CASE STUDY. Design Process Through Experimental Learning

Aligning collaboration

HOW IT STARTED

I like workshops. Meetings tend to go off-track and have a way of focusing on the wrong problems, or worse—starting with the solutions. The design team, account managers and marketing managers were struggling to collaborate and it was a lot of friction between them. So I took the idea from a Ted Talk https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast?language=en

Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast

This has led me to designing many workshops for teams at The Adecco Group, including:

Yearly planning for global CMO groups
Project discovery sessions
Debriefs and retrospectives
Problem-solving sessions
Team-building exercises
Design sprints
Training

Marketing Operations team Trello: Objective-based board for our strategies and goals

Design process though experimental learning

Workshop to help train new team members on our design process through experiential learning and real-world problem solving

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SQUADS

I wanted to give more autonomy to my team, to inspire and enable them to do their best work. Influenced by Spotify's Agile + Autonomous way of working, I set up squads for our smaller team of 12. Each group tackled one area of need: UX, Collaboration, Content, and Video, We met each Wednesday for a quick stand-up, then worked on self-identified project(s), and ended the day with another check-in to share what was accomplished. We mixed in these Squad days with the regular Workshop Wednesdays, alternating as needed to make room for larger workshops.

Circles of Influence to focus the participants on where they can truly make an impact.

THE RESULTS

Both the Squads framework and Workshop Wednesday have been iterated on and expanded to larger teams.

The Squads idea was recently adopted by the CMO NA and launched globally as a way to connect completely separate teams, giving them an opportunity to learn from each other and share ideas.

Workshop Wednesday is now led by one of my direct reports, who has opened up the voting and Trello board to the entire Marketing department, bringing more transparency to the overall planning and selection process that goes into each workshop.