Designing Better Teams with Theory of Change
How to find the right path in improving your team culture?
When talking to creatives and team leads about how to improve their current team culture, I often sense the same problem: they usually know what stage they are, often know where they want to get, but mostly never have an idea of how to get there.
In my work as a strategist and creative consultant, I make sure that those three points are clear (current status, long-term vision and how to get there). I found that applying the Theory of Change method makes it easy, simple and extremely clear.
What’s Theory of Change?
The Theory of Change is a method that helps organisations get to their long-term visions. The idea is that, instead of thinking how to get from today to the end vision, you should consider starting from the end goal and then plan the outcomes from there.
Said simpler, to calculate when to leave your house to pick an early flight, it’s easier to plan backwards from the departure time. Example: if your flight departs at 7 am + you need to get there 1 hour earlier (6 am) + 30 min ride to the airport (5.30 am) + 1 hour to have breakfast and shower. The conclusion is that you should wake up at 4.30 am.
How can you apply this theory to get to your desired team culture?
For designing a successful Theory of Change chart for your team culture, you’ll need to follow these five steps.
1. The first thing you need is a vision. A future scenario where you want your team to be. In this case, we’ll use the following example: “Our teams work independently and are focused.”
2. Departing from this vision, you go backwards thinking if our teams work independently and focus, what would be the needed outcome? You can say these teams would always aim for the best result, have strong group dynamics and do a wise use of time and resources.
3. Next step is to ask for the team attributes needed in order to get every single of these outcomes. In this case, I’ll use the first point as an example: what attributes would a team have if they always aim for the best results? Your answer can be that this team would feel ownership of the projects and that they have extremely clear goals.
4. When you have the attributes ready, you need to go one more step backwards and ask yourself repeatedly: “How would they get this?” For example, a team that feels ownership of projects would have 100% control of the process, and for that, would have a clear overview, and for that, would always be involved from the beginning.
5. If you take a look at the end of the exercise, you will find a clear path of how to get to the long-term vision. In this example, we see that something as simple as involving the whole team from the start of the project will lead the team to feel ownership and it will be one of the three steps to get closer to a more independent and focused group.
What I like about this exercise is how simple it makes to plan for long-term visions and how it divides the process into tiny and rational steps that you can start applying from day one.
Ready to try yourself?
This post was written for the Medium Publishing of Teamweek.
I’m a creative consultant focused on strategy, futures and processes. I help brands and organisations with cultural and digital transformations. If you have comments or want to reach out, you can tweet me or send me an old-fashioned email.
