Team Restructure

“Build the New Normal”

Three previously separate teams needed to come together to establish a new normal in the organisation’s bigger picture.

client

Iconic WA company with a wide portfolio

Group

30ish Data Professionals: analytics, visualisation, & governance

Duration

One Full Day

The objective was to connect this newly-amalgamated team’s daily work with the company’s bigger purpose, and build deliberate cohesion in how the group balanced working from home or the office in 2020 in Western Australia.

Approach & Format

Firstly, everyone knew each other. They just hadn’t all been in the same unit before. They also hadn’t really had the chance to appreciate each other out loud. We set the tone for the day by building our way around the Johari Window to reveal how everyone wanted to show up, and what they appreciated in each other.

Broadening from the individual, we then explored what the group sought in an ideal teammate, and what they had to offer a team. Those diverse perspectives made for well-rounded shared understandings, built into shared models with accompanying stories.

To get into the widest purpose of the day, we built to a question that lightly referenced the company’s mission, and how they work they do every day supports and furthers it. Database-facing work is and easy to get lost in the weeds in the day to day, and not “look up.” This drew everyone’s gaze a little bit skyward, and drew a line towards some bigger purpose with it. From that bigger purpose, we built together to create a strong shared understanding of how analytics, visualisation, and governance of data help the entire organisation do what it does.

This left us with a shared picture of their aspirations for team life, and a shared picture of their broader impact – a model representing culture, and a model representing purpose. Since the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it was worth taking a look at what they might encounter along the way. They were able to visualise all of those influencing forces in a landscape in that liminal space between culture and purpose, and be strategic in mobilising the supportive forces, and handling the forces that might present a challenge.

Highlights

That “liminal landscape” bridging two big shared understandings always yields some interesting revelations, especially as that diverse range of influencing forces begins to reveal how they impact each other as well as how they influence the main focus. In this case, one of the participants put forward the notion that one of their big inhibitors is the attention they receive from the media. Being a large, highly visible organisation that most people in the state interact with in some way, there’s going to be some noisy detractors that make for easy clicks if the media wants some ragebait.

Putting it into context close to the organisation’s broader purpose, neighbours with a model that revealed ways that clarity and transparency of data could be a powerful communication tool, it meant that media attention could be harnessed as a positive influence, and unearthed opportunities to connect and collaborate better with other parts of the business.