My design team at Gartner 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.

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, let them ask questions about the process, and then requested that they allow their team some space and not ask to join our sessions. In return, I offer to give them a high-level summary after the session with anonymous discussion themes.

Drafting Ideation Exercises

Our business unit within Gartner did not have any prior experience with EX workshops or non-management-led team improvement. Acknowledging this approach was new allowed them to identify two problems that needed to be addressed to get the full team to buy into wanting to participate:
• Team members thought any proposed outcomes would not receive senior leadership support
• Team members would individually confide with me their feelings about their lack of desire to stay with the company without changes but had doubts that others on their team shared similar sentiments

I have been an avid reader of Edward de Bono’s books and using his lateral thinking methods in UX management. His Six Thinking Hats book was the basis for a new exercise I wanted to run to address the risks of the work I was proposing. The use of black hat thinking to articulate the participant concerns created a vehicle for it to be discussed by the group but also allowed me to manage it so it didn’t hang over the blue sky possibilities I thought they needed to explore.

Ideation Sessions

I facilitated two parts of the session with ~25 colleagues. We started by setting up some agreements:

• All agreements had to be unanimously adopted through anonymous voting. Agreements would be kept front and center on screen during sessions.
• Assume good intentions from all participants
• Any discussion should not be used, during or after the sessions, in any way that could hurt a colleague
• All participants were required to join Miro virtually through anonymous logins
• We should connect the work we were doing with Gartner’s established values to tie this work to our company mission

One big unknown everyone was concerned about 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. This let to affinity mapping needs and team-owned solutions they wanted to explore. After the sessions, the group continued to collect quantitative data anonymously from their peers for several months to track how sentiment shifted

Outcomes

• Sentiment around the likelihood of staying with Gartner increased from a 3.1 (pre-session) to 4.3/5.
• Participants self-organized three ongoing working groups to continue discussions and propose recommendations to address team needs.
• They self-organized working groups around IDP mentoring, employee experience improvements, and external promotion of their work and contributions to the larger business unit.
• I presented this work to senior leadership and HR partners, with participant approval, and shared recommendations on how to scale design thinking EX solutions.
• Additionally, I receive executive sponsorship to explore how to create cross-functional design thinking teams to address a wider range of internal EX and process improvements.