Traversing the Miro Mountain, exploring online collaboration with John V Willshire

Miro is a really useful online collaboration tool, offering an interactive canvas onto which teams can inclusively convene to collaborate wherever they are in the world. The infinity of its canvas, and the playful simplicity with which ideas, notes, images and other elements can be placed, pushed, pulled and organised provides an inviting way to getting teams together with purpose and equal participation — a 'live environment' where everyone feels connected and working towards the same end.

We use Miro in many of our own training sessions and client workshops, and are often surprised by the number of people never to have used it, given the easy benefits it brings to team connectedness in these distributed times.

In this session; joined by YCN partner, founder of innovation practice Smithery, inventor of Artefact cards and Miro maestro John Wilshire; we'll bring those along up to speed with the tool's practical ins and outs — and broader potential to transform collaboration — so we're all confident, capable and inspired to make more of it in the future.

To do so, we'll all participate in a session that not only gets us familiar with Miro's features but also demonstrates how powerful it, and other such virtual canvasses are, in enabling collaboration and collective creativity. John will lead a 90 minute Mountain Morning, a popular and proven workshop format where individual and collective challenges are aired, captured and explored as we make our way in teams up a metaphorical Miro ascent.

What we’ll cover

— Practices for organising ideas
— Principles of remote facilitation
— The practical ins and outs of using Miro as a collaboration tool
— Techniques for creating meaningfully participating with it
— Combining the digital with the physical

How the session will be structured:

Led by John, and a co-facilitator from YCN, we'll first orient around some Miro basics (all participants will receive a simple Miro primer resource in advance to have a click around ahead), before working through our Mountain Morning workshop — where we learn by doing, as we make our way up a metaphorical mountain, sharing the individual and collective challenges that come with remote working, and opportunities to mitigate them as we go.

Who the session's for:

Anyone keen to get to grips with Miro (or similar online canvas tools like Mural), so they're better equipped to up the engagement in their own team sessions in the coming weeks and months — and keen for an energising, collaborative virtual session among curious peers.