Fun and fulfillment at work?

Why did we have so much fun during these trainings?
And why didn’t we in our daily work?
And what could be done to change that?
These questions intrigued us. So we dug deeper.

Let’s start at the beginning.

To extend our skills as Product Owners we recently enrolled in two Human Centered Design trainings by IDEO. They were hosted on the community platform +Acumen. The learning materials were online — but the major part consisted of applying practices to specific design challenges, as a team. We wanted to see if we could achieve a design certification, even if we were no designers.

5 hours per week — in addition to a 40-hour work week. For 9 long weeks.
Initially we were a group of 5, motivated by the prospect to learn cool things, together with awesome colleagues. Pretty soon people started to drop out though, as it became clear that the courses were demanding time-wise. They had built-in deadlines to submit results to the community continuously.
Apart from the pre-defined timelines to submit results and apart from the learning goals, we had total freedom: On how to organise our team and our time — and what kind of design challenges to set.

One of the design challenges we set for ourselves was actually aimed at our company. So we could do a lot of interviews and research — because our target group, our colleagues, were easily accessible. As we progressed, the topics became more and more tangible — and our coworkers started to get interested in what we did. Until then, we had held the workshops beneath everyones radar.

And finally, we made it. We had achieved every goal along the way, had continuously uploaded results and had sent in the final submission. We had used many stacks of post-its, produced a lot of prototypes and photos.
And we really got the certificates :)

During and after the training we noticed something:

After pondering this for a while, we came to the conclusion that there were certain key factors that might have been responsible for our fun and fulfilment during the courses:

We decided to focus on purpose first. For a reason.
One of our self set design challenges was:

Research showed us that purpose can be one of the main drivers for that.

Let me ask you: Would you be able to tell me your company strategy on the spot? For us, that would have not been the case.

But what’s the impact of a strategy that no-one can even remember?
The impact on daily work? It certainly doesn’t provide purpose.

So we thought about:

If you have done this already — we’d be happy to hear from you 🙂!

We’ll begin to experiment with storytelling for strategy now and will share our learnings in a bit!

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