Discovery and Communication Basics

Skill Development, Tools, and AI-Assisted Work

1.Practice the "5 Whys" technique on a minor personal or team problem before using it in a stakeholder conversation.
2.Before any conversation where you are expected to gather information, write out two or three open questions in advance.
3.Record, with permission, and review one of your own discovery conversations to notice your own listening habits and any missed chances to confirm understanding.
4.Ask a mentor for feedback specifically on how well you separated decisions, open items, and owners in your notes, since this is the habit most commonly rushed under time pressure.

II.

Tool Category	Representative Tools	How an OFA 1 Uses Them
Meetings and scheduling	Outlook, Microsoft Teams	Attending discussions and following up in writing
Transcription and AI summarization	Teams/Copilot transcription or similar approved tools	Producing a same-day summary without relying purely on memory
Visual facilitation	Miro, Mural, whiteboards	Capturing a process or decision visually during discovery
Survey and asynchronous input	Microsoft Forms	Gathering structured input from stakeholders who cannot attend a live discussion

III.

A.AI-generated meeting transcripts and summaries are now common and genuinely useful, but they introduce a specific new risk: over-trusting a confident-sounding summary that misheard a name, a number, or a decision.
B.A reliable habit is to skim the original transcript, not just the AI summary, for anything numeric or decision-critical before distributing a summary.
C.AI tools can also help generate candidate open questions ahead of a discovery conversation, which is a legitimate and low-risk use, since the OFA reviews and selects the questions before ever using them.