00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:49: A common complaint
00:01:55: A coach-yourself question
00:03:06: Some helpful principles…
00:04:05: … 1: add thinking time into your work
00:04:36: … 2: it doesn’t need to be led by the most senior person
00:05:35: … 3: it doesn’t need to involve everyone every time
00:09:39: A matrix of ideas…
00:11:16: … 1: worry lists
00:17:26: … 2: what’s ‘knot’ working
00:23:32: … 3: borrowed brilliance
00:30:55: … 4: Crazy 8s
00:36:17: Final thoughts
Sarah Ellis: Hi, I’m Sarah.
Helen Tupper: And I’m Helen.
Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. Each week, we talk about a different topic to do with work, and share some ideas and actions so that we can all navigate our Squiggly Careers with that bit more confidence and control.
Helen Tupper: And if you don’t already know, every one of our episodes comes with a PodSheet. So, everything we’re going to talk about today is going to be summarised. It is definitely worth you getting the PodSheet today, because we’re going to go through a matrix, and I always think there is only so far you can do a matrix over audio. So, have a look at our website, amazingif.com, so you can get all that information. And you can also sign up for Squiggly Careers in Action there, which is our weekly newsletter, where we pull all of our ideas and tools and squiggly support together for you.
Sarah Ellis: So, today we’re talking about how to help teams think better together. And often, I think one of the common complaints, if that’s the right word, but I think we all do complain about it a bit, is not having enough time to think. We don’t talk to anyone who’s like, “Do you know what, I’ve just got so much time to think”.
Helen Tupper: Infuriating!
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, “If anything, I need less time to think!” So, I think it’s something that we all feel like we’d like more of, but we often see it through the lens of ‘I’, “How do ‘I’ have more time to think?” And yet, we spend most of our time working in teams. So, a slightly different question is, “How do we have more time to think together?” And it sort of makes sense, because when you think with someone else, you’ve got that thinking partnership. So, your thinking will always be better because you’re involving other people. Even when you do some of the thinking by yourself first, there’s still a point where you need to start sharing. And actually, I think most teams would reflect on the same challenge that we have as individuals is, “Well, I don’t get enough time to think by myself, but I certainly don’t get any time to think with my team, because we’re all so busy, the demands of the day-to-day get in the way”.
Helen Tupper: A nice coach yourself question, I think, like, “Who is your thinking partner?” I mean, obviously you.
Sarah Ellis: It’s not a very useful for me because I’m just like, “And it’s you!”
Helen Tupper: Not the best one for us, but maybe for other people like, “Who are your thinking partners?” maybe.
Sarah Ellis: I have other ones though, you’re not exclusive.
Helen Tupper: Shall we talk about that? I mean, prioritise your thinking partners.
Sarah Ellis: What, now? Now is the time to break up!
Helen Tupper: Coach-yourself question is, “Who are your thinking partners?” and then the action is to prioritise your thinking partners! Great. Let’s not do that now. But also, the reason why we’re talking about this today, I guess the idea for the episode came from a conversation that we were having with a community that we’ve got, called Lead, Learn, Connect, which is all the companies that we work with. And we were talking about how to drive performance, an interesting, evidence-based review that’s been done by the CIPD on the factors that are most likely to drive team performance. And team thinking together is one of the highest contributing factors to team performance. So, I think not only does this feel a bit better, I think it’s nice to spend time thinking together, to get away from the doing and into the thinking, but also teams perform better together when this happens as well.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, there’s a good payoff, I think, for getting this right. We were reflecting on some of the principles that might be helpful to consider if you’re working out, “Well, what does this look like for me in the team that I’m in?” Because I think what this can’t be is, you know you often see those examples where people are like, “As a team, we’re going to take a week away to the countryside and go for these hikes”.
Helen Tupper: It sounds nice.
Sarah Ellis: It does sound quite nice, doesn’t it? And I think very occasionally, some people get the chance to do that, but most of us don’t.
Helen Tupper: I think some people are like super-senior people, like they’ve gone on a retreat, you know. Sounds nice.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and that’s great. Or you hear, it’s the classic example I always think of, is Bill Gates where he talks about, “Oh I have the two weeks of reading weeks”. And again, I’m like, “Oh, obviously I’d love that”, albeit I do read all of the time. But I just think if you are waiting for the perfect moment to think, that moment will never come your way. And so, principle one is, we’ve got to add thinking time into how we already work, not see it as like an extra or an add-on. I think your starting point has got to be, “When are we already spending time together? How do we increase how much of that time is spent on thinking, and maybe the quality of that thinking?” So, let’s not save thinking time for certain moments, which are often very occasional and ad hoc. I think it’s a waste, it’s a waste of everybody’s brainpower. So, that’s principle one.
Principle two is, thinking doesn’t need to be led by the most senior person. And often, I think that can happen a bit by default. We expect the most senior person to take the lead. Anyone can initiate this, anyone can facilitate it, anyone can suggest it. And actually, I think some of the ideas we’re going to talk about today are just very universal. It’s not about, “I am in charge of this team, so therefore I’m in charge of the thinking”. And occasionally, I wonder if we’re all a bit guilty of this from time to time, you outsource thinking to people or departments, like you outsource thinking to your leader, because you’re like, “Well, that’s sort of what they’re paid for”. Or you outsource thinking to the strategy people, because you’re like, “Well, surely they’re just really good at that”. Whereas again, I think that’s a bit almost like ladderlike thinking. Like, occasional thinking is quite ladderlike, you know, the big retreats. That it’s only done by certain people or certain roles or teams, that’s quite ladderlike thinking.
Then, the last thing, which I think sometimes takes a bit of confidence, is team thinking doesn’t need to involve everyone every time. And this can feel quite hard, because you obviously want to be inclusive, but not everyone can get involved, and not everyone needs to get involved all of the time. So, I think it’s also, how do you set this up so it can be for everyone, but it doesn’t need to be everyone all of the time? And I think you do need quite a high-trust team for that to happen. Because imagine if in Amazing If, for example, I spotted that you were doing some thinking thing with a couple of people in our team, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t get invited to that”. And you can imagine being like, “Oh, is that because they don’t appreciate my perspective? Is that because they think Helen’s so much more useful than I am?” You can imagine the spiral of self-doubt that that can create. And so, it’s almost pausing for principles. I think if, as a team, you talked about these three things, we’re going to add it in, it’s for everyone, but it doesn’t need to involve everyone all of the time, that’s our kind of mantra for creating team thinking time. Then everyone just relaxes into it, and you’re like, “Okay, great. That’s what we’ve decided to do together”.
You might have other principles, you might want to change some of the ones that we’ve talked about. But I think just pausing enough to have those principles will probably make all of the difference to then how effective that team’s thinking time is. And you don’t end up with unintended consequences of things you have done with very positive intent, but that can actually have quite a negative impact, like leaving someone out of thinking time, or experimenting with something that people are like, “Oh, actually, this has just made me feel like I’m not very good at thinking”. I think there’s a few watch-outs around if you’re going to do this, like involving everyone in that process, maybe even use the word ‘experimenting’, “We’re going to experiment with some ways to think together as a team more often, because we want to perform better, we want to generate better ideas”.
Helen Tupper: I suppose either side of the thinking, it is worth signalling that you’re going to do it, so, “Sarah, I’m going to do a borrowed-brilliance activity”, which is one of the exercises I’m going to talk about in a minute, “with a couple of people in the team, because we need a bit of fresh thinking on this area”. So, I’ve signalled that it’s happening, in which case Sarah might just nod along, or might then say, “Oh, I’d love to get involved in that”. Then, I wonder at the end, you have the sharing, which is, “Oh, we did a bit of borrowed brilliance last week, got some really good ideas. They may or may not be relevant to you, but we’ve shared them on [for us, it’d be] a Teams channel”, and you might have like Borrowed Brilliance Outputs, or something like that. Because I don’t think there’s necessarily a need for some of the things that we’re going to share to be completely private. I think the team can decide that together, but certain activities, even if you’re not involved in them, doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a bit of a read through the outputs of them.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. I actually saw someone in our team do that brilliantly this week, where I was having a conversation with them that turned into a bit of a thinking partnership conversation. Then actually, she did a brilliant job of, we have an ‘experiments’ Teams channel, and she wrote up the conclusions of our thinking time together —
Helen Tupper: It was good!
Sarah Ellis: — as an experiment. So, she was like, “So, based on the conversation we’ve had…” So, what she did so beautifully was turn thinking into action through the lens of, “Here’s the experiment”. And what was so good about that was you hadn’t been in that conversation. And actually, it was a bit like, it wasn’t a very intentional thinking conversation, but actually you’d not been there. But then, suddenly by her going, “So, this is the frame for the experiment”, also then everybody can comment and build, you could add any additions. We’ve also then got clarity about how that thinking is turning into action. And suddenly, that thinking as a team i think we’ve made a decision this week that we wouldn’t have made without that thinking time, but also without her framing it in that way. But I think that was slightly more by accident than design. I think what we’re talking about here is going, “let us know, let’s design that in”, rather than just hope it’s going to happen.
Helen Tupper: So, we have a matrix, “Da, da, da, daa“.
Sarah Ellis: You have a matrix.
Helen Tupper: That was me doing both a drum and a horn, I don’t know, but we have a matrix. Sarah says, “You have a matrix”. Why do we have a matrix? Because Helen likes matrices. The purpose of the matrix for this team-thinking episode is to help you identify what kind of thinking might be useful for your team right now and where you want the thinking to happen, just so that you can prioritise the right tools, to be honest. It’s just a way of filtering which tool might be right for your team right now. So, the ‘what’, we’ve got some team-thinking ideas that are really good for areas of improvement, you know, where you want to do some stuff better, where there’s some stuff getting in the way. Then, we’ve got some team-thinking ideas that are more about inspiration. So, if you want to create curiosity, you want to generate ideas, we’ve got a couple there. And then, we’ve split those ideas by things that you could make part of your everyday, so you’ve got a weekly meeting or maybe you have regular huddles, those sorts of things. They’re sort of quick and easy ideas to add into the everyday meetings and moments. And then, we’ve also split some of those ideas for improvement and inspiration for more like away day, like whatever your away day looks like.
So, we’ve got one soon, haven’t we? The team are together, it’s actually the team are together in person, which doesn’t happen that often for us. And these ideas that we’ve got for team thinking just benefit from a little bit more time. And they’re probably even better if they could be done in person. Don’t have to be done in person, you could replicate them virtually, but there’s just something that might happen in the physicality of the ideas that might just work better when they’re in person.
So, shall we go through idea number one? We’ve got four in total, one for each quadrant. As I said in the intro, this will be much clearer if you download the PodSheet, because you’ll be able to see the matrix. But why don’t we go with an everyday idea for improvement? So, this is something’s getting in the way at work and we want to do some team thinking on it in a regular meeting, a regular moment where we’re getting together. So, our idea here, maybe you talk about this one, Sarah, our idea here is worry lists.
Sarah Ellis: Okay, so I think we all have worries. And actually, I was watching a Margaret Heffernan TED Talk called Dare to Disagree, and she shares a stat that has just really stuck with me. I’ve started to share it in every context and every conversation. And she says, “85% of us have concerns at work that we don’t talk about, that we don’t share”. Now, some of that might be you spot something that’s wrong, and you don’t say anything; some of it might just be, I’ve got a kind of general worry and I’m not I’m not sharing that either. And I think using your team to think through your worries, what’s on your worry list, stops them I think dominating your headspace, which I think they can. If I think about my worries, I keep revisiting them. And actually, that doesn’t help you to resolve the worry, I just keep thinking about it, sort of more going around in circles. I’m not moving forward, I’m just like, “I’m still worried about that”, two days later, “I’m still worried about that”. So, that’s not useful in terms of energy and effort.
So, the idea here is get people to write down their worries. I think you’ve got to give people a little bit of space first just to think about what’s on your worry list. If you put someone on the spot, that could be quite hard to answer.
Helen Tupper: Well, particularly for someone like me who’s, I think I’m so into action that my default would be, “I’m fine, it’s fine, it’s not a problem, I’m fine”. I would just say that, but if you gave me two minutes and you actually said, “No, you’ve got to write down your worries”, I think I’d probably, after about 30 seconds, I’d get past the, “I’m fine, don’t worry”, and actually be like, “Yeah, actually that is a bit of a worry”. It takes a bit of time for some brains.
Sarah Ellis: So, if you’re doing this live, I would say you don’t need to give people very long. I think in two minutes, you might even just be like, “What’s top of your worry list?” Sometimes giving people that filter of going, “Top”, then it means people are just writing down one thing. So, maybe the first time you do it, you’re just like, “What’s top of your worry list right now?” And then, you could do this in a few ways. You could share it with just one person. So, I think doing this in pairs makes it easier, like you’re just having a one-to-one conversation, takes away any pressure. So, that’s probably the easiest way to do this, particularly if you’re not sure how your team will find talking about worries. If we were doing it in our team, people probably would feel quite comfortable doing this, or we’ve perhaps done this in certain ways before, you could probably do it in a bigger group, “Let’s all go round and hear what’s top of everyone’s worry list”.
What is really interesting about this, just an insight for everybody, you shared your worry list with me last Friday.
Helen Tupper: I did, on WhatsApp.
Sarah Ellis: Because we live on WhatsApp, and we don’t see each other very much other than these moments. And you and I are talking all the time, doing a very, very kind of similar job and on lots of very similar things. But there were still some surprises on your worry list to me. And I know you really, really well, and we spend so much time talking all the time, we know what’s going on. And I still thought, “Oh, that’s interesting”. I couldn’t have guessed that that was on your worry list. So, I think it’s just, even if you think, “Oh, I know what’s on everyone’s worry list”, I bet you don’t, because I didn’t when you shared some things. And I think naturally, as part of those conversations, people describe the worry, and that in itself is useful. It goes from holding it in your head, where it feels messy and confusing, to you just create clarity from both writing it down and saying it out loud.
I think your job as the person listening is not to solve that worry. I actually think that’s quite a big temptation if you are a solver, or like some people are natural problem-solvers, they like action. This wouldn’t be me, but this would be you. Like, if I share a worry, your first thoughts, which you would have to press pause on, would be, “How can I help?”
Helen Tupper: Yeah, like, “I’ll take your worry away”. I think the worst thing to do here is to try to take someone’s worry away for them, obviously meant with good intent, but that’s not really what we’re doing here; or dismiss their worry, “Oh, don’t worry about that”.
Sarah Ellis: “Oh, that’s not a big deal”.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, “No, don’t worry about that”. But obviously, if it’s on their worry list, it’s a really big deal to that person.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. So, I think just a few watch-outs if you’re the person listening to someone’s worry, you don’t have to solve it in that moment, and don’t diminish the worry. I’m like, “Well, if it’s top of your worry list, it obviously feels like a big worry for you”. But what you might do is you might ask a few questions. You might ask things like, “Oh, what do you think would be helpful, or what sort of support do you need?” Sometimes, what people just need is just to say it, like actually that’s enough for people to go, “I just need to take that action and then I’ll probably feel better”. Sometimes people already know, I think, how to solve the worry; they just needed a nice nudge or they just needed a bit of a space to go, “I know what to do and now I’m going to do it”. Or sometimes, it’s such a big worry that you couldn’t solve it anyway in one conversation. But talking about it at least gives you a bit of momentum to then start to break it down, to kind of figure out, okay, well what’s a small action that you could take to just start to make some progress on that worry.
So, what you don’t need to do in this thinking time is solve everything, have a big action list at the end of it. Really, your job to do, the purpose of the conversations is to give people space to share what they’re worried about.
Helen Tupper: And I think with all these team-thinking tools we’re going to talk about, I think just the more you use them, I think the more the names stick. So, “What’s on your worry list?” And it’s less about going, “Today, we are going to do some team thinking time”. It’s more like these tools will do the thinking for you. You just have to start to get the team familiar with the tools. So, let’s stay with improvement. But instead of the everyday meeting moments, let’s think more away days, so slightly more significant activity. The one we have suggested here is, what’s ‘knot’ working. We have very specifically spelt the word ‘knot’, like a knot, because when you’re thinking about what’s not working, we often feel that people really connect with visuals. And the idea of the knotty moments in your weeks and on your projects, the things that are messy and tangled and feel difficult, those are the things that we are trying to surface.
Now, the way that this works is almost like a bit of pre-thinking before the team thinking. So, the pre-thinking is independent. We have found the best way to do this is to set up something like a Miro board, where people can basically put their knots, what’s ‘knot’ working for them, on a virtual space like a Post-it Note, and they can just list them all out. They can just put as many as they want about things that they think are not working well, not efficient, not effective, not using the best of my time, not, not, not. Just get them all out and give people the freedom to put those down on paper, virtual paper. Then, when your team gets together, whether it’s virtual or in-person, the first thing that you’re going to do is cluster the knots. So, give people time to just read through all the knots that are there. Some people might have done that in advance, but I would create the time to give people to read through, and then you’re going to get them to theme. So, read them through and then theme the knots.
This will help you just start seeing where you’ve got knotty clusters, where more than one person is struggling with the same knotty situation. And you can then start to sort of prioritise these things in which knot is getting in the way the most. It might be because it’s having the biggest impact, or it might be because more people are experiencing that knot. You can maybe come up with your own filter for prioritising these knots. And then, really as a team, you’re talking through, “Well, how do we unravel the knot? What needs to change for that knot to stop getting in our way?” And it’s just creating the space for that collaborative conversation. I really like the physicality of it. You could, if you wanted to, completely scrap the virtual thing. You could do it all in a room with Post-it Notes, grab a wall, give people five to ten minutes with the Post-it Notes to write them down. You could do the same thing physically. I think it’s just it might be nice for some people to have that virtual element beforehand to think through on their own, rather than the pressure of time and people around them.
Sarah Ellis: I also think one of the things that can work well here is once you’ve got your theme, so you might be like, “Right, what’s knot working?” maybe one theme is to do with ways of working, like how we get work done; maybe one theme might be around processes; one thing might be something external, something to do with customers or clients, or whatever it might be. If you all choose the same knot to work on, but then I think if you work on it in small groups, most teams have enough people in them that you could be like, I think twos and threes is quite good. Again, it’s quite a safe sort of number. But by doing that, you don’t get too much sort of group think, like one person dominating discussions, it helps a bit with the whole, don’t just listen to the most senior person. So, everybody’s working on the same thing but having different conversations.
Then, I think it’s really interesting to then hear, where do people get to? What are people’s perspective on what we might do to unravel that knot? Because people who are really close to that knot usually have a different perspective to people who are a bit further away from it. Or some people might be like, “Actually, that’s interesting, because that wasn’t a knot for me”. And so, because it’s not your knot, you kind of have fresh-eyes thinking, fresh eyes just listening to what everyone’s described in terms of this knot, “Have we thought about…?” Or, “Oh, I’ve worked somewhere where this was a challenge, and this seemed to be useful”. So, I think you get more of a range of ideas if you give people space to do this, and then actually there’s no right answer here, it’s just like, “Well, what do we all think?”
Helen Tupper: Probably some nice questioning prompts as well that keep you in the thinking space, you know, “What are your first thoughts? What did you think about this?” rather than, because it’s very tempting to go, “Let’s spend some time and then all come up with three ideas about what we should do differently”. It’d be very easy to go from thinking into doing very quickly, but I think those thinking-based prompts and questions keep you in that space for longer.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I wonder if generally a risk, and it’s definitely a risk for me, with something where you have got more space to think, conversations can go in lots of different directions, which is a good thing because you want to explore, you’re encouraging people to zoom out. But you need enough structure, freedom within a framework, as ever. And so, if you are facilitating this, I think probably either facilitating through questions, so you’re like, “I’m going to have these questions beforehand and that is going to just help give everyone enough of a frame”. Because I find if you don’t do that, people actually find it harder, it’s too vague essentially, you’re not giving people enough of a brief to work on. And then, you can have some interesting discussions but sometimes, there’s a difference between interesting and useful, and I think you are trying to combine both of those things. You want that thinking time to be like, “Okay, we’ve had conversations that we wouldn’t normally have and we’ve explored things in a different way, and it’s felt useful”. I’m always like ‘interesting and useful’.
Helen Tupper: Well, I think particularly for these more improvement-focused ones. I think the next ones on inspiration, you might just be like —
Sarah Ellis: Have a play.
Helen Tupper: Have a play. But these ones, I think you want to feel like something can improve as a result of the thinking time you spent together. So, they are our first ones: worry lists; and then, what’s knot working, are the two ideas for team thinking for improvement. And then, we’ve got two more on inspiring. So, Sarah, do you want to talk through the everyday idea for a bit of team inspiration, how we use thinking for that?
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, so we’ve talked about this idea before, but we use the phrase ‘borrowed brilliance’. And I think when you encourage people to borrow brilliance from different spaces and places, it encourages everybody to just escape their silo. And you hear that a lot. Every company says to us, “Oh, people are very head down”, and that’s very understandable because you’ve got a lot of demands on your day job. But what we’re not quite so good at is being meerkat-like and looking around and thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting that they do that in this way”, or, “What could we learn from that?” And borrowed brilliance, I think, you don’t always have to then go, “That’s interesting”, and then, “What am I going to do?” You just have to think, “That’s interesting”. I think it’s just, I am very led with borrowed brilliance by curiosity. So, let me give you an example from yesterday.
So, yesterday, I went into a nail place to get my nails done in London, which is not something I do very often. So, I’m always like, “Oh, this is a bit of a treat”. And they were using some technology so that when you choose the colour for your nails, you click on the screen with the different colours, and then it shows what it looks like on someone’s hands, which are much nicer hands than mine. I was like, “Oh, they’ve got really nice hands”, so my hands don’t look like that. But it was really fun. So, it was like, I liked clicking through the different colours, which I don’t think they wanted me to do. I think they were like, “Can you please choose a colour?” I was like, “Oh, but look at this, look at this!” And also, it helped you to shortlist. So, it wasn’t exact, because actually the one that I picked on, that I liked on the lady’s beautiful hands, then she put on my hands and I was like, “Oh, okay, doesn’t look quite so good on me”.
But there was something about, it was quite playful, so I enjoyed it, so I enjoyed the experience more that I was paying for because of that, that I got to have a bit of a play. But also, it helped me. You know, it’s always easier to make a decision when you see something, rather than someone could describe a colour to you, but what’s the best thing about choosing a colour? It’s to see it on a wall, to see it on someone’s nails. So, that for me was a really good idea, and I’ve never seen that before. Maybe it’s because I don’t get my nails done very often, but I had never seen that tech work in that way. And so, I can’t work out yet, I don’t go, “Oh, and then how could we use that for Squiggly Careers and Amazing If?” I just think, I was really curious about that, that was really interesting, and it was also memorable. It was memorable enough for me to share.
So that, I think, is a really good example of borrowed brilliance. It’s escaping silos, it’s being really curious, it’s looking outside. And I think you can do that in lots of ways, looking outside your team to other parts of your organisation, looking into your industry, what other people in your industry are doing, and then go way beyond your industry. Sometimes, some of the most interesting things are from completely random acts of curiosity. Like, I went to a kid’s play last Saturday where all the kids got to draw on the walls, and I loved it. And they didn’t make the kids hardly do any listening. They just got kids doing loads of doing, and they were making the whole time. And again, I don’t think I can go to anything now without thinking, “This is good borrowed brilliance”! I’m not very good at being, I just need to get better at just being in the moment.
I think then, what is always amazing about that, and we’ve done it as a team, often in a team meeting as the first thing that you do. So, make it an agenda item, let everyone know beforehand, “We’re going to start the meeting when we’re together, we’re going to start our team away day or our team time together, with borrowed brilliance”. Everyone just brings one thing, and because there’s just no pressure, most people are not doing anything different. They’re just bringing something from their day-to-day that they’ve seen, but it’s just created a bit of a focus for it. And you do hear so much weird and wonderful stuff from people, loads of energy. I think you also get a lot of laughter.
Helen Tupper: I know, yeah. And it’s actually one of my most fun things that we will do together as a team. And I’m just thinking about a more recent one. Someone on the team was talking about a book that they had read, you get packaging, you get an email, like a customer service email that someone goes, “I thought this was written really nicely”. And sometimes you just listen and go, “Oh, that’s interesting”, and nothing else happens. But you come away and I think you feel a bit better because of it, because it’s a fun conversation. But then sometimes, something interesting does happen because you go, “That book, that’s a really interesting way that they’ve done that. We’re writing a book at the moment. I wonder if we structured it like that, what that could look like”. And so, sometimes you do make connections that lead to really interesting ideas, but I don’t think you’re doing it with the pressure of that. It’s inspiration first.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah. And so, two top tips if you’re going to start doing this, just from our own experience. One, you always need more time in the agenda for borrowed brilliance than you imagine. So, I go, “Oh, great, we’ll just go around and get borrowed brilliance from everybody quickly”. But even today, me sharing those couple of examples, people get very enthusiastic and you don’t want to dampen that. And so, actually just think about, okay, you probably want five to ten minutes, I would say, minimum per person. So, if you’ve got a really big team, I would probably split the team up. I would be like, “Oh, let’s go into groups of five and we’ll all do borrowed brilliance”. You don’t have to all do it, as there’s a point where I think it could feel like too many people. And as a team, we’re probably on the cusp of that. Actually, it’s probably why it has taken quite a long time on our agenda, because there is quite a few of us now and you want to give everybody equal space to contribute. So, you don’t have to all do it, you could break up.
The other thing, we find borrowed brilliance, I think, when you can see people, and that can be virtual or in a room, works really well. We did then have a Borrowed Brilliance Teams channel that then we have changed. So, it’s interesting sometimes how things then don’t translate in quite the same way when you’re using tech remotely and all at a different time. Because I think what people found with borrowed brilliance is it was almost too limiting for people. So, when it’s an agenda item, it’s fine, everyone had got something to talk about. But we changed our Teams channel from Borrowed Brilliance to Links to Learn From. Funnily enough, everybody contributes to that Teams channel way more now. I actually think borrowed brilliance perhaps put a bit of pressure on people to be like, “Oh, if it’s not from the outside, I can’t post this”. And sometimes, a link to learn from is very related to what we do, or it’s just like, “Oh, I read this report, but I’m not sure what the borrowed brilliance is yet”, so then people wouldn’t put it in.
So, it’s also worth experimenting a bit with how can you keep this alive beyond those moments where you are together, because again, I think that encourages team thinking time. So, sometimes that team thinking time could come from, you’ve shared a link to learn from, and then a couple of people in the team go, “Oh, that CIPD report that Helen shared, actually should we pick up on a couple of the data points that we read in there together and do a bit of thinking about what that means for us?” So, it can be a spark for team thinking time. Whereas borrowed brilliance is the team thinking time.
Helen Tupper: Yeah. I feel like the magic just didn’t happen when we did it on Teams. The magic is in the laughter, the connection, the conversation. It needs that level of closeness to each other, I think. So, our last idea, this is about inspiration, but maybe more of an away day kind of thing, and particularly good for prototyping, generating ideas. It’s called Crazy 8s. This isn’t one of our tools. It’s a tool that Sarah and I experienced when we were working with another company, and they wanted us to quickly generate ideas for some book stuff actually. The way Crazy 8s works is everybody’s given a piece of paper, A4 piece of paper. You then fold that bit of paper so that you’ve got eight squares. So, fold it in half, fold it in half again, so you’ve got eight squares on there. And then, whatever this thing that you’re looking to generate ideas for, so it could be, I don’t know, launch of a new product, or maybe it’s, I don’t know, maybe you’re doing a new website.
Sarah Ellis: It could be a process improvement.
Helen Tupper: Process improvement.
Sarah Ellis: Eight ideas for how we’re going to improve a process.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, anything that you’re like, “Oh, do you know what, we could do with a some new ideas on this thing”. First of all, you take eight minutes, everyone has eight minutes, and you have to, in each of your boxes, each of your eight boxes, you have to put an idea down. The idea is you get as creative as possible. So, we’re not just writing words. You could draw a picture, you could design what the website’s going to look like, or maybe do the process stages of what might be in the process. But you have eight minutes to fill your crazy 8s with all your ideas. Then after eight minutes, it’s quite strictly timed so that you can keep the energy and momentum with the idea; after the eight minutes, everybody then goes around and shares their ideas.
I do think this creates, I think it’s a little bit vulnerable, because you know in your ideas, some of them are going to be crazy, like crazy bad, maybe crazy good.
Sarah Ellis: Also, the ones that you come up with at the end, I remember just being like, “Oh, whatever. I’ll just add a couple of extras”.
Helen Tupper: It involves a hot air balloon and squiggly confetti! That’s how we’re going to make everyone hear about Squiggly Careers!
Sarah Ellis: Some of them do get quite weird and wonderful. So, it feels a bit like you already know sometimes that you’re like, “Well, this is not a great idea”, or, “This is only the start of an idea”, or, “Maybe I don’t even know how to share it”. But then, you realise it doesn’t really matter.
Helen Tupper: So, everyone shares it and it’s fine, and there’ll be laughter because some of them will be crazy. And then at the end of everyone sharing, what you’re looking for is where were some ideas similar. Like, “Oh, actually, it’s interesting that other people had the idea about the hot air balloon and squiggly confetti. Maybe we should work that one a bit harder”. Or it might just be that there was an idea that attracted a lot of energy like, “Oh, we had never thought that. That is a really interesting idea”. Then, what the team will then do is take a couple of those ideas that either lots of people have had a similar one, or there seems to be a lot of energy, and just work it a bit harder. That might involve another picture. You might say, “Okay, well, now let’s go from a crazy 8s to crazy 4s”. You might take the picture and say, “Well, let’s map it out a bit more, or put a plan in place of what that could look like”. Again, I would time that so that the team thinking has an end.
Then, you would share that back, and then you might get into the, “Oh, so what might we do now?” One might be nothing; one might be, “Let’s go talk to someone about this”; one might be, “Let’s turn it into a prototype that other people can feed back on”. There’s lots of ways that it could go, but I don’t think you want to constrain that at the start. It’s just, “What might we do now?” is the right sort of question to end with.
Sarah Ellis: And one of my observations from when Helen and I did this, and we were probably the two least experienced people in the room doing it, is you could tell. So, I think when you use this a lot, you just get better.
Helen Tupper: And braver, I think.
Sarah Ellis: Not that their ideas were necessarily so much better, but they were just better at the process. So, they were just very used to, “Yeah, in eight minutes, I do eight ideas. I don’t judge myself too much, I don’t filter, I just get stuff down, and I’m used to sketching”. And they sort of discourage you from trying to write too much, so they were just very good at doing that. And then, they were actually very noticeably better, I think, than you and I at going, “Here’s how to describe the ideas in a very short, concise way. Whereas you can’t help it, you’re trying to bring to life the fact you’ve done a hot air balloon and why there’s squiggly confetti, or whatever it might be. Whereas they were just very unapologetic, actually, is the word that I would use to describe it. They would just be like, “So, idea one is a hot air balloon. There’s going to be a big explosion of Squiggly Career confetti. Idea two is, there’s going to be a carnival float full of squiggly sweets and we’re going to throw them out”. And then, they just move on to the next one. “Idea three…” and I’m still there reeling from the fact there’s a carnival float with squiggly sweets, and they’re just on to the next one.
So, I suppose the point of that and the reason I shared that is like anything, the way we get better at something is by practising it. So, probably the first time you do any of these things that we’re talking about, you probably won’t be that good. We’ve done a lot of borrowed brilliance now, and I think if you came and observed our team doing that, I think it would look very high energy, people would have a really good range of things, and that’s because we have done it a lot and we’ve experimented with how that works for us. If you watch us do Crazy 8s, we don’t do that as much. So, Helen and I have done it a few times, but the rest of our team have not. And so, I suspect you might watch and be like, “Oh, that looked a bit awkward”, or, “Some people struggled a bit with that”, or, it did feel a bit vulnerable”. And of course it does, because it’s the first time that you’re doing it. And I think often we have lost a little bit of the practice of thinking together in this way, because we perhaps don’t have some of these structures.
Helen Tupper: So, we will summarise all of that together in the PodSheet so that you’ve got all of those ideas. If you give them a go, let us know. This is the sort of stuff we love to hear. So, you can just email us, we’re helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com. But yeah, I think as Sarah said, practice is the thing that will help this to happen and just go back to, why are we doing this? Not only is it quite fun, to be honest, but team thinking drives team performance, so you all get better together when we spend time thinking. That is it from this week. We’ll be back next week with another episode.
Sarah Ellis: Thank you so much for listening. We’ll be back with you again soon. Bye for now.
Helen Tupper: Bye, everybody.