Friday's Growth
Inspiration

• Adopt Visual Design – it is a powerful discipline, a host of methods in fact, to bring an idea to life, and as we incorporated visual design into crucial client conversations – conversations of visioning, of strategy, of culture and leadership, of what matters most – we noticed that visuals are more than a communication medium – they help evoke emotions, they invite others in the team to ‘complete the picture’, to add their contribution, and hence what is created becomes a safe medium for critical discussions.

• Introduce Anonymity to trigger ‘unspoken’ yet essential elements of conversation – One of the most useful aspects of digital facilitation is the ability to make use of anonymous feedback. While certainly not new, we often provide such a facility in our work, so that issues can be raised, without being attributed to the person raising them.

• Use Data science to contribute new insights – We have been inspired for a number of years, by the work of Ray Dalio, the Founder of Bridgewater Associates. Not only for his work, as a prolific writer on Radical Transparency and how to introduce it into organisations, but also in how one can leverage data to promote psychological safety in the workplace. The Dot Collector application, for example, allows Bridgewater employees to ‘grade’ one another during online sessions, on multiple dimensions, from whether they felt the person was believable or not, to whether they felt informed by what was said. As individual contributors, we can make use of such anonymous feedback. However, by incorporating an algorithm to make sense of the many responses and provide new insights on whether we indeed practice radical transparency, large sets of data become transformative, in building psychological safety in the workplace. Today, a number of applications exist that offer a similar, data-driven approach and so many organisations can now adopt such tools, in their digitally-led sessions.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Saar Ben-Attar (Chief Instigator) 

Links:

Ray Dalio on How to build a company where the best ideas win

Ray Dalio’s Principles in Action, an introduction to the Dot Collector and much more.