Too often, organizations opt for collaborative meeting models where one person shares ideas while everyone else listens. Whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid, this approach won’t yield many perspectives and ideas in less than an hour.
That’s why we recommend a very different collaborative approach when diverse input is important. What’s been working amazingly well in these situations? Text-based online collaboration grounded in idea-expanding exercises.
Whether all, some, or none of the participants are remote, a text-based online collaboration approach creates breakthroughs across multiple dimensions. It enables participants to typically share one comment per minute per person. When you do the math, you can see how rapidly your team will generate a tremendous volume of new ideas.
We’ve been employing online and virtual tools to collaborate for more than a decade. Brainzooming developed our first exclusively-online organizational strategy for a client in 2013. Early learnings revealed great insights into translating in-person workshops into virtual formats. We now consistently find the greatest productivity and impact with text-based online collaboration.
Saving $200,000 in Executive Time through Virtual Collaboration
One Brainzooming client during the pandemic opted for developing a multi-year growth strategy exclusively through online Blast! collaborations saved three weeks of executive time versus holding day-long, in-person strategy meetings.
Their actual participation time? Seven hours of online collaboration, in ninety-minute meetings spread across multiple topics and days.
The approach delivered savings in executive time exceeding $200,000 through freeing their leaders from multiple weeks of daily strategy meetings!
How Virtual Collaboration Enables Breakthrough Time Savings
Employing virtual collaboration sets the stage for everyone to contribute perspectives and interact simultaneously. With all the input visible on-screen, everyone easily benefits from seeing what others are thinking and sharing. These many-to-many exchanges are productive in ways that video conferencing platforms and exclusively in-person meetings can’t match.
Our approach for developing a larger volume of innovative ideas through keyboard-based collaboration involves:
- Participants responding to strategic thinking questions simultaneously as they instantly see other participants’ responses.
- Keeping responses anonymous to encourage participants to share challenging comments and emerging ideas.
- Capturing every keystroke shared within the collaboration platform so ideas and thinking are written exactly as participants intend.
- Including a video call, as needed, to allow participants to see one another.
This collaboration formula (which we call Blast!) creates amazing productivity. When everyone is collaborating simultaneously, twenty minutes of team input can translate into output comparable to a traditional six-hour meeting.
How does Blast! redefine what you think you know about team collaboration?
With Blast! from Brainzooming, productive meeting is no longer an oxymoron.
Blast! is a facilitated, collaborative experience that bridges strategy, creativity, and making things happen. While it uses online input, it’s never a tedious, face-to-face video conference. Instead, Blast! is brain-to-brain. Everyone on your team, no matter where they are, can focus on sharing ideas, solutions, and possibilities. The key is that participants respond to simple, idea-provoking questions that quickly produce amazing results.
For focused topics, Blast! delivers hundreds of comments within only thirty minutes. If your situation is more complex, we can extend the time for ideas and review. For more comprehensive strategy and planning initiatives, Brainzooming can easily incorporate multiple facilitated Blast! experiences, to create a customized process (and results) for your organization.
All the ideas that participants share in Blast! are anonymous. This delivers big surprises among executives who typically never expect such candor in a team’s input. And since it’s text-based, Blast! eliminates all the awkward interactions when participant microphones and cameras never seem to be on and off at the right times. For an inclusive, inviting, and impactful collaboration experience, it’s time to help your team deliver productive results while everyone has a Blast!
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