I was in a very privileged position yesterday to run a couple of experiments with colleagues exploring some ideas that have been percolating out of my #100coffees work this year. Here’s what happened…
The framing of this work is that if you have gone to the time and expense of bringing people together in person, you need to do things that couldn’t be done on a Zoom call because, otherwise, what’s the point?
The group represented the leadership and coordination groups from across teams at clients being run out of our London office. In Equal Experts’ parlance, these are Engagement Alignment Teams.
We want these groups to act as a focal point for improving the experience our clients and customers have in working with us and also link across engagements so that we are sharing good practices so that our clients get the benefit of more of the sum of our complete experience. It can be hard because immediate client needs often (rightly) take precedence.
I wanted to explore how we could build that cross-engagement network on the day, but also some of the challenges that are undoubtedly being felt with both increased hybrid and global working patterns.
The first session was called “Things in common”. Rather grandly (pretentiously? Maybe…) I suggested to the group of around 35 people that we would, through the medium of conversation, create art. It felt more interesting than talking about networking which I find still has such pejorative connotations for so many.
The exercise ran in four cycles: people would find a pair, have a six-minute conversation to discover three non-work things they had in common, and then a couple of minutes to document the three things on a web form.
In the first round, I asked people to find someone they didn’t work with directly, the second someone they did, the third someone they didn’t know and finally someone they did. It was a rough rule of thumb to get people circulating rather than a set of rigid rules.
The only hard rule was that in each set of the things in common, neither party could use something they had used before. This made each round a little bit progressively harder.
There was a bit of time for reflection at the end, particularly noting how the (mostly) trivial things we’d identified may be the sorts of things we know less about in others at work these days with less time and space for that most valuable of things, small talk. Without knowing something of the person, it’s much harder to build trust. In the hybrid world, you need to get more intentional in digging out such information (but without getting into creepy sales tactics territory). From those conversations, I also know that more people now know one another.
The second exercise was in the graveyard slot around 2.30 when everyone tends to flag. I got people to pair up and then go for a walk and a conversation for 45 minutes. I also pointed people at the remarkable resource I’ve recently been exposed to, Mark Winn’s Who Cards, which are an excellent set of conversation prompts.
In #100coffees I’ve frequently seen how much the act of going for a coffee without an agenda is, for so many, an act of corporate insurrection. For all of the calls back to the office for face time, so many people find the very idea of actually spending quality time giving undivided attention to another almost unimaginable when there are important things like spreadsheets to be done.
Sending a few dozen people off to have coffee felt rebellious, even in an organisation as progressive as Equal Experts. The Protestant Work Ethic has a lot to answer for.
I’ll wait until next week to solicit structured feedback from participants. Most seemed to respond well to the exercises, but it will be more interesting to see how they reflect with a weekend of space. And as for the art? I’m ordering that up for the office today…
mmitII 