“Hi everyone, my name is Tom,” said the new joiner “this is my first week here, I used to work for X as a senior product designer, and before that, I worked at Y. I’m really excited to be here and looking forward to work with you all”.

A week after another new joiner, Josh, opened with: “Hi everyone, as I’m sure we will have plenty of time to get to know each other professionally over the next few months, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself as a person, rather than a job title! I’m a proud, gay black man, something that’s taken me a good 10 years to be able to tell you today. I believe in two powers, God and dance and I’m blessed to be able to practice both often and at the same place. I’m also a strong advocator for mental health and for treating the workplace as more than just a place of work…” and he carried on while everyone listened in awe.

Josh managed to grab everyone’s attention and left a footprint in their memory, making his introduction stellar and EPIC (something we will explore later).

But not everyone does that.

Why not?

More than a LinkedIn profile

How many times do you get to be the new person in a company? Once. You are “new” only once. And you get this one chance to introduce yourself to the whole team while they are, out of interest, giving you all their attention. These are the same people you’ll likely have daily interactions with for the rest of your time at the company.

Yet you let this singular opportunity pass by so immemorably.

I’ve seen this happening on all levels of new joiners from a C-level to junior members. And from all types of extremely introverted to extremely extroverted people.

“My name is X. I used to work for Z company, and I’m so excited to be here”, isn’t all of that on your LinkedIn page?

We may want to learn how to pronounce it, but we can all see your name, we probably know where you worked before, and we probably can guess that you’re excited. So instead, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know? It is your chance to introduce yourself to us. Who you actually are. As a human being, as a person, and not just as a co-worker. Sure, we’re probably slightly interested in where else you’ve worked, but as humans, we’re really more curious about what makes you.

If you want to make this moment memorable, here is how.

Defining moments

Chip and Dan Heath, in their book The Power of The Moments, suggested four ingredients to harness the power of a memorable moment. EPIC: Elevation, Insight, Pride, Connection. You don’t need to hit all of them in one strike, but the more the merrier.

“Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!” — The Heath Brothers

Here is what they mean by the EPIC ingredients:

• Elevation. Those are moments of unique experiences, they break the script, they are anything but mundane, they are engaging, amazing, exciting, and energising.
• Pride. The moment when you feel your chin lifted and your shoulders broadened. And it is when we recognise others or get recognised, when we display courage and show vulnerability, and feel the power of that.
• Insight. Those are specialised in creating realisations and understanding, they are best when least unexpected (i.e. when you trip over the truth).
• Connection. Moments of togetherness, oneness, warmth, empathy, and validation. When we cement our ties with others.

Making it memorable

So, back to our newbie introduction. To make this moment memorable. To leave a footprint in your audience’s mind, I believe, you can sprinkle a bit of each of EPIC ingredient on those five minutes you have by simply presenting the human being you are.

If you do so, you will be breaking the script by introducing something unique and new. You will be forming a connection with your colleagues by being open and showing vulnerability. You will certainly give them an insight that is new to them. And finally, you will finish your speech with an uplifting moment of pride.

Don’t introduce yourself as the person who’s doing role A or B. Instead, tell them what matters to you as a person, what are your likes and dislikes, and what made you who you are now. Show them your true self.

They don’t really need to know your name, they will see that everywhere — it’s probably at the bottom of the Zoom call window you’re using to speak to them on. Do tell them how you would like to pronounce your name, if there’s a story behind your name or middle name, or what are your preferred pronouns actually (e.g. is it a He/Him or She/Her, or They/Them…etc.) — Read more about pronouns and their importance here.

Before you start talking think about using this time in the best way possible, because it is not going to happen again, you won’t get another chance to introduce yourself to the team and to have their undivided attention to hear what you’re about to say about yourself. Mind you, humans tend to remember the first few items (experiences, people…etc.) in a sequence better than any of the others, which is referred to as Primacy Effect by psychologists.

“When one is making judgments of others, first impressions are more important than later impressions. […] Thus what someone first sees, hears, or reads about a person tends to serve as a primary reference point or anchor for later judgments, so that later judgments are overly influenced by a person’s initial judgment. In essence, first impressions count”. And your intro is one of our early experiences of you, and it is you who decides the level of primacy of your first impression on us.

Take this opportunity to be vulnerable and open, this will bring you closer to them. It is more important now than ever before given the current circumstances we are operating under.

It’s your opportunity to come across through that screen and be with those people. Touch them, let them see the great person that you are and what made you that person. Tell them about your history, your culture, and your experiences. About the things that truly matter to you, what you care about and what you are passionate about. It is all about your identity. and identity is a complex concept, and it encompasses a wide suite of things that all together form who we are. You don’t need to share everything in one go, maybe not ever, but opening-up about a certain precious aspect of your being and your identity is essential in making your moment memorable.

Work:Home

One good thing, you could say, about the pandemic, is that it’s shattered the artificial walls we’ve spent decades building between our home lives and our work lives — all whilst we acknowledged that we spent more time with co-workers than our families. Over the years we all became the product our environments and kept carrying that environment with us between our jobs. It is about time we change the environment as we move along between companies.

Working from home forced us (or most of us) to open up. You’re calling your colleagues on a video call from your living room, your kitchen, or your bedroom. Your kids are running around, shouting, jumping in the back and being cheeky in front of the camera. Your dog jumps on your lap or your cat walks over the keyboard where we see the fluffy tail blocking the camera. This became the new norm.

We are now, more than ever, in each other’s lives. Isn’t it about time that we feel comfortable enough to let people in? To let others, know who we are? At the end of the day, we are not machines, not yet at least.

So, go on now! Go and grab that moment and make it EPIC!

It is your intro, make sure it counts was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How important is for you to be able to trust your colleagues? And for them, how important is it that you trust them?

All of us rely on trusting one another at work, probably more so in cross-functional and agile environments. Designers, product managers and developers, leaders, operators and centralised units: we all depend on the trustworthiness of others. I certainly do.

When leading a function such as Design Operations, you need to build mutual trust with various team members from almost every corner of the business. Coming from a non-design background, I knew that being able to establish trust with the design team was vital for the success of this function.

“And how did you manage to do that?”

A question I was recently asked, after my talk at a DesignOps meet-up. It made me reflect on the concept of trust, what it takes to build it, and, if I had to do it again now, would the new norms of remote working have an impact? I dived into some readings on the matter, spoke to a few experts, and here is what I learned.

The definition of trust

We all know what trust is, so you would think it should pretty easy to find the definition of trust out there. Or so I thought.

It took me a while to find something relevant to my research, yet it was really interesting to read about the psychology of trust. Learning about Rational, Institutional and Active Trust was eye-opening (and maybe a topic for another day). But the focus here is on trust at work, therefore let’s consider a simple definition like Amy Cuddy’s:

“Trust is the conduit for influence: It’s the medium through which ideas travel. If they don’t trust you, your ideas are just dead in the water. If they trust you, they are open, and they can hear what you are offering. Having the best idea is worth nothing if people do not trust you”.

Trust is both a logical and an emotional act, which the two following characteristics of trust demonstrate pretty well — You will notice that these are also embedded in the four factors:

- Professionalism: You are competent, always committed, show-up on time, do what you say, and are dependable. We trust you to get the job done.

- Personalism: This is about connecting with others on an emotional level, it’s more complex and requires a level of emotional intelligence. It’s when others see you as one of theirs. They know that you will be non-judgmental, fair and respectful. You will celebrate their successes as yours and you will support them during their “less successful” experiences. They can be themselves with you, be open and vulnerable around you.

McLeod stated, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that trust “is an attitude that we have towards people whom we hope will be trustworthy, where trustworthiness is a property, not an attitude.” For trust to be “plausible”, the parties must possess qualities and behaviours that allow the trust to develop. And for trust to be “well-grounded”, both parties must possess trustworthiness.

We must not forget that trust is a two-sided game, played by both trustors and trustees. Although this article is focused on how to help others trust you, it is equally important to remember that as players we all have:

• Our own life-long developed capacity to trust others.
• A perception of our and others’ capabilities and competences.
• Our judgment of others’ actions and words as being motivated towards the benefit of all, rather than the individual themselves.

Okay but why the fuss anyway?

Simply because research showed that, in addition to the intrinsic value of trust (i.e. trusting someone is a sign of respect), trust has enormous and instrumental value to many aspects of our lives, such as creating opportunities for cooperative activity, meaningful relationships, knowledge, autonomy, self-respect, and overall moral maturity. More importantly, individuals who trust their colleagues and leadership are more likely to be open, honest, empathetic, collaborative, and constructive. All of which boosts innovation and productivity.

The four factors

Now that we are done with the broad concept of trust, let me share with you the four factors my research, interviews, and experience have led me to. These, I believe, are essential to building trust:

1- Integrity

2- Dependability

3- Affinity

4- Benevolence

Let’s dive deeper into each of these and what I mean by them, before talking about the potential challenges that might be imposed by the new remote environment we are in.

Integrity

Demonstrating honesty is essential to building credibility. Being truthful, admitting your mistakes, and accepting the lack of knowledge are signs of honesty and authenticity. In my previous blog Please let me fail: Failure, Vulnerability and Creativity, I wrote about the importance of celebrating failure. When it comes to trust the story is no different: your colleagues need to know that you are able to fail and to own your failure.

Dependability

Remember that when we trust someone, we don’t do it just for the sake of it. We trust someone to do something. Hence, demonstrating that others can depend and rely on you is fundamental.

You can do so by saying what you mean and meaning what you say. By delivering on your promises and responsibilities, you are signalling to the team that they can rely on you. You can cement the impact of that reliance by explaining your way of delivering, and taking others through your process of coming up with or doing something.

Trust is an invisible social contract, and the binding clause of it is building a sense of camaraderie with others. A great way of doing so is by delivering tasks and projects jointly. So instead of locking yourself in your silo, invite them in and deliver for and with them.

Affinity

What I mean here is the sense of closeness, intimacy and understanding between people. For many of us, this factor might be the most challenging. It requires us to be open and vulnerable.

To nourish this type of connection, you ought to be a starter, to initiate trust from your end first. A sense of camaraderie not only supports your image of dependability, but by being inclusive you open the ‘trust door’ for others. Whether or not you are the trust’s initiator, always remember the importance of reciprocity in building affinity.

Another thing to keep in mind is that enabling an environment of virtue, and being vulnerably open about how you feel, will demonstrate to others your rectitude and probity.

While you are doing so, you should be mindful of your reactions to what others say and to your own body language (I hear you saying “Aha! Body language is the problem with being remote”. I will come back to this).

Finally, as McLeod stated, “People also do not, or cannot, trust one another if they are easily suspicious of one another”. So, I can’t stress enough the importance of building your ability to give others the benefit of the doubt, to improve the closeness and understanding between yourselves.

Benevolence

This is all about self-awareness. It is about others and avoiding self-centred behaviour. You can build this by being approachable, by giving others their credit before claiming yours, by being respectful and non-judgemental, by creating opportunities for others to talk, and more importantly to listen to them actively and attentively. If you are unable to listen in a given instance, it is better to interrupt and apologise rather than pretending that you are listening (I highly recommend reading “You are not Listening” by Kate Murphy).

From behind screens

I believe that if you manage to put all the four factors together, you will certainly be able to build trust. However, the important question here is: Can you do it from behind a screen?

I would argue that: Yes you can, but with one key challenge: body language!

Body Language

When it comes to building trust, we can group the relevant atoms of our body language into three categories:

Facial signs

Psychologists stress the importance of nodding, proper use of your forehead and eyebrows, a stable — yet slightly tilted — head, and eye contact to enable the building of trust. Therefore, you simply have to — and encourage others to — turn the cameras on. But more importantly, use it. Maintain eye contact by looking into the camera. It is a very simple thing to do, but is also so easily missed when you have two screens. There’s nothing worse than trying to build trust with someone who is looking away (that’s how it would look and feel to others if you are busy with your second screen, and not facing the camera).

Mouth and what comes out of it

Smile, and pay attention to your tone of voice. Build up your ability to be a good listener, showing concern, being respectful, and being approachable and down to earth.

The rest of your body

Research suggests that the correct use of touch is important in building trust; the handshake, maintaining open palms, arms and legs, and body posture are all key. Yes, these are tricky elements to master without being in the same room as the other person. Yet experts (including therapists) highlight that things like mirroring (mimicking the body posture of the other person) and distance can be as important. You can always mirror the other person to a certain extent (assuming that both cameras are on). As for distance, experts agree that actually by being behind a screen you are “closer” to others than you would normally be in person. They also stress the psychological importance of parties being at home, in their own habitat, which increases their sense of safety, allowing them to take more risk in trusting others.

In a nutshell

Of all the four factors (Integrity, Dependability, Affinity, and Benevolence) and their sub-elements and behaviours, only minor ones get adversely affected by remote working. Those can also be tweaked to adapt to the “new norm”. We may even gain some other indirect and intangible benefits by being behind a computer screen in our homes. I strongly believe that the “new norm” is by no means a barrier to building trust at work. What do you think?

Readings:

In addition to the few interviews I conducted with experts, below are some of the main readings from the literature and the grey literature on this topic.

Trust Under Pressure by Katinka Bijlsma-Frankema and Rosalinde Klein Woolthuis

Trust by Carolyn McLeod

The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford

What is Trust?

The Social Psychology of Trust with Applications in the Internet

The 3 Components of Trust

7 Ways to Build Trust in a Relationship

12 practical ways to build trust at work

Body Language and Trust

Icons designed by Freepik

The four factors of building trust: Do they get affected by working remotely? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When was the last time you felt comfortably naked in front of your colleagues at work? I do everyday. From what I have learned that being able to be so is at the core of any creative process. They told you to be creative, think outside the box, step outside of your comfort zone… but what is out there? Ambiguity and risk, excitement and opportunity.

Creativity is essential to our survival and prosperity as human beings. It is defined as the human capacity to use our imaginations to create solutions for complex problems (Kupers et al. 2018; Welch and McPherson 2012).

It requires courage to be creative. According to the literature, creativity is a process consisting of steps such as problem discovery, preparation, incubation, insight, implementation, and validation (Botella et al. 2018). However, I would argue that there is a vital step missing from this list. Failure.

I’m one of those who believes that failure is an essential part of any creative or innovative process. Chris Hay, in his book Knowledge, Creativity and Failure: A New Pedagogical Framework for Creative Arts, (Hay, 2016) described failure as a “way of knowing” and argued that embracing failure is about “finding one’s way through darkness and coming out […] armed with new knowledge”.

Innovation and creativity require iteration. Iteration is “the process of doing something again and again, usually to improve it”. Which implies that if I get it right, I don’t need to iterate. Hence, I would say, as soon as you think you are right, you’ve killed your creativity. Dr Karl Jeffries — a creativity mentor and coach — told me he would argue that thinking you are right is also a part of the creative process, but the mastery lies in being able to park that and continuing your exploration. “Feeling as sense of rightness in a creative insight isn’t the end of the process” he added.

Externally disempowered to fail

So, if embracing failure is so essential to our creative problem-solving process, what is stopping us?

I believe there are two types of causes: internal and external to oneself. Unsurprisingly these are intertwined as well.

External causes are society driven, the way we were taught that failure comes with negative connotations. Think about how scoring low in most of our educational systems is simply called “fail”; how most parents have raised their kids to avoid “being a failure”; and how social media has backed that thinking.

Think about this for a second. Did you notice the surge of motivational speeches in recent years? and how it was empowered by video-enabled social media?

It was a ‘push’ for more. More wealth, more achievements, more accomplishments, more success… I must say, this boom of motivational speakers and inspirational videos, was mostly with positive and harmless intentions. But suddenly, we all felt expected to be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk. It is the rise of a new culture, one that pushes individuals to aspire for more, to aim higher and to accept nothing less than their ‘dream life’. With every step, your expectations — and those of everyone else — become higher, bigger, and brighter. This could have been great, if only it wasn’t incomplete. It is still a culture in which — when expectations are not met — only you are to blame , you simply didn’t ‘push’ enough.

Internally demotivated to fail

And here comes the other side of the story, the internal causes.

You live in a society whose institutions shame failure, from the educational to the parental ones. You are saturated with a culture that only glorify the small percentage of exceptional achievers and their successes, while you are left alone to deal with the blame of not pushing enough. Yet they still ask you to step outside and be creative.

“Shame isn’t a quiet grey cloud, shame is a drowning man who claws his way on top of you, scratching and tearing your skin, pushing you under the surface.”

KIRSTY EAGER

We tend to internalise all this external pressure, negativity, shame and blame. It engrains inside and becomes a part of our psyche. Research showed that we consistently move through series of experiences shaped by culture and social situations, and that these experiences pile up “forming a sedimentation of culture within individuals”. (Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, 2015).

How are we expected to allow ourselves and others to embrace failure when it is painted only with shame?

Things have started to change more recently. Lately, we have started hearing more about the importance of failure, with an increase in the popularity of books and podcasts such as How to Fail by Elizabeth Day. This surge is build on wider growing interest in individual mental health. Google searches for “mental wellbeing” have increased by about 350% between 2016–2020.

Vulnerability as fuel for creativity

To embrace failure, we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. For those who make the slightest link — consciously or not — between vulnerability and fragility or weakness, I would advise reading and watching Dr Brené Brown’s work. Her TED Talk in 2010, The Power of Vulnerability, is one of the top ten most viewed TED talks in the world. Dr Brown spent over a decade researching vulnerability and she calls it a power. And to that, I say Amen!

Vulnerability is not about winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up even when you can’t control the outcome.

Brené Brown

Being vulnerable means daring yourself to face yourself and your surroundings. I see this as the cornerstone of any creative process.

Simply put, for you to be creative you need to be able to fail, and for you to be able to fail you need to be able to overcome the fear and shame that comes with that. And how can you do that if you are not empowered to be vulnerable?

Being vulnerable is not easy and it requires the right environment. While conventional work, school and home environments have often created a stigma and shame around failure, and associated feelings of weakness and flaw with being vulnerable, the right environment is one that empowers people to be vulnerable.

Workplaces are not just for work

Going back to my main question: When was the last time you felt comfortably naked in front of your colleagues at work?

An enabling environment is one where you CAN be naked. A place where you can express your fears and hopes, where talking about your mistakes and vices gets as much as — if not more — celebration as your successes and triumphs. This is the environment that creates the necessary safe zone for you to be vulnerable, to fail and to be creative.

I was lucky enough to be in such an environment when I was asked to establish a brand new DesignOps function; a task filled not just with excitement and opportunity but also risks, ambiguity, and (yeah, you guessed it) potential failures. I needed to be comfortable saying: “I don’t have the answer”, “I don’t know” and “I failed in […] but I’ve learned […]”.

I doubt I would have dared to embark on such a journey without having felt secure and enabled at my workplace. And it has been a life-changing journey so far.

So, let me ask you one more thing.

What are you doing to enable yourself — and empower others — to be vulnerable as leaders, co-workers, teachers, parents and friends?

Resources

Kupers et al. 2018

Welch and McPherson 2012

Hay 2016

Botella et al. 2018

Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie 2015

Please let me fail: failure, vulnerability and creativity was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I asked Google for the definition of a ‘Playbook’, I got this: ‘Playbook’ is a noun from North America meaning: “a book containing a sports team’s strategies and plays, especially in American football”. And the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as: “A set of rules or suggestions that are considered to be suitable for a particular activity, industry, or job”.

While I like to simply refer to it as:

“An IKEA-style flat-pack means to get things done”.

Think of it as a knowledge hub that is specialised in activities (a.k.a. plays or tools) that enable teams to collaborate, ideate, problem solve, make decisions…etc.

The importance of Playbooks

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”

— Maimonides

Democratisation of creativity

IKEA made furniture accessible and easy — or easier — for everyone to assemble and use. A Playbook shouldn’t be any different. It should enable EVERYONE to use tools such as workshops, rituals, and ceremonies to work more efficiently and effectively, to problem solve, and to foster their creativity. This shouldn’t be a function-specific privilege.

A good Playbook should enable its users to pick a tool — or mix and match few — that it is suitable for their needs. These should come with their respective instruction manuals (e.g. how to, best-in-class examples, and templates when appropriate).

I believe, that you can — maybe should — start building your Playbook from one function such as Design or Product but it should not be designed — or be exclusive — only for them to use.

Taking this democratisation to a pro level is done but making your Playbook — or part of it- open to external users (e.g. Atlassian’s Playbook). These are great to learn from, but remember that your Playbooks should consist of answers to the ways things are done in your business.

Standardisation

Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK and the founder of Ogilvy’s behavioural science practice, often talks about how one of the reasons behind the success of fast-food businesses, like McDonald's, is consistency.

“We don’t go to McDonald’s for the world’s best meal. We go because McDonald’s is always pretty good”

— Rory Sutherland

Despite my feelings and opinion towards McDonald's, I couldn’t agree more. And therefore, by standardising your plays, you will be leaning on the power of consistency.

When a business — or a team — is small, Playbook and ways-of-working tend to fall under the ‘norm’. At this stage, some or all team members, are experts when it comes to the norm. However, with scale, new joiners will bring with them new ideas, new plays, and new ways of doing things. Newbies, seniors and juniors alike, will start asking how things are usually done in this business.

Having a Playbook in place will not just help onboarding new joiners, but also prevent the confusion around plays’ names, the duplication of plays, and the variety of ways of doing the same thing. And more importantly, it will limit the concentration of knowledge with only a handful of people.

The seven

Whether you are designing a new Playbook, restructuring an existing one, or simply just adding a new play, following a template will help you to maintain consistency and improve the overall comprehension.

Note: No matter how much of an expert you are, it is very important to remember that this template should not be used in isolation, it is vital to answer these questions with the help of others.

Here are the seven questions that I use:

The why

1- What is the purpose of this play?

For you and everyone else to be on the same page, this a critical question to be crystal clear on.

The whos

2- Who should run this? 3- Who must be there? 4- Who could be there?

What is a play without players? It is highly important to make it easy for your Playbook user to understand who they need to perform the play.

The how

5- How should we run it?

This is the heavy part. In this section, you need to strike the right balance between details and clarity. You don’t want it to be too long but also detailed enough.

A practical way of structuring this is by splitting the actions into phases, by giving an indication of how much time each phase will take, and by stating the roles and responsibilities at each phase:

• pre: Any preparations that need to be done before the play takes place, and by whom.
• during: What happens during the play and everyone’s role.
• post: Stuff like documentations and follow-ups, and who is responsible for these.

The when

6- When should we run it?

This varies between industries. In the Tech industry, this can refer to the product development cycle. Hence, some plays might be time-related (e.g. Weekly kick-off), some are related to the development cycle (e.g. Critiques: as often as needed between 20–80% of design completion), while others are circumstantial (e.g. Design forum: when faced with multiple solutions).

The golden one

7- what is the definition of good?

You might not have the answer to this question from the get-go.

Nevertheless, you should not leave it blank. You are better off coming up with a hypothetical answer and then testing it over time. Keep repeating that until you find the correct answer as to what success would look like.

Is all this really worth doing?

Hell yeah!

Empowerment

IKEA is making things affordable (i.e. accessible) but also, they empowered their customers by enabling them to assemble these packages by themselves, and having a Playbook enables its users to just DO.

In fact, in my experience having a well-structured Playbook increased the use of some of the main plays (e.g. Critiques) by nearly 250%.

Agility and scalability

This is your ability to quickly adapt your plays to change and to be able to respond to a sudden demand for new ones.

Having this structure allowed us to respond to the unprecedented COVID-19 related circumstances in an effective and quick manner. When the business’ priorities changed over-night, and the team had to suddenly face new realities and different ways of working, we managed to design, test and roll-out a totally new cross-functional play in a matter of a week or so. It is not just a new one but also replaced two of our existing ones. I called it “Zeroing”.

Very shortly after launch, Zeroing proved to be a success. Not just in the number of sessions but also more than 93% of the participants said that they had a useful or very useful session. Some even started using the name Zeroing as a verb in their sentences.

Disclaimer: no matter how brilliant a Playbook is, it is useless without great players and advocators.

Please let me know in the comments section if you would like to know more about our “Zeroing”.

7 questions to design your team playbook was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether you are ready to, comfortable with, excited by, anxious of, or frightened by change, it is safe to say that we were all caught off-guarded by this pandemic. COVID-19 introduced an unprecedented multi-dimensional impact on our lives. And we all had to react as quickly as possible, introducing a great amount of change to our social and professional lives.

At ClearScore, we managed to switch smoothly to remote working. Nonetheless, the whole business had to shift gears swiftly and change priorities in a flash. That meant some projects had to be stopped, or paused, while new ones started — leading to the need to re-allocate our resources.

Our design team is distributed across delivery squads, and all of a sudden we had to gather our cards, reshuffle our deck and distribute them again.

Here is how we approached this.

(Note: Although I applied the below with a design team in a mid-sized business, I believe that this framework can be followed — or serve as the foundation — for the resource allocation of any functional team at almost any size.)

Start Here

Who should be involved?

The answer depends mainly on the size of your team and the depth of knowledge that you have. In our case, we were about 30 team members in the design team, and hence the heads had a good understanding of our designers’ knowledge and expertise. Also, we had just finished a team-wide skills and capabilities mapping exercise, so we had a pretty solid understanding of our team members’ personalities and strengths.

Hence, our workshop’s participants were the Design Heads and me (DesignOps Manager).

In bigger teams and/or where you lack such a level of in-depth knowledge about the individuals, you may want to run a couple of activities (e.g. surveys or workshops) to collect more information about the individuals’ skills, capabilities, personalities, and area of expertise.

The magic

Set your principles first

Before you start thinking about the individuals and the upcoming projects, you should kick-off by discussing and agreeing on a set of principles. Those will be your guiding rules — they are things that you deem important to your team, and company dynamics and culture.

Just principles conceive just notions and perform good actions in consequence of them.

― Hugh Blair

Ours were:

1- No single point of failure. Projects are extremely important and time-sensitive now. By preventing a single point of failure, we are protecting, not just the business, but people too — shielding them from additional stress and anxiety.

2- Solve for personalities. Moving to full remote working has introduced a novelty to the ways things are done (and maybe a bit of confusion and complexity at the beginning). Matching individuals’ personalities would enable them to lean on each other and worry less about how to build their relationship with their peers during the lockdown.

3- Balance skills and product knowledge. As a DesignOps Manager, a big part of my role is enabling people and improving efficiency without jeopardising quality. This reshuffle is about enabling our squad to deliver as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Balancing skills and product knowledge will enable the business to achieve its goals and will allow our designers to do so while maintaining quality.

4- Mix seniority. Peer-to-Peer feedback and learning was a value that was repeatedly highlighted during my workshops with the design team. Making sure that we mix seniority in our squads is one of the ways to make sure that we maintain that value.

5- Maintain and split for team performance. Having this principle in place is a necessary reminder to ourselves, and others, that nothing is set in stone. It enables us to break, or maintain, our reshuffled matches to optimise squads’ performance.

The skillset that will make all the difference

Having set and defined your principles, you are now ready to drill deeper. Dive into a pool of skills, identify and define the most required skills to answer to your business needs.

For us, we looked for the skills that will enable our paired designers to become a power within their new teams, in the new projects, and under the new ways of working. A power of productivity and efficiency, whilst being the guardians of our design quality and our users’ voice. Our skillset was:

a) Design System. Knowledge and fluency of our Design System. the ability to capitalise on its power for quick and consistent delivery, while maintaining quality.

b) Domain knowledge. Breadth and depth of knowledge of the product and their expertise in certain sub-sectors and specific technologies.

c) Design Process. Mastering our design process — at speed and remotely. That includes capabilities like — but not limited to — remote facilitation, running lightning design sprints, rapid ideation, speedy hi-fi wireframing, fast prototyping, and strong copywriting.

d) Resilience. Facing new realities with patience and kindness, and without ego. The ability to build and maintain friendships, and to be proactive and diplomatic.

e) Design management. Strong people-management set of skills and to be a master and being a champion of Abstract (our design version control tool).

f) Communication. High-level of organisational skills. Meticulous and thorough in their documentation. The ability to give focused and constructive design feedback.

g) Data and research. Fluent in our suite of user testing tools. Strong data analysis acumen and Skilled at conducting lean research.

Mapping and scoring

This last bit consists of three steps:

1) Choosing your cornerstone.

2) Grouping individuals and assigning them to projects.

3) Scoring and optimising.

During and after each of these steps, you need to check that you are adhering to your principles.

Given the current climate and being aware of the impact COVID-19 brought upon us — both on business and personal levels — we decided that Resilience is our cornerstone on which we will build our resource mapping.

We grouped our designers into twos and threes based on their Resilience level. Once we had our first ‘mix and match’, we then mapped these against the business’ upcoming projects.

Next, we scored these teams on each of the skills mentioned above. Finally, grouping people to optimise the average scores of each team.

What’s next

Once you are done, you need to make sure that you have what you need when you review the groups.

For instance, you need a ‘definition of success’ for these new groups and the data to support it. In my scenario, some of that came from surveys and some from tools like Abstract and Jira. Metrics are a story for another day.

One last thing to remember!

This exercise is heavily reliant on your, and your participants’, knowledge of the team’s streams of work (past, present, and future). And more importantly, you are relying on the detailed and intimate insights you have on your team members’ skills, capabilities, expertise, and personalities.

Preparation doesn’t assure victory, it assures confidence.
― Amit Kalantri

This process wouldn’t have been as successful without the support of Simon Doggett and Tai and their great in-depth knowledge of our Design team.

How to reshuffle a design team in the time of crisis was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Location: outside London Bridge station

Time: 6:30pm

Usually, I would be utterly annoyed and you will be able to see it from miles, if I’m still there, when you are late.

I’ve always been like that. Since the day I started commuting alone to meet friends, I would leave home early to get to an appointment 10 mins early. I don’t expect you to do the same, but I certainly expect you to be on time, give or take 5 minutes no more. If you happened to be late, I do really try my best to understand the reasons why but I struggle in pretending that I’m ‘OK’ with it; I’m certain that you will see it on my face and in my mood for the next hour or so. And it used to upset me to the point where I would turn around and go back to wherever I came from if you are more than 15 mins late.

But this time it was different. Yes I had to wait, yes I was getting agitated, but I was not upset when he arrived almost 30 mins late.

As usual, I was early for my appointment, I took out my phone and sent him a message to let him know that “I’m here”. In other words, “I’m here on time and waiting for you and the clock is ticking”.

It was a busy narrow pavement next to a busy station and it was peak time after working hours. I had to move aside and stand with my back on the wall, of a bank I believe, waiting for him by the exit of the tube station. For a reason unknown to me, I didn’t have my headphones on.

I checked my social media accounts and my dating apps, and it was time for him to arrive. He didn’t message to say that he will be late — I checked. I put my phone back in my pocket and started looking around for him.

At that moment, I noticed the busyness of my surrounding. People are just passing back and forth in front of me like a parade.

I was captivated by the scene. A scene I take part in every day but never occurred to me to stop and be the spectator.

Everyone is going somewhere, some going back home from work, some going out for dinner, some have that touristic look on their faces and some and some… all just participating in the same parade for me to enjoy.

I suddenly forgot that I was waiting for someone, and found myself getting mesmerised by this display, this international show and its diversity. People of any and every ethnic group I could think of, every background, and every age. Not having my headphones allowed me to hear the languages - some I can recognise and many I couldn’t - even the accents and the tone of voices of those passersby were something to be in awe of.

Every now and then, someone would stand by my side to text, to look at the map or to smoke. No one else seems to have noticed the magnificent show I’m fascinated by.

A lady stood next to me, similar to everyone else, she is just looking at her phone. Until a guy came to her, said “Hi”, they hugged and walked away together, to blend in again into this current of walkers. It was all part of the same great show. They did remind me, though, that I’m waiting for someone.

However, I wasn’t bothered - I wanted him to be late - I wanted to absorb this moment to its fullest, as I don’t know when I will be on the bench and watching again rather than in the current participating in the same parade.

I wanted the reality to sink in. To be honest, I’ve never been the biggest fan of London but on this day I realised the beauty of this not so pretty city. And the big revelation was that this beauty, that can easily go unnoticed if you don’t stop and spectate, comes from within, from the people who make it London, from their diversity.

In the span of those few minutes of observation, I have seen the whole world passing by probably, just walking somewhere or nowhere. Happy and sad, content and worried, relaxed and anxious, rich and poor, religious and atheist, hetero and homo, anything and everything. Yet we don’t see it usually, or at least I didn’t. Busy running from the office to catch the tube and from there to our homes. Very rarely that we stop and look around. See and appreciate this multicultural metropolitan that we make London.

P.S.: I wasn’t upset with the guy when he came, but don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just let it go, I told him that he was saved by London and the show it put for me… I had to say it, at the end of the day, I’m not a saint.

If you enjoyed this, Khawater is a series of short blogs, try the first one — Daily Dance — .

Location: Liverpool Street Station
Time: 8:20 am

Have you ever had the experience of seeing yourself through the eyes of a stranger? I did.

If you live or have lived in London, you know that there is an art for commuting through the city. There is a traditional dance that you need to perfect through practice, especially if you use a big station, like Liverpool Street Station for your daily commute.

It all starts on the train, the gathering by the door, the threatening looks at the door button and the poor person who is responsible for clicking it exactly on time. The thrill of waiting for the sound. Beep, beep, beep… off we go! We are on the platform and within a couple of steps, that dance will start, all your senses are at alert. Soon we will all become a current, all going in the same direction. At one point there will be congestion, a bottleneck before a gate or an escalator. At that particular point in time, there will always be that one person who is starting to dance a bit earlier than others, swinging right and left trying to find that little gap that will make all the difference in them winning this morning race.
Past that point, you are more likely than not to be faced by a current that is coming opposite to yours. Don’t worry this is manageable, somehow we all form lanes and put on our auto-pilot. The true dance is when you are crossing a hall of a station like Liverpool Street.

In there, there are no lanes. Suddenly, the danger is coming from everywhere, some in the form of small to a large current of people, some are just individuals going in some random direction, some take the weirdest turns, u-turns and even a full stop. We are all contributors to this manic, chaotic and yet harmonic symphony. Somehow it all makes sense to us, locals.
Unfortunately, if you are a newbie, a tourist and or just a passing visitor, to you this can be a fascinating and horrific scene at the same time.

While I was performing my usual dance, at 8:20 am, my eyes crossed the eyes of what looked like a tourist to me. For that split second, I saw myself in her eyes, I saw all of us in her eyes.

Tourists tend to walk differently and look around differently. While we are too busy pacing and performing our routine dance, looking at our phones or just looking at the floor, they walk slowly, looking in all directions, taking a sphere-like picture. Even if we simplify it into 2D coverage, we both cover a 45° angle, however, ours is downwards while theirs is upwards.

For some reason, I was looking at myself in her eyes, all while listening to what she was thinking: how lucky they are to be living in such a magnificent city with an endless offering, I’m here for a week only.

At that particular split of a second, it struck me! I realised how we, or maybe just I, have little appreciation for this city. How we take it for granted. How we do less and see less just because we live here.
It made me realise that the difference between those tourists and us, between when we were tourists (here or somewhere else) and now is simply a deadline!
As a tourist, you know that you have a few days in this city (or any other city for that matter). A few days to see, feel and appreciate. As locals, we tend not to feel that urge, we just live in our routines, rituals and daily dances. We treat our visit to this city as eternal. We become very good at bragging about the benefits of the magnificent city, about things to do and see and about all that it can offer. Yet so little do we take advantage of it. Think of how many plays, exhibitions, and events you missed just because you thought that you will go later. And now think if you were visiting the city for a couple of days and this event is happening, what would you have done?

All of this, as you may have guessed, made me think of the other stay that we are taking for granted and treating as if it is an eternity with no deadline. Do you know which one I’m talking about?

Most successful meetings and workshops are the ones where the participants look forward to and leave afterwards feeling good about the time they spent there. Participants should be there because they want to contribute, and as a facilitator, you have the ability and responsibility to ensure that and secure the inclusivity of the dialogue.

It all starts from the minute you begin thinking about running that session and who should be there (see Part One), going through the first few minutes of your session and how dynamics can be shaped at that point (see Part Two).

In this last part, I will cover how you can maintain an inclusive dynamic and dialogue.

Seats, physical and virtual

Actual seats in the room are not to be taken lightly. Hence, make sure that people are balanced around the room and the table, also that you have the right mix of team members in different groups if need be. However, with more and more businesses promoting working remotely, you need to be careful that these physical seats don’t overtake the virtual ones. One way to ensure equal voice and opportunity is, where and when possible, to try to have everyone dialling remotely if some team members are doing so.

💡 Be more proactive in giving the remote participants their chance to contribute by engaging them with sentences such as “What do you think, Matt!”, “Let’s hear from Matt, what do you think?”.

Control the control-freaks

Control the action in the room (without imposing yourself) by calling on dominant players or making sure that the people who are remote had the chance to express themselves.

Give people the benefit of the doubt but gently point out their dominant behaviour if it is repeated, after the session or during a break. You will be surprised how often people don’t notice how they have been behaving.

💡Intervene with interruptions and encourage others to do the same; use sentences like: “Excuse me Jamie, just a sec — I just want to make sure that I fully understood Clara’s point before we add on it or move on”.

Keep the dom(s) busy

If you know or you notice that someone is a dominant participant, task them with something like taking notes or being on the whiteboard. This will provide more room for the more introverted participants to contribute.

Acknowledgement

Another tip to empower and motivate people to speak is to iterate on people’s ideas giving them the credit, this would also prevent anyone from seizing those ideas for themselves.

The loud silence

Silence has great power if harnessed properly. However, it is very important for a facilitator to be comfortable with silence first. Often than not “awkward” silence is good in team activities, it gives a window of opportunity for those who need it the most, it allows people to reflect, and it gives a breather for the information to sink in. In such moments, you need to remember that you could be the subject-matter-expert but your place is not to intervene and break the silence.

💡Artificially introduced silence is great as well. For instance, put a question to the team and ask them to write their answers down before reading them out. This will allow people to reflect but also introverts will love you for doing this.

Milestones

Depends on the length of your session, it is usually worth using the agenda items as milestones. Stop, reflect on the covered items, confirm the team’s agreement and move forward.

Don’t tell people what to do

Don’t try to force involvement and openness out of your participants, instead, you need to create a feeling of relaxation and ease in the room.

💡Move away from sentences like “I want you to” and use things like “I would like to invite you to” instead.

Mind your inner ego

Don’t run the workshop with the aim to see the results you wish for. Most people would say “of course not!” but in reality, our inner ego silently keeps pushing to control the processes and the flow of the discussion within the session in order to get its desired results and outcomes.

End on high

Try to always leave a couple of minutes for a quick one or two sentences to summaries, and thank the participants for their presence and contribution.

Remember to assign action points owners if relevant and let everyone know what is next and how to follow-up.

Facilitation is not facili but it can sure be more successful and enjoyable for the facilitator and the participants alike by applying some if not all the tips that I have highlighted over these three parts. With the increase of the awareness around diversity and inclusivity in our workplaces and the growing remote-working culture, I think it is essential to create and maintain an inclusive approach to the way that we run our meetings and sessions.

In Part One, I flagged the importance of proper planning beforehand, how to prepare yourself and your invitees to the what is about to happen. While in Part Two and in this part, we dived deeper in the session itself from the minute you say Hello to how you can manage the dynamics in the room. By applying these tips you will surely be a great inclusive facilitator.

resources:

Altassian:https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/inclusive-meetings

BigTalker: https://blog.bigtalker.io/10-keys-to-leading-a-great-workshop-4b6bbdccf064

Death by Meeting by P. Lencioni

Understanding Facilitation: Theory and Principle by Christine Hogan

https://www.mcgill.ca/sustainability/files/sustainability/the_art_of_facilitation.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311826240_The_art_of_facilitation

In this series, I am sharing with you some great tips to apply when facilitating sessions. I’m trying to shed a light on inclusivity and its importance when it comes to team activities.

In Part One, I listed tips for the pre-session part of your facilitation journey. It covered agenda in the invitation, invitees, and the duration of an effective session. In this piece, I’ll move to the first few things that will need to be considered during a session.

Hello everyone!

Move away from “Hello guys!” to “Hello everyone!” or “Hey folks!” to make your opening more inclusive away from any gender references. Remember to introduce yourself this is the first time you’re meeting members of your group.

💡 Write your name somewhere visible to everyone, so they don’t struggle with it later.

First thing first

If you set your invite following my suggestions in Part one, your attendees will know why they are in the room. Still, it is a good practice to take a minute to go around the room and remind people why they are there.

💡Avoid any statements like “and Andy, you are here because I thought this would be interesting to you.”, remember you want people to be active contributors!

Ground rules

It is important to lay out the ground rules right at the beginning. You want your participants to bear them in mind throughout the session. Ground rules are things like when people can ask and interrupt you, “one discussion at a time”, adherence to Chatham House rule…etc.

Use this time to introduce any special tool(s) that you will use such as timers, rubber chickens (for timekeeping), talking ball or stick…etc.

💡If people are expected to use sticky notes, let them know that you are planning on using them later; thus legible writing and initials (if needed) are appreciated.

Slides can be optional but should be available

In my opinion, less wordy slides are better; you want people to be listening to you not reading off the screen and often squinting to read. If you decided on having slides, save people the question and the attempt to copy your slides or take pictures of them and let them know that you will make them available and how they can get them.

Are we on the same page?

Before diving in, iterate on the agenda and roles to make sure that everything is clear to everyone now and people can focus on the task at hand.

Engage and commit

A good way of engaging with the audience from the beginning is the old-fashion question of why are you here? (or something similar)

You could ask people to take a minute to write that down before shouting out. This will give people time to think and room for them to express themselves. Remember, individuals have a different level of confidence in expressing themselves in public, it is your responsibility to make sure everyone feels included and heard. This would also create a sense of commitment from the individual, e.g. “I’m here to learn more about…”

💡A pro practice is to take notes of most of these and try to address them during the session and then revisit them towards the end. You may need to adjust your approach to the session accordingly. This works well for relatively long sessions.

Some other things we often forget

1. Make sure you have the right mix of people in groups if needed. That could be vital for the dynamics of the session.
2. Remember to take notes or have someone doing so.
3. Have a look around before starting, to make sure that you have the right space and facilities for the sort of activities that you have in mind.

In this part, I listed some hints and tips to bear in mind at the beginning of your inclusive session. From your Hello to your ice breaker, going through rules, roles and slides. Each of these can be deployed as a tool to make sure that you are giving everyone a voice while running a great session.

Next time I will go through some of the things that can help you excel in facilitating the rest of your session whilst maintaining inclusivity.

Resources:

Death by Meeting by P. Lencioni

Understanding Facilitation: Theory and Principle by Christine Hogan

https://www.mcgill.ca/sustainability/files/sustainability/the_art_of_facilitation.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311826240_The_art_of_facilitation

Altassian:https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/inclusive-meetings

BigTalker: https://blog.bigtalker.io/10-keys-to-leading-a-great-workshop-4b6bbdccf064

Based on my personal experience, my readings and some online resources, I have put together 3 blogs of some of the best-in-class practices for inclusive facilitation.

The Latin word facili is the origin of facilitation. Facili means is “easy” or “to make easy”. However, if you had to run a team meeting, a working session, a workshop of any type of group activities you would know that definitely there is nothing facili about it.

In here I will share with you some of the best practices that I have come across and/or tried so far. I have also added a bit of focus on inclusivity and what you can do to make sure that all your participants are actually contributing and being heard.

I believe that the below can be applicable, with variant degrees of importance, to most types of team activities. Although I might refer to these using various names, that does not mean that any of these practices is limited to any particular activity. However I must admit, I personally often forget to follow all of them hence I decided to write them down🤫.

In this first blog, I will cover the basics of facilitation, the contextual definition of inclusivity, and the bit of homework the facilitator has to do before their session.

Basics

Let’s start by looking at some of the basic requirements for facilitation.

A facilitator controls time and space, they have the responsibility and power (to a certain extent 😛) to set the time needed for the session and to choose the location. They also have the ability to assist the group in arriving at their turning point, simply by being a neutral observer.

A facilitator ought to be patient with members who are less knowledgeable with the matter at hand and affirmative of the team members and their ideas.

Being a facilitator means being fair, empathic, empowering and holding the balance. It requires confidence in oneself and in the team. They need to be ready to be vulnerable and comfortable with the “awkward silence”.

Inclusive facilitation

The focus here is on how to be a great facilitator, and from my perspective, you can’t be one unless if you are ensuring and maintaining inclusivity. Below is one effective approach to start paving the way to an inclusive session.

Set the agenda and share it beforehand.

We all know that a good facilitator prepares for their meeting/session/workshop beforehand. So wouldn’t it be only fair to give the participants the ability to do so as well? By setting up a clear agenda beforehand, you would give all the attendees the chance to prepare themselves before they come to the room. This is essential and empowering for all team members but more so for the shy and introverted ones. It will give them the chance to think and be ready beforehand which increases their ability to actually participate in the session.

💡 Try to write your agenda in the form of questions, this will prompt the attendees to think.

Who should, could and want to be there

You must have heard a lot of people complaining about “one too many” meetings. I believe that this is not because people are having lots of meetings or because they just don’t like having them, rather it is because they are having unnecessary ones. “Well that was a waste of time!” how many times have you heard someone uttering something like this after a meeting, I have certainly heard it a lot.

Think long and hard about who should be invited. Ultimately, you should be inviting only people who can contribute. Use the ‘require’ and ‘optional’ invitees options if your calendar tool offers such a feature.

💡Use your agenda invite not only to explain what the meeting is about but also to actually invite people to decline the invite if they think that they don’t have anything to contribute.

Length is a vital decision

Time can also make a session an “utter waste of time!” if done wrongly. Time should be taken seriously, and trust me it is not an easy business to balance time correctly. Of course it is more difficult if you are running a particular session for the first time, but even if you have done it before, the team’s dynamic, people’s personalities, time of the day, time of the year and even the weather could affect the smoothness and hence the length of your session.

Time limitation has proved to often be a positive push for better efficiency, so if managed properly a shorter session can be more productive and more efficient leaving you and the team with a good sense of productivity.

⚠️ Yes, time limitation is great but could also mean more pressure on those who are less comfortable expressing themselves.

In brief

To summarise, in this piece we covered a few things that you need to remember to take into account, to plan for and to apply before your session. We laid out some of the basic rules for inclusive facilitation and we focused on the run-up to the session, how to get your invite and agenda ready, how to decide on invitees and how to account for time.

In Part Two of this series of blogs, I will cover the very first few minutes of the session and the things needed to be in check before you dive in into what might some think as the important part of the session, the session itself. Stay tuned!

Resources:

Death by Meeting by P. Lencioni

Understanding Facilitation: Theory and Principle by Christine Hogan

https://www.mcgill.ca/sustainability/files/sustainability/the_art_of_facilitation.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311826240_The_art_of_facilitation

Altassian:https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/inclusive-meetings

BigTalker: https://blog.bigtalker.io/10-keys-to-leading-a-great-workshop-4b6bbdccf064