The Mayvin team held our annual Away Day in June. As a fully remote organisation, the opportunity to be together in-person is one we relish, and we know just how important an investment it is for our connection, clarity and creativity.
Connection
You’ll often hear us saying connection before content here at Mayvin. It speaks to the notion that before we can do good work together, we need to feel connected and pay attention to how we are in relationship with one another.
We are very thoughtful about how we connect throughout the year. Daily check-ins via MS Teams to share what we are up to, informal coffee chats, a weekly business meeting, a bi-monthly team meeting in person, and more.
We know that the more connected we are, the better our working relationships, which in turn impacts the quality of our work and our ability to navigate challenges. Consequently, when it came to planning the away day with a design team drawn from the different teams that make up Mayvin (Consultants, Operations and Marketing), ensuring we had plenty of space to connect and be with each other was key. To maximise that, we were intentional about just how much time we gave each topic. We avoided the trap of a packed agenda, with no space for conversation. We made sure there was plenty of time for socialising – lunch together on arrival, dinner, drinks and a game of werewolf in the evening, check-ins at the start of both days so we could connect to how we were all showing up.
We even collectively agreed that we wouldn’t watch the England vs Slovenia game, so as not to split the group and diminish our time together in the evening. A decision that was ratified further when the game ended in a 0-0 draw.
Clarity
As a design team, we paid close attention to the purpose and theme of the Away Day. This created a foundation for us to test each agenda item against, did the topic speak to our purpose and fit with the overall theme? This clarity gave the Away Day a sense of flow and coherence and gave us a basis for agreeing what to include and what to leave out as we honed our initial ideas.
Mayvin has recently established a research hub to support and facilitate a collective inquiry into the future of organisations. And because we like to do our work with integrity, and walk the walk, this became the theme of our Away Day - our own inquiry into what the future of Mayvin could be. We started with what is, and where we are headed, by sharing our strategy and thinking about how we can each contribute to that, what might be missing, and any questions we had. This gave us collective clarity on where we are headed as an organisation in the next three years. From this, we were able to inquire into what the future, beyond that three-year horizon might hold. And this is where our creativity took hold.
Creativity
We know that doing things a little differently can give rise to new information and insights, it’s why we run our Artful series and encourage our clients to engage beyond the cognitive and intellectual ways of knowing that are often privileged in organisational life.
At our Away Day, this looked like using Lego to inquire into the future of Mayvin – building our own representations, and then working in small groups to co-create collective representations before sharing as a whole group to explore what was similar and different across the models we had created. Maybe you saw Jeff the Llama and Calvin the Culture Panda make an appearance on our social media?
And having played with Lego, we identified some common themes and areas for further inquiry, we took ourselves outside for a walk and talk in the grounds of our hotel to continue the conversation. A chance to connect to our surroundings, gain further clarity and enjoy the creativity that often comes when you get outside and let the thoughts flow in a different setting.
What does this mean for our practice?
The design of our Away Day was a series of interventions that offered something meaningful in their own right for each item on the agenda, that when added together created a holistic and coherent 1.5-day design.
What we are noticing with our clients is a need to for focussed interventions, that are shorter in duration and nimble enough to respond in the moment to their context. Consequently, a major focus for us right now is the creation of what we call Kickstarter events. Kickstarter events are typically shorter session, usually 2-3 hours long and intended to be rolled out at scale. They are designed with the principles of connection, clarity and creativity to deliver immediate impact and invite people to do something different in response. Making them a rapid way to meaningfully engage with a large number of people at a critical time.
A recent example is the delivery of a programme of Kickstarter sessions for over 1000 leaders in a large public sector organisation that was going through a period of significant change. The Kickstarter events enabled their leaders to understand their own experience of the change, in order to better lead their teams through the change. This consisted of two, two-hour virtual sessions delivered to the whole group over a four-month period.
If this sounds like something that would be useful in your organisation, and you’d like to know more, get in touch for a chat!