The Use of Visual Templates for Sharing Knowledge in Team Meetings at Work: A Qualitative Case Study.

Abstract

The present study explores the use of visual templates to facilitate knowledge sharing in real life team meetings. Ten real life teams belonging to ten different departments of the same organisation have been invited to take part in a case study replicating a team meeting. The purpose of the case study was to compare how and why meetings supported or not by visual templates lead to diverging meeting output, participants’ behaviours, and perceptions. The visual template used in the case study is a matrix mapping interest and power of stakeholders. The present qualitative research built on two disciplines, namely knowledge visualization in communication research and group interaction analysis in small group research. The phenomenon of knowledge sharing in meeting discussions was explored through a social constructionist lens with some embodied cognitivist elements borrowing from the 4E cognition framework. The verbal statements of the meeting participants were coded with the Act4Teams coding scheme. Participants’ perceptions have been collected through an individual questionnaire and focus group discussions. Field notes, artefacts and photographs completed the data set. The field research confirmed that also real team are helped by visual templates when it comes to delivering on their meeting objectives. A visual template can help make tacit knowledge tangible. It helps recall the knowledge visualized on the template. It nudges the discussions towards a concrete output. A visual template stimulates disagreement and avoid groupthink. It enables silence which in turn helps teams take distance to review critically the knowledge sharing process. It also helps the team organise the knowledge shared. The research contributed to bringing together knowledge visualization and group interaction analysis. It allowed the Dunning-Kruger effect to be observed as the satisfaction affirmed by teams without tangible meeting output was comparable to those with a tangible output. It also contributed some insights on how making thinking visible can help researchers unveil patterns relating to the phenomenon studied using visual ethnography approaches.