Collaboratively crafting a team vision

Photo by Nicholas Swanson on Unsplash

As a newly formed team, we needed something to help us define where we wanted to go as a team. To help us with this, we decided to craft our own vision statement. During our first away day, I prepared and facilitated a creative, hands on session to get us all sharing ideas and having fun - with the outcome of a team vision created by us all.

What is a vision and mission statement?

Before we started, we wanted to make it clear what a vision statement is and what the difference is between that and a mission statement. Using some inspiring examples we learnt the difference between the two:

• A vision statement focuses on tomorrow and what an organisation/team wants to become.

• A mission statement focuses on today and what the organisation/team does.

For example: TED Talks Their vision: We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. Their mission: Spread ideas

Who is the CX team?

We also needed to define who we were as a team. We were a new team, consisting of user experience designers, user interface designers, researchers, optimisation managers, product owners and a customer experience manager, head up by our customer experience director who's main focus was improving customer experience at TalkTalk.

Crafting our own vision

I wanted everyone to be engaged and all input into what the team vision should be. To do this I planned a creative, hands on, session that involved crafts, glue, paper and lots of play dough. The reason behind the craft elements, was to allow the team to be playful and creative, just like children, where they are not inhibited by restrictions and creative blocks we adults have as we grow up.

Step 1 - Getting prepared

We split into groups to give us different vision statements. We talked through examples of other vision statements to get us inspired.

Step 2 - Doing some ground work

We started to answer a set of questions, that would help us build up our statement. These included: What do you do? For whom do you do it? What is your aim/goal? What are your values? Pulling together all the answers into one sentence, started to form the vision statements.

Step 3 - Visualising creatively

Once we had a statement, we began to visualise the vision to bring it to life through all the crafts we had spread across the table.

Step 4 - Playing back our ideas

After a couple of hours of playing with play dough and crafting our vision, we got back together to share our statements and the visual representations with each other.

Step 5 - Grouping and collating ideas

After going through everyones amazing visions, we started to pull out common themes and collate ideas. We realised a lot of us had come up with similar visions, but had worded things differently, so we wanted to keep everything noted to refer back to.

Themes from all the vision statements

• Design easy experiences

• Simple and accessible

• To live happier, connected lives

• Collaboration and customer centricity

• Design human experiences

• Empower our customers

Team values

• We are proud to be part of the CX team

• We are supporting and collaborative

• Every voice is heard

• You can be yourself

• We are curious

How do we work?

• We are data driven

• We fail fast, learn and try again

• We don't work in business silos

• The customer is at the heart of everything we do

Step 6 - Converging to one statement, together

Through pulling out common themes and key words we wanted to combine many ideas to form one solid vision. This involved voting on favourite themes and now as a team, forming a sentence together.

Our output: the CX teams vision

After the away day, we took our sentence and revisited it in another collaborative team session. After some tweaking and editing, we had completed our vision statement. It was something that we were all happy to work towards and the fact we had all crafted it together, made it all the more inspiring.

CX team vision: We create simple, accessible experiences, so our customers can live happier, connected lives.