The Unicorn Series: Moving Initiatives Forward with Development Teams Post 2: Stepping forward together on the stones of collaboration and teamwork

Introduction

In Post #1 of the Unicorn Series, we introduced the concept of development teams and why we think they work so well. In this post, we highlight the experience of one of the development teams and share what the team created together.

Stepping Stones

In six hours over the course of three months, program-nominated team members^[1] met three times with the goal of creating a certificate in Indigenous Health and Wellness. That was all we had to start with—and our blank Google doc. Together, we ended up creating a web page that honors and supports individual ways of learning and growing—instead of a certificate. How did we get from the initial concept to the final web page?

Together—one conversation at a time! At the heart of our time together were deep, meaningful, respectful, and productive conversations. With team members from all health sciences programs and from a wide variety of backgrounds and worldviews, collectively, we:

• Created an ethical space to have safe discussions. With diverse perspectives on the team, having this open and respectful space for exploring ideas with curiosity and genuine interest was essential.
• Learned to navigate our way to our shared spaces and common ground (not to be confused with the lowest common denominator 😉).
• Worked through the process together to achieve our shared goal which ultimately was reconciliation in action for us all.
• All had a voice and contributed—everyone actively participated. We had opportunities to speak up and be heard. Whether it was during actual meeting times (six hours over three months) or through asynchronous conversations in the shared online working document, we had respectful, productive, and interesting conversations that ultimately inspired our final resource.
• Were flexible and responsive to the ideas presented by our team members. Ideas sparked other ideas and before you know it, we had transformed the idea of a single certificate that a few learners a year might take to a webpage that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, anytime!

Summary

Functional highly productive teams are not a myth. Successful development teams are not a unicorn experience—in our experience. Development team members repeatedly comment that they appreciate working with colleagues from other programs. It’s an opportunity for programs to learn from and with each other, navigate varying perspectives, and genuinely appreciate their team members. Such projects are inclusive and thrive off of diversity of thought and perspectives.

By starting with a blank Google doc, recording all our meetings^[2], providing meeting summary emails/meeting reminders, setting up easily accessible documents for sharing and contributing and using transparent processes, discrete tasks are completed with the opportunity for all team members to contribute in meaningful and relevant ways.^[3]

We have successfully worked with dozens of development teams and the experience is similar on all teams. The process we use is generalizable and replicable. Although our teams have a facilitator, all team members, faculty and staff, are equal and reliant on one another to build something new together. There is not a “boss” or a “chair”. We have team roles and are equal contributors on these horizontal (rather than hierarchical) teams.

Closing

In this post we presented a specific example of what one of our many development teams built together—in just three months. You can see it for yourself by visiting the Stepping Stones web page. In the Unicorn series’ next post, we outline the sometimes invisible nuts and bolts that set up the development teams for successful productivity that is joyful and inspiring. 🙂

For more information on development teams, please contact: sheryl.mills@usask.ca.

^[1] All Stepping Stones Development Team members are listed on the Stepping Stones webpage.

^[2] Recordings have been used differently according to the needs of the project. In some cases, the transcripts are added to a document to refer back to and in others it is used to synthesize the ideas and provide email summaries to development team members.

^[3] Streamlined and standardized processes–and emojis–are imperative for keeping multiple teams functioning and productive at the same time. We use emojis in the subject line of emails as visual organizers and in shared documents titles so that topics are easily recognizable. Emojis are meaningful to the project and add a light-hearted and joyful start to shared documents and emails. Centrally, we rely on them to help distinguish among projects and teams since we are often simultaneously working with multiple teams! 😃