Weeknote 2019-W6: Starting well
What happens when you discover your team before you discover the product you’ll build together
Sitting at my current favourite bar in Melbourne, celebrating the day’s achievements with my current favourite drink[1].
The Team (working title) met in person for the first time this week, dedicating an entire Saturday to meet in person for a kick-off workshop to work out if we can indeed work together and what ‘working together’ might actually mean.
How did we get here
It has been an efficiently additive process which began two months ago when I announced I’d be leaving the organisation I’d been running [2]. Craig Ambrose was one of the first people to reach out and suggest the possibility of us doing something together and within a month, I was convinced that I wanted to be part of the crew[3] Craig was assembling around The Product (working title)— mostly because he kept saying he wanted a place to explore radical team processes.
Within a month of saying yes, I met Ben Rowe and soon after Adam Aflalo over a couple of video calls that Craig convened, and voila the four of us were sat around a table in Fitzroy[4] on a sunny Saturday making big plans.
Hold up, that seems fast for you
It usually takes me two years from meeting someone before I’m ready to create something with them. By all accounts, Ben and Adam would be on my ‘let’s chat in 2021' list, however, given my regard of Craig, I trusted his judgement about who else would be part of the crew.
So how did it come to be that I was so willing to trust and work with someone (Craig) that I’d only met a year prior and with whom I had zero work experience with? The key was that Craig was part of the Enspiral network[5] which meant that at some level we were values aligned and hence it was easy for me to ‘vet’ Craig as trustworthy and ultimately as a reliable collaborator through multiple mutual social and professional connections.
Starting well
Craig in his wisdom, suggested that the four of us spend some time face-to-face, in some form of facilitated workshop to work out if we indeed could work together. It’s one thing to have a general chat where everyone is putting their best foot forward, it’s a whole other thing giving up family / recreation time to spend sixhours with a bunch of strangers.
It made sense that I’d pair up with Craig to design and lead some team-discovery / team-building stuff and that one of the other guys would lead the product-discovery discussion. What could go wrong — I’m a professional Facilitator and Collaboration Designer.
Turns out I’m so accustomed to being the only facilitator, I neglected to meaningfully include Craig and the others in designing out the first half of the day beforehand and I was doomed to learn the very lesson I’d be sharing about collaboration …. no matter how well you work with other people, when you’re in a new group, you need to build your collaborative capability anew, which includes discovering what each other’s work preferences / styles / approaches are — d’oh.
No matter how well you work with other people, when you’re in a new group, you need to build your collaborative capability anew
It’s like new, each time around
I spent a few hours the night before, refining the agenda for our kick-off workshop , on top of an exhausting conference schedule[6]. At 11pm Friday night I was regretting my life choices and wished I had prioritised planning the Saturday kick-off workshop over connecting with random people at PauseFest during the week[7].
I had decided to start with the Code for Australia Fellowship Kick-Off Workshop — a half day workshop which I had designed and run successfully a dozen times over the past 18 months. It was interesting tweaking a familiar session plan to suit a situation where there was a lot more psychological safety[8] and for a group which had implicit trust.
It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement
~Abraham Maslow
The main change I made to the session design was to explicitly ask:
- What do you want to learn / what do you want to grow by being involved with building The Product(regardless of who The Team is)?
- What will we have achieved by the end of today, that would make it feel like it was well worth your time?
- What is your preferred thinking style — do you need a moment to gather your thoughts or do you think by talking?
I wouldn’t ask these questions to a new group of people who are coming together to create a new team, because it takes quite a bit of self-awareness to know what you want and a lot of courage to reveal that to people you have just met.
Things get so much more interesting, when you show an interest
Once again, I re-learnt the lesson that when you pause and take the time to be curious about the human creatures around you, it’s a good way to start exploring the possibility of what you could achieve together.
This was the first time I have run my Project Kick-off process with a new team outside of Code for Australia and it was the first time I ran it whilst not being in a position of power — so I know for sure that Craig, Adam and Ben’s feedback was from peers who have nothing to gain from flattery, rather than individuals who may feel some pressure to say nice things about me and my work.
Product is a whole new world for me
The second half of the day was a rapid-fire product exploration process led by Adam, who is a Product Manager in his day job. I really enjoyed being guided through a process of divergent and convergent thinking over a couple of hours, ending on v1 of a product definition to pitch to potential customers.
By the end of the day, Adam had helped us narrow down one market segment to test the product idea with, along with rallying us around a plan for Sprint 1, mapping out activities for the following three weeks with some ambitious goals around product validation.
All in all, it was a day well spent and I’m excited about what we’ll discover in the next three weeks during our first sprint.
Hi, I’m Lina and my mission is to alleviate workplace suffering and bring more kindness into the world, one team at a time.
I do this by working with teams and communities as a Facilitator and Collaboration Designer, and with organisations as an Interim Chief Operating Officer.
If this piques your interest, I’m open to exploring how to make something good with you.
Inspiration for action
[1] Citadelle gin at Amarillo in Fitzroy, Melbourne: https://www.amarillofitzroy.com.au/
[2] Me, on leaving Code for Australia: https://blog.codeforaustralia.org/when-its-time-to-leave-be-kind-and-go-calmly-52e80608b62f
[3] The concept of a crew and parts of my kick-off workshop design was inspired by Richard D. Bartlett microsolidarity series: https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/microsolidarity-part-2-a-theory-of-groups-and-groups-of-groups-7c6e7ce63eda
[4] If you’re looking for a brightly lit space with plenty of tea, whiteboards, and space to start something good: https://neighbourhood.work/
[5] What exactly is Enspiral? Who really knows — they are generally good people doing good work https://enspiral.com/
[6] The name PauseFest is a misnomer, it’s a Hectic AF Fest: https://www.pausefest.com.au/
[7] I did my first PauseFest ‘talk’ in 2019: https://blog.codeforaustralia.org/pause-fest-2019-into-the-future-of-civic-tech-57e9dc3f1758
[8] More on psychological safety as a key ingredient in building teams: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
I’m experimenting with Weeknotes after discovering them via Matt Webb Pre-history of Weeknotes: https://medium.com/job-garden/a-pre-history-of-weeknotes-plus-why-i-write-them-and-perhaps-why-you-should-too-week-16-31a4a5cbf7b0
Listening to
In each Weeknote I’ll include music I’ve particularly enjoyed during the week, because in every good team, music sets the beat.
