Getting and Staying on the Same Page

Joe Still
2 min readJan 22, 2021

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Create a Page to All Be On

Everyone would surely agree it is important to be on the same page while working together in any context. It seems obvious to claim value in coherence. But how do you get on the same page? You create a page to all be on!

Capture What the Last Person Told You

My favorite way to generate page we can all be on is to interview anybody involved with a collaborative work effort and capture their verbatim understanding of expectations and process using the Organic Capture Method. The result is a page we are all supposedly on.

Be Wrong Until You Aren’t

Once you have a page to all be on comes the fun part. Assert this page as the fact of the matter and wait for someone to disagree.

Cunningham’s Law states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” The concept is named after Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. -Wikipedia

Disagreement will cause a discussion about what is missing or false about the document. The result of that discussion should be captured back into the document to better serve as a page we can all be on.

Always Reference that Page

Any document worth writing is worth referencing. If ever applicable, it is valuable to refer to the document in any written communication it applies. Or if the document is a capture of scope, for example, any discussion about scope should be about the content and updates to this page we are all on.

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Joe Still
Joe Still

Written by Joe Still

DevOps Engineer, Scrum Master

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