"SF Formats to Stay Connected"

Annie Bordeleau

With our international community in confinement, we at SFiO have explored innovative ways to stay healthy and connected online. Here’s what we’ve learned on preparing our organisation for a more sustainable future.

We live in a society that currently burns our planet’s resources faster than it can regenerate, and it’s time we find more innovative ways of striking a better balance in our ways of working.

Our experience facilitating and connecting online during the lockdown showed that virtual formats not only reduce cost and CO2 emissions, they can also enhance work-life balance, create more human organisations and build a stronger sense of community. If we succeed in creating reliable collaboration formats online, we can travel less, be closer to our families and local communities and continue to experiment and learn with our colleagues from overseas.

A strong SF assumption is that all of the resources we need to create a better future are already at hand; we simply need to identify and enhance them to make the desired difference. In this article, you will find 8 SF formats we used during SFiO meetups, and with them, we hope to inspire you to continue learning and experimenting with new ways of connecting online.

1. Rekindling the Fika

It started in a catch-up call with John Brooker, where he suggested we organise online meetups for SF practitioners around the world to stay connected during these volatile and unexpected Corona times.

We decided to rekindle the Fika (Swedish coffee break), a highly appreciated format we had used for the first time on May 3rd 2019, to honour the Swedish roots of SF Day.

After facilitating more than 15 weekly Fikas, and trying over 50 different Zoom formats (activities) with over 250 coffee, tea and occasional wine drinkers from across the globe, the experiment exceeded our expectations.

The first SFiO Fika invitation read like this:

Hello, all SFiO friends and colleagues. Knowing that this is a time of enforced isolation for some, and an unwelcome ‘staycation’ for others, we would like to help you ‘get social’ online. Following on from our very successful SFiO Fika event last year, SFiO is introducing a weekly 60-minute SFiO Fika while the crisis lasts.

Fika is more than having a coffee. It is a Swedish social phenomenon, a reason to set aside a moment for quality time. Fika can happen at any time, morning or evening. Perfect for a global community! Annie Bordeleau, John Brooker and others will be your hosts to Fika with you online for sixty minutes. Join us for 5 minutes or an hour, whether you are SFiO contributors or not.

Come and Fika with us! While we appreciate these are serious times, this is an opportunity to be light-hearted, converse with friends and perhaps stimulate your minds. So please ‘bring’ coffee, cake, tea, biscuits or something alcoholic and savoury, talk with Solution Focus colleagues and meet new ones. Bring an instrument; we might have an impromptu cabaret!

The original intent was to bring us together, and the fantastic side-effect was that we all learned a whole lot about hosting online meetings.

In the first minute of a recent Fika, I witnessed the following conversation:

• John: Do you hear the music I’m playing?
• Nicoline: Yes, interesting how you’ve succeeded in adding music, John. How did you do this?
• John: You go into the share screen function, where you can see “share computer sound”.
• Nicoline: Oh, hm, it’s not working
• John: I’ll make you the co-host, and possibly you will see it.

The lessons we learned were innumerable, and here are our top 7 SF formats that work wonderfully online.

We have shared these formats in a way that you can copy the instructions and paste them into the Chat during your online meeting. You can introduce the exercise as proposed, copy/paste the instructions and send the participants into breakout rooms to experience the activity.

1. Memory Lane

Kick the session off with a video of a nice memory in the past (we used a scene of tango dancing at a SOLWorld conference in Bad Pyrmont), and invite all to think back to a precious moment they have experienced.

Divide the group into pairs or groups of three to share their story.

Instructions:

• “In your breakout room, please talk about a happy memory (a highlight or a success story)”.
• Listen to each other with care and curiosity.

Duration: 10-15 minutes

2. Story Spine

Invite the group in pairs or trios to develop a story of them doing something they dream of doing (or of their preferred future). Instructions:

Co-construct a story following this structure:

• Once upon a time in the future… a miracle happens, and we are… (doing what we have always dreamed of doing)
• Every day…
• But one day…
• Because of that… (repeat this sentence at least three times).
• Until finally…
• Ever since then…
• And one small step we can take to make that dream real is…

Duration 10-20 min.

3. Open Space:

• Present the Open Space principles by sharing a slide
• Collect the main topics for the spaces in the Chat with the host’s name
• Prepare the desired amount of breakout rooms manually and give each room an unusual name (you can also ask the open space hosts to name their own space). Replace the breakout room number with the name
• Next, make everyone a co-host.

Instructions: You will enter the ‘lobby’ and then click on the breakout symbol at the bottom of your screen to select the space you want to join. After joining that space, you can contribute as long as you wish and then move to another discussion by repeating the same procedure. You can also ‘butterfly’ in the lobby if you’d like.

4. Interlude

Create a moment for the participants to refresh, or ease into a break. Do this by playing a song or a video. In one Fika, we played this one:

or sit back and enjoy as a musical colleague enchants you.

5. Jamboard

Google offers the option to create a Jamboard where everyone can meet and use notes to share their ideas.

Instructions:

• Open the following link: (insert your link here)
• In breakout rooms of 2 - 4, share your ideas on the board and become inspired by the views of other groups
• To create a new post-it, click on the post-it on the left menu bar and write your note. You can also change the colour if you’d like.

Duration: 10-20 minutes

In the larger group, you can cluster and discuss some of the ideas that emerged.

The above picture shows an example of our Jamboard session during the 2020 Solution Focus World Day Fika, in response to the question, “What have Steve and/or Insoo taught me?

6. Product Development

Inspired by a customer need or preferred future exercise, invite all to connect and get creative by thinking of a fun new product. Instructions:

• Develop a fun product idea
• Give it a name
• Develop a strapline
• Develop a jingle
• Choose who will present name and strapline and sing the jingle to the group (ideally the whole group participates).

Broadcast to breakout rooms: When done, talk about how you might use this.

Duration: 10 minutes

7. Future Journey

This exercise is a helpful way to talk about a journey ahead in small or larger groups.

Instructions:

• Find two objects in your immediate surrounding: One that represents what you want to do less of and one that represents what you want to do more of
• Share your two sentences with the whole group (or in breakout rooms)
• Talk about how or where you might notice each other doing more of that which you want to do more.

Our Hope

Meeting online is opening a whole new realm of possibilities for communities to stay connected across all borders. Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown us into a wholly new and unexpected reality, which forces us to adapt quickly. We hope that we continue to develop and share what we’ve learned about new ways of working. It is time to rethink and even reboot our system and be a leading force towards more sustainability for future generations.