Collaborative Blueprint Onboarding
This structured onboarding process helps transdisciplinary teams align expectations and build a shared understanding. By openly discussing individual needs and collective goals, teams establish a foundation for effective collaboration and shared ownership.
Use this method at the beginning of a transdisciplinary project to ensure all team members (students, teachers, external partners) are aligned on expectations, roles, and goals.
Solves: Misaligned expectations, unclear roles, lack of shared understanding, potential conflicts arising from differing assumptions.
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Step 1: Informal Kick-off (30 mins) - Facilitate a casual get-together for the team to meet and connect. Optionally, use an icebreaker activity to encourage interaction.
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Step 2: Orientation (30 mins) - Explain the purpose of onboarding. Provide sticky notes and ask each participant to reflect individually on what they bring, get, and need from the collaboration, writing one idea per sticky note.
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Step 3: Sharing Mutual Expectations (30 mins) - Have participants consider their expectations of others, based on their needs. Each team member takes a turn asking others, 'What do you expect from me?' A designated note-taker captures keywords on sticky notes, avoiding repetition.
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Step 4: Aligning Expectations (20 mins) - Guide the team to cluster sticky notes by similarities and differences. Discuss how to translate similarities into concrete working agreements. Address differences by identifying underlying concerns and finding compromises.
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Step 5: Collaboration Blueprint (45 mins) - Facilitate a discussion to define the team's main goal, success criteria, and commitment. Then, guide the team to create a creative expression (symbol, image, sentence) that represents their collaboration.
- Encourage active listening and respectful communication throughout the process.
- Ensure all voices are heard and that no one dominates the conversation.
- Help the team translate abstract expectations into concrete, actionable agreements.
- Use different icebreaker activities to suit the team's preferences and context.
- Adapt the Collaboration Blueprint template to include additional elements relevant to the project.
- Conduct the onboarding process in multiple sessions if time is limited.