Building Our Team - Thinking

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

In the last article, you read about the Crisis we went through. After about a month I wrote this email to the team (It was something like this)

Dear Team,

I hope you are enjoying the long weekend. We recently went through a Crisis. It was a stressful situation for most of our team members. I really thank everyone who helped us to put it behind us. We have all our clients who supported us and we have in turn improved a few of the process.

It's an old saying that "necessity is the mother of invention". We went through a crisis situation and came out on the other side. We are planning to keep 2 days aside and we will call it Thinking Day.

We want you to list down between 15-20 ideas or features you wish you had in Probench when you were going through the crisis. You can also mention challenges, communication mishaps, common mistakes etc. But innovations will come on the solution side of the problem, so focus on creating value from the downside. Jot them down in a word document.

In order to give you time to think. We will kick off day one at 12 noon with a short meeting and answer any of your doubts, followed by letting you all go individually to think of 15-20 ideas. The next day we will all update a ticket with the individual document with their names on it at the same time at 12 noon and start a marathon meeting to go through each point and discuss the idea and concept.

Thus reflecting on the challenge we faced and what can be done to turn it around into profits.

-Vikram

We come up with 177 ideas, suggestions, challenges in one single day

This was in my perspective one of the most productive days we collectively had as a team. We discussed that all ideas did not come to us at once. It came when we took a stroll, took an afternoon nap, sat with a pen or a paper, early next morning and for couple of us in our dreams we were thinking too. :-)

This reminds me of the TedTalk by Jason Fried of Basecamp

Here are my 7 takeaway from our first Thinking Day:-

1. We can create a system that can help any team generate ideas and innovate with the challenges we commonly face.
2. There are different behavioural diversity within the team so we must give a platform or an environment so that each one can share the idea without feeling any judgement.
3. When we share discuss in terms of ideas there are correlation and two ideas convert into a completely new idea which can be implemented in few hours
4. The team always wants to contribute and participate in innovation and make their work easy to do, but sometimes they don't have the skills or medium on how to accomplish that.
5. Every one of us is capable of coming up with new ideas, you only have to give some time to think.
6. The lessons from a crisis can be only be learned after we put back the efforts on what to do about it.
7. I had never thought that the team will come up with so many ideas in about 6 hours. An average of 14.75 ideas per person. That's the initial request we had from the team

Share this article with your team if they are interested in new ideas and innovation. This could be one of the experiment to try.