The Strategy
Stop, Reflect, Plan and Act
and do it again
In Reigersbos, the collaboration between all the different parties involved is complex and challenging. The main parties in this process are the active homeowners, Stichting !WOON, the Municipality of Amsterdam and Stadgenoot. For the project to be successful, the people involved need to overcome their differences and work in close cooperation.
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To cope with the communication challenge, three students from the MADE master have tried to give more transparency in the process through working sessions. The purpose of these sessions is to give everyone a platform to communicate their preferences, doubts, and opinions about the facade project. By involving all parties, we want to achieve cooperation towards the final goal that satisfies everyone as much as possible and in which everyone can recognize themselves.
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We have designed tools and activities to support working sessions to stop, reflect and find a way forward as a team. In this manual, we guide you, the people involved, through a series of activities to help you plan and communicate the facade retrofit process in a shared language and space.
For these sessions to be successful
all parties involved need to participate.
Miro® + Google® Docs Templates
The online supporting activity tools for the working sessions
The Miro template is a collaborative online whiteboard platform that will support you to work together as a team. As you hold your meetings often in a hybrid form, both online and offline, we have chosen to work on an online platform. Nevertheless, we highly recommend you adapt this Miro into physical tools for everyone to participate in the process, regardless of their proficiencies with digital means.
Take into account that when you have both a digital and a physical version, we recommend you appoint someone responsible for maintaining both versions up to date so that you will not lose any information between the different versions.
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In addition, we have developed Google Docs templates to support you in organizing all the activities and creating an efficient and smooth environment. We have chosen this format as most of you already have experience working with this software. We added comments in these templates to give you tips and recommendations.
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Note that all the content and templates are composed of adaptable elements. You can incorporate all types of changes to respond to your needs so that the sessions become as fruitful as possible.
The Working Sessions Steps
Here we will take you through the tools step by step!
STOP
First, it is vital to make a conscious and active decision to stop for a moment. Often in processes, you might feel like you need to continue to be able to complete something. However, for improving any process, you need to stop and take time to see what is happening to reflect on the process and make adjustments.
The Start
To start a working session, you must prepare the sessions beforehand. You will need to consider the different topics and activities you want to consider in that session. This section will show you the building blocks of a session. We will take you through steps as the agenda and provide you with some ideas for steps and processes that will help you keep each session running smoothly.
ACT
After going through all these different steps, you will have a clear overview of various decision-makers involved and their needs and priorities. You have defined a shared vision and individual roles, responsibilities, and action points that consider the existing individual capacities and processes as well as available resources.
Now it is time to start working towards your shared vision and take on the different activities defined.
Now it is time to act and incorporate all this in your project.
Illustration by Storyset