A perspective of the application of Change Design Principles

Your team conversations and relationships can be enriched with consideration of the Change Design Principles (and Key Factor Cards) . Together explore and define what team practices you design for your team’s workscape. Conversations about the principles can surface what individuals in the team believe, and create deeper knowledge of each other and their place in the world. Such conversations are essential to calibrate for effective collaboration.

The Principles can also be used for explicitly designing experiences like Team Meetings or Team Planning Day, particularly where you seek to change how these experiences are shaped. Read more on designing experiences of changing.

 

Activities using the Principles

The Change Design Principles come to life when used in conversational activity. The Card Set contains ACTIVITY cards to help you create different conversational experiences for your team in designing their workscape experiences.

Free Activities available now

Notes: These activities are not printed on cards in the card set.

• Play Bingo to get familiar with Change Design Principles As a team, explore and share meaning about the PRINCIPLE cards. (Includes a set of 10 printable Bingo sheets for Starter Set/Set 1; and 30 printable Bingo sheets for Set 1-Set 2 combined.)
• Affect the Key Factors for your People As a team, use KEY FACTOR cards to identify team experience needs, and shape meaningful responses to those needs.

Suggestion for a new activity

Share with us your suggestion for a new Activity to add to the Team Development collection.

 

Stories of using the Cards

Real people are using the Questo Change Design Principle Cards in their everyday practice. Here are stories about those moments for a Team Development context.

Story 1: Living our stories

Here’s an example I want to share of mixing two favourite cards:
Activity 08: Make principles real with body storming and role play
Principle 24: Stories convey what is possible

In my team we talk a lot about stories, and how using story telling can make a given situation far more real and relevant to stakeholders, and to ourselves, too. Storytelling and visualization go comfortably hand in hand – what’s uncomfortable for most people though, is role play.

However, once we agreed that it didn’t have to be ‘role play’ in any scary sense we were free to act our stories in ways quiet or boisterous, safely. It therefore became an immersive, powerful tool which also helped build the psychological safety in the team.

In my new role at another company, I am planning on using the cards with the change network, who are scattered across the country and have little opportunity to meet face to face. I think ploughing bravely into these beautifully designed concepts will help build a strong team.

Anna Kiss-Gyorgy
Change Manager, Linfox
August 2018

 

Story 2: Shaping the group experience

As the head of Knowledge Management for the CFA I get involved in projects when multiple stakeholders and competing requirements need to be resolved. Facilitating a place where everybody has a shared understanding of the principles, or even just the language of change can be difficult, especially in large meetings but without it, they can talk past one another or simply dive to simple solutions.

In a recent think-tank aimed at identifying the key issues and outstanding requirements of an important project, I needed to introduce a high level leader to some of the change concepts we had identified as potential problem areas and I decided to use the Questo Change Design Principles Cards.

The day before, I selected around 2/3rds of the cards that were most appropriate as well as a plastic $2 referee whistle. On the day, I asked the leader to be the umpire for the group. He has a great sense of humour, so the rules were simple: 1) He could pick up anybody on breaching one of the change principles, 2) he had to blow the whistle, name the person and read out the card – usually with a lot of laughter.

It worked wonderfully. Within 10 minutes he had laid out all the cards in front of him and read them all. He then used one to pull me (the facilitator) into line which set the tone beautifully. In the end, he pulled another two people up but I referred to the cards a few times as well when issues came up to help the rest of the group acquaint themselves with the principles. Using the cards, rather than me just mentioning the principles, bought a sense of authority to them, like an outside expert was in the room with us. I will definitely continue to use the cards and gradually build the leadership team’s familiarity with the language of positive change.

Stuart French
Program Manager – Knowledge, CFA
November 2018

 

Story 3: Taking the team’s temperature

In our challenging workspace somewhere in Melbourne, our team has the Key Factor cards blu-tacked to a cabinet door with a ribbon as the neutral line. Each day in our standup we have a brief discussion about each of the Key Factors and move the card to indicate how we are collectively feeling. Then we discuss what we can do to positively affect things where needed. It’s been very helpful to have such a conversation each day, and to see how things shift day-to-day. Thanks so much for encouraging us to think about such things as we act as Change Agents in our organisation.

(Oh and we love the HTCS poster too – it’s up on our wall!)

Project Officer
Anonymous workplace in Melbourne
March 2019

 

Story 4: Focus for the week

I have been using the Change Design Principle Cards on a weekly basis. What I do is every week I select a principle card and then think about what that one means to me and use it as a focus principle for the week. I share my reflection with my team and occasionally share it in a weekly email that I send as well with the wider branch. It’s been really helpful in shining a spotlight on key change and communication techniques and becoming a better human.

Rob, Government Organisation
February 2020

 

See other Stories in OCM Practitioner Context section.

 

Submit a Story

Share with us your story in how you used the cards for positive impact.