Hi Cristina, have you tried IdeaBoardz or Trello?

This sounds like an excellent challenge! One of the things COVID times have helped me to think about is this sort of “asynchronous engagement” stuff as a possibility rather than always feeling like everything has to happen at the same time. We helped a group to set up a remote whiteboard using Miro that people could join in their own time, add comments, add questions, shared ideas etc… This could definitely be adapted around a Liberating Structures activity.

We’ve also been considering the idea of cultural probes as a solitary activity (or set of activities) that a person completes over a few weeks to document their reflections from their own daily context. I think LS could again be used here. The idea that springs to mind for me is of playing chess remotely in the very early days of the internet! You take your turn, then you wait until the next person takes theirs, then you respond, etc…

Happy to talk through some ideas if a call would work for you!

Hi Cristina,

Similar ideas to others.. had a chance to attend one of the recent Cynefin 21 events on ‘complex facilitation’ which used concept board as an interactive space to capture anecdotes and narratives which we then clustered together into themes (no facilitator involvement, just participants clustering and relabelling clusters as we went along so not at all neat but definitely a good virtual experience of emergence).

I guess the first aspect of capturing anecdotes can be done without needing everyone to be present at the same time… (also exploring how we might Mentimetre for the same purpose and will be trying this out ahead of some team workshops in the next few weeks so can share any learning when that comes in…)

In the Cynefin workshop we then used an exercise called linear contextualisation to organise our narratives into different domains (consistent with the 5 domains of Cynefin but without any reference to the framework) which began to bring some coherence into what had been shared – this did feel like it needed to be an ‘in the virtual room together’ experience but could be done as a follow on to an initial period of gathering stories, experiences and anecdotes if the same people were able to participate in both aspects (so as to minimise the imposition of other peoples’ interpretations onto stories shared).. would be happy to share what I learnt with both exercises if that would be at all useful..