 Hello everybody, thanks for coming, it's so nice to see you all. Yeah, so we're going to do something today called the team transformation canvas. I'm going to tell you all about it. We're going to work on it by yourself, we're going to work on it together, we're going to have a really good time this afternoon. This is me, sometimes I sit like this, wearing a black shirt. So you heard a little bit about me, I'm a teacher, I'm a coach. And lately, I'm chief technology officer of a health tech startup based in the United States called for evolution. And we've got some contact information for me here. If you'd like to stay in touch with me, these are some ways to do it. I would love to hear from you both during the session, after the session, and after I return home. So my little health tech startup, for evolution, we use a little bit of AI to help people with mental health. We help you find the very best therapist, the psychologist, to help you be your healthiest. We got three parts to this afternoon. We're going to start with you, each one of us individually. We're going to look at this canvas and we'll get into a little bit about what your next steps might be to take this back to your team. First, there will be a lot of interaction. Some of the interaction will be us doing things on paper, talking to each other. Some of the interaction will be digital. Did you bring your digital interaction device? Mine looks like this. You could aim, oh, does your digital interaction device have a web browser? Does your web browser, did your web browser come with a camera? You could aim your web browser at that QR code, or you could type that into your web browser. When you get there, when you get there, tap one of those icons and we'll know you're there. Just like that. It looks like a heart. It looks like a thumbs up. And what's the third one? It's a what? It's Batman? I don't know what it is. If you like it, you can tap it. Thumb up, it's very popular. It looks like it's working for a lot of people. If the QR code isn't working for you, you can type menti.com into the web browser. That eight digit code, that will still be there. I have a question for you, two questions for you. So, I'm from the United States. I'm actually from Boston. So I have a peculiar accent. And part of my peculiar accent is some of the words I use. I always want to work on an awesome team. Like I just want everything to be awesome. The lunch we just had, that was an awesome lunch. This whole conference, this is an awesome conference. Now if something is really, really, really awesome, I say that's wicked awesome. Right, so now you all are experts at the Boston Accent. You can say that's wicked awesome if you really like it. How awesome is your team? Whatever team you're part of right now, and you get to decide what that team is, who those people are. How awesome is your team right now on a scale from not that awesome all the way to really wicked awesome? How awesome is it right now? And how awesome do you want your team to be on a scale from not that awesome to really wicked awesome? How many people are in the room? Maybe 42, maybe 45 people are here. So, you've all spoken, it looks like we've got some pretty good teams. And there's a little bit of room to make those teams better. In fact, I've never done this on a screen this size. It looks like we want our teams to be one meter better. I think we could do that today. Let's make our teams one meter better. Looks like our teams are two and a half meters good and we want them to be one meter better. Let's see what we can do today. So that gap, that says that we're in the right place. We want our teams to be better. Our teams are pretty good because we're all pretty good at what we do. And we know how to guide our teams. And we're gonna make them even just a little bit better. We're gonna take them from awesome to wicked awesome. So we're gonna start with a story about teams and team performance. We did a full day workshop yesterday on this. So for some of us in the room, this is gonna be a review. For a lot of us in the room, this is gonna be a new. Although, you've probably heard some of this before. The story about teams and team performance, this became really easy to tell a few years ago. You've probably heard this story. Maybe this is new to you either way. Back in, what does it say there? 2016 in the New York Times. I think it was the New York Times Sunday magazine. Charles Dewick shared this story about work that the nice people at Google were doing. To try to figure out what made the best teams at Google, the best teams at Google. So historically, going back to the 1950s or 1960s, people have been researching teams and team performance. In business schools and academic programs in industry, and trying to figure out what makes the best teams the best teams. Now even at a place like Google, Google is a high-performing company. There are definitely high-performing teams inside Google. There are definitely lower-performing teams inside Google as well. And they wanted to understand what it was about those high-performing teams that they could identify and share with the other teams, so they could all be high-performing. The academic research that goes back 50 or 60 years. The researchers have identified hundreds, maybe 200, maybe 300 different attributes that depending on the research, depending on the experiments they conducted, they say this is the one thing that correlates to having a high-performing team. So there are like 300 of these one things, 300 of these one things. 300 things that you're supposed to focus on to have a high-performing team. That's too many things, you can't focus on 300 things. So they decided to try to reproduce the research. They got the right kind of people to join the company to help them reproduce the research. They got a couple of hundred teams to volunteer to participate in reproducing the research. And what they found was that for those teams, the one thing that mattered most was psychological safety. That if a team measured high on psychological safety, they measured high on performance. No matter what kind of team it was inside Google. Software development teams, hardware teams, sales teams, didn't matter what they were doing. If they measured high on psych safety, they measured high on performance. Psych safety, also part of my accent, I abbreviate things. Psychological safety, psych safety, is this idea that it's safe to show for work and work in that team. I'm staying here in the hotel from the window. I can see some construction workers at some building across the parking lot. The construction workers around a rooftop, that's not safe. That's physical safety. The construction workers are wearing helmets because it's physically dangerous. They're wearing special boots so they don't lose their toes because it's dangerous, it's physically dangerous work. For probably all of us in the room, our work is not physically dangerous. It's physically safe. But we don't always feel safe in our hearts. We don't always feel safe in our heads. And that shows up in the results of the work we do. When we don't feel safe in our hearts and in our heads, we don't work as well. When we're doing creative intellectual work, which is the kind of work that most of us here are doing. So psychological safety is the idea that it's safe to take risks. It feels in your heart and in your head like it's safe to show up as who you really are with your teammates. It's safe to try out new roles. It's safe to admit you made a mistake. It's safe to make mistakes. You don't get fired when you make a mistake. In fact, everybody helps you and you learn from the mistake. And your team becomes better. It's safe to learn. That's what psychological safety is. It's safe to learn. And so obviously teams on which it's safe to learn perform better than other teams. I shared this story about Google with a new friend at that time a new friend who is also based around Boston. Oh, also this idea of safety, this cuts across all industries. It was discovered in healthcare. We've seen it in digital services, Google. This is about dentists. I told this story to my dentist and she was really excited about it. She had a dental magazine about safety, psychological safety in the office. That dental teams with psychological safety are better than other dental teams. I shared this whole story with Steven Wolff. He's a researcher and consultant based in Boston, like me. He and his research partner, Vanessa Druskit, they knew all about this psychological safety stuff. They were doing their research at the same time as Amy Edmondson, also based in Boston. Amy Edmondson published a lot of the seminal work on psychological safety in the 1990s. Vanessa and Steve were doing their research at the same time. They discovered something that they called Team Emotional Intelligence, or TEI, Team Emotional Intelligence. What they discovered was there were nine dimensions, not just psychological safety, but still a much smaller number than 300. There were nine measurable dimensions that mattered for team performance and psychological safety is one of them. So you could think of psych safety as a subset of TEI. So emotional intelligence for you and me individually basically means something about us on the inside and something about the world outside of us. That on the inside, I understand how I'm feeling and I can behave the right way no matter how I'm feeling. And I can infer how people outside of me are feeling and I can influence their behavior a little bit. That's emotional intelligence. Team Emotional Intelligence is the idea that we as a team understand how we're doing and we can do the right thing, do the right behaviors to achieve our goals. And we understand how the organization outside of our team works and how people are doing and we can influence them to help us get our job done and to help the whole organization succeed. That's team emotional intelligence. It gets measured in nine dimensions. One of them is psychological safety. One of them is social capital. One of them is executive support. Teams that understand themselves and the world outside of their team, they know how to build relationships with other people and other teams and get the benefits of those relationships. That's social capital. They know how to, well via social capital, they know how to get executive support. And when the executives support your team, they give you all the resources you need. They get all the obstacles out of your way. Obviously, you become a successful team. So teams with high team emotional intelligence, they have high performance. Now both the Google story and the TEI story, there's an interesting little fairy tale ending to these stories. We wish that we could just tell teams do more psychological safety and you will live happily ever after. But even at Google, they don't do that. They just teach people about psychological safety and they hope that they get the results they want. With TEI, it's kind of like, do more emotional intelligence together and you will live happily ever after. But actually, if I told you, do more emotional intelligence, you don't know what to do. Because it's an outcome. It's not a behavior that you can do. So there's this other body of work. It's the work of Jim McCarthy and Michelle McCarthy called the core protocols. Jim and Michelle worked at Microsoft in the 1990s. They worked with a really, really successful team. It was the team that built one of the most successful products of its era. It was Visual C++. Way back then, it was a really, really impressive piece of software. It was an integrated development environment. There weren't that many of those at the time. They introduced a lot of new technologies. They introduced a lot of innovative business ideas that helped it be a super successful product. So successful that at least one competitor went out of business that couldn't compete. So when we talk about high-performing teams, we're talking about teams that are objectively better than other teams doing similar work. One way to say objectively better is the other team went out of business. That's what happened. The team was so good that nobody else could compete with them. The McCarthy's reflected on that experience. They were hoping that they could figure out why that group of people were so successful. They left Microsoft and opened up a team research lab. And in their laboratory, they would invite a team of people to join them, give them an assignment and a five-day deadline. And at first, they just watched these teams at work and took notes like you're doing now. You're sort of watching me at work and taking notes. This is what the McCarthy's did. They watched these teams at work and they took notes. The teams that were successful in the laboratory, they noticed had similar behavior patterns. That there were a lot of things that they did that the other successful teams did. They wrote down these behaviors in a way that they hoped they could help other people reproduce those behaviors. They wrote them down in a pattern language that they called protocols. A protocol before there were computers talking to each other. That's how a lot of us think of protocols. Protocols were things that people did to communicate very clearly with each other, to make sure we're all moving toward our goals together and to minimize misunderstandings like there are healthcare protocols. We do the same things over and over to make sure the patient is healthy and safe. There are diplomatic protocols. There are things that we say and behaviors that we engage in amongst leaders of countries to make sure that we achieve our common goals together and that there are very few misunderstandings. And so the McCarthy's wrote down these 10 or 11 team protocols to help us communicate and behave really clearly with each other, to achieve our goals, to minimize misunderstandings, to help us be super successful, wicked awesome teams. McCarthy's taught this to teams then in their laboratory and every time they did that, those teams were successful. They taught it to teams in industry and every time they did that, those teams were very successful at performing. Other people have taught this to teams in industry and every time they've done that, those teams became high performing. Steve Wolf, the team in emotional intelligence researcher and I have done a little bit of our own research on this. We measure teams on their emotional intelligence and their performance, teach them and coach them on core protocols and measure them again later on. And they always rose into emotional intelligence. They always rose in performance. And so these behavior patterns learned from watching high performing teams. Here's a way to look at it. If you want to high performing team, you probably do. You all said you did. At least you wanted one more meter of high performance on that chart. You definitely want psychological safety. And psych safety is a subset of team EI. So you definitely want that. Now you can't just tell people do more psych safety or do more team emotional intelligence. You need to give them some behaviors they can follow. And the core protocols is one set of behaviors. There's almost definitely some other way to do this. This is the way we're gonna look at right now this afternoon. Core protocols as a way to do this. And so since I discovered the core protocols, the work of Jim and Michelle McCarthy, been trying to figure out how to help people acquire these skills really, really fast. So one way is to do something like what the McCarthy's do. They teach a five day class. You go off to Washington on the west coast of the United States, you go to a five day class. If you're coming from India, that would be like two days of travel, time zones to get used to. You'd have to be a two week trip at least. That's a long time. There are a few people can do a five day class, especially to travel to it. We did a one day class here yesterday. It was really great. But even a one day class. I mean, we had 12 people in the one day class. We've got close to, I don't know, 50 or 60 people here. Obviously a one day class is even too much to ask for people to try to learn these skills. So we've been trying to find ways to do this faster and faster and faster. And the result of that is this canvas. I think you all have a copy of this canvas. There are a few copies on each table. This canvas is a really fast way to really quickly boot up onto these skills. I'm not actually gonna teach you explicitly any of the core protocols. You can find them. It says in the small print, where to find them. Thecoreprotocols.org. You can go there. Thecoreprotocols.org and find them. But we're gonna, we're gonna, this tool is a fast way to get a sense of what these behaviors are about and help bring you closer to having that wicked awesome high performing team that you want. Also, I've never seen these printed on such beautiful paper. So we are really in luck here today. That is really nice, shiny poster paper. Like I don't even know if I want to write. I want to put it in a frame. Take it home. So this is what the canvas looks like. You have a lot of these on the tables in front of you. You have pencils. We're gonna fill in these canvases together today and learn a lot of these skills for having a wicked awesome high performing team. So starting with you is about knowing the background there. It's about thinking about the canvas. We're actually gonna do the canvas solo. We're gonna do more starting with you as an individual. We're gonna do the team transformation canvas starting now. You can get your own canvas. You've got this nice printed one right there on the table. You can go to teamtransformationcanvas.com. It will take you to a blog page on my website where you can download the print version or get an electronic version that you can do online. There's a template and mirror for people who use mirror. You can look up the team transformation canvas in the mirror catalog and you'll find it there. You can download the PDF and print it. This is actually, this is from the PDF. Or you could just, you don't need the canvas. You can just do this on a blank piece of paper. So here's what the canvas looks like before you start. This is what you see in front of you on the table. And we're gonna start in the top right hand corner, top left hand corner. The top left hand corner is all about positive bias. And this is kind of like a license agreement for using the canvas. To be able to use this canvas, you kind of have to check these boxes. It's not gonna work unless you can check these boxes. But okay, this isn't like a license agreement on a website or a piece of software where you just go, click, done. Read this, you have to read this. And you have to believe this. This won't work unless you read these sentences and believe them. I will use positive language, including phrases like yes and. For this to work, we have to be oriented in a positive mindset. The words we use together this afternoon, the facial expressions we make, the body language, this all has to be toward wanting to have something good. Trying it out, pretending that this might work. You really have to be here for another hour. You can stop being positive at the end of this hour. If you want to, that's up to you. I will bias my action toward positive outcomes for myself and for the people around me. If you can do that, check off those boxes. If you're not sure, pause for a moment. Think about how you might be able to do that. Then check off those boxes. If you really can't do that, there's a really nice session next door. There's another one right after that. You might be better off in one of those other sessions and that would be okay. This is totally voluntary. You don't have to do this if you don't want to. If you're not quite ready yet, that's okay. But if you are ready for this, just check off those boxes. You have pencils, actually do this right now. We are doing this canvas together right now. Check off those boxes if you're okay with this. Do we have any more canvases in the room? No more. So you don't need a can, oh, there's, nice, thank you. If you don't have one, you can just use a blank piece of paper. It'll work out. So from here, we're gonna move to the top center. This is about freedom and autonomy. A little bit more of this sort of license agreement or a little bit more of adjusting the way we're thinking right now. That we're all here because we want to be here. Nobody's boss said you have to be here, right? I'm not sure maybe somebody's boss did say you have to be here, I don't know. I didn't say you had to be here. I'm assuming that you're all here because you want to be here, not because somebody said you have to be here. This will only work if you're here because you want to be, not because somebody made you come here. This whole thing is a big activity and it's a little thing filling out the canvas. These are smaller activities. You can opt out of any activity at any time. Actually, this applies outside of this room as well. If you're here totally of your own free will and volition, check off that box. Anything you don't wanna do today, you don't have to do. Anything you do wanna do today, you can do, it's totally up to you. You can exit any situation at any time for any reason. If you really wanna go to that talk next door, go ahead. This will be like a team agreement for all of us in the room. If you wanna do something else, go do it. If you need a coffee, go get it. If you go to the bathroom, go do it, it's okay. If you wanna stay, that's okay too. Whatever you wanna do, it's fine. If you don't wanna check these boxes, it's exactly okay. I'm not making you do anything. You can do whatever you want while you have, we have social norms that we're gonna do anything. Too unusual or weird. But if this is true for you, check off these boxes right now. If you're not sure, then just pause for a moment and think about how you could make this the truth. And maybe then check off these boxes. And if you can't check these boxes, you might wanna go somewhere else. Because this really won't work. This won't work unless you're oriented toward positivity and you're doing everything because you want to do it, not because somebody made you do it. So let's move on from there. This is actually, well, you were in class yesterday. So you know that this is the behavior called check out. That this is a bigger idea than just this canvas. This is like, if you're at work and something's not right at the moment and you need some space, go do it. If you're in a meeting and the meeting isn't working, you don't feel right, you feel afraid or anxious. You're allowed to leave. Maybe you're not allowed to leave on your team. But on the really high-performing teams, this is what happens. So I didn't mention it, but these check boxes, these are things that people, I don't know if they have check boxes, but these are behaviors that happen on the highest-performing teams. On the highest-performing teams, people use positive language and positive body language, positive words and positive body language. They orient themselves toward good. And if you can do that while you're here, maybe you can do that while you're with some other group of people as well. On the highest-performing teams, people have this freedom and this autonomy. They get to decide even what team to work on, what work to do, how to do the work. You've heard about some of this in Scrum, you get to decide, the developers get to decide how much, which work they do in a sprint and how they get the work done. There's a little bit of this built into practices like Scrum. But what if you could even pick what team you worked on? You could probably pick what company you worked in. I mean, we've got a lot of freedom in our lives. So if you can have this kind of freedom, then you're probably gonna have a really high-performing team. And this is from watching high-performing teams. And another question or comment. It says for any reason, it doesn't say for any valid reason. If you have a reason, it's a valid reason. You get to decide. You get to decide right now and you get to decide later. Okay, but if you want to have a high-performing team, it's totally up to you. I don't know, it sounds a little condescending for me to be up here on the stage. I'm this much taller than everybody and I'm like, if you want to have a high-performing team, then do this. If you don't want to have a high-performing team, that's okay, right? But if you watch the high-performing teams, this is stuff that they do. If something's not going right at the moment, they get to opt out. They get to pass on activity. It's your turn at the daily stand-up and you're not ready. You can pass and somebody else will take their turn. If you're in some other work situation or non-work situation and something's not going right for you, you can leave. You can come back as well when you're ready. On the best of the best teams, this is what people do. If it's not going right for you and you stay, you're gonna drag down the rest of the team. If you leave, the rest of the team is gonna go on without you and they're gonna be fine. You'll come back when you're ready and then the team's gonna be even better. That's what this is about. Thank you. Sure. This is a behavior of a high-performance team. We intentionally, so the question was, the stuff about positive behavior bias, is this an outcome of a high-performing team? So the high-performing part is the outcome. The input or the behavior is we orient ourselves toward positivity. So why I'm saying that is basically like, let's take a team. Okay, and the team is very low for any XYZ reasons. And we just come to them and tell them, you have to behave positively. You have to have a positive bias. It can't happen just like that. Definitely not. Definitely not. And we can't tell people to do anything either if we want the team to be high-performing. But, okay, and we'll talk about how to use this canvas maybe with your teams later on. Maybe you could do what we're doing right now with your teams and introduce this to them and just share it with them and offer it to them. And see if they like this. Or offer them some parts of this and see if they wanna try it out. Just offer it and see what happens. Like we're doing right now. We're offering this to each other and we can try it out. Sure, we can experiment. So next, on the left-hand side, in the middle of that column, this is about your current emotional state. We saw a little bit of the research related to team emotional intelligence. Start with personal emotional intelligence. Fill in the blanks. Now, this is a little bit harder than a checkbox. How do you feel right now, number one? Complete the sentence. Go ahead, do it right now. Check in with yourself. Check in with your head. Check in with your heart. How are you doing right now? Write your answer. I feel blank, just fill in the blank with whatever is going on within you right now. How do you feel right now? I'm gonna wait while you do that. Oh yeah, I just saw somebody modeling that if you don't have a canvas, you can just do this on any piece of paper. If you don't like paper, you could tap this into the notes app on your phone. No matter how you do it. Actually, write it down. Write down how you feel right now. It's different from just thinking about how you feel, write it down. Make it concrete. And these canvases are so beautiful, maybe we'll be able to frame them after we. Let's go to the number two here. It's almost the same, fill in the blank, it's I feel blank, but this time it's multiple choice. This might be easier, but this might be harder. I feel glad, sad, mad, or afraid. Which one of those is closest to how you feel right now? Circle it. There's more than one, you can circle more than one. Whatever you said in number one, I feel blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For line number two, which of those emotion words is closest to how you're feeling right now? If you had to pick some emotion word, which of those words, which one of those words is the word for how you feel? And then in box number three, add on some more detail. What else is going on within you? Whatever you picked for line number two, how is that going for you right now? What else is happening? What do you want to have happen? Happens before you feel that way, what happens after you feel that way? Add a little more detail. So there's a lot of individual activities this afternoon and there's even some group activities. Find a partner. This might be the person sitting right next to you. It might be somebody else at a different table. You and your partner share with each other how you're feeling right now. This should be easy because you just wrote it down. You might even just read what you're feeling. This might be more difficult because maybe there's more to it than what you wrote. Spend a couple of minutes sharing with each other how you feel right now. Share that with somebody and listen to them as they share with you how they feel right now. Good. You could even move to be closer to your partner if your partner is far away across the table. Let's all gather back together. How is that going for you? How did that go for you? You just shared how you're feeling with somebody. You heard how somebody else is feeling. How's that going for you? So what did you notice happening right now? What did you notice happening as you were sharing how you were feeling with somebody else? What's a fact about that? So if you already know the person, maybe this is easy. If you don't know the person so well, maybe this isn't as easy. Maybe it's a little bit unsafe feeling. How did it go for you? Somebody, it went this for somebody. It went this for somebody. Do you ever do this with people on your work team? Share how you're feeling at times? Yeah, this must be why you have one of those two meters long, good teams. On the best of the best teams, we notice that people share how they're feeling with each other. That this is a really easy step toward team emotional intelligence. We know the teams that measure high on team, EI measure high on performance. They perform better than other teams. What we just did here was an example of something you could do with your team. Just a little bit of individual emotional intelligence. How do you feel right now? Many of us don't do that on any particular day. We don't ask ourselves how we're feeling or make it a point to check in with ourselves. And then share it with each other and suddenly we're building team emotional intelligence. It's a little thing. The more often we do it, the easier it becomes and the more comfortable and safe it feels. If it's something that you've never done before, anything we've never done before is uncomfortable. Anything that we're doing for the first time or that we don't normally do feels uncomfortable, feels unsafe. But if we do it more and more, it starts to feel safer and safer. There are a lot of teams that make it a point to do this every day. Like you might do it as part of your daily standup, your daily scrum. Just to talk about how are we feeling in addition to what's the work we got done and what's the work we plan to get done and does anybody need help? How are we feeling? Add that on. Talk about it at least once a day and it becomes easy. And you start to build that team emotional intelligence and team performance will actually start to rise. Now I am curious about all of us in the group. Here's another way to build a little bit of team emotional intelligence. Just to understand where we all are together as a group. So back to your electronic interaction device. What was your answer? How are you feeling right now? And I already believe you because there's at least one for every one of these four emotions. So there's a lot of glad in the room. That's nice, I'm happy about that. There's a little bit of sad, there's a little bit of angry, there's a little bit of scared. So this is sort of the barometer, the temperature of where we are together as a group right now. That's good to know. There's at least one person who's sad, there's at least one person who's mad, at least one person who's afraid. We're gonna take care of each other while we're here. We're gonna move over to the center, the big part of the center column. It's called personal alignment parts to this. We'll start at the top. Fill in the blank for line number one. I want black. When's the last time you wrote down what you want? When's the last time you checked in with yourself about what's important to you? Now, this is a really big want. If you want a cup of coffee, just go get it, that's easy. If you want something else to eat, just go get it, that's easy. This is more like, what's the biggest, most important thing in the world for you? What is your biggest, most important want, your biggest, most important desire? What is the most important thing in the world for you right now? You, what do you want? What is your biggest desire? Guardless of a tune, this starts with you. It starts with each of us individually. Well, you know, like, I need oxygen, yeah. But I got it, I need adequate sleep at night. That's a little challenging when you travel time zones. What do you want more than anything else? Like, you know, I need a ride home, maybe somebody's answered, but you're gonna do that. Think like I want world peace, or I want COVID totally solved, or my health tech startup. I want everyone to have really great mental and physical health. What is your big want? What if it changed? That's okay if it changed. What is your biggest want right now? What is on your mind right now as the biggest, most important thing in the world to you? This might be difficult because we don't normally do this. This is interesting, right? If you want a normal team, then do all the normal things. But if you want an above normal team, then do things that are not normal. Normal teams are easy. They're kind of boring. They're not that good. I've been on a lot of normal teams. I've been on a lot of mediocre teams, and I've been on some really great teams. The great teams do things that are abnormal, that normal teams don't do. Asking it yourself, what is the most important thing in your life, in your world? That's not normal. Doing these not normal things is gonna help us have a not normal team. Maybe we should call this a not normal team instead of a high performing team. We're gonna have not normal teams. What do you want more than anything else? What is the most important thing for you? And then box number two. If you got there, if you figured out something that's really important to you or the thing that is important to you, why don't you already have it? If that's the biggest, most important thing in the world to you, whatever it is, you should already have it. You should be spending all your time and energy pursuing that. If it's I want to attend agile conferences, then you got it. If it's something else, you should be doing it right now. What is in your way? What's preventing you from having or having all of the most important thing in the world for you? What's blocking you? Pause for a moment, reflect, and write down your answer. Why don't you already have it? What's in your way? If it's a watch, you probably don't have it or you don't have all of it yet. If you already had it, then you don't have to want it. Or maybe you want it, you want all of it, you already have some, but you want more, right? So why don't you have more? Why don't you have all of it? If you really do want COVID solved, we're in the wrong place. We should be working for some biopharma tech company instead of data conferences right here. If you want world peace, we're probably in the wrong place unless we're doing something that helps us connect with other humans and attain some sort of peace. What is it that you want? And why don't you already have it? What's in your way? Now this next one is a fun one, number three. You got that thing that you want. We've got whatever's in your way. Number three is another I want black, but it's multiple choice. 10 choices. Which one of these 10 words? If it were your future superpower, if you had all of the self-awareness or all of the courage or all of the wisdom in the world in the whole universe, if you had that superpower, which is the one that would help you eliminate everything that's blocking you and get you everything that you want? Get you those most important ones. Which one of these 10 words? If you could be a 10th degree black belt in one of these powers, which is the one for you that would unblock everything? Of course, you're gonna have to practice it. You don't get it for free. But if you had all of the energy in the universe associated with health and passion or fun or one of the other seven words, which is the one for you? But if you focused on it, it gets you everything you want. Write down your answer. Circle one of the words and write down your answer. If you're not sure which one, this one is the default answer. You're not sure what you want to try, try maybe self-awareness could be your superpower. Now, which one did you choose? What is your future superpower? That's really amazing. You know how like in Scrum and other frameworks they talk about cross-functional teams? Imagine if we had a cross-functional team with somebody who was a superhero of self-awareness and another superhero of integrity and another superhero of courage and all of these superpowers were on your team. That would be an amazing, wicked, awesome team. That would be an abnormal team. That would be one of those really, really awesome teams. And imagine that it wasn't just you working on that power, that the people on your team would support you as you're practicing that new skill or enhancing that skill that you already have. Imagine that you were practicing courage and everybody on your team supported you when you were doing that. And you supported them while they were practicing whatever skill they're building within themselves. Number four is about this. How would you tell your teammates that right now I'm practicing my future superpower? When I do this, whatever it is, I want you to do that. Try this out for a moment. It could be as simple as when I say I'm working on courage, I want you to say awesome, we support you. Or it could be something like when I do this, I want you to do this. Whatever you want, think of a signal some way you could tell your teammates that you're working on your superpower. And something you want them to do, this could be like a secret handshake. Nobody else has to know, just the people on your team. What do you want them to do when you signal to them that you're doing some work on your superpower? It could be just I'm, hey team, I'm working on my wisdom and they say, we support you. Or it could be fill in the blanks with something. Finally, big box number five, you're not gonna get this superpower built up without any effort. You're not gonna eliminate everything that's blocking you without trying, without trying really hard. And without the people on your team being aligned with you and supporting you. How will you practice? We actually call this your alignment, that special virtue or that superpower like integrity or courage or passion. How are you gonna practice it? What will you do every day to build that power within you? This could be as simple as write it down in my diary every day that I practiced it. This could be something else. Like if you want help, what would that be? I want help. So I walk 8,000 steps every day and I've got some little computer on my wrist that counts how many steps I'm taking. I want wisdom, so I read books instead of Instagram and I write down how many pages I read in a book every day. I want peace, so I meditate for 10 minutes every day. What is it for you? How are you gonna build your future superpower? What will you do at least once a day? Write down your answer in box number five. I want courage, so I will meet a new person every day. I'm shy and I'm afraid of meeting new people. I will write down their name every day in my life. So there's evidence that I've been practicing and I could even share that evidence with my teammates and they would hold me accountable to myself. They would help me hold myself accountable to myself. They would support me while I make myself better because when I make myself better, my team is gonna be better. This is all about starting with you. From there, we're gonna move on to the top right. Top right is called investigating myself. Okay, so that thing we just did, that was called your personal alignment. You might call it your personal superpower. That word that you picked, let's dig deeper. What does that word mean for you? Like, I know what courage means for me, but if you picked courage, how do you define courage? I know what self-awareness means for me, but if you picked self-awareness, what is it for you? How would a friend be able to observe that you've been practicing your alignment? What would it look like? What would they notice if you were practicing health? What would it look like to a friend or a teammate if you were practicing self-care or passion or peace? Is there anything else about your future superpower that you can think of or that somebody else might be interested to know? What would you like to have happen? Fill in the box with some of the answers about yourself. Dig deeper into yourself. Dig deeper into your brain, into your heart. What else about this personal alignment for you, this future superpower? I might be tricking you into doing some self-awareness practice. You could even ask a friend about theirs. You don't have to do it just by yourself. You could investigate somebody else about their superpower. That one of those 10 words, your future superpower, we call it your alignment, what superpower am I aligned with? Courage. How do you define the word? I don't know what your word was, but how do you define your word? How do you define it? Not how do I define it. You get to decide what it means. I love that we have a lot of time here. We're doing this at workshop speed so we can really go deep. We're doing this at the speed that you could do this with your team or with anybody you care about. Maybe you got started. Maybe you finished. If you're not finished yet, you can go back to it later. I have an idea. That friend that you shared how you're feeling with ask them about their personal alignment. Ask them about their future superpower. Investigate them. Ask them a few questions. Hey friend, what word did you pick? Hey friend, what does that word mean to you? How do you define that word? Hey friend, what would it look like if you were practicing that word? How would I know that you were practicing it? How would you tell me that you're practicing it? How could I support you if you were practicing it? What evidence would there be, friend? If you were to practice this, what evidence could I see later on that you had been doing it? Ask your friend right now. Go ahead, talk to each other. Investigate each other on your personal alignment. Investigate each other on that superpower that you're gonna build. All right, let's gather back together. So maybe you connected with a friend. Maybe you made a new friend. Maybe it's an old friend. Maybe you just connected with somebody in a deeper way than we normally connect with people. Maybe you just did something a little bit abnormal. You asked somebody about the most important thing in the world for them and how they're gonna work toward it and what it would look like and how you could support them. That's abnormal. On the abnormal teams, on the high performing teams, this is what people do. They know within themselves what's the most important thing and they know a little bit about the path they're gonna take to get there and they know that they're gonna need help from other people around them and they talk to each other about it and they build a little community of helping each other. This is what people do on the best of the best teams. We're gonna move down to the bottom right corner. Oh, based on that conversation you had with yourself, based on that conversation you had with your friend, how good is your personal alignment? How good is that new path for yourself? Is it just right? Is it perfect? Is there nothing to change? If it's perfect, give yourself a score of 10. If it could be twice as good, give yourself a score of five, five times two, twice five is 10, right? If it's like 90% good, but it could be a little better, give yourself a nine out of 10. It could be three times better, give yourself a three or something, get closer to 10. How amazingly good is this practice for your future superpower? How much better could it be? Give yourself a score, just a number. And then, number two, what's good about it? Did you pick the right word? Can you define it well? Are those some of the good things about it? Do you have a good way to practice it? Do you have a good way to signal that you're doing it? What could be better? Can you find a better way to practice it? That's box number three. What could you do to make this a really, really good self-improvement, group improvement practice? Go ahead, fill in the blanks. What's the score for how good this personal alignment, this superpower building practice? What's good about it? Can you come up with that that's gonna work? What would you change so that you could really, really achieve that superpower? Unblock everything that's blocking you. And obtain everything you really, really want, those most important wants. If you got started, that's good. If you finished, that's good. If you're not finished yet, you can finish it a little bit later. Definitely go back to it. The last thing on the canvas is the bottom left-hand corner. This is about getting help. You're not gonna be able to do this by yourself. Who could you ask for help? Write down the person's name. Exactly how would you ask for the help? Practice, write yourself a script. This is how I would ask for the help. I would say whoever the person is, wife, husband, friend, whoever it is, will you blank, fill in the blank. What's the script that you will use when you ask for help? This is getting yourself ready to ask for help. If you were talking to that friend, that person that you were just communicating with, having a conversation, what would you ask them if they were your helper? What do you want that help to look like? How will I ask for help different from the personal alignment? I will signal this is my response. It might not be different. It might be the same thing. Like maybe when I signal this is how I ask for help. You could write that as your answer. And the help that I want is to know that you're supporting me. Or maybe it's something else. Maybe it's like I want you to do pushups with me. That would help me with health. Let's meditate together. Will you meditate with me? That might be how we ask for help. So keep thinking about that. If you haven't finished filling in the box, you can fill it in later. So we've done a lot of reflecting on ourselves individually here. We've done a little bit of connecting with somebody else. What can you do next with this? Obviously you could take this canvas and you could bring it back to your work team or any group of people you care about. Team doesn't have to be a work team. Team could be you and your spouse, you and your family. Team could be any group of people you care about. So a question for you. I love this question. I'm gonna answer this question in a minute. Question is about, this seems like a personal transformation canvas. How could this be a team transformation canvas? Is it because it starts with me? And I'll talk more about that. So we've been here for an hour and 15 minutes together. We practiced a few things. You've heard me say a few things. What was your key takeaway? What's the most interesting thing you heard or the most important thing you learned? I learned that circles become ovals on a screen with this shape. So maybe this canvas could help you be a better you. Or maybe it's that there really is some science about high performing teams, about abnormal teams. Maybe this canvas could help your team. Maybe you wanna take a class on this. Or maybe you just love canvases. There are so many canvases, canvases are fun. Maybe it's something else. It's something else. I wanna hear from you later on. Tell me what the something else is. Really, here's a look at, this is kind of going back to where we started. There is science and research on high performance teams, on abnormal teams. You definitely want psychological safety if you want a better team. Definitely want team emotional intelligence. You definitely need to practice some behaviors, build some skills to get there. This canvas, I didn't teach you explicitly the behaviors but you did a lot of them. You learned how to give feedback on something. That was the perfection game thing. You can do that for anything. Give it a score from one to 10. Notice what was good about it so you can do more of that. Notice what you wanna do differently. You investigated, you asked big questions about big important things. You did a personal alignment. You did an emotion check-in with yourself and you shared how you're feeling with somebody else. These are the skills and habits of high performing teams. I kind of tricked you into doing them without telling you that these were the skills and habits but now that you've done them, you could take these habits back to your team. You could read more about them at the corp.roticles.org website. You can have a high performing team. You could do this canvas by yourself which we kind of did today. That was really good. You probably got some good ideas for yourself. Maybe relate it to work. Maybe bigger than work. Work is just a part of your life. Your life is bigger than work. You could do this canvas with your whole team. We just did a little bit of this together. You just saw me facilitate doing this with a large group of people. You can imitate everything I just did. You can copy this experience and bring it back to your team. Take this canvas and do it together. One of the things we notice in the best of the best teams, these abnormal teams, is that the people are super connected with each other. On normal teams, everybody works on their own thing by themselves. And that's where those teams are normal. They're mediocre. On the best of the best teams, we are super interconnected. If you could do this canvas together, it would help build that super interconnection. Move us up individually and us up together into that state of a really wicked, awesome, high-performing team. So try repeating everything we just did with your team. You could do this if you happen to work in a physical space. You could do this on paper like we're doing here. You could work in digital space. You could do this digitally. You could do this in Miro or with a PDF or just have everybody get a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera, show each other. You can get your canvas at teamtransmissioncanvas.com. You can download it. You can print it. You can find the Miro version or the PDF and you can edit the PDF on your computer do whatever you want. Get your own canvas and try it out. You can ask me for help anytime. You have my contact information. Ask me for help. You could read these books. All these behaviors you can find them documented at thecoreprotocols.org. It's totally free. You can take them. You can use them. You can enjoy them. You can try them out with your team. You'll notice that we did a lot of them. By doing this canvas, we did a lot of these thecoreprotocols behaviors. In my newer role as CTO of a startup, I don't do a lot of this stuff. I don't teach a lot of classes. Speak at conferences a lot anymore. I am teaching at Harvard again this summer for three weeks. If you want to come to Boston, it's on campus. If you want to come to Boston and take a class with me this summer, you're invited to come. It's open enrollment. Anybody can register for the class. Anybody can come join us. You can come to Boston and spend three weeks with me in Boston at the best time of year to be in Boston. It's really fun. Oh, you can go to my website and I've got a really short, easy psychological safety assessment. If you want to try this out for yourself and for your team, go do it. It's a really quick intro to how you could measure psychological safety for your team. You could do it by yourself representing your team or you could have everybody do it together. You could even impress your teammates by abbreviating and saying psych, safety. You'll find it on the website at kasparowsky.com slash diagnostics. Oh, let's practice another one of these behaviors. That one that was you give feedback on yourself or you give feedback to anything to try to make something better. I'm gonna ask you for help right now. That's another one of these abnormal behaviors. People don't, we don't ask each other for help enough but on the best of the best teams, people ask each other for help all the time. Hey, will you help me? I want this kind of session to be the best it could possibly be. Will you play a perfection game and give me feedback on this session we just did right now? This is the same thing that you've already seen. It's answer three questions. Give a score from one to 10. Say what was good about it. So I can do more of that and say what I could change to make it a perfect 10. Yeah, if you have a question, I'm here, let's try it. Sorry, okay. So when we do this with the team, do they get to share with each other what they have written? Yeah. All of them? Yeah. Part of being one of these abnormal high performing teams, we're gonna do some abnormal things that are gonna make us better. We're gonna talk to each other about how we're feeling. Okay. The canvas facilitates having that conversation. It makes it a little bit easier. It makes it a little bit safer because we're just filling in a canvas. It's not like I'm really sharing how I'm feeling with you. I'm just reading what I read on my canvas. That's easy. But it turns out we aren't really sharing how we're feeling with each other. And do we ask them to restrict what they write to only work, work context? District what you write to only work? Absolutely not. Okay. This is how do you feel? This is what is the most important thing in the world for you? Okay. This is how will you work on that superpower? What do you want help with? And how will you ask for that help? We want people to bring their whole self to whatever they're doing. Not just a little piece of themselves, right? If we work together, I would want all of you to be there, not just a little bit of you to be there. So this is totally open. Thank you. And let's assume the results are no way kind of a little team, right? So how is it, what are the steps you would do to make your team high performing? So what if people filled in this canvas together and it had nothing to do with the work by filling in the canvas together and talking to each other about it and asking each other questions and listening to each other and talking from our hearts about how we're feeling and what's important to us? We are creating a stronger team. And we're gonna take that stronger team and wield it toward doing the work. Being more strongly connected is a foundation of being a high performing team. We're gonna be watching out for each other now. We're gonna be helping each other more now. We're gonna be helping each other, not just on wisdom. We're gonna be helping each other on everything. We're going to be asking each other for help now because we've already practiced a little bit of asking for help. You can ask for help on, you know, I seek inner peace. You can ask somebody for help on that. You can ask somebody for help on, will you help me write this line of code? That's easy, right? So if they do this, no matter what the answers are, they're the right answers and we're connecting together as a stronger team. That stronger team can do anything. I feel that it is even better if the answers do not come from work related because I think we all know or know our colleagues in terms of the strengths and weaknesses, what we see in the work. But what we don't see as them as a person and their strengths and weaknesses as their person. And when we get to know this as a human being, that kind of bonding is going to last forever. For sure. And that's abnormal in most work teams, which means it's different from mediocre in most work teams. I'm going to change the slide and we can keep talking. Yeah, Richard, I have a question here. So is this canvas complete when we see as a team transformation canvas? Because I see more of ice here. It's more of individual trying to explore them and building the trust within the team. Yeah, the idea of the canvas is to facilitate a little bit of introspection and to facilitate this conversation amongst individuals on a team and to facilitate a little bit of learning the behaviors from the core protocols. Because I see transformation is more bigger than, this looks more of a team building or team trust, building within the team, rather a transformation here because I see transformation is more bigger scope than what we discussed here. Maybe the word transformation means something different for you than it does for me. That's okay. Richard, first of all, I would like to say that thank you so much for this wonderful session, that too immediately after lunch. I mean, to be honest, I didn't feel sleep or something boring. In fact, I was not sure like how the time passed. So thank you for that. And apart from that, this team transformation canvas, it's more practical. I could see like something better out of it. Personally, I'm taking it. But I have a question here. See, if my colleagues are experienced, I mean, in case if I'm working with them from past couple of years, it's very easy to do this exercise. So do you have any thoughts in case any new members join to the team? Because it's more of the transparency and trust. How can we build that? So if you have new people joining your team, well, here's what I find. Even if you've been together with some teammates for a while, even a couple of years, we often don't know them deeply. We don't know them as people outside of work. We don't know what they really care about, what's really important to them. At least in, I don't know, this is definitely a cultural thing and even a micro cultural thing. Like, at finance companies in New York, people don't talk about their feelings. At most companies, I've been, and people don't talk about their feelings. Even if you've worked together for 10 years, you don't really know each other in a deep way. Some people do, and some people become friends outside of work, but a lot of people just work together. Whether you've worked together for 10 years or you're new to each other, a tool like this, just fill in the blanks and talk to each other about it, it's a pretty safe low barrier tool for approaching some of these topics and for building up a little bit of skill in sharing how we feel with each other and sharing what's important to ourselves with each other and in connecting with each other more. So we've got a low barrier tool here that you can use with anybody. Oh, you could change it too. I guess most of us work in English, but maybe you work in a different language. You could adjust this to your work language. Thanks, Richard, for this amazing activity. So probably my question is, as per Ajay, if you really see, we define teams as self-sufficient or what you call self-reliant, I would say, where the team is expected to kind of work together. I don't understand that. Practically, that's impossible. There is supposed to be always a motivator, somebody who can push those limits to make sure that. So in that case, in your practical experience as a consultant or let's say a mentor, how many, let's say, having, I said, different levels of experience of, say, somebody from, let's say, 10-year-old, 10-year experience developer to somebody who's just standard off to even say mid-level developer, say, five years, to break this ice through your activity. What has been the average time, say, average company has taken to break that ice and become more transformed in, say, delivering their products to the client or whatever it is, whatever the project context. Thank you. Take about half a year for a team to become reasonably well-performing. That's a long time. And that's only if you get lucky. Worked on a lot of teams and approached a lot of teams. You don't do anything on purpose. It might take six months and you might become a successful team if you get lucky. In big companies, and I bet a lot of us here work for big companies, every three months there's a reorg and the team changes. And every time the team changes, it's another six months but you don't get six months. So the team changes again and you get six more months but you don't get six months. So you never have a chance to build a team that works really well. A tool like this can decrease that time. We did the full day class yesterday. The idea of the full day class is to decrease that time from six months to one day. This tool can also reduce that connection and building up some new habits and practices from six months to a few days, I don't know. You could use this as the starting point for building new habits and skills together. But this is where the real transformation comes from using this as a catalyst to build new skills. Make it happen faster. Like you could have an awesome team right now. If you just connected with each other, people were ready to orient themselves with positive bias and all the things on the canvas. Okay, plus more, plus a few practices and behaviors, you have it built together. Oh my goodness. It is five minutes after we're done. We have five minutes so far. We're going to wrap up. We'll have, I'll be here. If anybody else has more questions, I want to mention again, this is my health tech startup. It's a revolution. We're helping people have awesome selves, awesome lives, awesome families, awesome workplaces. And you've got my contact info. So if we don't get a chance to talk right now, we can communicate anytime. Thanks everybody. Thank you.