Quick Virtual Team Activity | Collaborative Journaling

Quick Virtual Team Activity: Collaborative Journaling

Use the Chat to Go Beyond Surface Conversations

This collaborative journaling idea has become one of my go-to, absolute favorite virtual team activities. I stumbled across it by mistake. Recently, I was giving a virtual keynote to 300 people at an education technology company, and I led this exercise. After the session, my client told me it was a “home run.”

I got a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn too. One person said, “This was the best session I’ve ever attended,” and that was compared to not only other virtual meetings but in-person sessions as well.

I think the activity I’m going to unpack in this chapter was a big reason why the session I led was such a home run. Believe me, all the activities and sessions I’ve ever led haven’t been home runs. I’ve made enough mistakes at this point, and I’ve learned what works really well after facilitating virtual team activities for tens of thousands of people.

What I love so much about this exercise is that it’s super flexible. It has the potential to boost morale and make your group feel really appreciated all in the span of three minutes, or stretched out to 30 minutes, depending on how you want to facilitate it.

The other little bonus feature of this live collaborative journaling exercise is that it’s super introvert-friendly. Often icebreakers or team-building stuff can get a little superfluous, and there’s not a lot of time carved out for self-reflection. But that’s not the case here. Collaborative journaling is also good for people who tend to be extroverted. 

Learning From Failure

Now in order to share how this exercise came about, I need to tell you about a major failure of mine—or rather, partially a failure of mine, partially a failure of Zoom. I was giving a separate keynote at a university for 400 staff. I went to do 50 breakout rooms, and it didn’t work. It started sending people one at a time two seconds apart. 

I had this whole interactive keynote we were going to do with a series of breakouts. Now the number of breakouts we could do was reduced to zero. I had to quickly come up with an alternative that accomplished the intention and purpose of breakouts, which (for any interactive team activity, beyond this one) is to bring people together. 

You want to make everyone feel connected and appreciated, and to invite the group’s collective wisdom, have fun, and actually enjoy the process. In this instance, I eventually settled on the idea of live journaling. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, and I’ve since refined it. 

But the idea behind all this is that typically the chat is used for sips of connections. It’s like, Hey, welcome to the webinar, where are you from? People type in their location, or some other quick, one-word, one-phrase answer to that or another question like, Can you hear me—yes or no? 

Gulps, Not Sips

But Zoom has a fairly high limit for the number of characters you can type into a single chat message. And I don’t know about you, but if it’s a hot summer day and I’m parched, I’m not taking a small sip from my nice, ice-cold water bottle. I’m going to take a gulp. The reason you take gulps when you’re thirsty is to satisfy that thirst.

The reason we do team activities is to feel connected. I don’t think sips and little bites of connection actually get us there.

With that in mind, I’ve refined this exercise to pick two songs that are instrumental, upbeat and reflective. The first one I want to make slower and pensive. With the second, I want to get things moving.

For the first song, I invite people to journal in the chat, but not hit send. For a minute or two, people are just typing based on a prompt. For the group of 300 sales leaders at the ed tech company, I asked: “What is one thing life is teaching you right now about selling virtually?” I encouraged them to take a minute and actually reflect on the question.

Think about some of the meetings you’ve had with potential clients. Think about some of the successful and not so successful conversations you’ve had. What were the defining moments? What is life teaching you? Turn that into a few sentences, or a paragraph, and when you’re done, hit enter.

That was the aim for the entire first song, which lasted about three to four minutes. The next song—a little bit more upbeat, still instrumental—invited people to become miners and steal and harvest some gems from the chat. 

There was so much in the chat it could have been a book. You only need to do the math. Let’s just say in that two to three minutes people wrote, on average, 100 words. Multiply that by 300 people, that’s 30,000 words. My and Will Wise’s book Ask Powerful Questions is 60,000 words. That means with this collaborative live journaling, we literally wrote a decent-sized book on selling virtually in three minutes.

Writing It Down

I used the question, What is one thing life is teaching you right now? But you can pick whatever prompt will serve your group in that moment. The point is to raise the level of depth in the chat in the form of writing. 

This idea kind of pulls from wisdom that Amazon has adopted, where they start off a lot of executive meetings by reading a narrative summary of whatever it is they’re going to talk about. That way everybody has the exact same words and language in their brain before the meeting even begins.

Literally, it’s people sitting around in silence reading what’s happening. I don’t know why we don’t do that in meetings more often, because one of the slowest ways to transmit information is talking. You have to think about it and then you utter what you’re thinking. Sometimes it’s not as clear, so you double back, and people ask questions. It’s just a really slow way to exchange information. Whereas writing allows us to transmit a whole lot of data in a pretty succinct format, with no “ums,” “uhs” or “buts.” Yet we’re still using the chat for, Where are you from? Can you hear me? and other questions like that.

Now if you totally love this idea of collaborative journaling, and you need some prompts to get started, you can access 60 questions at www.weand.me in digital format for free. You can also purchase the deck of We! Connect Cards, and have it shipped to you. 

There’s something cool about having an analog visual, a card you hold up to the camera, with your question on it. But however you approach collaborative journaling, the point is to go deeper and connect to the purpose of your meeting as well as others in your group.