Sometimes my better ideas come from my mildly sarcastic one-liners... A couple of weeks ago I was in a workshop with a group of people when someone said that they were working on a project to promote "Paperless Meetings" within their organisation. "You should be striving for meetingless papers" I quipped. It's been a recurring … Continue reading Meetingless papers
Category: Themes
A bit of a "how to" post reflecting on a session I ran yesterday for the technology team from a retail client. The Brief All of my most exciting pieces of work come at short notice. I spoke with the CIO from the client on Tuesday, and he wanted an interactive and fun session to … Continue reading Agile Simulation: Method and Reflections
You wait for blog posts about how we record WB-40, and then two come along at once... The problem How to get as good audio quality as you can when using a web conferencing service like Zoom? The method An audio setup as documented in this article:https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2018/02/16/podcasting-primer/ And then some clever ways of using the … Continue reading Getting good audio results when interviewing on Zoom
This is a very specific description of something I worked out how to do today. If you edit audio for things like podcasts you might find it useful. If you don't then probably not so much... The need Just about every week these days I have an interview to edit for WB-40, and coming soon … Continue reading Apply transcripts to audio in Audacity
This week I have learned: I really do like starting things There's a huge gap in the way big tech firms push collaboration software. They neglect to think about the groups, focusing too much on the individual The power of music, the shared experience of music, is something I forget about too often The new … Continue reading Weeknote 409 – new beginnings
Anyone who regularly delivers workshops or presentations will know the massive impact that the layout of a room will have on the session. An audience laid out in the lines of a theatre auditorium will be in receive mode. Put them around tables in "Cabaret" style and they'll talk to one another more readily. Put … Continue reading Virtual rooms
Semiotics isn't something I've heard much about in the two and a half decades in which I've been working in the technology industry. It's a bit woolly for the tech world. But I'm a big believer in how you can understand much about the culture of an organisation through the artefacts that it creates as … Continue reading The cultural assumptions in collaboration software
I've been working with lots of teams in different organisations over the past few years on a question that generally starts along the lines of "We'd like to know how to use Product X", where 'Product X' is one of Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Slack or one of many of the dozens of … Continue reading Understanding collaboration through rich pictures
This week I have learned: everyone should make time for lunch with a poet once in a while. train strikes are a massive failure of employee engagement. Funny we don't see the answer to them being discount vouchers at the local health spa. walking in hills is good for the sole. I'm getting into the … Continue reading Weeknote 407: Brexit? Brecon
Back in those strange days when I worked at Microsoft there was a concept of giving and receiving kudos. This wasn't a soft skills thing that encouraged people to face the fear and start giving rich and rewarding feedback to one another. Kudos was a system that allowed for the automation and measurement of the … Continue reading Kudos where kudos is due
