vat🧭 Designing how we work: team development that feels like us
During the height of the pandemic, I wrote a blog about how our team adapted to working in crisis mode. At the time, everything felt urgent — we were building the plane while flying it.
Now, we’re still working in a hybrid way, but the pace is different. We’ve had time to pause, reflect, and ask deeper questions. One in particular keeps returning:
How can the way we work as a team reflect the values we say we care about — and help us shape the kind of organisation we want to become?
This blog shares how we’ve tried to answer that — not in a perfect, shiny strategy doc, but through small, sometimes messy, human steps.
🔧 Starting with what to stop
One of the best team workshops we ran wasn’t about vision or goals. It was a conversation about what we needed to stop doing.
We looked at everything we were juggling — and talked honestly about what helped us thrive before the pandemic, during it, and what we’d missed altogether.
Then we plotted it on a grid:
- 🔥 Is this urgent?
- 👥 Who’s best placed to take it on?
Some things were quick wins:
Like blocking half a day each week for deep focus,
Or bringing resident voices into our team conversations more regularly.
Some needed more time and collective energy — like reviewing how our associate model works, or pairing up better across projects.
🎯 Want to try it? Here’s the Miro board I used — feel free to adapt it.
🔁 Holding space for learning (not just delivery)
The tricky thing about team development is it always comes second to the “real work”. But what if it didn’t?
I’ve been learning from others who are doing this differently:
- At TPXimpact, teams design their own learning through internal academies, building it into delivery rather than tacking it on.
- Open Systems Lab runs agile teams that redesign infrastructure — not just what services do, but how they work together.
- In Umeå, residents and staff collaborate directly on service changes. It’s more about shared learning than top-down reform.
None of these approaches are about being slick. They’re about being intentional. And I’ve been trying to do that too — starting small.
🎯 Try this: Ask your team:
“If our development was part of delivery, what would we stop doing — and what would we make space for?”
✍️ Rediscovering our purpose (together)
We’ve all seen vision statements that gather dust.
So when we talk about purpose as a team, don’t start with a strategy document. Start with people.
In a previous organisation I was at, we asked each other:
- When do I feel most connected to my work?
- How do I know I’ve made a difference?
- What gets in the way?
We even looked at value propositions from networks we admire — like The Relationships Project or Participatory City — and asked, “What would this look like for us?”
None of this gave us a neat answer. But it helped us remember why we’re here. And that’s enough.
🎯 Try this: Invite your team to map out their own week as a “user journey”. Not the service users’ — their own. What patterns do they notice? Where do they feel most alive?
🌍 Inspiration from people doing it differently
Here are a few organisations that’ve sparked ideas for me:
- La Model in Barcelona — transforming a prison into a co-created public space with the community.
- Good Work Camden — helping people into decent work through joined-up support, shaped by lived experience.
- New Local — whose “community-powered” reports remind us that teams, like services, thrive when they build trust and relationships.
Final thoughts: be a team that reflects your future
Team development isn’t a side hustle. It is the work.
Because if we want to build public services that are adaptive, participative, and resilient — our teams need to be too.
You don’t need a five-year plan. You need the space to ask:
- What matters most right now?
- What’s feeling heavy — or energising?
- What would be possible if we worked more like this, every day?
Here’s to building a team that doesn’t just deliver the work — but shapes what the future of work could feel like.
