Building a User Guide
Virtual Workshop

Session Recap

What We Covered/Will Cover

“Building a User Guide” is a 60-minute session co-facilitated by Jeff Gibbard and Erica Chen at BloomCon 2026.

The session moves participants from a set of personal, story-driven examples of miscommunication rooted in unrecognized difference, through a structured self-assessment exercise, to a concrete plan for applying the same process with their own teams.

Learning Objectives

Apply — Given the finalized worksheet, participants complete all ten questions about themselves, producing a personal user guide within the session.

Understand — Following the opening demonstration, participants explain in their own words why a short, structured question set reliably differentiates individuals even as group size scales up.

Analyze — In discussion, participants compare their completed answers against at least one other participant’s and identify at least two concrete differences relevant to how they’d collaborate.

Apply — Participants identify at least one specific adjustment they’d make to how they work with a teammate based on that teammate’s user guide.

Apply — Participants articulate how they would lead their own team through this same question set at their organization.

Analyze — Participants distinguish between assessment tools that sort people into a shared label or bucket (MBTI-style typing, for example) and the user-guide method, which also uses fixed-option questions but combines multiple dimensions to produce a unique individual profile rather than group membership, and explain why that distinction matters for collaboration.