My my my, doesn’t time fly when you are having fun. another three months another design quarterly.This was Reason’s 5th quarterly design quarterly, coinciding with Reason’s new end of year we wanted to spend the majority of the day co-authoring strategic objectives for our team over the next 12 months.Alex also shared his “state of the team” presentation and we closed out by re-branding the very session I am writing about, meta I know.

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State Of The Team presentation

Alex Baxevanis kicked us off with his state of the team presentation.

TLDR:

1. Congratulations Daniel Robert Prieto on being selected as a BIMA 100 winner
2. We released 2 new blog posts and presented at UX Camp Brighton
3. Won 5 new exciting projects including strategy, coaching and innovation
4. We launched our brand new skills framework
5. We are working on carving out our space within DCX

You can take a look at what we cover in the presentation below

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Creating some shared goals

Having shared goals is something that has been talked about for a while within the team.

They are important for many reasons. They help orient the design team to ensure we contribute to the success of the wider team. They can guide individuals when thinking about personal development. Most importantly they enable our team to focus our energy all in the same, agreed direction.

No one likes singing off different song sheets..... It sounds awful.

When creating our goals we didn’t just want to set them at a leadership level and inform the team. We also didn’t want to do it in the vacuum of the design team. We wanted to take a view across the entire business, we wanted to be ambitious and creative and we wanted to have fund doing it.

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Step 1 - inputs

Before thinking about any goals we started by reflecting on a number of inputs that included:

• Our newly minted company-wide objectives
• Previous team exercises on what we consider to be good design
• Feedback from across the company on the design team and how we can support them better
• Our team skills framework
• Some of the amazing work we have done in the past 12 months

This enables us to reflect on what we hold important and true as a team as well as think about how we can support other teams and focus on achieving company goals.

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Step 2 - Wouldn’t it be great if...

Rather than diving straight into our objectives, we wanted to start by thinking about what would a great future look like based on what we had just looked at.

We kicked off with the prompt “In 12 months, wouldn’t it be great if...”, using the 1,2,4, all liberating structure we worked individually to complete the sentence as many times as possible. Then in groups of 2, 4 and all we combined an iterated through our list before landing on a single list of brilliant outcomes.

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We were able to prioritise this into 4 amazing outcomes:

In 12 months wouldn’t it be fantastic if:

1. We proactively and consistently pitch to our clients bigger and better ideas
2. We successfully hired and onboarded entry-level team members
3. We were seen as the design centre of excellence in DCX, helping transform DCX into a design mature organisation
4. We integrated more specialisms and diverse skills across our team i.e. motion, illustration, strategy, content etc

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Step 3 - A letter from the future

To add a personal touch we decided to write ourselves letters from the future.

A letter from yourself (in 12 months' time) congratulating yourself on achieving our team goals and telling us what it was like and what we did in order to achieve them. Through this, we uncovered interesting learnings and ideas such as:

• Partnering strategy with small creative studios
• Developing mentoring and coaching principles for the team
• A passion for climate action and regenerative tech
• Developing a closer partnership with our client and commercial teams

To spice things up we played the old primary school game of adding to everyone's letters to add different perspectives to each letter.

Some highlights from the future:

• James Craig looks great in the future
• Jonny Ballard re-launches his DJ career and is killing it
• Christiana Kim successfully pitched and launched a Levis & BTS AR collaboration
• The lottery numbers on Aug 18th are 11,14,25,46,12 & 9

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Step 4 - A celebration of success

It’s one thing to talk and write about it, but what does a successful future look like. In a quick-fire exercise, adapted from Lego Serious Play we asked the team to rapidly visualise what success looks like based on our agreed amazing outcomes and the letters from the future.

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We then tasked ourselves with selecting the most important aspect of each visualisation and bring it over to a single visualisation. A stamp, a crest, a visual reminder of sorts of what we will set out to achieve this year.

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Step 5 - Turning these into objectives

So as it turns out we were having too much fun and ran out of time to complete this. But hold that thought, we are getting together in a week's time to complete this activity.

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Re-imagining our Design Quarterly

As usual, we like to round off our sessions like this with a bit of a ‘non-work related’ creative exercise. Thanks to some good feedback from the team we focussed on how we might ‘rebrand’ the design quarterly.

It is a very boring name for something so important to us.

As usual, this task fell to Daniel Robert Prieto to lead, and lead he did. Armed with Beautiful typography, a rousing speech and a dash of revolutionary fervour we set about

1. Creating a flag for the event
2. Selecting a song that represents the event
3. Naming the meeting

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Iterating through creative exercises, a little dot voting and some going off script we re-imagined the design quarterly as our own space, our own republic a place where we gather every three months and Rave?

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Our Name

Rave at One

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Our Motto

Sharpies not blunties

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Our flag

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Comic sans questions marks... classic



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Our song

Ricky Martin - She Bangs (English)


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Our Anthem

*Here we come here we come *

*Cursors hovering in miro boards *

Dovetail tagging

Skipping google slides

*Slacking our problems away *

Aligning boxes till forever ends

Cool typos and swish colours

Figma is where we brag

We design we design we design

Solutions for them old corporate minds

Solutions for the new and upcoming entrepreneurs

Solutions for the eager to live a new life Here we come here we come

The legends of reason

Holding our adventurous souls and our big minds high

Contact us at Reason.co