Our team needed to codify our values.

Role: Instigator and workshop facilitator • I asked Leah Bradford to help refine the survey and co-facilitate the workshop

The process

1. Make a Proposal
2. Create the Survey
3. Facilitate the Workshop
4. Refine Our Values
5. Publish and Embed

Why create team values?

Our team needed to codify our values to give meaning to our successes and failures. We knew what behaviors make us successful, but we didn't have a shared language to challenge and encourage one another with.

Years before, I'd seen how team values provide an anchor to ground important conversation on.

Step 1

Make a Proposal

A highly structured approach would succeed where a passive approach had failed.

I approached our team lead with a proposal and recruited a fellow designer to help refine my approach and co-facilitate the workshop.

Why it would succeed

• It would be collaborative
  • Debating one value versus another is fertile ground for building rapport and helping designers refine the perspective from which they design on a day to day basis. In the end, published values only matter if they reflect the genuinely held beliefs of our team members.
• It would be lightweight
  • Submitting ideas anonymously leveled the field for our most reserved team members.
  • The whole process, from brainstorming, to discussion, to refinement, should not take more than a few hours for each team member
• It would be mandatory
  • People need skin in the game to discuss
  • Making participation mandatory ( in contrast to almost every other project/activity on our team) communicates that this is something that's consequential for every team member.

Step 3

Create the "Team Values" Survey

We needed a lot of diverse ideas. An anonymous google form was a great way to give teammates the time they needed to compose their thoughts.

Approach

• Clearly reiterate why we're doing all of this at the top of the form
• Provide guidelines for what makes an effective value statement in our context
• Require five value ideas
  • This was a (healthy) stretch for certain team members and a helpful constraint for more loquacious teammates
• Severely limit the character count for the value ideas
• Provide space for stray thoughts beside each value idea.
  • This relieves the stress of compacting a big idea into a few characters

Here's the survey. I apologize for any jankiness with the embedded form.

Here's the survey. I apologize for any jankiness with the embedded form.

Step 4

Facilitate the Workshop

I allotted a couple hours and booked a room far from our normal workspace. I printed all the value ideas the team had submitted and collected all of the supplies and snacks we'd need to keep everyone focused on task at hand.

An abbreviated outline

1. Break the ice with a rousing game of two truth and a lie. It ended up being far more rousing than anticipated.
2. Introduce the workshop
   1. Solicit lingering questions about why we're doing this.
   2. Share an outline of the workshop's schedule
   3. Define success: Values that are deeply resonate, avoid truisms, are unique to the our team's role, and support our corporate values.
3. Stick all of the printed value ideas on a wall, informally grouping similar ideas (without allowing anyone to advocate for any particular ideas).
4. Vote with sticky notes, reorganize by popularity, remove the ideas with the fewest votes, discuss remaining ideas, add any new ideas that come up.
   1. Repeat step six as many times as necessary to get down to five or less values
5. Closing ceremonies where we acknowledge the hard work that's been done and review the final values (or value clusters)

Collaboration!

Step 5

Refine Our Values