How often do you review organisational or team strategy? Is it often enough for the pace of change affecting your organisation? Do you find it hard to get agreement or challenge entrenched views around the table? If your answers are, only when forced to, no, and yes, then you are not alone.
Outside of needing more knowledge of a subject before making a decision, then the main reason for this is often down to just a couple of factors; a) the day to day of running an organisation or department naturally pulls you into ‘the now’ and hampers your ability to carve out the time to step back as a team to consider the broader picture as a whole, and b) it is simply really hard getting teams of people to agree on direction.
This is where an external Design Thinking consultancy can help. Design Thinking itself is a process centred around empathy and team based development of ideas that are underpinned by clearly defined human centred needs, prototyping, testing and refinement. It is a now commonly used approach in many organisations for developing new Products and Services and ensuring they start from robust foundations and they are then properly stress tested before the big bucks start to come into play in rolling them out. But by stepping back from the macro process, we are able to realise that the approaches used for the facilitation of teams within this overall approach actually provide a sound method to solve many other business challenges.
In particular, a key part of facilitating the Design Thinking approach is about getting diverse groups of people together, breaking down the barriers to effective communication and freedom of expression (such as job title/silo/pigeon hole, hierarchy, priviledge or prejudice, experience and levels of introvertness) and then taking the group through a process together using deconstruction techniques, divergent ideation exercises, reframing exercises and convergent exercises that allow them to work things out as a team. This approach takes everyone on the journey and in turn leads to far greater unity, speed and shared advocacy for the outcomes. By applying this approach you ensure that everyone moves forward with shared understanding, a mutual appreciation of each others’ viewpoints and a team standpoint that is less biassed than what would reside in any one individual. Likewise, what might take months of side room chats and one to one lobbying gets brought together in one focussed programme designed to get results. In simple terms, it is perfectly suited to helping leadership teams to align and agree on strategy, and fast.
At Room 42, we often get asked to act as a catalyst and be the external commitment in the diaries of the senior team to simply make it happen. We then act as the specialists to break down barriers, bias and status quo before providing the expertise to facilitate you though the journey. Our job is not to tell you what you should do or what you should think, but instead it is far more important. It is to facilitate you in your timely agreement and the unified direction you need to stay focussed with the pace of change around you.
