Getting Leaders
In the Pocket
Client: Google gTech
Services: Leadership Development, Event Design & Production
Challenge: What can Google learn about creative leadership from a world-class jazz ensemble?
Team: Curiosity Atlas – Me: Experience Design & Co-Facilitation, Gretchen: Facilitation & Client relations, Shana: Graphics
gTech leadership tapped Curiosity Atlas to not just inspire, but genuinely move their leadership team to approach their work differently.
Our solution, get curious about jazz, baby!
Through a series of employee interviews and surveys, gTech identified a gap between the organizational vision, management direction, and the employee experience. With an off-site for 150 leaders looming, the VP wanted to leverage the time to overcome three managerial challenges:
Activate the vision - Employees don’t see how their day-to-day work contributes to the bigger picture.
Improve communication - Employees feel communication is one directional not conversational. They don’t understand the rationale behind decisions that impact their work.
Align as a leadership team - The management team are not the evolving leaders gTech needs.
Tackling the organization’s challenges head-on would impair participant’s ability to tap into creative solutions. Instead, we wanted to take the Google leaders out of their element. Changing the subject matter allows more freedom and creativity for generating new solutions to their problem space. gTech’s challenges shared a lot of themes with improv jazz:
How do members of a band express their uniqueness while contributing to an ensemble?
How does a band communicate with each other on the fly during an improvised set with out speaking?
How does a band leader inspire musicians to create their best work harmoniously?
In exploring leadership through the lens of jazz we were able to explore the challenges and opportunities of leading teams in a more relaxed context. We designed a two-day immersion into the world of music with the help of Stefon Harris and Philip Sheppard.
“You only get goosebumps when something exceeds the possibility of what you put into it.”
- Philip Sheppard
From musical plants to theremin lessons, we created a world that tapped into the power of play. Philip and the Stefon Harris quartet took everyone on a musical journey exploring lessons of expression and leadership.
“I need to allow my players, my colleagues–the people I’m lucky enough to work with–enough freedom to bring something extra to the game.”
“My role as a leader is not about contributing ideas, funnily enough. My job is about organizing this collection of interesting ideas.”
Through talks, solos, sets, and even an impromptu freestyle jam session between Philip and Stefon (who had never met before this retreat), the musicians shared intimate insights into their role as leaders and collaborators.
Next, we walked participants through a series of exercises to capture lessons and distill them into salient themes. After synthesizing our findings, we presented teams with a design challenge: Develop new rituals and practices they could incorporate into their work to overcome their ongoing challenges. We provided “How might we…” prompts and use cases to help guide their brainstorming.
How might we…
… Design for “goosebumps” and help employees connect emotionally to the gTech vision?
… Create more opportunities to listen and learn from our team?
… Create a culture of experimentation and learning?
Leadership teams identified promising concepts then committed to 30-Day Experiments–small practices they could immediately implement at work to test the new concepts with their staff. They would then report their findings with a cohort of peers for shared learning and iteration.
To help reinforce and maintain the lessons on improvisation, communication, and flexibility once they returned to the office, we created an artifact–a leaderships kit–each participant could reference in their day-to-day work. The kit contained:
A book of insights and quotes gathered over the two days; lessons they wanted to share with each other as managers.
A series of cards with action prompts they could experiment with in their interactions with employees
Curios activity cards for continued inspiration
A playlist of gTech theme songs
A custom harmonica engraved with the gTech logo
