So in my last post I detailed the experiment I was going to run as a connect activity at the start of my next retro, a remote version of a Standing Survey. After seeing the feedback from the team, it became hard to seperate the connect activity feedback from the feedback on the main activity. So I've decided to combine the two write ups That means first I need to detail how I planned to run the 1-2-4-All Liberating Structure while limited to just the use of G-Suites.
1-2-4-All
In order to implemented 1-2-4-All, I needed a way to mimic people seperating off into small groups that increase in size at regular intervals. Some tools such as Zoom offer breakout rooms functionality where this can be controlled centrally by the facilitator. Unfortunatly, (but wisely) I am currently unable to use Zoom due to security reasons. So how to do this in G-Suites?
The first step was to create 4 breakout rooms and 1 main room. I created these as all day meetings so they could be used again (I later made them recurring meetings). So they don't block out my calendar, I set them to "free" from a visibility perspective.
Doing it this way means you can use the Meet lobby to jump between the different "rooms". From my experience most people who use G-Suites just use the calendar to join Meets meetings. Personally I find the Meet lobby very useful as it displays all relevant meets in one place and you can just keep it open in a spare tab. If you don't know, it can be opened in the same way as any other Google App. In addition to being to return to this lobby area after you finish a call. The lobby area looks like the below when setup as described.
The next part of the setup was to create blank Jamboard frames for the various groups to put there Sticky notes. These took the form of blank pages with just the headers, "Group 1" - through to "Group 4" and then combination pages for when the groups merged. For example "Group 1+2" and finally 1 for "All".
The final bit I wanted to do was to allow the Team to self organise into their first groups themselves rather it be told by the facilitator (me). To do this I created a Jamboard which splits the Team in to quadrants with their avatars placed at the top. This will enable the team to move their avatars to a group ahead of separating out.
Once this is done, all the setup is complete. I posted links to the meetings in the team's Slack. I asked everyone to make sure they had 2 screens (seperate devices OK but not essential) available, 1 for the video call(s) and 1 for the Jamboards.
We are now already to go.
Note: In addition to these activities, I also had some activities to gather insights. 1-2-4-All was used to generate actions the team wanted to take forward. I'll leave those activities for another time.