IDEO’s Cultivating Creative Collaboration Course In Review
This year, Nimble.’s Design Director, Stephen Wright put his professional development stipend towards IDEO U’s Cultivating Creative Collaboration, a five-week online course designed to gain the skills and techniques needed to foster creative collaboration and unleash the potential of a team. Over the course of the five weeks, Stephen learned IDEO's methods for guiding teams through uncertainty and encouraging colleagues to forge ahead into new territory by intentionally designing for moments where ideas can be shared, built on and evaluated in a safe space.
A course recap by Stephen Wright
Mindsets: Curiosity, Vulnerability, Learning
It starts with understanding the ‘psychological safety’ of a room or organization. This was a term that I was unfamiliar with, however it’s something that we’ve all experienced at one point or another. It is characterized by a culture of speaking up—raising different points of view, seeking clarifying questions, asking for feedback, and admitting mistakes or mis-steps.
Depending on who is present in the room, their presence can have varying effects whether it is a CEO of an organization or key decision maker, someone that wants an immediate answer or resolve (‘premature converger’––you’ll learn about this later) or maybe someone that is completely set in their ways.
Addressing this and having an understanding of the room, while adopting these three key mindsets can help open doors, break down barriers and lead to a heightened collaborative environment.
Curiosity — Being able to look at the bigger picture by simply being curious, question your assumptions or biases, spark optimism and lean into challenges.
Vulnerability — Having the courage to name your weaknesses, admit past mistakes, when you don’t know the answer, and bringing your whole true self to work.
Learning — Being comfortable with experimentation, risk taking and resiliency in the face of failure.
Craft Team Agreements
Underlying every group’s interactions is a set of behavioral norms that create and maintain the team dynamic. When these agreements go unspoken, it can result in tension and a lost opportunity to define a better way of working together.
As a full team, we participated in an ‘Agreements Session’ where we gathered to gain a deeper understanding into our work preferences and how we can best support our differing work styles.
Prior to the meeting we each took a personality test, ‘CreativeTypes’. This provided a talking point and baseline prior to the Agreements Session to better understand our personal ‘creative type’ and learn from other types amongst our group.
Candids from our Team Agreements Charrette
Diving into the ‘Agreements Session’, we strategized around questions to help get to know each other on a deeper level––from personal work styles to preferred work environment. These were done on a visual scale to provide a range of where we landed. Each Nimbler. initialed where we felt we landed on the scale. These visual scales covered topics like personality (introvert/extrovert), presentation styles (on your toes/rehearsed), work preferences (silence/music on/podcasts) and (lights on/off). This enabled us to open the doors to conversation about how we best can support each other as a team and understand our work-styles.
One discovery — half of the team prefers to work with the lights off and the other half with them on. We were able to land on a studio agreement that the lights remain off until noon and then come on to revitalize the last half of the work day.
NOTE: This is an exercise that is intended to be revisited regularly (ie. when on-boarding new team members or proactively before large process changes) to operate smoothly as a team unit.
“Imagine your team as a country and the members its citizens. What behaviors define their citizenship, what can they expect of each other, and how can they hold each other accountable?”
Choreograph a Meeting
Sessions of creative collaboration need to be intentionally designed to bring together diverse perspectives in a way that breaks down barriers between people so the team can develop solutions that no single contributor could have envisioned alone. This session was incredibly helpful to understand the value of divergence (creating as many ideas as possible) and convergence (coming to team agreements on specific directions). Learning about these approaches was beneficial to explore ways that we could apply these techniques to our existing processes. We were able to explore these approaches through our visual identity development process.
We were able to diverge by verbally exploring different conceptual directions, general color options and utilize the process to think of as many as possible options. Then each designer on the team was able to take these discussed directions and run with it, personally diverging before we came back together to discuss our visual directions. Adding in the additional ‘all minds’ meeting, enabled us to have clear direction and be in a similar headspace before internally presenting our visual identity directions.
Harness Tensions
Tension can be uncomfortable, but it is a precious energy source if you can harness it productively.
A look into a few types of tensions:
Inherent –
These are tensions that don’t go away (unless things drastically change). Inherent tensions may be the root cause of emergent tensions that creep up in active collaboration.
Emergent –
There is a specific situation that is unfolding in front of you. Look at it objectively. What is causing this tension to emerge? Pause––and look at context clues before you act.
Missing Tension –
A lack of tension isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes tensions need to peak to push the team through group think or early consensus.
At the time, we were in a point where the team had reached a mental road block for creating directions. We tried and tried again but unfortunately no concepts were hitting the mark. This tension needed to rear it’s ugly head and we were able to address the issues by applying the concept of the ‘mood-meter’.
We drew out the project phases that we had experienced from kick-off to visual identity development, and each drew a graph of how we were feeling throughout the duration (and phases) of the project.
Much to my surprise, this simple exercise opened doors! Through discovery, we were able to collectively step back, analyze findings, and discuss where process might have gone awry. From there, we came back together with a refreshed lens and were able to discover alternative ways to approach our process with the understanding of our differing work styles, while keeping strategy and timeline top-of-mind.
Define Rituals
With each of the previously mentioned collaboration methods, there is opportunity to create rituals, ones that allow teams to unite and engage. Take initiative to step back and realize that every individual [on your team or project] has a unique story and set of experiences that, when harnessed effectively, can contribute to the bigger picture. Rituals help get everyone in the same headspace to produce stronger work, together.
Onward and lead.
Scenes from this year’s Nimble. Offline Retreat