It’s always great to celebrate the completion of a great programme. The best is when we are not just concluding a learning experience for the team but being able to test out new theories and processes ourselves along the way!
Now I will be honest. Most of the time I am not the most creative person in the room. I might have been able to make that claim in some past careers, but at Interactive Workshops I am constantly astounded by the creativity and innovation of the team I am surrounded by, and the participants we get to work with. (One of us has to be the grounded one, right?) So it has been a real pleasure to work with our team on a truly experimental way of delivering results.
A new organisation
It’s always fun to get to know new people and this time it was in the Tech Start-up world. Each room we find ourselves working in has different dynamics, structures, cultures and expertise. This keep us on our toes every time.
A new group of people
On this occasion, we collaborated with experienced and engaging leaders at the forefront of their fast-growing business. Plenty of pressure. Lots of responsibility. Not much structure or hierarchy. Quite a bit of freedom. Varying levels of experience. Challenges, opportunities and frustrations which are not all that different from the ones we face in our own growing teams, despite this organisation being a few years and a couple of hundred people down the road.
The truly new part was that we stole the client’s delivery model.
One of the big tech trends is the service, subscription-based model. So we thought, why not have a subscription-based learning provision? On day one we arrived with a skeleton outline, some topics that might be useful and some format options. Plus a lot of questions.
One day or half? Your place or ours? How much time do you have, and how much of us do you want?
Is this topic relevant? If so, why? What questions do you have around that? What are the challenges you face? How do we work together over six months to deliver the best value for you?
We made a plan and started with month one. Each month we refined, refreshed and tweaked the plan to suit the changing needs of the group, as well as our growing knowledge of how they worked. We stopped after each month to check the course we were navigating was the best possible route.
The outcome has been a great journey. We covered many topics that I could have guessed we’d include, and a lot more that I wouldn’t. We have looked at goals, innovation, agile, and more. We developed some great internal projects. Disputed the results of a raft building contest (heatedly) and developed some exciting milk-related insights to shape the future of a great company. The team presented to their company’s annual conference. They even wrote a book. Spoiler: milk is a feature.
I have learned a lot. For a not-so-creative person like me, processes are great. Creative processes might just be the way forward…