Category Archives: Teams

Plan

Orig­i­nal Post from 2011 When work­ing with new teams it should be assumed that par­tic­i­pants have lit­tle or no expe­ri­ence with project man­age­ment and task del­e­ga­tion with­in a team envi­ron­ment. A brief intro­duc­tion to agile and scrum sys­tems is ben­e­fi­cial. Each of the new teams takes time to famil­iarise them­selves with their final con­cept and […]

No More Managers. Everyone Leads

An engi­neer­ing researcher was clair­voy­ant when he said in 1994 that sub­or­di­nates often make the best lead­ers: Often with small groups, it is not the man­ag­er who emerges as the leader. In many cas­es it is a sub­or­di­nate mem­ber with spe­cif­ic tal­ents who leads the group in a cer­tain direc­tion. Lead­ers must let vision, strate­gies, […]

Teamwork Ground Rules

Good advice from Kristof Kovacs There’s only three things: ASK: If a task is not clear, or more infor­ma­tion is need­ed, please ask as soon as pos­si­ble. Ask­ing is always ok. Doing the wrong thing (or doing noth­ing) because you did­n’t ask is not ok. DEBRIEF: It’s not done until you report­ed it done. This […]

Conceptualize

Explode—Divergent think­ing Take risks, be per­sis­tent, be curi­ous. Fail ear­ly and fail often. Using the inspi­ra­tions that were col­lect­ed in phase one, the team offer up ideas that address the needs of the brief. Team mem­bers can offer up fresh con­cepts or build on the work of oth­ers. Go for quan­ti­ty, explore each idea entire­ly. […]

Team dynamics: Swapping individuals

Through­out the process learn­ing facil­i­ta­tors should be try­ing to cre­ate even teams. By even we mean func­tion­al­ly rather than struc­tural­ly, acknowl­edg­ing that indi­vid­u­als per­form dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Good com­bi­na­tions are vibrant and pro­duc­tive. Spot­ting poor com­bi­na­tions is rel­a­tive­ly easy, as the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the team will be great­ly reduced. Par­tic­i­pants should be moved, as […]

Team rotation methods

Let­ters are peo­ple in teams, #num­bers are projects and cir­cles are tables/work areas Three Stage Q&A Rota­tion In this mod­el teams rotate around projects in a two-step process illus­trat­ed in the dia­gram above. As the teams come to a nat­ur­al ebb and the facil­i­ta­tors feel it is time to reen­er­gize the group, each team (fig. […]

Team rotation across projects

A key com­po­nent of facil­i­tat­ing team based cre­ative think­ing process­es, is the require­ment that teams repeat­ed­ly move around projects. There are a num­ber of impor­tant rea­sons for this dynam­ic: Ideation—Going for Vol­ume More peo­ple, means more ideas. Mas­ter­ing a process requires rep­e­ti­tion; by mov­ing the teams to a new project while still in the same […]