Jeff Patton visit

Yesterday Jeff Patton came to visit us in the Reading Plus offices in Winooski, VT.  It was a most illuminating day.

I’ve been batting emails and working through the phone with Jeff for a few months now, so he was familiar with what we have been working towards.  All of my halting steps and overall approach to holistic product development is shaped for the most part by Jeff’s training and materials. A few months back, after I had worked through a number of his handouts and we worked through some of my challenges together, he mentioned that my learning his process from the slides and PDFs was like learning to ski from Powerpoint.

It took a few months and a minor scheduling miracle to get Jeff to Vermont for a day, and after spending it with him it’s easy to understand why.  His technology and product knowledge is comprehensive, but it’s his skills as a process facilitator that make what he does and his methods so powerful.

Jeff posted his agenda for the day on the wall of the conference room as a story map, which was awesome.  Months ago I had taken Jeff’s guide to storymapping and used it as the basis for an exercise and design session at Reading Plus, so seeing a story map turned into a visible agenda was nice – ‘here is the script for our day, we may not get to all the scenes, but this is the set of possible ones.’

As it was we covered a lot. Here’s a shot of the agenda:

We bounced around for much of the day – tackling problems and processing information as we went.  There were a lot of a-ha moments for the team, and for me personally.

One item was related to collaboration, and how to design collaboratively. Jeff helped us by unpacking the term ‘collaboration’ itself, and we realized that the social nature of collaboration is balanced with the problem-solving nature of design by the implicit communications involved.  So even if people are not necessarily actively speaking or drawing, they are present and learning. It strongly suggested the idea of continuity, and institutional memory, and the value it brings to small organizations.

More to come on the visit, but wanted to get this up on the blog, as it’s been a week and I’ve been remiss in not posting something yet!