My design team at Gartner had introduced design thinking exercises to our Product teams to help them build better feature updates. Our stakeholders had seen better outcomes with the exercises and became strong advocates for our work. When another team went through several sudden and regrettable departures I offered to facilitate some exercises for them to help them address what was happening. The goal was to better understand employee challenges and needs that were specific to this team.
While many of the team members understood how we applied design thinking towards external projects it was not immediately clear to them how they could use this framework internally. I met with some of the team members to socialize how the exercises might work, collect anecdotal information about what was happening on their team, and identify areas where the collective team had unidentified risks.
I knew from initial conversations that the team members had concerns about being able to be honest about their experiences. Within Gartner, several teams had been championing Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor and this was a known practice we could lean on. Additionally, I knew we needed team members to feel comfortable sharing their sentiments. We reached out to team managers and let them know we would be talking with their team, addressing process questions, and then requested that they not join the meeting. In return, I offer to give them a high level summary after the session with anonymized discussion themes.
For our first session, my co-facilitator and I set up a virtual meeting so everyone could be in comfortable private spaces. We set up a Miro document and required all participants be non-logged-in anonymous users. We also requested everyone be present with their video cameras on. We let them know that the meeting would not be recorded, that they could see their managers were not on the call, and that all of our work would be done anonymously in the document.
One big unknown everyone had was what was the overall sentiment of the team. To level set our experiences the first exercise we walked them through was dot voting Likert scale questions about how they were feeling about the departures, how they felt about their team, and how they felt about their business unit. Once everyone could see the distribution of sentiment of their peers they organically started openly discussing their concerns.
The next exercise we ran with them was structured How Might We questions. We wanted to expand on what was keeping them from knowing how others were feeling and what they needed to support those with lower scores. We led them through an affinity mapping follow-up and invited them to collaborate on how they wanted to structure what happened beyond the initial setting.
The first session ended with the team putting several internal deliverables in place:
The Setup
While many of the team members understood how we applied design thinking towards external projects it was not immediately clear to them how they could use this framework internally. I met with some of the team members to socialize how the exercises might work, collect anecdotal information about what was happening on their team, and identify areas where the collective team had unidentified risks.
I knew from initial conversations that the team members had concerns about being able to be honest about their experiences. Within Gartner, several teams had been championing Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor and this was a known practice we could lean on. Additionally, I knew we needed team members to feel comfortable sharing their sentiments. We reached out to team managers and let them know we would be talking with their team, addressing process questions, and then requested that they not join the meeting. In return, I offer to give them a high level summary after the session with anonymized discussion themes.
For our first session, my co-facilitator and I set up a virtual meeting so everyone could be in comfortable private spaces. We set up a Miro document and required all participants be non-logged-in anonymous users. We also requested everyone be present with their video cameras on. We let them know that the meeting would not be recorded, that they could see their managers were not on the call, and that all of our work would be done anonymously in the document.
Exercises
One big unknown everyone had was what was the overall sentiment of the team. To level set our experiences the first exercise we walked them through was dot voting Likert scale questions about how they were feeling about the departures, how they felt about their team, and how they felt about their business unit. Once everyone could see the distribution of sentiment of their peers they organically started openly discussing their concerns.
The next exercise we ran with them was structured How Might We questions. We wanted to expand on what was keeping them from knowing how others were feeling and what they needed to support those with lower scores. We led them through an affinity mapping follow-up and invited them to collaborate on how they wanted to structure what happened beyond the initial setting.
Outcomes
The first session ended with the team putting several internal deliverables in place:
- They organized themselves into working groups to encourage each other to own the team culture and support they were wanting.
- One of the working groups took on running quantitative sentiment surveys and presenting the analysis on a regular cadence. They coordinated with UX research partners to draft and revise questions for the duration of the data collection. Sentiment among the immediate team members grew significantly and remained the highest of all the sentiment score responses they collected.
- Additional outcomes included the creation of IDP-based collaboration groups, regular collection team discussions with all of their managers, and restructured sprint meetings to allow for more team dialogue and shared responsibilities for team improvements.