Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, and High Performance

Description

Graphic tools and visual solutions for team building and development

Visual Teams uses visual tools and methods to help teams—both face-to-face and virtual—reach high performance in today s work environment. As teams become more and more global and distributed, visualization provides an important channel of communication—one that opens up the group s mind to improving work systems and processes by understanding relationships, interconnections, and big picture contexts.

Visual Teams shares best practices and uses visualization as a power tool for process improvement by providing teams with a common language for high performance. The book:

• Explores how any kind of team can draw on the principles and practices of creative design teams in the software, architectural, engineering, and information design professions
• Introduces the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model and related tools—a system used throughout companies such as Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron, and others

Visual Teams presents a comprehensive framework, best practices, and unique visual tools for becoming an innovative, high-performance team.

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From the Book: Visual Teams in Meeting Settings

Same Time/Same Place—Face-to-Face Meetings
The traditional, and historically most familiar way to work as a team, is face-to-face at the same time and in the same place. Many kinds of work groups are still located in the same geographic area or building and can meet together this way. The tools explored in Visual Teams for this team mode are:

• Graphic recording on large paper
• Static and interactive whiteboards and multi-touch screens (and walls)
• Computer projection of idea mapping, flow charting, and other software
• Predesigned presentation murals and charts
• Wall and tabletop graphic templates
• Workbooks, worksheets, and handouts
• Sticky-note displays
• Decision-support software for electronic brainstorming, voting, and ranking
• Tablet computers for active graphic recording that is projected

Same Time/Different Place —Virtual Meetings
Increasingly, teams are distributed in different locations, many times all over the world. But they still want to meet at the same time, hearing each other’s voices and perhaps seeing themselves on video and looking at shared drawings. Many face-to-face meeting involve a virtual component with several people calling in. Its tools are:

• Teleconferences with target documents
• Web conferences with shared whiteboards and interactive presentations
• Web conferences with active recording on tablets
• Video conferences with telepresence and interactive whiteboards integrated
• Interactive whiteboards and telephones
• Live chat with or without video
• Browser-based decision-support software

Different Time—Same Place Meetings
This brings us back to a physical office or workspace. When teams are collocated they can communicate visually through the physical environment in ways that allow coworkers to see what is going on at different times. These tools include:

• Physical bulletin boards and project-management walls
• Posters
• Posted action plans and road maps
• Team rooms with displays
• Kiosks—physical and electronic

Anytime/Anyplace—Social Media and Cloud Computing
With cameras on smart phones and tablets, wifi and other Internet connects becoming universal, and data access from the cloud expanding exponentially, the “anytime/anyplace” possibility is becoming reality. Some of the tools that specifically make this possible are:

• Texting
• Video and photo sharing
• Teleconferencing on smart phones
• All the above plus drawings on smart tablets
• Coordinating through cloud computing services
• Mobile appliances of increasing variety

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