A guest post from Rhiann McLean – a project manager in IRISS’ Innovation and Improvement team. Rhiann recently led the team on an outdoor – walking – reflection. Read all about their conversation here!
At the start of the new business year, the Innovation and Improvement team at IRISS benefitted from an away day together. On this day, we reflected on the year gone by, planned new work and rapidly created a prototype for a current project.
We wanted to take opportunities to take time away together. Taking this time has come from a recognition that sometimes it’s easy to fall into a routine of doing – meeting deadlines, writing outputs and planning events, all of which restrict the time for reflection.
We are using these sessions to think about:
- how we work together
- our successes and failures (and what we’re learning from them)
- the things that inspire us
For me, planning the first session was a) daunting and b) obvious.
As an organisation, we’ve been in a period of change. We’ve got a new Director, a new strategy and a host of new Board members! And since a lot of what we do is supporting people to navigate change, I thought that we should use our quarterly session to explore how we were coping with change ourselves.
Before this session, we had spent time in our team meeting practising our active listening skills. This involved taking turns listening to each other before silently writing a follow up question for our colleague to reflect on later. We explored how we listen and communicate, and the value of having time to speak without interruption. In fact, it felt really challenging to speak for two minutes without interruption or feedback.
So what did we get up to?
For our group reflection we went for a walk in the park. I asked a series of provocative questions around change, culture and how we support each other. The key to this exercise was to give ourselves the opportunity to speak freely in response to these prompts and to continue to practise active listening.
Why walking?
- It’s summer in Scotland and it wasn’t raining!
- It might make us more creative!
- Short bursts of time spent outside (and moving your body) can make you happier
We took the time to walk around some of the landmarks of Glasgow green (photos) and talked through questions. Some of the questions were adapted from the 100 Questions game from the School of Life.
Warning: These question bombs are not for the faint of heart. I took the decision based on how our team works together and conversations had in advance of the session.
We split into two groups and answered the questions with our team members before leaving another follow up/related question for the other group to find on their walk and reflect on.
Little buckets [like this one] were left in the park for people to leave their follow up questions in.
Sidenote: one of the buckets went missing – and we hope it loves its new home.
Each group was asked:
- What is your gut reaction to big changes in your life or work?
- What work were you doing the last time you lost time altogether?
- Would other people consider you a good listener?
- Which of your talents is the world in danger of overlooking?
- What have been some of your most successful working relationships and why?
Wee note: we put some verbal confidentiality agreements in place within our groups about what we wanted to share at lunch as well as what we wanted to share on our walk outside. This helped us stay with the questions and be open with our responses without fear or blame.
After we had discussed the questions and answered the follow ups from our colleagues, we had a meal together to discuss:
- how we wanted to support each other and communicate
- the work that excited us – and how to do more of it
- how we wanted to continue to reflect together
For me, the real learning from this session was about the importance of taking time away – preferably in the outdoors to talk about the work we do. Part of me wondered if this was the first time that we as a team had really acknowledged the changes we were experiencing and how they were affecting us.
The day also gave us the opportunity to recognise that working alone on projects can be isolating – we need more time to learn from each other. As a result, we’ve made the decision to host a quarterly team reflection session.
We want to continue to reflect and support each other, so this is only the beginning…