Team purpose / repurpose

To work productively we need a purpose. Involve the team to shape the purpose statement.

①  Prepare answers

• What do stakeholders think the team is doing?
• [if the team isn’t new] What was the original purpose of the team and how it changed over time?
• [if the team isn’t new] What were the biggest successes of the team where it stood out?
• What problems is the team solving now?
• What problems team may need to solve in the future?
• How is this different compared to other teams? Do we know the purpose statement of the teams we work with?
• What are good example of purpose statements?

② Set up the meeting

Figure out the agenda and the duration. Invite everyone from the team taking into account their availability. Prepare the workspace: you would need to show the data you collected and collect input from the team.

③  Run the session

• Set the stage by reminding about the goal and the meeting agenda.
• Let everyone feel comfortable with each other by check-in activity.
• Give inputs that you collected upfront. What stakeholders think the team is doing. Purpose statement of the teams we work with. Good examples of purpose statements.
• Collect inputs from the team. Let them share, possibly on sticky notes, what problems is the team solving now? What problems team may need to solve in the future?
• Shoot! Now team has enough data to work with. Go directly and ask everyone to come up individually with a purpose statement.
• If the group is more than 8 people consider splitting in pairs and combining the statement into better ones. As soon as you have 4 different reviewed statements, publish them and let people present them. As the presented talks, invite participants to underline the parts of the statements they like the most. Each participants could have a unique colour of the pen.
• Moderator should try to write down a statement that takes into account the most likeable parts.
• Come up with a final purpose statement.

Attributions:
Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik