When I started as a senior marketing manager in Team Panda (yes, my team is called Panda!!!), I was so lucky to kick off my job with a “Team Designer Workshop” with the goal to set the groundwork for the future of a new successful and high-spirited Panda squad.

Not too long before I entered the marketing department in March, Team Panda consisted of only a few people. Since the company was successfully developing in the right direction, the department quickly grew from 5 to 11 people in just 4 months.
New team members always bring several benefits to a team’s productivity. However, when teams scale quickly, processes are often outdated and need to be redesigned and in a second step, introduced to the new team members aka “pandas”. For this reason, my team decided to kick off our next “phase” with a workshop to design solutions for the challenge: ”How to become a strong, self-organized team?”

Post-its & Professional support

From my previous experience as a workshop designer & facilitator, I know how important it is to have such workshops run by professionals. This is why we got help from Jens Otto Lange, a partner of #PoDojo, a Berlin-based agile network of coaches that have worked with many smaller and bigger companies to help them work more agile & innovative. In two days we used about 3 gazillion post-its and laid the groundwork for the future of Team Panda.

I would like to share three of the many methodologies that helped us grow together as a team, get to know each other, and set up reliable processes within the panda universe.

1. Speedboat: Analyse the problem in a playful way

In order to find out what holds us back as a team we used the Speedboat technique, which is a fun and visual exercise to determine the anchors which slow down the speedboat. I experienced that it is especially useful to kick off a workshop with a playful exercise, where participants can express their doubts and criticism. However, take care of how you frame the game — it is not about starting a complaint session, but rather to collect information on potential improvements and set ambitions.

How it works:

• On a flipchart draw a picture of a speed boat on the water.
• Write a specific question next to the boat, for example: ‘What holds us back as a team?’ / ‘What are features you don’t like about our product?
• The team takes a few minutes to individually write down their ‘pain points’ on post-its
• Once the participants are finished, the notes are stuck as anchors to the board/ flipchart. The deeper the anchor the more severe the complaint or criticism is.
• When participants finished posting their anchors, they are reviewed & discussed by the group in order to understand what changes should be considered and tackled within the team.
• For more detailed info about the Speed boat exercise check out Gamestorming and Innovation Games.

2. Market of skills: get to know each other’s skills and use them!

Since more than half of the team members were pretty new, we didn’t really know each other — neither personally nor professionally — so we basically started from scratch. The market of skills was one of my favorite exercises from the workshop. It helped us to grow closer as well as it was a lot of fun! This game is inspired by the blog post of Anders Laestadius from the Swedish consultancy Crisp, and further designed to match with all kind of team setups.

How it works:

• Imagine your team is on a market (like a nice street food market) and every person has their own market stand. But instead of food they sell their strengths & abilities.
• Each team member gets a sheet of paper where he/she can prepare his/her counter within 15 minutes.
• On top of the sheet (aka counter) they should write/draw/stick their ‘main skills’: skills they bring to the team to succeed with the mission. Below the counter, they should present their ‘hidden skills’: capabilities that might be out of focus, yet interesting to know. The third section are ‘skills they would like to buy’ — so strengths they would like to enhance and build up.
• As soon as everybody finishes the design of their creative market stand, each person gets 2 minutes of attention from everyone to ‘sell’ their skills and present what skills he/she would like to acquire.
• After each skill presentation, the team members can ask questions and can ‘buy’ skills from other team members by putting a post-it on it that says ‘I buy it’.
• After the exercise, team members should get together and teach their skills to people that ‘bought’ them.

Little hint

Encourage your colleagues by adding skills that they haven’t mentioned themselves — e.g. ‘I think you have really good research skills, it’s definitely a strength I want to add to your counter’. Like that, I learn a lot about the others, but also how others see me and my skills in the environment of the team.

3. Delegation poker: define who does what and how to collaborate!

This exercise helps to understand every team member’s collaboration attitude and their opinion on certain tasks and processes.

How it works:

• First, we collectively defined what key activities we have in our Team Panda as for example events, content marketing, employer branding, brand guidance etc. We defined an ‘owner’ (accountable person) for each key activity and listed on sticky notes the major tasks that come along with it.
• Every team member received a set of delegation poker cards, which show 7 different ways of delegation/ working together, e.g. Is the activity something I can decide on my own? Am I told what to do? Do we decide together?
• As a next step, we went through the single key activities and asked questions like ‘what is the delegation process in branding (key activity) between the head of brand and the involved team members?’
• Every team member gets some time to think about which collaboration style they would pick and everybody reveals their chosen delegation poker card to the group at the same time. This can be a real exciting moment and shows how (un)aligned the team thinks & acts ;)
• The card owner with the lowest and highest number elaborates why they picked the card, which should nurture a team-wide discussion to align and decide together which collaboration style they want to adopt in this context.

Little Hint
Focus on a maximum of 7 key activities. If you are not aware of them summarize all activities you do on sticky notes. Then, cluster the notes and assign headlines to some of them before you start the delegation poker exercise.
To check results and opinions , do a second round of delegation poker after discussing the lowest and highest numbers.

To learn more or to download your set of cards, check the article of Jurgen Appelo, the creator of the delegation poker tool.

Workshop Achievements

The major learning for the team and myself was that having workshops that focus primarily on the team’s collaboration & well-being instead of content only, are key to the health of a team and should be done at least once a year or during important times of change. It helped us to define a frame that supports our self-organization by providing helpful guidelines. Another great outcome was clarifying our purpose, aligning all team members with each other and the organization as well as framing the context and constraints we are operating in. It strengthened our common understanding and was a great starting point for an exciting future.

More about #PoDojo:
The #PoDojo stands for an innovation learning culture that is creative, engaging and practical and brings Agile, Lean and Design Frameworks to the most advanced technology companies in Berlin and across Europe. Since early 1990’s #PoDojo built up a network of experts in agile coaching, product innovation and strategy, product design and development, product leadership and agile transformation.

Exercises to become a strong team was originally published in Monster Culture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Business Model Canvas represents a valuable framework which is used by many small and big organizations all over the globe. With its flexible yet simple application, it has helped many companies to improve existing businesses, create new ones, and develop better strategies for the future.

When we work with clients, whether it is building up on and developing existing ideas, or completely innovating a business model, the canvas is one of the most used tools here at LHBS. Interestingly enough, despite most managers being aware of the canvas and with the vast amount of information about business modeling online — many organizations still struggle and encounter difficulties in applying the Business Model Canvas to their company.

In order to give a simpler framework to the process, I wanted to explain the most important aspects about the what, the how and the why of business modeling. If you are more ‘the visual type’ of person, you can also click through the Slideshare presentation, giving you a brief overview of all essentials.

THE WHAT

A business model is a holistic and systematic approach to define, create and analyse a business or idea.

In general, there are several ways of defining your business. However, the Business Model Canvas offers one of the most holistic approaches that creates a system out of the most essential aspects of your business and shows the interdependency and relevance of each building block. A business model helps you to answer the most important questions about your business (e.g. Who is the customer? What is the value? How does it make money? Who and what does it need for realization? etc.)

In general, there are different forms and frameworks for business models. I personally find the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder, the most useful one. Its simple design empowers businesses and entrepreneurs to create, visualize and test business ideas without being too complex.
It consists of 9 building blocks, divided into 2 sides. On the right side, you can find all important aspects related to the customer, displaying the value offered to the target group. Whereas on the left-side the back-end is being defined, showing all efforts how to reach the customer and deliver the value. Both sides mirror and complement each other to create an interconnected system out of all building blocks.

THE HOW

In general, a business model assists throughout the entire phase — from the very early stage of idea generation, up to the last part including the execution and roll out.

1. Define: helps to define & assess the current business model or idea
2. Discover: helps you to identify ‘white spaces’ for growth & innovation opportunities
3. Develop: helps you to generate valuable, new ideas & business models
4. Deliver: helps you to test developed ideas & business models

Being such a versatile tool, the business model can be used on various levels of your organization — from an overall industry model to a single company, as well business units or even single products or services.
Most often entrepreneurs use the canvas to develop an entirely new business or to create a new product/service within the existing business model.

However, a business model is also a management tool that serves as a valuable tactical layer and intermediary between the overall strategy and the hands-on business process. With the help of the business model, the highly aggregated and often abstract information of a strategy can be translated into a more tactical level. It also works vice-versa, converting the operational information of the business level to a useful basis for strategic guidelines. Furthermore, it can assist the organization in decision making and managing change, planning as well as implementation.

With so many usage advantages, it is easy to see why the business model is an easy yet highly appreciated tool that gives a systematic overview of the most important aspects of the business or an idea. It has a huge value when it comes to communicating an idea or the core of a business to stakeholders. Additionally, it has proven to be especially helpful not only to transform key elements of the business, but also to invent completely new ways of doing business.

THE WHY

Business Model has various valuable uses cases, here are the ones that I found most interesting.

A business model helps you to define your idea and align all stakeholders.

The Business Model Canvas is an easy tool to define the key parameters of your business idea. Once it is filled out, it represents a practical way to communicate most important information to your stakeholders and also serves well to align the goals with your team members.
Since all the core aspects of a business can be seen on one page, it also helps people to see the big picture of a business idea — which is a crucial basis for jumpstarting the innovation process and further development.

A Business Model helps you to create the right ideas.

My experience working with business modeling has shown me that many people use a business plan to describe their potential idea. Although a business plan is a great tool to understand the details of an idea it unfortunately, limits the general overview, without giving the reader the key business aspects — which leads to the idea being judged upon these single or isolated aspects. The bigger picture, and more importantly, the connection between all the core aspects, seems to be lacking.

“It’s said that no business plan survives its first contact with customers. As soon as it’s out there, the first thing you want to do is burn it, and you feel like you wasted all this time.” Osterwalder

In my opinion, the strongest advantage of the business model is that it allows to put the business idea into a holistic system that is interconnected, at the same time showing the interdependencies between the core parameters at one view. The right side represents the customer side and how to sustain the value & customer (value caption) and the left side shows how the value is created (value creation) with all the efficiency & logic behind.
All of this allows the business ideas to be rapidly tested and examined by checking if all of the boxes work in harmony and support each other.

A Business Model helps you to innovate.

In a highly fluctuant and constantly evolving world CEO’s see innovation as the most important aspect for their business in order to survive and grow in a complex environment.

Interestingly enough, the approach towards innovation has certainly evolved over the last decades. Increasingly, organizations realized that the huge potential of innovation goes beyond merely improving and adapting new features and functions of products. Innovation is considered by far more powerful when developing and disrupting the system around the product (the production, the promotion, the provided service, the finances etc.).

As the Global IBM CEO Study revealed, ‘business model innovators’ outperform traditional innovators (product, service, market, operations innovations) by showing a 5 times higher growth.

Abusiness model helps you to define & assess the current business model in order to identify ‘white spaces’ for growth and innovation opportunities. By using the Business Model Canvas as an idea template, new ideas can be easily tested and alternative business models rapidly prototyped. So, go ahead and create exciting new products and business models — just do not forget to team up and check the ideas with your target audience and stakeholders before the roll out.

This article was first published at: http://www.lhbs.com/news/2015/11/17/a-practical-guide-to-business-modelling and co-created with Stefan Erschwendner.

A Practical Guide to Business Modeling was originally published in Frontira | Strategy & Implementation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.