If you’re anything like me, you love a good sticky-note brainstorming session.
But getting better results than design-as-entertainment requires investing time to prepare by framing the challenge, gathering context, identifying what it is we’re optimizing for, and defining how we’ll measure progress and recognize success.
Framing the challenge, framing the problem, or framing the opportunity (whatever you’d like to call it) can be tempting to skip or simply replace with a snappy “how might we” question, but without fully immersing in the nature of the challenge, we risk causing harm with our good ideas.
Here are five risks of jumping straight into brainstorming with only a “how might we” question as the foundation.
TLDR: How to receive it is just as important as how to give it. Use this 6-step process to receive and process feedback.
For many of the teams and organizations we work with, giving feedback is the norm. Some companies even make the act of giving feedback a measure of individual performance. These organizations recognize that developing a work culture that values feedback increases collaboration and strategic agility. With time and practice, the act of giving feedback becomes a normal, expected part of the culture where each person is willing and able to tell someone else how their actions and behaviors impacted them.
But what about how to receive feedback?
The reason we do the work we do at Navicet is because we care about developing teams that love the work they do, and do amazing work. The way people work together is just as important as the work they do together. Setting boundaries, both individually and as a team, are valuable tools to live our lives more aligned to our personal and professional values.
In addition to living a life aligned to your personal values, here are five benefits you can unlock when you and your team members set boundaries…
Lack of clarity on agreements and expectations for team communication dynamics is one of the most common causes of stress in working relationships. When we don't set social norms and team agreements with intention, they get set for us to a default – usually from the preferences or habits of one person, or unchecked assumptions about how others prefer to work.
Whether you’re working 100% remote, back in an office, or a hybrid model – and whether you’re a co-located or global team — each environment offers unique opportunities and constraints. The problem with default communication norms is sometimes it only works well for one person. Without an explicit agreement or discussion about how we want to communicate together, undesirable patterns of behavior can persist over time, even when they don’t work well for anyone on the team.
Instead of suffering the consequences of the default, teams can set their own intentional communication norms and gain agreement for how to work together. Use these four steps to surface hidden assumptions and build intention.
Can you follow a repeatable process but still come up with something fresh, new, and fun?
Surprisingly, yes.
It may sound like a counter-intuitive, but it works; in fact, it’s how we designed a fantastic virtual party during the pandemic. We used the same empathy-driven, collaborative, iterative problem-solving process we use with our consulting clients – whether they’re a 5-person non-profit or a 155,000-person multinational company – to design an authentically fun experience.
In our human-centered management consulting work, we often say "if it's not fun, we're doing it wrong." Fun is, well, fun which is enjoyable, but it’s also a proxy measure that lets us better detect issues with communication dynamics, hidden assumptions, or unarticulated concerns.
The benefit of any prioritization model is that it allows us to quickly measure an investment against the alternatives, including “do nothing,” and assess it against the goals of the organization. Instead of just considering cost, an ideal prioritization method will produce a fast estimate of the return on our investment without the analytical overhead of having to monetize every aspect of every decision.
For years we’ve been using Business Value-Driven Prioritization, a framework we developed that provides a simple set of rules for evaluating the costs and benefits of initiatives relative to each other. We help teams define their key dimensions of value through hands-on workshops and we lead teams through training on the concept and application of Business Value-Driven Prioritization, both as a standalone course and as part of a Product-Oriented Engineer Teams (POET) Learning Journey. We were asked recently by a team if there’s an article or whitepaper we could share about this practice, so we decided to put one together.
Collaboration is one of the most regular topics that come up in conversation for me. I’m not sure if it’s because of selection bias of who I tend to talk to, if it’s still a hot trending business term, or if I just signal something about wanting to talk about collaboration (I do want to talk about collaboration). After someone asked what it takes for a team to collaborate effectively, I thought we’d put together a list.
An individual workshop is great for learning specific skills, policies, and tools. While workshops can support organizational goals, stand-alone workshops aren’t designed to produce organizational transformation on their own. They can offer an introduction, inspiration, and some progress, but if organizational or cultural transformation is the goal, learning journeys offer an effective pathway to create value and shift cultural norms across teams.
A learning journey is a cohort-based, curated series of workshops and training combined with practicum projects and coaching delivered by external, internal, or a combination of facilitators and coaches. Learning journeys are ideal for achieving business or organizational goals that require complex skills, new ways of working, and leaders who are prepared to drive organizational change.
When we ask our client collaborators, friends, and family members how much time they spend in meetings, we hear the estimate is upwards of 75% of their total work time. This is consistent across individuals who work in small nonprofits all the way to global IT enterprises. If we spend this much time in meetings – they’d better be worthwhile.
Here are 7 things you can do to improve the effectiveness and impact of your meetings.
What started out as individual LinkedIn posts turned into a small series. Since then, we’ve had a few requests to see all the tips without having to scroll back to our old posts, so we decided to consolidate them here. We also added a couple more tactics. Here are 10 key tips for working remote that work for me. Let me know in the comment what works, or doesn’t work, for you.
There are a lot of advantages to in-person presentations. When we are in the same room, we get to look people in the eye, shake their hands (maybe), and use all of the subtle signals we’ve learned over a lifetime to build a strong, human connection between us and our audience. As wonderful as it is, many people view video conferencing of any kind as a poor substitute for these face to face interactions. We miss the many social signals, like hand motions, tone of voice, small facial expressions that might communicate delight, or skepticism. On a video conference, it’s harder to see whether someone is engaged or imagine what might be going through their mind.
It is impossible to know everything. But, if you can learn to listen and collaborate, you can know anything.
This was on the top of my mind as I wrapped up two life-changing years at Presidio Graduate School and started with Navicet.
By my second week, I was already embedded in three client projects. I was particularly excited to start work with a client who has an excellent track record on environmental sustainability and employee engagement. We were asked to design a Learning Journey, a cohort-based professional development program that combines workshops, coaching, and practicum projects. With my background in participatory education and professional development at an international nonprofit, I knew I could jump right in to add value. We began designing the Learning Journey in the way Navicet always does, by interviewing stakeholders who have the most context and interest in creating great outcomes...
When an executive at one of our client's asked me for a list of simple principles of design-thinking a few days ago, it got me thinking.
It's not like there's a shortage of them, as you can see from a quick Google search. We even contributed our own list years ago, which I expected to be sufficient response to this particular CTO. But as I considered them on this particular day, they all fell flat somehow.
I wanted something that reflected the trends and challenges that we see in our day-to-day work now, something that might be useful for seeing where an individual or even an organization might improve. I wanted the principles I shared with her to gently shine the light on the limiting habits that hold us back, often without us even being aware of them, and to be useful for any team, regardless of how well they were doing...
Once you get a taste of what it's like to truly delight your customers, it's hard to settle for anything less. In retrospect, whatever you did to delight them can seem obvious, and you wonder how you didn't see it sooner...
This is my first week as a strategic design intern. A week ago, I had no idea that such a thing existed.
At Navicet, we're on a mission to build design-led organizations. On the surface, the goal seems simple enough. Digging deeper, however, it turns out that a useful definition of the term is anything but obvious.
Just the other day, a board member from one of our favorite nonprofit clients asked: what exactly does it mean to be "design-led?" Having been at it now for a little over three years, we thought we would take a stab at putting it into words.
Here's how to tap in to the potential already hidden on your team...
Having a clear, coherent set of actionable principles is an essential ingredient for designing great customer and employee experiences, especially for larger organizations. But, easier said than done, right?
Employee engagement matters. A lot. In fact, according to a recent Gallup report, companies with the highest employee engagement outperform their competitors by 2.5 times. That same Gallup report found that 70% of the U.S. workforce was disengaged, and 20% are actively working to sabotage their employers objectives. The number one influencer of team health? Manager performance.
Over 70% of large IT projects fail. Conventional remedies promise greater predictability and control but only marginally improve team engagement, collaboration, and innovation. Is it possible to trade predictability and control for better results?
