Unorthodox Change Management
When an organization tasks you to design, measure and optimize a process in your first work experience, it can be daunting. Or, as I responded, “Fun!”.
We were working to enhance a development process that required animators, scripters, voice over artists and exceptional performance. The timeline was short and the resources were few. In short: an adventure.
We interviewed 7 animators and onboarded 5. We engaged with a short design thinking process to bring to surface our individual motivations. We followed this with a brief mapping of our primary customer with an aim to demystify them. To do this, we developed a Questions and Assumptions chart and proceeded to design our user research.
By now, it was evident that all these novel frameworks and tools were proving difficult to engage with in a brief amount of time. The next course of action as the novel scrum master? Add more tools and cognitive activities! The steroid failed us as renown hulks.
To resolve our hypertension, we held a weekly playback to identify our gaps. The new tools and frameworks, as impactful as they were, met resistance. They were unfamiliar and their impact unknown. Furthermore, the timelines ticked louder than our sticky notes and daily standups.
Change management can prove daunting where new processes, new teams and new tools align but it presents a rare opportunity: co-creation. This wonderful process increased our adaptability to new tools such as Notion, processes such as time auditing and design thinking activities.
The first activity was to align our communication by developing a progress page that was updateable every 6 hours. The first version of our co-creation activity included simple group interviews asking them what they would want the page to capture.
The second co-creation activity a week later involved developing a prototype from their daily feedback processes for challenges. This allowed the team to engage with a coaching session to learn the 5-whys insight derivation process. Adaptability of the prototype improved when I probed the team on what they would change on the page.
The third co-creation activity, a week later involved a 8 sprints of 5 minute sketches of what they would envision an automatic time-audit tool. I learned that the team is more innovative than they knew, this allowed them to appreciate their innate capacity to design for their needs. It also indicated the level of sociability within the team and unfounded the myth that introverts are not social people.
After a month of running co-creation and one-on-one coaching sessions, I have discovered:
- Sociability enhances co-creation activities
- Diverse teams create diverse innovation
- Co-creation increases ownership
- Background instrumental music disassociates team members from their environment
- The above point improves psychological safety
- Coaching highly sociable team members enhances dissemination within the team
- Celebrate ideas and innovations
- Reflect on co-creation activities to improve with each iteration
