Google Resilience & Innovation Workshop

In the summer of 2019, Google hosted an offsite for their marketing team in New Orleans, with the theme of "Resilience and Celebration." They asked Hyperakt to facilitate a workshop for Google employees about how resilience can also be manifested in innovation.

How might we unlock the full creative potential of our product and marketing teams by teaching to them to be more flexible, resilient, and innovative?

The Hyperakt team conducted a 2-hour workshop, for 140 members of Google's global marketing team. We based our workshop on three guiding questions:

"How might we enable Google marketers to see old problems in new ways?"

"How might we establish behaviors and rituals that give Googlers the room to explore unexplored territory, consider different angles, and try new things (innovation)?"

"How might we increase our appetite for bouncing back when plans change and learning from failed experiments (resilience)?"

Hyperakt worked with our experience design friends at Mischief Makers and facilitators at Women's Brain Trust to explore various options. We crafted different workshop scenarios that could help us solve this challenge — all with various degrees of interaction, spontaneity and spark.

We facilitated a learning and skill-building experience that was not only engaging but also participatory and fun. This unique session ignited new conversations and interactions, offering the Google staff a fresh lens through which to view their work. As a result, the participants left the session feeling inspired to approach their tasks with renewed perspectives. They felt confident in the vast array of skills already present in their toolbox and felt fully equipped to integrate new behaviors within their teams.

Objective: Articulate existing strengths that we can draw from when developing new behaviors

How to: Find a partner, draw your partner’s face without lifting your pen off the page or breaking eye contact, ask them for their superpower:

"What unique ability, behavior, or attitude can you contribute to your team to promote resilience and innovation?"

Responses: Cultural competence, creative thinking, decisiveness, empathy, an inquisitive mind, systems thinking, peace-making, sense-making, simplification, distillation, etc.

Objective: Practice the skill of "looking out", defined as the ability to look beyond the organization’s walls to understand customers, technologies, and cultural shifts. Develop the ability to “think beyond” and “think forward”.

How to: Reflect on technological trends, business trends, societal trends, and human needs. Choose 1 trend and 1 human need to pull forward for conversation.

Objective: Articulate how the team will work together to address these trends?

How to: Reflect what might happen at the intersection of these two trends through the following questions:

What opportunities do we see for Google?

What threats do we see in Google?

How will we work together as a team to address these trends?

Objective: A social contract gives the group insight into how to establish a solid foundation amongst teams. Establish the very first steps you can take in order to get your process in order.

How to: Articulate 5 helping behaviors, and 5 hindering behaviors