Weeknotes
Week 15
Workshop with NOBL
Initially this was set up to help our leadership team form as humans, get to know one another and so on. When we were setting up the event, one of the things we talked about with Bud and Lauren was the need to model the type of teams we want our teams to be, which led to some interesting discussion about fractals and teams.
Anyway, the thing went well and reminded me about the importance of events like that (we’ve already set up one for my leadership team). The value of things like making time and space away from the routine is something I forget. There’s a comfort to the gentle inertia of the day in day out which I can see in my behaviour - things like nudging things forward across a wide front, rather than picking a few things and making them do or die.
The other thing I took away was a much better understanding of the people I work with and their motivations: it’s one of those things I knew was important to me, but had never reflected on. The realisation for me was that I think I tend to build relationships quite slowly (introvert…) and need, for my own reassurance, to know how that person ticks because I need the confidence of believing that they trust me.
What I took away
Some very steal-able group-working techniques, one was about getting to understand who you’re working with by creating a sort of user manual - seen these before but the way it was facilitated was great: we paired off and using a set of predefined questions, interviewed each other. Lots of fun, high-energy and a good way to form those early bonds.
The other was helping teams form a sense of their priorities without being railroaded by the HiPPOs. Built on a 2x2 (yay!) with impact/effort axes and using our leadership team backlog as an example. The team forms a conga line, and each person sequentially gets to move items from the backlog onto the 2x2, or move items on the 2x2 into another quadrant. The fun part was that you only get a minute, and 2 passes of the conga line.