The Rocketship Files V: Conditions for Rocketships

Follow two Heads of Profession on a mission to make a real difference. We are writing about how we create conditions to get people to collaborate to solve problems that really hold us back.

Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

Preparations: Setting up the conditions for change

There were several key things we needed to put in place to be able to establish our Rocketships programme. We had to fertilise the ground and then slowly bring the organisation around to seeing the value of the Rocketships approach:

1. Making invisible work visible
2. Finding allies
3. Finding your people — true collaboration

Making invisible work visible

Just because the organisation doesn’t explicitly acknowledge the value of cross-cutting initiatives very often doesn’t mean they are not happening. They are crucial to keep the show running.

So we got better at talking about the work we do. We got better at making sure leadership knows what the professions are contributing. We improved how the Heads of Profession worked with the generalist leadership and started to build relationships.

Another key tool to show the sheer amount of cross-cutting problem solving was the introduction of Profession Objectives.

We worked with our communities to get all the work that was already happening into one backlog.

We found a wide range of topics that were tackled by our professions

• Knowledge Management
• Improving onboarding
• Self-managed learning
• Prototyping Kit Training
• Ethics
• Etc.

So now we have a big Trello board and have regular Show & Tells. It is really impressive to see all the great work in one place — and it really changes how people think about what professions can do.

All of these pieces of work are no longer considered “someone’s little side project” — they are acknowledged as Profession Objective work, and in people’s quarterly goals.

But the beauty is that everyone is still free to pick a project that interests them, or that is great for their CV. We are not forcing anyone to get involved.

Profession Objectives really were the foundation for Rocketships for us. We’ve established that professions and communities can also deliver things. And some of those things just need some extra rocket fuel and the right crew to have massive impact.

Finding allies

The same approach of “not forcing people” is also critical for the second key condition: Find your allies.

One of the original misconceptions that took us a while to overcome was the idea that we had to get buy-in from everyone and always work together as a full team. The breakthrough came when we turned the work into an “opt-in + transparency” approach.

Who is mission critical? Get buy-in from the key people — the rest just need to be aware. Find your champions — your early adopters — who are drawn in, not pushed in, and have the right skills, attitude and maturity for the problem you are solving.

Keep the door open for potential allies. Make sure everyone knows what is happening and anyone can jump back in at any time.

This all led to a FOMO comms strategy — Fear Of Missing Out. We had one-to-ones with a few budget owners, floating the idea of Rocketships, and went through the draft backlog with them. Most of them found a thing or two they were really excited about and wanted to be involved with.

From there, our work spread by word of mouth, and people started coming to us wanting to hear more. In the next session with the leadership team, most had heard about what we were doing and were positive about it.

Think about where you can find allies, and which groups you might want to get on board. For example:

• The professions and communities
• The Heads of Professions team
• The generalist leadership team
• Other areas/silos in the organization
• The wider government/business sector…

Finding your people — True Collaboration

Last but not least, the third key condition is to Find your core team.

Establishing true collaboration is important for your Ground Control team — who will lead the whole thing — and also for your rocketship crews.

Well. We talk a lot about collaboration — but it’s not that simple, isn’t it? How can we get from talking about it to doing it?

First, you have to find your people.

• Chemistry comes first — you need to click — if you don’t get on this won’t work.
• They have to be excited about the thing you want to collaborate on.
• Find someone who wants to get stuff done and can and wants to prioritise the thing.
• Their ways of working match yours.
• You actually need to spend working time together — block out a weekly slot or organise a swarm.
• If it’s not in your weekly priorities it might not happen.
• Clearly define what needs to be done together and what asynchronously.
• They need the right skill sets that compliment yours.

Profession BFFs — How can you find the right profession to team up with and how do you get the most out of it?

• If you want to get stuff done, starting small is usually a good idea, don’t start with a full team.
• Professions usually aren’t all at the same level of maturity across an organisation. Find the professions that are at a similar level of maturity — they’ll likely have the same goals and the same readiness to act on them
• Get the mix of skills you need for the work you want to do (as a Service Designer, for example, you might want to team up with a User Researcher for a discovery project, or with a Delivery Manager to get stuff done. As a Delivery Manager maybe you need a Product person for the thing you are doing.)

Think also about your specific point of view and unique selling point (USP) as collaborators. For example:

• Delivery Management & Design are often ideally positioned to improve organisational ways of working, experiment & innovate.
• A Technical Architect and Service Designer duo might look at architecture across the organisation, for example a strategy to share and reuse components.
• User Research and Business Analysis might work together to develop a full view of user and business needs across the organisation.

So think about what the specific things are that only you can do together, that can inject some rocket fuel into your organisation and take it to the next level.

COMING SOON: Blog VI: Ready for Rocketships!

This is a series of posts over the next few months. Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

The Rocketship Files are a collaborative initiative by Lianne Mellor, Nikola Goger and Louis Allgood.