Work

Google Resilience & Innovation Workshop

Empowering Google's global marketing team to fight monotony and keep innovation alive.

Experience Design

Background

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.

Google Workshop

The challenge

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?

Google Room

The opportunity

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)?"
Google Experience

The experience

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.

Google Experience2

Impact

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.

Gallery of Superpowers1
Google Superpowers

Drawing on our superpowers

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.

Google Superpowers 2

Futuremapping

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.

Gallery of Superpowers
Google Futuremapping
Google Futuremapping3
Google Table Top
Google Table Tops
Google Vision3

A vision for a new way of working together

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?
Google Vision2
Google Vision

Connecting superpowers to the vision

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

Google Menti

Project Credits

Client
Year of Completion
Project Team
Collaborators
  • Mischief Makers
  • Women's Brain Trust
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