🌿🧭🌳 OD33: Pairing for creative work ∙ Caring more about the future ∙ OD goodies
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Foreword
Is there a specific organizational area that you want covered next in the newsletter? We’re inviting you to suggest topics for September’s monthly theme by Tuesday, 1 SEP eod.
Pairing for creative work
For the past few weeks, we’ve been addressing the theme of “Engaging the distributed organization”, asking whether engagement is a choice or sharing about self-engagement outlooks.
Here’s an unconventional idea related to the theme:
During a recent conversation with Ari Franklin, one of our readers, we got to discuss the idea of applying the concept of pair programming to other types of creative work.
Pair programming is a practice where 2 programmers work on developing a piece of software functionality in tandem.
Applied for other types of creative work, in a distributed context, it may translate to:
When you have a non-repetitive task that requires creativity, partner up with a colleague to work together for 30 or 50 minutes
As the initiator, make sure you both have the pre-requisite information to build upon and the collaborative tools to support your work
Agree on who will take notes based on your conversation
Offer to contribute to your colleague’s tasks in the same manner
Some guiding principles for pairing, inspired from thoughtworks.com:
Commitment to work by both participants
Mutual respect
Balanced sharing of tasks and responsibilities during pairing
Leverage each others’ strengths and work around the rough edges
Willingness to take feedback from each other and work towards improvement
Ability to share a laugh and work through stressful situations
Here are some benefits that we’ve seen in practice:
Less isolation - especially for people with roles that involve lots of individual tasks
More creativity - exchanging thoughts with someone else can trigger better ideas
Better quality - better ideas can translate to better quality of the results
Increased camaraderie - connecting to work meaningfully on creative tasks can build more trust
Better productivity - gained by focused work, while respecting the time of the colleague.
Let’s discuss
Do you think pairing is useful? Is pairing a common practice in your work?
Do you have lessons learned around similar practices that help when working in distributed teams?
Join the conversation and share your insights with fellow readers:
Caring more about the future
The Long Time Project team has created a toolkit with 6 levers and 13 tools for cultivating an attitude of care for the future.
Exploring the toolkit might inspire you about thinking long term and also about enabling a mindset shift in your organization. Here are some snapshots:
The levers
The list of tools
One of the tools
We enjoyed the list of 4 ways to introduce a new practice in an organization: opportunistically, formally, operationally and ritualistically.
You can read the whole Long Time Tools guide here:
OD Goodies
If you like this stuff and you’re curious about some extra #orgdev.
I+J: Our reader Inna Makoterska shared with us a beautifully illustrated guide to managing a distributed team during the pandemic. Many useful ideas, like remote team charters, IDOAART for designing meetings or the team temperature concept.
Skills for Mars & ODC: Iulia Istrate has created a series of 20 insightful interviews about Making Remote Work featuring academics and practitioners (including an astronaut). Bonus: all videos are timestamped so you can jump directly to the topic that interests you the most in each interview.
Pluralsight: If you’re curious about team (re)design, you can find about 5 patterns of responsible reteaming in this interview with Heidi Helfand: “One by One”; “Grow and Split”; “Merging”; “Isolation” and “Switching”.
Dubberly Design Office: Food for thought - “Knowledge of cybernetics and other aspects of systems thinking, such as systems dynamics and complexity theory, is a prerequisite for practicing design going forward.”
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition.
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.
We're using systems thinking, behavioral science and mental models to advise organizations to become more effective.
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