Creating a team of collaboration coaches to bring design thinking to life
A group of collaboration coaches at Daemon
Last year I set up a Team of ‘Collaboration Coaches’ at Daemon, the idea was simple really: bring together a dynamic cohort of people to turn impactful collaborative, client-centric and design thinking techniques into common work practice. These Coaches would be the doe-ers and the pioneers and the champions, keepers of the ‘creative problem-solving flame’, both inside the company and with our enterprise clients.
Bringing ‘Design Thinking’ to life is not necessarily straight forward in a place with a lot of consultants with deep technical backgrounds who naturally adopt the ‘engineering mindset’. Additionally the traditional concepts of design and innovation, are not necessarily front and centre of the company value proposition. However I was fortunate enough to have the support of Leaders who totally believed in the importance and value of a ‘human-centred problem solving’ approach in that Engineering + Cloud layer of Digital Transformation.
People first, people last, people always
But having the backing of Leaders is not enough. I realised I needed to take some of the ‘abstract’ stuff around Design Thinking and turn that into something tangible and practical - more frameworks and documents were not going to cut it. And then there’s winning over the sceptics, sometimes that’s people who have attended badly run workshops or have just not seen how design thinking really brings value to their working lives. More theory and more desirability/viability/feasibility venn diagrams ain’t going to over win hearts and minds.
To really get things moving and make progress I realised this needed to be totally about committed, enthusiastic people, the kind of people willing to learn new stuff and go a little out of their comfort zones. Thankfully Daemon has those kinds of people in abundance.
Diverse skills, dynamic Team
The Coaches would be a blend of people with different backgrounds - Engagement Leads, Client Success Managers, Agile Coaches and Principle Consultants. All looking to use and grow the toolset, adopt and ‘access’ the mindset and learn the techniques. We’d meet, share ideas and opportunities and build up a set of useful resources over time.
Timing is everything as they say. The Coaches (CoCo’s for short!) coming together coincided with a deep dive brand reimagining concluding in a big relaunch 12 months ago. ‘Movements power digital transformation’, the brand promise has people at its heart. Movements don’t start with decisions about the latest shiny tech, and they don’t get moving at all without people willing to push against the norms. You need to start by uniting people and aligning teams to a common purpose and shared understanding.
Making an impact
Since then we’ve created impactful workshops with a focus on strategic alignment and delivered them for many clients, and other workshops focusing on people, trust and behaviours like the Team Charter sessions.
We’ve also used design thinking principles to build workshop templates to improve our own ability to turn new ideas into action, and then there is simply making meetings more useful, productive and enjoyable!
The Collaboration Coaches ‘model’ has given people easy access to facilitation and problem-solving skills, design thinking mindset, and the toolkit to work with and is a core part of what Daemon brings to digital transformation projects.