Money design team offsite
I was part of a 4 person leadership team who crafted a bespoke curriculum and two day agenda for a team of 30 designers. In pre-planning, we defined goals for the offsite, then designed and prototyped the activities to work out any kinks.
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1. Get to know each other
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2. Get to know ourselves
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3. Have fun
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Day 1: Get to know ourselves
I was excited to define, facilitate, and drive the "Personal Values" activity to help attendees get in touch with their intrinsically motivating factors. Years ago in a manager training course, I participated in a similar activity that, with some fine tuning, I thought would be perfect to adapt for our off site. First I prototyped an adapted version of the activity with my direct reports, then I was confident it would scale for a larger group. For the Personal Values module I created custom card decks to facilitate the activity and to serve as a fun souvenir for the attendees.
My Values mood board
Visual exploration / variants
The final iteration
Custom hand lettered stickers were used to seal each deck of cards
Each attendee was greeted with a welcome packet including their cards and worksheets on Day 1
Getting to know ourselves as designers
After getting in better touch with what motivates us personally, we moved on to self-assessing our design skills and superpowers. I designed the individual worksheets using a hand drawn style so that the documents wouldn’t feel too precious. I wanted the attendees to feel comfortable drawing on them, and making them their own.
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Day 2: Have fun
Like many designers I know, I’m a big fan of unstructured time as a way to refill my creative bucket. In pre-planning for Day 2, I advocated for some pure maker time with enough structure to create focus, but not so much that attendees might feel constrained. We ultimately ended up on this prompt: spend the morning making something to represent how we we feel or something we learned. This activity was a huge success, after three hours everyone was smiling, engaged, and chattering away. During the gallery walk, I was absolutely in awe of what was made, we’re so lucky to have such talent on our team!
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Designers share some laughs during our unstructured makers time
March 2020, blissfully ignorant of what the world was about to throw at us
Mission accomplished! We got to know each other, ourselves as designers, and had fun
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We got to know each other
I was surprised by the emotional intelligence and vulnerability demonstrated by the attendees in their willingness to share personal anecdotes, strengths, and opportunity areas broadly with the group. I can't help but take this as a nod to the ability of our leadership team to create the emotionally safe conditions for this to happen. |
We got to know ourselves as designers
One of the the most rewarding aspects was to see that at the end of two days, each attendee had a personal thesis to take back to their managers as a foundation for career and personal development focused conversations. |
We had fun
It was so nice to unplug from the stresses of our daily work to connect as a group and just enjoy each other as humans. |
Mario and I after dominating in a cornhole tournament
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