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How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#22We have just started trying to answer this question on my team, and our first take at it is pulling out specific questions from various emails and conversation, and documenting them (in our wiki) as a decision to be made. We write up the question, various answers on the table, pros/cons for each, and then have a call to talk through them and decide. That decision is recorded on the wiki page, and we have a running log of the team's discussions and decisions.
There may be better ways, but it has done a number of things for us:
1) Improved our documentation of decisions.
2) Helped us pull focused, answerable questions our of free-ranging discussions.
3) Allowed everyone to have a voice, not just the people with vocal, strong personalities, as any one of us call just write up a page to discuss, and then set up a call to do so.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#23collanon.app
Feel free to try it out as much as you want, it's a communication tool based on timely anonymous topics with limited deep dives(3 levels deep), a star system on solutions and only after the time ends you'll be able to see who was behind the messages and who had the most liked solutions.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#24I don't think it's a tool problem. It's a communication skills problem.
Everyone has different communication skills. If you chat with me on Skype, I'll be mostly passive saying "yes" "uh huh".
I've had the deepest discussions through Slack, but you have to embrace it as a chat medium - late night Slack, first thing in the morning, ignore your kids at dinner kind of discussions.
BBS/forums are the same. We've had great discussions, but only with the people with the skills for it. On an actual board, everyone chatting there does havw the skills, whereas there are 80% of 'lurkers' who are not very comfortable yet.
So it depends a lot on your team itself. Agree on something and give them 6 months to learn it.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#25I use https://simpleboard.io to keep everyone on the team updates on projects we're working on, you can submit mini reports on a realtime dashboard that everyone get updated at the same time, it helps a lot especially on remote teams and also you can manage project linked to any platform like jira, asana ...
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#26As an R&D focused company operating across a wide range of areas we have tried a few things. We are not explicitly focused on written discussions but do want results to be documented. We have tried many things from wikis to clipboards, Github issues to formal verbose documents, and settled on markdown files on Github. Usually we have a group meeting, discuss things, take notes either directly to a markdown file or transfer them quickly to a markdown file, then expand thinking there including approaches tested, findings, test results, conclusions. We like the format because it allows linking to other internal systems (accounting, other repos, etc.) plus integrating media. Edit history and access control comes free.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#27Disclaimer: I work here.
Discourse http://discourse.org/ really is fantastic for this. We do all our internal communication and longform discussions using the software as a form of dogfooding. We have lots of plugins that make working together as a team easier, and it’s so wonderful to be able to write a longform discussion that everyone reads and contributes to! We have more team tools on the way as well.
I worked on a remote team before primarily using slack and zoom and that was awful and full of distraction. Discourse is a breath of fresh air here.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#28(Obviously biased.) So, instead of using tools primarily designed for chatting and commenting, you could use a tool specifically designed for the facilitation, capturing and representation of complex arguments. We have spent the past 8 years building just such a tool, it’s called Kialo ( https://kialo.com ). It’s nowhere near as perfect as we would want it to be, but it gets the job done nicely. In a nutshell, Kialo…
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Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#29Confluence? wiki? Google docs? Github Markdown files? - all of these can work.
Re: How do you have deep, written discussions with your teams?
#30(Obviously biased.) So, instead of using tools primarily designed for chatting and commenting, you could use a tool specifically designed for the facilitation, capturing and representation of complex arguments. We have spent the past 8 years building just such a tool, it’s called Kialo ( https://kialo.com ). It’s nowhere near as perfect as we would want it to be, but it gets the job done nicely. In a nutshell, Kialo…
Just wanted to say thanks for mentioning this website. Really interesting concept. Registered!