How we trained Lotus Notes

A recent post on vowe.net pointing to Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch sent me down the memory lane into the 1990ties.

Collaboration training

Companies would send regular employees in groups of 10 -20 to a full day training to learn about that new thing "collaboration" (which gave the word collaborator a less perilous meaning). This is how it would go down in four modules:

In the first module the Notes discussion database gets introduced. Participants would learn about topics, responses and response-to-responses. Without seeding lively discussions would emerge.

The second module would focus on eMail, inbox, signature, encryption, richtext and - everybody's favorite - permanent pen.

Followed by the lunch break

The trainer would have prepared individual emails to all participants. Most of them with harmless request like "What's your favorite color" or "Ask your colleague about the last holiday". Two emails however had loaded requests: "Stand up and put your one hand on your head" and "stand up and sing or hum the national anthem (considered unproblematic in Switzerland)"

Unsurprisingly hardly any of the recipients of such a message complied. The trainer would then ask a random participant to join in front to face the class, followed by the explanation: "You can't expect email to transport requests that a better issued in person (paraphrasing here)".

Time for a coffee break with gipfeli.

The trainer then introduced module four "Imagine you are all distributed in regional offices, so you can't show paper documents to each other, solve the problem I'll hand out". I then would hand out sheets of paper with the sentence "Every capital letter is part of the solution". The sheets were all different with different letters capitalized, so the task was to collect the capital letters and form the solution LOTUS NOTES. This wasn't explained to the participants though.

Typically a barrage of emails would follow with different levels of speculation, curiosity, acceptance or ridicule. After 20-30 minutes the task would have been figured out at the "cost" of 100+ emails. The winning team (we informally tracked completion time) however took less that three minutes: One participant created a discussion entry "Please share all capital letters on your sheets" and sent a doc link (hyper link in today's lingo) to the rest. 10 response documents later they were done.

Participant reported a better understanding of "Zusammenarbeit (collaboration)" and "Benachrichtigung (notification)" which made them appreciate the shiny new tool.

I loved this sessions since the showed not only how to use the tools, but why and when and when not.