2014: The Year of the ... Sticky Note!

That's right, the year of the sticky note.

The year that the new, highly sophisticated management system of #MBSN becomes mainstream.

Tom Peters has MBWA — Managing By Wandering Around — and we have #MBSN - Managing By Sticky Notes.

Why sticky notes?

Because sticky notes make your ideas portable and your thinking visible to others, two essential skills for leaders and managers in today's fast-paced environment.

The magic behind this sticky note obsession is actually collaboration and participation. We believe that in order to buy-in, people have to weigh-in. Sticky notes and other collaboration tools help us connect people to work together on shared goals. That means engagement, alignment, inclusivity, the wisdom of the crowd, and yes even a little fun. That means we can tackle bigger opportunities and solve bigger problems, together.

Sometimes it can go overboard, even for me. Watch this little clip to see how it got out of hand...

The point is that to thrive in this rapidly changing and complex environment we need all of the help we can get. Some are saying that the collaboration curve is quickly replacing the experience curve. Who you know and how you collaborate with them will quickly supplant what you know. (See the HBR article, Introducing the Collaboration Curve by John Hagel, John Seely-Brown, and Lang Davison). We have definitely found this to be true in our work with organizations and our own membership at the MACPA.

Sticky Notes are just the beginning. We have been working over the last year with some technology platforms that support our collaboration obsession. Conferences.io is an interactive conference and learning platform that allows social Q&A, interactive and shared polling that we are using in our town halls, conferences and other learning activities (See my post, A New Era In Talent Development and Learning).

Our Thinktank collaboration platform by Group Systems allows us to go deep into collaboration virtually, live or in a mixed virtual/live setting. Thinktank allows for a deeper level of collaboration and can quickly rank, prioritize, and graph participant's responses. One of the features I like best is that it allows for "parallel processing" as participants can all enter thoughts and brainstorms simultaneously, saving lots of time and allowing anonymity when desired.

Together these tools combined with our team of trained facilitators, allows us to work collaboratively in ways never before imagined.

Here are some examples of our work with sticky notes and structured collaboration from our work at the Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute.

• CFOs identify their top issues, first with sticky notes (in 2011) and then with our ThinkTank Collaboration platform in 2013.
• Our first annual Generational Symposium used sticky notes (see slides 54-68 in ) to capture the wisdom of almost 200 CPAs from all generations in May, 2013.
• Sticky notes and collaboration are the foundation of our work with Sage to create their vision to strategy program for CPAs and accountants.
• We used sticky notes to identify the top trends facing CPAs by facilitating over 1,000 CPAs across the US for the AICPA in their CPA Horizons 2025 Project.
• Our ThinkTank collaboration platform was used to create shared vision for the State of Maryland for the Maryland Competitiveness Coalition (see our blog post, Average is Over).
• We teach collaboration and #MBSN in our i2a: Leadership Academies.
• Collaboration and sticky notes are at the core of our i2a: Strategic thinking System.

So join me in our declaration that 2014 is officially the year of the Sticky Note! 2014 is the year of collaboration and working together.

With thanks to our friends at 3M and their famous post-it notes.

Wishing you a Happy (and sticky) New Year!