Integral Practice - A Case Study
In 2008 Laurence Moss, organisation development portfolio manager for a large local authority, had a problem. His team of project managers and analysts, responsible for delivering big internal projects with the council, had doubled in size in a year and was experiencing “some of the typical challenges you get on growing teams”.
‘We had gone from quite a small, almost family, culture to scaling up to quite considerable numbers of people and we lost some of that cohesiveness.”
There wasn’t a real sense of engagement—and there were some communication and relationship problems. Moss wanted his team members to stop looking to management for instruction, and start coming up with suggestions and solutions themselves.
Moss knew David Kayrouz and realised that the Creative Pathways approach might be what was needed to turn his team around. So he asked Kayrouz to put together an intervention workshop for 20 team members that would result in “more engagement, more volunteering of not just ideas but issues and concerns”.
In March they came together for the workshop, starting with what Moss calls “a fairly typical opening session”, explaining where the group had come from, what the issues were, and where it was headed in the future.
Then Kayrouz began a two-hour workshop. For the first exercise, he asked everybody to do a very simple painting to introduce themselves.
Not only did everyone explain why they had painted what they had painted, but others in the group gave their feedback on what they saw in the painted introductions. The feedback from other team members was interesting, says Moss, and led to good personal interactions and increased awareness of other team members.
“It got people to hold a different frame of mind.”
Then came the next exercise—Kayrouz asked everyone to paint their perfect place. But just as they were getting really involved, he stopped them, picked up their paintings, exchanged the paintings between individuals and asked them to carry on—making their alterations to other people’s perfect places.
“Some people were surprised at their own feelings in terms of frustration at having their work taken away from them,” says Moss.
“It triggered a few people’s awareness of their own behaviour at work, which was a good result.
“It really did trigger a real awareness about how they work with other people. That was quite powerful.”
A discussion on the different qualities of reason and feeling, of art processes and business processions, of order and chaos, followed. But after lunch, the team came back together to discuss what they had learned.
“People started volunteering ideas about what the team could be doing better,” Moss says. “That was exactly what we wanted. It generated the interaction between people themselves rather than leadership asking and them responding.
“People said it was the best of these types of off-sites they have done and were very enthusiastic. We struggled to end it because people were talking so much.
“It was very synergistic conversation. It was all about how to improve things as a team and also improve the organisation over the longer term. All sorts of people were coming up with ideas and the ideas kept flowing and other people were building on these ideas and there weren’t any arguments.”
All suggestions were recorded, and some have since been implemented— with team members knowing that they are responsible for those changes, they can’t sit around waiting for someone else to issue instructions.
The workshop was so well-received eight members asked to continue on to Creative Pathway’s four-week ‘Surfacing Creative Behaviour’ programme, which looks in more depth at exploring creativity.
Not only was the initial workshop successful in turning around the team dynamic, but Moss says he’s also seeing further results from those taking the extended programme.
“Definitely people have been very enthusiastic about what they
have learned from it and certainly it’s raised their self-awareness
about how they have ideas and how they deal with that.”
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