Get A Room
Why teams need to slip into something less comfortable and spend some quality time together
Chances are, you will not make it through this post without being distracted by a notification of some kind.
“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
A meeting request from a client, an email from your boss asking for that report (which reminds you that need to send an email to your team chasing the stats you need), followed up by a Slack conversation kicking off that new project.
Not to mention office chats and all the social spam constantly sliding into your notifications.
What were you doing again?
According to the 2018 Workplace Distraction Report by Udemy Research, nearly 3 out of 4 workers (70%) say they feel distracted at work. And with an ever-increasing adoption of new technologies to boost collaboration and real-time responsiveness in the workplace, the onslaught of the standard workday is starting to resemble a DoS. A DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack is when hackers send so many requests to a website that it effectively knocks it offline.
This assault of information and urgent requests is making it increasingly harder to carve out the time and attention needed to do the essential tasks required for employees and teams to achieve their long term goals. We are siloed off into our own ever growing to-do lists, and most other people cannot even see the tip of our to-do iceberg because they are weighed down by carrying around their own.
Then there is the added complication of the siloed structure of most organisations making collaboration and alignment for projects nigh on impossible. Problems are often solved with sausage-factory processes. People are working independently of each other on different tasks with separate KPIs and opposing political agendas, then occasionally coming together for meetings to align the un-alignable.
These are big curly problems that are yet to be solved, but one thing we can be sure of is that more technology isn’t the answer.
Carving out Space
We need something altogether more human and participatory than our current ways of working. Space needs to be carved out where teams can unplug, connect, step back to look at the bigger picture and take a deep-dive on things to get to the bottom of them.
That’s why we need actual space — a physical space, head space, a safe space to be able to think, experiment, contemplate and collaborate in a place without interruption.
We need to ‘get a room’, regularly, slip out of our comfort zones and spend some quality time together.
Either at an offsite or out in the park or even in the board room. So long as it is a space without interruption where you can work together, communicate and collaborate.
Just as mindfulness and meditation practice, or spending time in nature re-connects us to what’s important and improves our mental health. Carving out this kind of space as a team is essential for morale and healthy relationships in teams and organisations.
Cognitive Models
However, this isn’t all kumbaya. It isn’t enough to only make the space. You need guardrails and cognitive models. Tension needs to be introduced via those models and also via urgency and time limits. We’ve all been in workshops that end up in the weeds with no way of finding your way out.
You need models that engage and involve everyone, not just the extroverts. And you need to design around rhythms of divergent and convergent thinking.
Effective workshops also need to harness behavioural economics using framing techniques that put the focus on determining the right question before finding the best answer. You’ll need models that leverage and/or limit cognitive traits such as leaping (to obvious solutions), fixation (on how you usually do things) and anchoring (to what you read in Digiday that morning).
If you get this recipe right, the result can be a kind of group flow, where everyone’s synapses are firing towards novel solutions and rapid consensus.
Tech companies, design consultancies and (increasingly) agencies have been increasingly employing sprints and design thinking workshops in their processes. And as Fromm comes up to nearly two years of age, I’m increasingly convinced that every organisation needs to do more and more of them. Finding a scrum-like rhythm of getting together to work on a problem or milestone and then each going off to do their own deep work.
It’s better together
“Why is “together” such an effective strategy? For starters, the obvious. Humans are a social species. We’re competitive, cooperative, sexually attracted, and all the rest. These are all exceptionally powerful motivators. As a result, when other people are present, we pay more attention to the present. Community drives focus into the now — it’s arguably the simplest flow hack in the world.” Steven Kotler
Once you get into a rhythm with this, you start to see more and more of your work through the lens of a workshop. From setting up quick half hour micro-learning workshops on a particular topic for your staff, to two-day marathons to ensure your business is ready to launch and on to ensuring your time on social media is time well spent.
To illustrate the range of applications for this approach, here is a selection of some of the workshops we’ve designed recently (in addition to our brand, purpose and strategy workshops) :
- Story Atlas — A roadmap for powerful messaging
- Framing the Challenge — Ensure you’re answering the right question
- Concept Accelerator — From problem to solution in a day
- Once More With Feeling — Weaving emotion into your pitch decks
- Launch Doctor — Make sure you’re ready to launch
- MicroMasters — Grasp a topic in a half hour
- Mindful Social — Get more out of social media than it gets out of you
Reflecting on this for what was going to be a single blog post, I realised that there is not only so much to share — but a ton for me to learn and explore with other experts too.
And in realising that I do a lot of my thinking via writing, I’ll be sharing and exploring a lot more about teams finding space to connect, collaborate and co-create more right here.
Matt Kendall is an award-winning communications and content strategist, and an experienced facilitator and workshop designer.
As Founder and Director of Fromm, a strategic consultancy based in Byron Bay, Matt believes ongoing transformation is fundamental to the future of work, a future that is decentralised, empathic, collaborative and, therefore, a whole lot more human.
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