Category: #coop

“My bandwidth isn’t great today so I’m going to face mute…” This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

Where do you get your confidence from? Practice? An inbuilt sense? Reassurance from others? And what leaks your confidence? I watched the highlights of a tennis match yesterday, and saw a young upstart blow away their mature opponent, but still need 6 match points just to get over the line. Don’t overthink it – you’ve…

Thinking again about communications, it’s easy to forget that your audience may only be open to certain modes of communication. So it’s probably a good idea to survey them and see which channels they prefer. This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

There are two sides to every communication. And one of those sides is usually pretty ropey. In tricky circumstances, I’ve been amazed at email’s ability to remove any trace of human soul. The result leaves the communication open to the addition of any, and every, piece of baggage that the reader is carrying. At least…

Who isn’t guilty of putting up a website and then completely forgetting about it. It takes so much effort to get a decent web presence over the line and usually it comes down to the creation of relevant, punchy content (or lack thereof). It’s easy to be completely oblivious to the fact that parts of…

If in doubt, tell a story. Even better – visualise the story. When I try to think through how to tell a story, I always take to paper first and sketch each bit out as my brain jumps around from wrong turns at the start of the journey, to reflections from the summit. And oh,…

At the end of the 10 week product definition course run by We Are Open co-op, it became time for each charity to create a wrap-up deck of all they had been learnt along the way (with lots of live drawn images to bedazzle the audience too!). And of course, in order to decide the…

Isn’t it so frustrating to be taken outside your digital comfort zone? Luckily, all the questions you’ll ever need to ask have already been asked before – on the Internet. Now, if only you knew what the questions were and how to phrase them in order to search for that missing knowledge. Each software package…

When I’m live-drawing my ear is often pulled towards those little tickly comments. Someone dribbles a little humour on a very tedious topic and a picture emerges. We were talking about backlogs. Someone mentioned swallowing the elephant… This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.

No, not that Moscow; this MoSCoW – or more helpfully, MoSCoW is a way of prioritising user stories into 4 categories: we must (M) implement this, we should (S) implement this, we could (C) implement this, and we won’t (W) implement this. You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to decide which category a…

When you wish upon a star… this illustration has nothing to do with that. This is a handy little method of self reflection. You go round each participant and think of two things that went well (the two stars) and one wish, knowing what you know now. You can read about a real life example…

Unmoderated user testing allows you to go wider with your tests as they can be performed at the users convenience, and doesn’t require human hand-holding. You never know what you might find… This Thinkery was captured live during a series of workshops by We Are Open, for Catalyst.