Our Remote Dojo Toolchain

We're using Mural for whiteboarding and to simulate the many artifacts we place up on a dojo challenge team's space, Zoom for audio and video, and, depending on the client, either Slack for status updates, integration, and chat to create collaborative environments for immersive learning.

A few things we've learned:

• Mural is incredibly flexible and easy to use. It rivals the in person experience and has many cool features for facilitators. It's easy to do framing/chartering, retrospectives, post up drawings and sketches, run "dotmocracy" moments, model standard work, create a plan for the day, make a team logo, and more. Best of all, it's held up to the punishment of what I imagine is a 10x growth curve. Kudos to the team at Mural; they've done a great job curating a simple set of features that just work.

• Onboarding people to Mural (or any other new tool) is a necessity. That means taking it low and slow and that 15-minute icebreaker might, necessarily, turn into a 50-minute one. I developed a short routine for showing new people the ropes. The main points I hit in a kind of "follow along with me" exercise:

  • Create, colorize, and change cards and other shapes.

  • Navigate/pan to each corner of the canvas and duplicate the card seen there.

  • Zoom out to the whole canvas. Zoom back in.

  • Follow me or another facilitator.

  • Drop a "lucky charm" icon onto a card (heart, star, rainbow, et. al.).

  • Pull up the shortcut drawer (SHIFT+?).

• Zoom breakout rooms are great for splitting into mini-mobs, pairs, and running workshops with breakout rooms. The trick in the remote era is to be prepared. Take time at the start of the day to form voluntary groups. In the case of workshops, pre-assign groups with your co-organizer on the client-side.

• Many things take a lot more preparation to be successful than they do in person. When working remotely, you can't rely as much on your ability to improvise or the group's ability to self-organize. Again: be prepared.

• Editors - 5K or ultra wide screens with 8pt font with line numbers are impossible to see. When you're pairing or mobbing or reviewing, people need to be able to drive at a distance which means they need to see what to navigate to, click on, which app to switch to, etc. If you're don't have line numbers turned on in your editor of choice, it might be time to find and enable that setting. It makes it much easier to talk people on to the line of code you're talking about — in person or remote.

The nature of client work, especially in the enterprise, is such that you usually won't be able to choose your toolchain. This accounts for the crazy assortment of file sharing and conferencing tools I have installed. One day last week I had back-to-back meetings in Skype for Business, MS Teams, Zoom, Zoom (again), and, everyone's favorite, WebEx. That said, most of our clients have been very flexible in either quickly licensing tools or getting licenses to the coaches and challenge teams that need them. If you've ever dealt with enterprise procurement, this anecdote should warm your heart a bit.