In the last newsletter, I wrote about reinventing ourselves in order to continue to inspire our customers, writes OTD business coach, Katarina Sovic.
The key message is that we should observe, explore and build new skills now, so that we’re ready for the future.
Sometimes this whole process of reinvention is not simply a choice, it’s a necessity. Big and unexpected things happen, which leaves us with no choice but to change direction.
It happened to me following the COVID-19 pandemic.
All of my work was postponed for the foreseeable future and I completely deleted my calendar.
It was clear to me that I needed to transfer my work to a virtual environment, but I didn’t know how to keep the same engagement, interaction and connection with participants as I had before.
And so my quest for better online tools and training resources started.
I don’t know how many webinars I attended, or how many platforms I explored or even how many online communities I joined. I do know that I carried out many experiments with my customers though!
Sometimes everything worked really well, other times it was terrifying and on occasions it was just funny!
I would like to share a few online tools with you that worked really well for me and that I still use today. There is no hard analytics behind this list, it’s completely biased and highly subjective but hopefully you can benefit from exploring them too:
This is a workshop planning tool that we can use to design training content and build agendas. I don’t use it at the start of a workshop design because I prefer to draw the concept. But later, when it comes to building detailed agendas or leader guides for customers, I find it really useful. It has a big library, full of facilitation techniques and ideas that you can use for inspiration. The basic package is free, and it’s enough for what I need.
Jamboard is a digital, interactive whiteboard developed by Google. It’s the simplest digital whiteboard that I’ve found and it’s great when you have a short online workshop and you can’t spend time explaining how to use it. It’s very intuitive and in my experience, participants get it immediately.
I use it like a virtual flipchart whenever I want participants to collaborate and create something together. If you have a Google account, you can create it before the workshop, save it on your Google Drive and share it with participants.
You can use this online tool to work with pictures. It’s great for a range of different activities, such as those occasions where you would use picture cards in a face-to-face workshop. It can be interactive, or you can use it just to share a screen with different images.
These are online workspaces designed for distributed teams to collaborate, design and manage projects together. Their only challenge is their complexity, so it takes some time to explain to users that are unfamiliar.
Miro and Mural are very similar. For me, Miro is better, but I find Mural easier to use for participants, so that’s the one I tend to use most of the time.
It’s ideal for designing workshops and programmes, as well as different exercises in virtual workshops e.g. when I want participants to collaborate in breakout rooms.
It is also perfect when you have a programme consisting of more workshops, with homework in between. The possibilities are limitless! I’m still getting new ideas and discovering new opportunities to use it.
If some of the tools are new to you, try them out and let me know what you think. And if you have a tool to recommend, please put it in the comments!