ALAC Development Session - Abu Dhabi - 3 November 2017

This ALAC Development Session is only for ongoing and incoming ALAC members, liaisons and others invited by the ALAC Chair.

To be held in the Abu Dhabi Convention Center,  at ICANN 60 on Friday 3rd November, 2017  (1100* through to 1830 GST {UTC +4} - In 4 sessions with breaks as follows in the detailed Agenda)

*PLEASE gather from 1030 on in our allocated room, as we will be starting promptly at 1100.

Also note that you have some preparation to do before attending. You are requested *not* to share the details of your prepared materials before our sessions.

 

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Aim: An introductory session to aid in the improvement and development of a productive, communicative, effective ALAC team for the year ahead.

 

Please pay particular attention to text in this style and colour this indicates something that you will need to prepare in advance for our session. 

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In our session we will aim to discover how we can try to ensure that we have a clear definition of our ALAC shared purpose and core work, in addition we will explore some of the procedures and structures we can deploy to enable us to work effectively together.

It is vital for distributed or global remote team (and that *is* what the ALAC and At-Large should be defined as) to have a common vision of the future and a clear strategy of how to achieve that vision. 

To do this best we should look at a few questions and each participant in our session should come with a few brief prepared ‘talking points’  on the following questions:

○        How do we set goals and define priorities?

○        How clear are our values?

○        How can we lead by example and act as expected?

○        How can we develop  trust in each other?

○        A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal; How can we collaborate cross-functionally?

○        How should we best communicate?

○        How can we best talk about sensitive topics?

○        How should we make decisions?

○        How do we hold one another accountable?

○        How can we balance regular ‘urgencies’ against the long-term development of ALAC as an effective entity within ICANN?

○        How should we workout inevitable conflicts and competing priorities?

For our starting Agenda Item -  Icebreaker exercise. ‘An unlikely truth and the believable lie, each of you is requested to come prepared to in less than 2 minutes tell the group at least 2 things (so that to share with the group you will take no more than 2-3 mins) about yourself that to the best of your knowledge the rest of us do not already know. At least one of these things should be true and another should be a ‘believable lie’.  PLEASE ensure you have not shared anyone else on our group, what these things are. This type of short, and hopefully fun, process is known as ‘icebreaking’ and I will explain to you why we do this as we start our session.

 Ideally if time had permitted we would run further sessions to guide our group through a process of defining and improving our charter (mission, values, goals/metrics, etc.), design (how we can best organize ourselves to accomplish our work), and relationships (their respect, trust, cohesion and synergy) so we can become a ‘best effort’ cohesive team with a common focus, able to rally people behind us, and achieve outstanding  and effective results in our aim to influence.  However the time available for us at ICANN 60 is limited and this will mean a highly compressed activity, where sadly these important issues will need to be done (or not) at a later date.

Agenda

 

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Reference material and suggested readings:

TBD

Attendees: