The Create, Strategize, and Meditate (CSM) method fosters an innovation culture in an organization of any size. It revolves around the human-centered “pause.”, a concept described below.
I recently ran two corporate offsites for a legal team of a big conglomerate and a marketing team of a multinational F&B business. The offsite included a 3 hour Design Thinking 101 experience and strategic objectives facilitation. At the end of the workshop both teams walked away very happy with the results, but worried about how they can infuse an innovation mindset and culture in their daily business.
For those of you less familiar, Design Thinking is used to innovate and create solutions to build new products and optimal processes through a human-centered approach. It is actually not just a process but rather a way of thinking. Human-centered approaches are defined by deep empathy for a situation to identify the root problem and need. This is followed by an iterative and experimental process involving feedback and testing, which leads to quick adaptation before implementing. Design Thinking's attributes can be applied to daily work and team rituals to increase engagement and creativity within a company.
CSM does just that. It can foster an innovation culture in an organization through the key concept of a “pause” meeting. In a pause meeting, human-centered principles are applied to the way we work, to our team goals, and our shared group culture.
Most of the year flies by just keeping up with daily tasks and urgent fire-drills. A scheduled “pause” enables teams and companies to create, strategize, and meditate when planning and executing. It is the equivalent of mindfulness at the individual level. It’s akin to a group meditation practice. Pause meetings’ purpose is to increase the effectiveness of your team in reaching the goal, beyond just its efficiency and productivity in execution.
As mentioned, create, strategize, and meditate (CSM) can be applied to any size organization: a burgeoning startup or even a large corporate. Startups have to stay agile, for which the “pause” process can help them better incorporate the business environment and pivot their strategies for better market uptake. Corporates need to future proof and build a culture of innovation to remain relevant. The “pause” method empowers teams with a simple tool to foster an innovation culture and achieve business results.
There are many ways that a team can incorporate a scheduled CSM “pause” into their culture. Below is the breakdown of the Create Strategize Meditate (CSM) process:
Create
Design Thinking Workshop - These should be run quarterly and have predetermined scheduled themes for innovation. Pause meetings may surface these themes. Three to Four themes should be identified at the strategy meeting and then reprioritized during pause meetings as necessary.
Strategize
Strategic Objectives Offsite - All teams should have at least one annual strategic objectives meeting offsite. The goal here is to set and align the team vision and mission, as well as define KPIs at the team and individual levels. This is also the time to discuss team culture and identify opportunities for innovation and to run design sprints. Two days is the ideal time-frame.
Meditate
Pause Meeting - These should be scheduled monthly for about 1.5 hours.
The monthly pause meeting is to help the team reflect on tasks at hand, review how they are going, and how everyone is feeling. The goal is to let go of harmful channels and lost causes and to prioritize best case opportunities. The type of questions that should be addressed and workshopped around are:
What do you like about what you are working on?
What don’t you like?
What problems are you running into?
What needs to change to fix those problems?
What topics do we need to run a Design Thinking or innovation session on?
What’s Up Update - This is usually sent in the form of an email or message. We do not want this to burden the team with extra work. It is just a pulse check to ensure that the bigger picture is in view. Every week individuals should submit an answer to these questions:
What is making you happy this week?
What is making you frustrated this week?
There are many tools for facilitation. Below are a list of just a few of my favorites:
Post-its for crowdsourcing ideas and opinions
Bucketing for Defining Themes
Gallery Voting for Prioritization
Crazy 8's for Ideation
Prioritization Matrix for Decision Making
Design Thinking Empathizing Methods: User Journey Mapping, Ven Diagrams, Process Flows, Surveys, Observation, Questions and Grouping
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