My role: co-lead design strategist and workshop design/ facilitation
I joined this project at the start of phase II. At that point, it was still an ambiguous challenge to tackle. We continued synthesizing academic research to develop a “framework for thriving” and understanding what the FoW meant for ONR. We designed and facilitated a Change Design workshop with 50+ employees at ONR to guide them in developing FoW prototypes to test out in the workplace.
Here is the overall flow of the week-long virtual workshop.
We strived to design a workshop with activities that helped participants internalize the principles of organizational change design while also guiding them in mapping out a prototype of a change initiative to implement at the organization.
The outputs of each activity in the workshop served as a piece of the puzzle culminating in a comprehensive “Change Roadmap”.
Designing the workshop with these scaffolding elements allowed the participants to internalize and process bite-size pieces of the complex subject of organizational change.
This was a project that did not turn out as planned. We took big pivots as a team and adjusted to meet the needs of the client. After the workshop, we structured teams to actually test out the prototypes they developed. However, we quickly realized that the “volun-told” employees lacked energy, time, and motivation to pursue these prototypes in the workplace. Additionally, we also learned a lot of employees were already working on their own change initiatives to advance ONR on their own time. We shifted to harness this existing energy and connect these silos instead.
We also realized that ONR needed to focus more on the NoW (Now of Work) before focusing on the FoW. So we pivoted the prototypes and turned them into broader strategic focus areas for a FoW roadmap, and built a digital community on the Microsoft Teams platform with self guided information on: synthesized insights, change design principles, and what it means to thrive in the workplace.
We developed several artifacts for ONR as a final deliverable including:
Creating a digital FoW platform on Sharepoint/ MS Teams platform for employees to disband silos and engage with each other, have a dialogue about the FoW, and learn more about change design in their organization
Developing a roadmap for change to inform ONR’s future structure for tasking and performance reviews
A thriving framework for defining what a thriving state means - at the individual and organizational level
Change design artifacts to facilitate self-guided learning on how to affect change in an organization through sound principles
And probably the most important deliverable we gave them was just having conversations with the staff and leadership. Employees needed an outlet to air their grievances and feel heard by leadership. Leadership needed a way to connect with staff experiences, to gain insight into their needs and pain-points, and to realize and harness the potential currently residing in siloed pockets at ONR.
We made a ritual of taking a picture at the end of our meetings. It sort of serves as our collective journey map throughout the project.
