A small collaboration - Learning Trello

The genesis of this small project was an interesting case study just in itself.

A group of us had migrated away from the main Facebook group, Ecology of Systems Thinking (EoST), and also another Facebook group ADDIT Together, and we were talking in small groups using Facebook Messenger.

Having been a design participant, to a degree, I had for some time been enjoying using the story telling and project oriented structure that Dasaratha Rama had constructed, ADDIT Together. I knew how she worked, and was impressed with her speed of turn around and bravery and honesty about the work she was conducting.

Michael Josefowicz is a retired print business owner and design lecturer, very willing, supportive, and open minded towards new projects, new ideas, and with many ideas of his own he is still keen to explore.

He & I had tried to dive in and engage with a good number of folk on EoST, with varying results for varying reasons. We both found that Rama was someone with an engineering orientation, very open and generous with her work and supportive of others. Added to this, we encountered Bob Burkhart, again more than willing to engage, ex-forces, brimming with techniques and energy, and despite being in his "fourth fifteen year career", working very hard on Minnesota ecology projects, often on behalf of indigenous American peoples.

Michael & I discovered hands on profiles are important, since some folk are quite esoteric and hands off, holists, preferring quite high level and personal positivity mantras, and others are very detailed, scientific, theoretical.

These two polar extremes seem not to have much in common. It seemed to be only the much smaller number of hands on pragmatists who can bridge between the detail involved on How Systems Thinking works, and the Why we need change that holists are happier with. The pragmatists job, it seems, is to find the What, the active projects that both extremes can work on to joint effect.

Having discovered our commonality, we had discussed a number of options as to what we could work on collectively, Out of this, Bob suddenly decided (my recollection, a process of elimination) that we should trial Trello and see what results we got.

Bob has many apt processes to apply, and in this case, we Formed the group and the project, Stormed the training profile and a crash course in learning Trello, and then collectively tried to understand the results. Here we are using a Design, Produce, Educate, Learn template, which has some correlation with the one Bob suggested.

Well the training wasn't a total success, with only Rama finding the tool entirely to her liking.

Like myself, she has enthusiastically adopted the tool, found and fitted her working patterns to Trello, which Bob would describe as Norming, and is now using Trello with gusto, the final Perform element.

But my "tetra" of processes is not yet complete. I still want to Norm the Educating process, and so need to Learn what happened, how well it worked, what we need to improve. And then offer the training to the wider EoST community, my Perform element.

And this will be the subject of a subsequent blog.