of the planning workshop that creates them (held virtually via online whiteboards in this case). It is then annotated, augmented and reworked in subsequent partnership review meetings. As a result, the visual cues reconnect people with the ambitions and emotions they experienced at that time. Purpose is not only maintained, it is reinforced and built upon anew.As Jake Knapp puts it in his book ‘Sprint’: As humans our short term memory is not all that good but our spatial memory is awesome. The sprint room plastered with notes diagrams print outs, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team.
Getting the best out of online whiteboards
Currently we find that people tend to use online whiteboards expediently, in the moment, and then dispose of them. But if we have a longer term perspective of their power and potential, we can invest more thinking into how we can design them to have greater and more sustainable impact on insight, creativity, collaboration and strategy engagement.
In respect of strategy engagement, well designed Insight Landscapes can: Capture the vision; connect everyone’s role into it; map out the culture; link our various adventures together; provide a powerful basis for facilitation; and engage our partners and customers in exciting pictures of joint success. Imagine the psychological and emotional power such a visual environment could have as an active contextual backdrop to your own meetings. And those that your teams have within it.Exploring landscaping further
Insight Landscaping engages the heart
As an illustration of how powerfully Insight Landscaping can support deeper meaning, emotion, and even more spiritual connections we created an entire spiritual retreat using one. The result was that many people felt that it was one of the best retreats they had been on.To explore this topic further, feel free to contact us. We find our own thinking is continually sharpened and enriched by the questions people ask, and by the discussions that emerge from it.
If it is of interest, the use of Insight Landscaping for the spiritual retreat has been written up here.