Today, at the Institute of Design, Chris Bernard, Joe Dizney, and David McGaw held a Teaming workshop, that was illuminating and a very welcome start to the school year.
Classes here start on Monday, and everyone is looking to start the year off with good team practices.
We started the workshop with a presentation by Dave, an ID alum, now an associate at McKinsey. He presented a 3 step system to teaming, with suggestions for each step. Align, Commit, and Build. I really liked his notion of invoking pre-selected buzz phrases that communicate a point very well to your peers: to gain alignment: “I’m just not feeling it…” (and holding a kickoff meeting initially); to gain commitment: “I have a request for you… Can you commit..?” and always use a facilitator; to build: give constructive, appropriate, honest feedback often, “May I make a suggestion?“.
Well, I did my part. Consider it evangelized, Dave.
We also spent some time doing prework for the workshop, including taking alternative versions of the Myers Briggs MBTI personality profile, and a neat one called the CPSP (Min Basadur’s Creative problem solving profile) intended for innovation teams. This one is available through the NextD site.
When I took the MBTI, I was an ENTP/ENFP. Teddy was also an ENTP. woot.
When I took the CPSP, I was a “Generator/Conceptualizer”. This is more vague, to me. I inherently think that most people (esp. in a design school) are going to tend towards the Generator/Conceptualizer side. Maybe more b-schoolers might fit into the Implementer/Optimizer categories?
Finally, we spent some time on Stone Yamashita’s model for getting Unstuck when encountered with a team problem. I thought this part of the presentation was particularly helpful.
A few really good takeaways that I had from today that I’m definitely looking forward to use with my innovation teams here at ID and beyond:
- Having an assigned facilitator or team-meeting leader (NOT a team leader, and yes, there is a difference!) that rotates for each meeting during a project.
- Have someone role play the customer–every customer! Including the final end user AND the company you might be developing the innovation for.
Thanks to Dave, Chris, and Joe for putting on the ID teaming workshop. It is imperative that innovation teams work together like a highly tuned performance machine, and Chris is at the forefront of thinking about how this can take place more smoothly. I don’t know if he offers his teaming workshop in other companies with innovation efforts, if so, sign him up!
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