Collaborative Journaling

This is a very introvert-friendly way to create Connection Before Content.

Frame It

“You all collectively are much smarter than I am individually. This exercise will allow us to harvest the collective wisdom in the group in a very short period of time. Then you’ll have a chance to learn from each other by reading each other’s words.”

Objective

Our objective here is to actually write a collaborative journal. Instead of just a quick, simple response in the chat, I’m going to ask everyone to write a paragraph response to my prompt.

Guidelines

✓ Allow roughly two to five minutes for writing followed by two to five minutes to read through, exchange and digest what others have written.

✓ Invite everybody to type their response, but hold off on hitting enter until your cue.

✓ All at the exact same time in 3..2…1…hit enter. Your audience basically just wrote a miniature book. Now it is time to read and digest.

✓ If you are face-to-face, invite folks to journal on sticky notes or sheets of paper. Then have them scatter the notes around the room on the walls, desks or tables. For the reading and digesting period, turn the room into a museum gallery walk where people move around taking in what others have shared. 

Leadership Tips

✓ Choose a very clear prompt that is guaranteed to add value to everybody else. Some example prompts include: 

• Write about a valuable insight about your work that could make somebody’s life easier.
• Share about one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned from failure—so others can learn from your “whoops.” 
• If you could give one piece of advice to colleagues to help them succeed at this organization, what would it be?
• Write about a key takeaway you got from this session as if you were teaching it to somebody who wasn’t here. 

✓ To really connect to the purpose of the gathering, consider inviting people to generate the prompt or question that you’ll journal on. This may take an extra few minutes, but it can really personalize the group’s learning and connection. 

✓ For some clients, I take the transcript of the chat and have the responses designed and placed into a PDF as a tangible takeaway from the workshop. This exercise gets a lot of valuable perspectives out in a short period of time. Consider doing something with all this gold to extend the impact. 

✓ Of course you can lead a verbal debrief after all this as well. For the extroverts, that can serve as a useful “brain purge.” 

✓ Pro tip: you can use both the We! Connect Cards and We! Engage Cards for infinite amounts of meaningful journaling prompts. For example, “write about how this image or quote relates or does not relate to your work.”