Rev up with Design Factory Melbourne #11

Rev Up with DFM is a series of short posts to get your day started. Delivered in bite-sized chunks, this series gives you a taste of a wide range of activities, that you can try out to enhance your own workflow or share them with your team. Each week, we will share an activity varying in four different themes; Gain Focus, Boost Energy, Find Inspiration and Make Connections.

This week’s theme: Gain focus 

Welcome back to Rev up with DFM. As the winter break or summer holidays are wrapping up, many of us are getting ready for the second half of the year, which often is presented by opportunities, like starting new projects, kicking off the semester, or tackling new challenges.

Especially when starting something new, it is beneficial to take a moment to focus on what we are looking to achieve and how we feel towards a challenge, task or project ahead. This week we share a simple activity that helps you to acknowledge your thoughts and emotions, create empathy and clarity in a team and hopefully make you and your team better prepared for collaboration. Introducing the Hopes, Fears and Expectations exercise, a simple ‘checking in’ activity that we at DFM like to use to kick-off workshops, lectures, projects or other collaboration sessions.

Before explaining the exercise, let’s have a look at why it is important to be able to recognise, connect with and focus on your emotions. 

Expressing emotions or labelling them might not always come naturally to us in a work environment. However, the ability to recognise and perceive your own and co-workers’ emotions, i.e. emotional intelligence, is important for us all, and a key skill for effective leadership (Goleman, 2004; Ovans, 2015). Writing down emotions is an effective way to process them and it is found to be very beneficial for handling particularly difficult emotions or feelings (David, 2016a). Furthermore, writing down our thoughts and emotions can help us to gain perspective, get out of our head, thus creating opportunities to see the emotions in a new light to focus and act on them.

“Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences.” Psychologist Jonathan M. Adler (in Rodriguez, 2013) 

Naming and recognising our emotions helps us to rationalise our decision-making, problem-solving and approach to collaboration, as we become more informed about what might drive our behaviour and actions. Thus, taking a moment to check-in and focus on how you are feeling towards a session, an activity or a task ahead helps you shift your mindset from one task or moment to another, which can be especially useful when collaborating with others. Sharing thoughts and expectations builds empathy in a team, aids in clarifying a shared direction or motivation towards a task or challenge ahead. Furthermore, it helps to reduce assumptions, which are the danger zone prone to misunderstandings, misguided solutions or conflicts. 

“...naming our emotions [...] is an important first step in dealing with them effectively. But it’s harder than it sounds; many of us struggle to identify what exactly we are feeling, and often times the most obvious label isn’t actually the most accurate.” (David, 2016b)

You might remember how in our previous Rev up with DFM post we talked about curiosity, and how important it is to practice curiosity more consciously, to break away from simply assuming and to unveil new avenues of thinking and problem-solving. The conscious activity of checking in with your thoughts and emotions is also a way to practice curiosity, and also a great way to be more curious of others. 

“We can’t change what we don’t notice, so the first step is becoming more aware of what we’re feeling at any given moment. That means cultivating the capacity to observe our emotions, rather than being run by them.” (Schwartz & Pines, 2020)

Hopes, Fears and Expectations + Actions - How to do it?

The activity itself is a very simple checking in exercise, which can be done just in a matter of minutes. You can do this activity alone, with your team or for others ahead of any meeting or session you are planning to run. You might start your day by answering these prompts to yourself, or use them in a particular context and frame a question so that it supports what you are currently working on or trying to achieve. In team settings, we recommend taking the time to share and making sure everyone feels comfortable and safe sharing their thoughts. This helps to build trust within the team and brings everyone on the same page faster, clearing potential assumptions and misunderstandings away at the start.

The activity Hopes, Fears and Expectations gives everyone an opportunity to share what they hope, what they fear and what they expect. The aim is not to solve, fix or act on these emotions and thoughts immediately. Instead, the value lies in acknowledging them, providing everyone with an opportunity to reflect and share to gain greater insight into the team dynamics and individuals’ state of mind. 

For the best outcome, we recommend you write your answers down. Writing down makes your reflection more grounded, gives you the opportunity to come back to your thoughts, to share them with others if desired, or synthesise to find similarities in the team’s thoughts to guide future work.

1. Make sure you have a few minutes of uninterrupted time. Think of a context which you want to focus on. 
2. Then reflect on your hopes, fears and expectations towards a prompting statement and direction you have set for yourself or for the team. This could be for example: 

Take a moment to think about your Hopes, Fears and Expectations ...

• … regarding the meeting/session ahead.
• … towards a challenge you are facing.
• … related to a project you are starting. 
• … about the semester/second half of the year ahead.

Hopes can include things you’d like to see progressing, something you look forward to or something you wish to happen or would like to see. Fears can be attitudes, behaviours or other factors that are blockers, obstacles, challenges or barriers that you identify within yourself, in your team or in your surroundings. Expectations are things you envision to change, achieve, happen or see as an outcome.

Stating Hopes, Fears and Expectations does not only ensure you are more aware of your own emotions, but also gives opportunities for action. Thus, the fourth element that can be included, if suitable in the context, is actions. Actions can include anything that you can do to advance something. Especially when solving complex problems or feeling overwhelmed, we might not know where or how to start. It is always good to think about the smallest action, smallest step, that you have influence over and can do right away.

This exercise Hopes, Fears and Expectations can be used in various different situations to gain focus and give yourself a moment to recognise how you are feeling, before jumping into action. The role of these prompting questions and sentence starters is for you to gain perspective, set goals and also create clarity within your team or working group. 

Recognising emotions is a vital first step, and combined with the ability to know how to learn and use them through actions is setting you, and or a team, up for success. When you have been able to share the hopes, fears and expectations, you are more equipped to work towards ensuring the hopes are realised, fears are not actualised and expectations are met or better aligned.

We encourage you to give this simple activity a go and try it out in different settings. After trying it out, take some time to reflect how it felt, worked and what you learned. We’d love to also hear how you go, so please don’t hesitate to share your experiences. 

Stay tuned for the next Rev up with DFM next week!

References

David, S. (2016a). You Can Write Your Way Out of an Emotional Funk. Here’s How. The Cut. Accessed 31.7.2020

David, S. (2016b). 3 Ways to Better Understand Your Emotions, Harvard Business Review. Accessed 31.7.2020.

Goleman, D. (2004). What makes a leader?. Harvard business review, 82(1), 82-91.

Ovans, A. (2015). How emotional intelligence became a key leadership skill. Harvard Business Review. Accessed 31.7.2020.

Rodriguez, T. (2013). Taking the Bad with the Good. Scientific American Mind, 24(2), 26-27.

Schwartz, T. & Pines, E. (2020). Coping with fatigue, fear and panic during a crisis. Harvard Business Review. Accessed 31.7.2020.