This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) to define different aspects of the team. Having done it a bunch now, I’ve developed a fairly strong agenda for conducting these sessions, which I’m now sharing publicly. Feel free to use it for your team!

Agenda for Group Sessions to Build a Design Team Charter

Embedded in that agenda are links to a series of public Miro boards for capturing the group work. I think (?) you should be able to copy the boards to your own account, and if not, they’re pretty easy to recreate.

Why draft a charter?

As design teams grow, they often realize that there’s a set of assumptions about they work they do, assumptions put on them by people outside design. These assumptions end up constraining the potential of the design team, and they find themselves focused on production when there is so much more they could offer.

I believe these charter projects have proven popular because they provide a platform for a design team to define itself, to set its own course and agenda. They help teams build confidence taking control of the kind of work they do, and how they do it. This empowerment, in turn, makes the teams more effective, as they feel greater connection to their work.

“If Design Were A Person” Activity

Most of the activities are fairly straightforward group work to arrive at some common understanding, with a divergent phase (generate a lot of ideas), grouping and organizing, and then a convergent phase (voting) to arrive at a result.

These activities tend toward the logical, verbal, rational. Working with design teams, I wanted to tap into the creative, pictorial, visceral. When I conducted these group sessions in a conference room, I would use the Design The Box activity to get people in that generative, lateral thinking mode, hoping to tap into stuff that’s subconscious. I tried bringing that into a remote session, but I find that drawing tools just aren’t sufficient in these platforms, and were getting in the way of creation.

So I changed it to a “If The Design Team Were a Person,” with the idea that we still have imagery, and there’s something subconscious that goes into the identification of that person, with a post hoc rationalization of the qualities of that person and how they apply to the Design Team.

That said, I’m not thrilled with the exercise. It works, and I’ve gotten good stuff from it, but I suspect it could be better. I’d love to hear from folks on generative, creative activities that they’ve facilitated remotely.

The Sessions Are Only The Beginning

The group sessions account for about a half to a third of the total effort in charter building. The sessions are great for getting ideas out of people’s heads, and the voting and discussion that happens places focus on the specific areas that are most resonant to the team. After the sessions are complete, then someone (or a small group) needs to take what’s been generated as input into the drafting of a charter, which is a process of distillation, wordsmithing, refinement, a lot of dead-ends, and occasional epiphanies—much like any writing work.

I’ve very much enjoyed facilitating these discussions, and if you’d like me to do so for your team, you can reach me through my website.