Gamified Team Conversations
Facilitate discussions about team maturity, people's wants and needs, and team culture.
Face-to-face conversation
Joint conversation that stress tests joint needs and wants in engaging and transparent way
Humour assisted way of building Trust
Easily revealed data points speak for themselves without pointing fingers. Word cloud game splashes the color.
Authentic measure of talent retention
Psychologically safe measure of feelings about individual journeys and future sentiment
Joint buy-in into improvements
Reset social contract on the spot and together, as opposed to updates on the back of survey results.
Step 1 - Easy Conversation Triggers
Leverage fundamentals for your context:
- The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith)
- Four basic models of interpreting needs and wants
Step 2 - Conversation and Alignment
Leverage fundamentals for your context:
Create a culture of authentic, collective systems thinking. Go beyond Kudos and Town Halls. Joint conversation reveals multi-facet data points about what could be done differently across teams and business processes.
Part 1 : Pre-Event Quick Voting - Gather Conversation Triggers
What culture people want vs. reality
Introduction ~30 minutes
- Provide an introduction to the team about the Maturity Curve organizational behavior spectrum concepts
Tip
Encourage the team to avoid over-thinking these concepts; Practice shows that convergence of understanding is achieved through a conversation about initial votes
Hearts & Minds check-in
Introduction ~5-15 minutes
- Provide an introduction to the team about the Hearts and Minds concept
Quick Voting ~5 minutes
- Provide link to the team
- People post anonymous reflections about how they felt when joining the organization, how they feel today and what their sentiment is about the future
- (Optional) In a very safe and mature environment, individuals may choose to make their reflections revealed to others in the team (default setting is anonymous)
Tip
Hearts & Minds infographic provides unadulterated insights into talent retention.
How to Facilitate Conversation During the Event
Joint inspect reality
- Open the event with a review of the sentiment about what people said they want, and what is happening in reality
- Facilitate a discussion based on insights into motivations, reality and potentially conflicting needs
- One of possible outcomes of the conversation is an updated social contract or refreshed mutual accountability drive
- Radical transparency of perceptions about organizational behavior accelerates team maturity, ensure resiliency and strengthens talent retention
Play a Word Cloud game
- Avoid the mistake of stating what organizational culture is like based solely on small focus groups or surveys
- Play a real-time Word Cloud game at scale, right on the spot
- People post anonymously
- Neelix paints a picture real-time - facilitator can merge words
- Project the live Word Cloud on screen and encourage the unadulterated conversation
Play a Pictionary game
- Break-away groups should draw 4 good and bad habits (on paper or virtual medium) ~20 mins
- Reconvene - wider group tries to guess what was drawn
- Facilitate a humour assisted conversation
