building collaborative culture

Creating through collaboration, or co-creating, is one of the best aspects of design for me. As designers, we are often in a role that lets us create safe participation spaces.

Perhaps because of my background in the cultural sector, or because of living in different countries, I am drawn to focusing on culture.

Culture is often invisible, and a slow material to work with, but it is the soil that supports all growth. Service design and facilitation offer great tools for advancing a stronger, healthier collaborative culture internally, within and across teams.

Of course, this is extra powerful when it helps align company’s goals and employee experience.

Lightening decision jams

I joined Lightspeed at the beginning of the pandemic, one of many new designers. We all had to adapt to the novelty of remote working, to processes that had not been set up for that scenario, and to a multi time-zone expanding team. People often complained about a lack of visibility and a lack of connection to each other. This had a negative impact both on work satisfaction and on the product itself - lack of connection reduced consistency.

Together with Victor Chibacu, a great Product Designer from another vertical, we decided to see what we could do to improve this situation. We organised two Lightening Decision Jams - a workshop format that has a good balance of open sharing, focused conversation and actionable insights.

(one APAC, one EMEA/NOAM).

Some initiatives withered, and very positive changes and initiatives had their seeds in these workshops

We had established a survey to have a baseline and check wether these initiatives were working.

What worked from there - Sharing channel - No

More frequent peer reviews and shows and tells

Clubhouse

Research Tools (Dovetail and Maze)

Re-structuring, team changes - culture takes a hit, and some spaces disappeared. People were figuring out this new landscape, a new way of coming together. We created a clubhouse. My role was setting up and coordinating our get togethers. Some were unstructured, we just wanted to have a space to come together with designers from other verticals. Some other were workshops around best practice topics. I facilitated the initial Retro and Planning, a session on collaborating with PMs and handy Facilitation Activities.

We also surveyed the team to have some metrics to measure posssible improvements, but the context changed so much over the following months that those metrics would not apply anymore.