Team Evolution Ritual

From a group of individuals each doing the best they can

To a collaborative team that understands their shared challenges and addresses them together

Signs you need it

  • Do you feel like your team has become stuck?

  • Are they unable to progress to the next level of performance?

  • Is there friction within your team or between teams?

  • Do people blame others instead of looking to solve issues themselves?

What is a Team Evolution Ritual?

The Team Evolution Ritual is a half day workshop for four to 24 participants. They can be from one team or multiple teams. It is focused on finding and solving the most important issues that are preventing your team from progressing. These might be problems with processes, tools, training or culture.

It will promote good communication and give the participants a positive experience of collaborative problem solving approaches. Bringing teams together in this way helps them to understand each other better and encourage shared ownership of problems. It will move them from their current situation to a more evolved state, ready to help each other to keep progressing.

How do we do it?

In an expertly facilitated workshop environment we will run through a set of carefully designed exercises that will:

  • Give a safe structure for participants to directly feed back on how things currently work

  • Help the participants to identify key areas for improvement

  • Co-create ideas and strategies for moving forward

  • Agree on the approaches participants think will have the best chance of success

  • Create concrete actions and next steps for testing the ideas in the real world

What will the outcomes be?

  • Better understanding of all the perspectives within the group

  • People more willing to listen to each other

  • Progress made on specific issues that are holding your team back

  • A stronger more collaborative team

Case Study

Team dynamics at TMW Unlimited

At TMW Bristol the Client Services and Creative teams had to work together to deliver a challenging job for their automotive clients. The project repeated every quarter and required them to deliver a high volume of assets at high speed and with complete accuracy.

This repeating project had become a source of friction between the two teams. Both sides felt under pressure and tensions were building. The teams were each blaming the other side for issues they were experiencing and something needed to be done.

They’d had wash-up meetings before, and whilst they provided an opportunity to vent and let off the pressure that had built up, they never felt particularly productive.

To move things on I used Design Thinking principles to plan a wash-up workshop. The objective of the session was to co-create a set of test-able actions that might make the repeating project go more smoothly. In the end the outcome went far beyond that.

Based on the outputs of the first workshop, the teams made changes to their processes and communication practices, but the most significant change that we noticed was a culture shift.

The teams went from a culture of isolation and blaming the other side, to one of shared responsibility and collaboration. The teams had space in the workshop to listen to each other and understand the challenges they each faced. The act of solving problems together helped them to empathise and communicate better.

Following that first engagement I ran a series of three more workshops with slightly differing focus areas each time. These were all successful, but the best news was that between workshops the team members completely changed their relationship and worked together to fix any subsequent problems they encountered.

Shakeela Looker, Head of Delivery Management TMW Unlimited

“The workshops were really good, we were able to identify quick wins and implement them straight away and for some of the bigger stuff we were able to pick them off and treat them as projects to work on.”

Get in touch

If you want to use the magic of Ritual Thinking workshops to solve problems and bring your teams closer together pop your details into the form below. I’m happy to discuss your situation over email or send me a phone number and I’ll give you a call.