Going from idea to reality in three days
The way organisations work is changing.
Right now, the world faces a great many challenges and changes. From the climate crisis to growing movements for social justice and demands for an end to economic inequality of the scale we see currently.
As a result, the “what” and the “why” of many people’s work has changed over the last few years, with organisations across sectors rethinking and refocusing on their purpose. (Two fascinating books to check out if you’re interested in this shift are Fredrick Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations and Adam Dignan’s Brave New Work)
And now, with the continuing impacts of the COVID pandemic with the associated explosion of meaningful remote work — the “how”, “where” and even “who” are changing too.
Recently, me & Matt worked with a local authority which is one of the many organisations figuring out what this means.
They are excited about transforming their organisation. They know that the way we work is changing and they want to be ahead of the curve. And because they understand the movement, they know this change needs to be inclusive and democratic. They wanted to find a way to listen to what employees are thinking and feeling about the work they do and how they do it.
Then they wanted to make it happen.
The council had already recruited change champions from across the Council to lead and drive the transformation. However, as is so often the case in local gov, they were facing scarcity: challenges of limited resources, time and bandwidth, while needing to engage with a massive diversity of teams across the Council (changing the way you work means something totally different to the phone operator than it does to the park keeper!)
Needless to say this is a pretty big challenge.
However, (and I’m not trying to brag here… okay maybe a little) together with council folks we managed to do it, in just 3 days…
Yep. You read that right. No tricks involved — just a heap of really useful tools, methods and exercises (plus a little bit of secret sauce).
I know so many organisations are going through the same transition right now (I challenge you to find someone who isn’t grappling with this stuff), so I thought I would share so that others can have a go too!
So how do you go from the aim of transforming your organisation, to having a game plan and the tools to go out there and make it happen in just three days?
The answer is an impact sprint.
If you don’t know them already impact sprints are an amazing tool to go from confusion to clarity quickly. They are a whole detailed methodology (we could talk about them for weeks — if anyone wanted to listen).
But the principle is pretty simple: turn off distractions and get a small team to put a real focus on one problem. Basically, do some deep work (if you haven’t come across the idea of deep work before, check out Cal Newport’s book on the subject for a perfect intro). Give it a try and you’ll be surprised by how much you can achieve and how quickly you can do it.
In the sprint the team takes on a really complex challenge with no one clear answer, creates and prototypes a solution within just a few days. They go through 5 steps: explore, create, iterate, test and release. At Basis we use them all the time when we need to make quick progress on a complex problem.
The council invited us to come and facilitate the good folks from the Transformation Team through a three day sprint (And don’t worry, we weren’t just running the process. This changing the way we work stuff is our jam — we couldn’t help but get stuck in to the content!)
Step 1: Explore — what are we trying to achieve here?
We kicked-off in style with a crystal clear steer from the Director of Transformation on where we need to get to by the end of the sprint:
- Create a space (events run by the change champions) for teams to have conversations about what their core purpose is, how can they do that better and what does this mean for the technical and digital requirements for their team (“the easy bit”)
- Find a way for the change champions to be easily able to create and adapt these events for the specific needs and contexts of their teams
You might be wondering at this point — why events for each team? Why not just bash out a quick survey to capture everyone’s ideas.
You’d be right in thinking that might be simpler and quicker. However, it kind of misses the point. While there’s some hard data we needed to capture, the value of the conversations is the chance for teams to reflect as a group.
This is something many teams in the public sector don’t get many opportunities to do — give it a go with your team and watch as they reconnect with each other and with why they do what they do. It’s a pretty essential part of keeping work meaningful!
Now we had a direction, there was nothing left to but dive into the detail. We got started with with an exercise Matt borrowed from our brilliant colleague Judy Rees called drawing together — ““When you think of an event, what kind of event is your event?”
We drew exactly what popped into our heads and asked ourselves “What’s different between our ideas?” This is an great tool to put meat on the bones of a concept and build a shared understanding of the end goal you’re trying to reach.
We also took the time to get to know and understand each other a bit better — and to think about how we would work as a team. We used the metaphor of a plane to think through “where we came from”, “who do we deliver value to?”, “how do we steer?”, “what gives us power?” and “where are we going?”
This really helped us to get on the same wavelength as a team, we knew our strengths and our weaknesses and we could start to spot how we prevent these affecting the work — e.g. the risk of getting lost in a bit of jargon! It was vital that everything we designed was simple and easy to understand, so we created the “bullshit button”. For the rest of the sprint any team member could hit the bullshit button at any time when we were veering off course. No judgement, let’s keep it simple!
Next we used an exercise called postcards from the future to ask ourselves: if in 5 years time this work has been a total unmitigated success “how did you do it?” and “what did you learn?” This helped us to drill deeper into what we’re trying to achieve with the events and how we can get there!
2. Create — let’s narrow in and get to work!
The key at this point is to get from something big (like events to transform an organisation!) to some tasks that are small and manageable. So we broke down the event into the key content chunks — but this wasn’t enough.
We broke down the chunks even further by attempting to “explain it like I’m five” and asking “why should I care?” for each.
This gave us our tasks. We knew what we needed to create. So we split the work up and literally just got it done. While workshopping ideas is absolutely crucial at the start of the sprint, time to do some deep work without distractions and get creating is just as important to making quick progress
By the end of the day we had a bones of a kickass workshop which created space for colleagues to have conversations around:
- What is the purpose of our work?
- Who is the community we want to reach?
- How do we do our jobs?
- Where do we work?
- When do we work?
- What actions should we take going forward to improve the way we work?
3. Iterate — it’s time to get some feedback!
As soon as we had a product we could share, we got the change champions involved. These are the people who are going to lead the charge — so we needed to make sure what we were creating worked for them.
We got lots of great feedback, e.g. the need to communicate the purpose of the events as clearly and simply as possible at the outset, to make sure there’s space for teams to capture the quick wins they can do immediately and to make the facilitation as easy as possible for change champions so they can concentrate on the conversations with the team.
On day two, we took all this great feedback and got to work. We broke down the work, split into small teams and cracked on. No distractions, just a few stand-ups to check-in on progress and prioritise “what next”!
We created personas: who are the people who would be part of the event and what is their journey both before and beyond the events.
We got into the weeds, identifying what are the non-negotiable pieces of data that the Council needed to capture from these events — in short: “where do people want to work” and “what tech do they need to do that”. These are obviously the absolutely crucial bits of info when redesigning an organisation for the new world of meaningful remote work.
In order to make understanding the events and how to deliver them as easy as possible for the change champions, we developed the content we had already created, using our learning from day one, into a detailed facilitation handbook.
This gives the change champions who will facilitate the events everything they need: “what”, “who”, “where”, “where” and (importantly) “why” — and checklists for everything they need to do and remember to make the sessions run smoothly!
4. Test — let’s try it out in practice!
Now we had a session full of brilliant activities, aiming to help the whole organisation reflect on how the Council of the future should work to support residents — and a handbook on how to deliver all of it like clockwork. But we hadn’t tested any of it yet!
We brought in the change champions to try out three activities (two of them adapted versions of exercises we had introduced the team to earlier in the sprint — the team must have liked them!):
- Design your ideal work environment
- Using the plane diagram to figure out a team’s purpose
- Drawing together your team purpose
Again we got brilliant feedback! Both specific to the detail of the activities but also about what we need to achieve during the sessions.
5. Release — let’s show it to the world!
Day three was all about rounding it off. We crossed the Ts and dotted the Is, adapted the workshops based on the feedback we had received, figured out the tech logistics, finished off the handbook — and created a presentation on the work we’d done, because we’re proud of it!
We presented back to the Transformation Director, followed by other key leadership and got sign-off to go ahead and do a full prototype the next week — get in there!
What’s next?
We made a massive amount of progress in a really short space of time. The team took a big idea and made it happen — now it’s time for the events to do the same thing.
The sessions have now been prototyped and adapted further by the team. Alongside the team, me & Matt have already designed and delivered bespoke facilitation training for the change champions. Then then its time for the champions to put their learning into action.
The events will happen over the next few months, giving all colleagues throughout the Council the chance to contribute to conversations about purpose and propose radical exciting ideas to transform the way the organisation works. It’s an exciting time and we’re really proud to have been part of it.
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Oh and one last thing. You might be wondering, in a world where many of us find it hard to get work done in between constant meetings, messages and unexpected requests, how we managed to get there.
There’s not some weird alchemy in all of this. Once you’ve been involved in one sprint, you pretty much get the idea and can run one yourself. The team reflected on this themselves “now we’ve done this and seen what progress can be made in such a short time and with engagement — where else can we use this approach?”.
I think that there’s something important about the liberating sense of achievement combined with the simplicity and playfulness of it all. From a more hard edge perspective, you can combine that with the simple calculation of 7 people X 7 hours X 3 days = 147 hours of focused creativity.
That’s over a whole month’s work for one person in just 3 days!
If you’re interested in chatting more about impact sprints, any of the activities I’ve mentioned, or the changing nature of work itself (a big one I know) then drop me a line at max.goodall@basis.co.uk.
We can try keep the call under three days this time.
