Seeking different ways to close the project loop
By Tomomi Sasaki with Sophie Knight and Eiko Nagase
When you work on a project basis, you go from one assignment to another or juggle a few at once, with varying degrees of poise. At the end of one project, we’re already thinking about the next one, or about the other one that’s been waiting for attention while we wrapped up the first project. At other times, all we want is a break!
But it’s important to mark the end of a project. Reflecting on how things unfolded, appreciating all of the effort we put into it, and celebrating a job well done brings closure to our experience. Sometimes a client will provide that sense of closure. But more often than not — partly because our timelines are different — it needs to come from within.
Aside from setting aside the time to do this, there’s also the question of finding an appropriate ritual to do so. Typically, teams hold a retrospective. As a Japanese company, we also have project-specific ‘drinking parties’ (uchiage).
While both of these rituals serve a purpose, I’ve felt for a while like something was missing. Retros often focus on what could be done better next time. And at an uchiage, we enjoy the collective digestion of the experience but there isn’t necessarily much appreciation of each individual’s contribution.
I started thinking about how to organize a different kind of closing ritual as AQ finished a big project. Everyone had come through to deliver at an exceptionally high standard despite challenging constraints, and there was a strong sense of satisfaction among the team. As project lead, I felt the occasion called for more than simply patting ourselves on the back for having produced another happy client. I wanted the effort, care and energy that each person had brought to be recognized and celebrated.
Going around the table saying positive things felt cringey and it wasn’t my place to dole out praise and “good job!”s. This needed to be a different kind of designed experience, and I decided to position the idea of a peer-to-peer-and-all-together celebration as the main activity of our retrospective.
Here’s the simple activity that I surprised the team with:
- Everyone takes 15 minutes to write five things that impressed them about each team member during the project.
- Those things had to be as specific as possible. Prompts included: “When you did X, that was great…”, “I’d like to learn from the way that you X…”, “You really helped me out when you X…”
- After the time is up, all of the post-its are revealed and we do a walk-around together.
We did the session online using Mural, which has a useful feature to hide post-it content while you’re writing them, and then to reveal them all at once. This gives everyone time to think alone, and to write well-considered notes. It also made it impossible for people to deflect praise directed at them. There’s a mounting of anticipation and then we’re greeted with a wall of remarks that celebrate us.
Remarks ranged from “Your positivity was infectious” to “You gave me clear advice when I stumbled,” “I want your ability to stay focused” and “That time when you did X, I saw it meant Y to the client.” Members were thrilled to read what others wrote about them, and they were happy to see how others reacted to their comments. We found it especially gratifying to receive comments for things that we may not have considered worthy of praise, or even did unconsciously.
The practice also helped us identify each others’ strengths in more detail. We could see more clearly how our skills complement each other — how some people are stronger on detailed work and operational tasks, while others excel in seeing the big picture. It’s important for us to encourage and value each of these capabilities so that people can continue working to their strengths.
As an additional benefit, we found that this process reinforced AQ’s values and what we find important in our practice; by highlighting subtle techniques and practices worthy of celebration, everyone, and especially junior members and external collaborators, identified things they wanted to adopt or improve upon.
Afterwards, we listed up missed opportunities and things that didn’t go as well as we’d have wanted, and quickly diagnosed them to extract learnings and practices to incorporate. It was an energizing discussion, propelled by a feeling of lightness and eagerness to continue building our collective practice.
Spreading the love
These celebration sessions have since taken on a life on their own. You could say they’ve gone viral; members have gone on to initiate them after other projects and we’ve run them for client teams, too.
Some teams are more practiced at giving praise than others, observable by the specificity and relevance of the comments. It doesn’t actually matter, though. Teams start from who they are as a team, and with each configuration, we’ve noticed the positive impact that this time together has on a team’s sense of coherence.
How can we organize for celebration?
At AQ, we see a gaping hole in the global discourse about remote/distributed/hybrid workplaces when it comes to how we celebrate together. Especially when the focus is on intentionally closing loops so that new ones may open with gusto — I’m not just talking about care packages or expensing food to munch on together!
Celebration is one of the activities that hasn’t carried over well to Zoom, but you could argue that we weren’t doing it well ‘before’, either. In client services, the observable markers of achievement are client satisfaction and a project delivered on time and under budget. Individual achievement tends to be about one’s contribution to that collective goal against a mix of expectations — our own, the project team’s, the discipline peer cohort’s and from the hierarchy. That mix makes individual achievement tricky to discern, let alone recognize. Can we meaningfully celebrate something without first recognizing it…?
There’s a finer nuance to be treasured in how we build our connective tissue, as part of a bigger question of “How can we appreciate, honor and find joy in each other and our work?”. This is an inquiry that our studio practice continues to hold, and I believe it’s relevant for many other workplaces, too. I publish this article with gratitude for what our team learned from experiencing this session and running subsequent versions for other projects and organizations.
In closing, here are a few questions to ponder on. If you’re open to sharing your thoughts and ideas, please leave a comment here or on Twitter @tomomiq.
- How has your team celebrated recently?
- What have you not celebrated? What feels like it’s missing for you?
- How do you know when the loop has been sufficiently closed on a project?
- How might a team’s efforts be celebrated on projects that weren’t objectively successful?
- How might a team’s efforts be celebrated on projects that have a very long timeline?
[Bonus] A few design considerations for the celebration activity:
- The praise and compliments should be written, not verbal. We’ve found written statements not only resonate more with the receiver, they are also more thoughtfully constructed. Writing it down also evades some of the awkwardness people feel around praise.
- Be sincere and specific. Superficial or general compliments don’t have a place here. Encourage participants to think about actions and behaviors that moved them.
- Participants may find it difficult to come up with something to write. Prompt participants to observe this struggle with curiosity. How often do we exercise our celebration muscles? What would shift if we did it more often?
- This is not a feedback session. Feedback is about making improvements and pointing out how you want or need someone to change. This session is explicitly about celebrating people for who they are and what they contributed to the work. We did have a follow-up activity of “What are some changes we want to make to our practice?”, but it came after this one.
- It is also not just a feel-good activity to pump people up before you critique them; it should not be used as a primer before a feedback session.
- Remind people that their points should not only be about appreciation. It’s not only saying to people “Thanks for saving my skin on that task!”. It should also be about admiring people for their prowess.
- Define the number of post-its that each person will receive. It’s a blunt constraint but any hint of a popularity contest will dim the lightness in the room.
