PSM / Week 1 Reflection / “Making the Implicit, Explicit”
I enrolled in this course 2 months ago and I must confess that last Monday I was super eager to start the experience, meet the facilitators, and start working and learning with my peers :)
What did I learn in my first week?
The whole week was packed with super insightful conversations, challenging questions, resources and articles to deep dive, and assignments to practice and crystallise some of the key concepts.
Now, looking back, and if I have to choose the 1 thing that was the highlight for me, I would say it was the idea of …“Making the Implicit, Explicit”
If I have to define in one paragraph what does it mean for me the concept of making the implicit explicit, I would say the following:
As our work (and the world) has become more complex and interconnected, the capacity to take time to self-reflect and fully understand how do I want to present myself to others, as well as being clear on what I need from others, is key if we want to do great things together as a team in the future.
Now, I know the paragraph above might be a bit high level, so please allow me to highlight a few elements of it:
- “Together as a team”: We all know that trust in a team is like oxygen. Without it we just die. By defining this agreements and expectations upfront you are aligning each other’s assumptions and setting up “trust foundations” so you can later do great work together.
- “Take time to self-reflect”: In our busy lives we don’t normally take time to stop and reflect on the simple, but very important question, “What do I want?”. If you want to make the implicit explicit in your team, you must spend some time with yourself before you start agreeing collaboratively how are you planning to work together and the “rules of the game”. (ie. how will I show up for others?, how I prefer to communicate?, what I am committing to?, etc.). This is the link to my individual Role Expectation Canvas
- “Do great things in the future”: We are very used to start projects and initiatives always thinking on the WHAT (ie. deliverables, tasks, timelines, etc) and we very rarely stop to reflect HOW are we planning to work together to make this happen as a team. By taking the time as a team to think on the HOW before you start any type of work, you are defining some commitments that will drive, influence and impact anything you do in the future. From what I heard this week, working in a Self Managed Organisation its a lot about “adult to adult relations” (Thanks Joshua!), so this time you spent today on this piece of work (THE HOW) becomes like a mantra that everyone should hopefully follow moving forward.
- “Write it down”: Its key that you write your needs and expectations down. We hear again and again that attention spans are decreasing day after day, and we also know that our memories are fragile if we don’t give them a little bit of love. By writing down our agreements and expectations as a team, and not just talking about them, we are making the implicit explicit for everyone to be able to see them today, and more importantly, to have something to reference in the future to help us steer our team to a better place.
Practicing the idea of “Making the implicit explicit”
During the week I had the opportunity to get more exposure to this idea of making the implicit a bit more explicit with 3 things: Social Contract, Roles & Agreements, and Check In / Check Out.
- Social Contract:
The first group assignment of the course was to design a Social Contract for the team. The whole idea here was to define , before we start doing anything as a group, what we wanted to offer individually to the group and which ones were our expectations from others… or in other words “make the implicit explicit”
During the week, and using Google Docs, we collaborated asynchronously adding our ideas, comments and contributing to other’s. By Friday, and after 3 iterations, we managed to get to a first draft of a list of mutual group expectations for the coming 5 weeks.
Any Learnings? It was really cool to collaborate online and asynchronously during the week, but we didn’t manage to get enough “facetime” as a group to be able to discuss a bit longer / deeper about some elements of the social contract. Looking back, I would say that unless your team is very mature building social contracts and/or has been working together for a long time, its key to be able to have some “facetime” (at least a little bit) when building your Social Contract for the first time.
2. Roles & Agreements:
On Monday session we discussed a bit about roles in a Self Managed Organisation, and we were also exposed to some great curated content about the topic via articles and podcasts.
Here, and linked with the main idea of my reflection this week, “make the implicit explicit”, I would highlight this idea of moving away from “Traditional Job Descriptions” to more “Granular Roles and Accountabilities”.
The whole point was that what you do in your day to day differs a lot to what it says in your job description, and that a better way to approach role design would be to focus on explicit accountabilities and not so much on labels, titles, or job descriptions as these are very generic, unclear and sometimes very fluffy.
Any Learnings? Whenever I embark again in a role design process for someone in my team, or myself, I will keep in mind 2 things:
a. “Make explicit your accountabilities”:
For a moment, try to forget what it says in your job description. For a week (or 2 or 3) just write down and “make explicit” what you do in your day to day. List your accountabilities (ongoing activities) you do first and then cluster them together so you can start having a “real idea” of what you do.
b. “Ideal Role = Business Need + Passion + Talents”:
One of the articles of this week, which also has a deep dive in a super cool podcast from Lisa Gill, featured Edwin Jansen from Fitzzi. Edwin shared his experience on what he called the “Role Advice Process” and how do you get to design a role in which you will feel just great.
The whole point is to try to do some self reflection on 3 things “Which are the business needs?”, “Which are my passions?” and finally “Which are my talents/skills?”. When you have self reflected on those 3 things (imagine now a venn diagram with 3 circles connecting) in the middle of those 3 areas you fill find the “sweet spot of your role”. Then you need to write down a proposal, “make it explicit”, and implement an advice process. In this way, and by being more intentional in trying to define what do you want for your role and how it links to the business, your skills and talents, you can end up, after some advice from your team, with a more purposeful and fulfilling role for yourself.
3. Check In & Check Out:
Finally, I really liked what we were doing at the start and end of each session.
It was very simple but at the same time very powerful. Instead of just starting or closing the meeting with a “Hello, this is the agenda” or “Good bye and see you next week” we would do a Check In and Check Out.
I experienced these “Checks” during the week as some sort of rituals that allowed me, and all my peers, to be more mindful about what we were leaving behind (ie. I had a stressful day at work) and/or how we were presenting to each other at that very moment (ie. I am looking forward to working with all of you today).
We normally used a guiding question that each of us responded in rounds, which allowed us to stop for a moment to be mindful about our inner experience (which we don’t normally get to share when we go to meetings) and then “make it explicit” and share it with others so they understand a bit more how we are at that very moment and can use those insights to interact more mindfully with us during the session.
In summary…Week one for me was all about understanding that taking the time, the courage and vulnerability to “make the implicit explicit” its key if we want to set the foundations to do great work together moving forward.
