Team Expertise and Skills
Your lab team is the most important building block for your work, with a mandate to bring about positive change.
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Your lab team is the most important building block for your work, with a mandate to bring about positive change.
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Roles: Your core team drives the process and approaches that you use in your work. You convene and engage your key stakeholders, funders, partners and end users or beneficiaries of the change you are bringing about. Your team also facilitates and inspires others to get involved, together building a movement for change.
Competencies: Your team is a multidisciplinary unit, and you are able to see problems from different perspectives. Your team members are systems thinkers with a hands-on mentality: they are not afraid to ‘dive into the deep end’. They are equally passionate about bringing about change, and process-oriented to take the necessary steps to move the needle on your challenge (see Joeri van den Steenhoven’s for more on this). Your team are managed risk-takers and not afraid to fail.
Success factors: Your team is savvy (astute, knowledgeable and insightful) – as you are able to make practical judgements on your work as you go. You have empathy for your end users, partners and participants, and for the diversity of their perspectives on the problem you are trying to solve. Your team is flexible and adaptive to a changing environment. Your team also has the humbleness and integrity to allow others to take credit for your collective work.
The success of a lab team will further depend upon the right mix of expertise, skills and attitudes. Your team’s expertise will need to be diverse and fitting to your specific challenge, but will most likely include:
System innovators who understand complexity and are able to design and change systemically
Researchers who understand users (e.g. designers, social scientists)
Facilitators who can design and facilitate processes to develop and prototype solutions collaboratively
Domain experts who understand the challenge area
Your team will need a variety of skills and attitudes to be successful, which will likely include being:
Innovative: Eager to try new ways of doing things, able to find solution ideas for hard problems, and knowing what it takes to do so
Design-oriented: Able to understand patterns; iterating and creating valued solutions in a complex environment
Entrepreneurial: Takes initiative, able to see and address problems in new ways, willingness to take risks, able to sell new ideas
Organizational: Skilled at convening and coordinating a team; a sense of practicality
Diplomatic: Creates partnerships, is a good listener while maintaining neutrality, brings people together
Instructions
1) Challenge Framing With your team, answer the following questions and fill them out in the template below.
What is (the current version of) your value proposition?
What change are you trying to bring about?
What problems do you have to solve in order to bring about these changes?
2) Team Expertise As a team, work to identify your team’s expertise in terms of your desired expertise, what you currently have, and your resulting strengths and gaps.
Use the template below to fill out your desired expertise:
Describe what is needed on your team, and why.
Describe the expertise that you have now, currently present on your team.
Describe the strengths and gaps that you see with respect to your lab team’s expertise.
3) Team Skills Use the template below to fill out your desired skills.
Describe what is needed on your team, and why.
Describe the skills that you have now, under currently present.
Describe the strengths and gaps that you see with respect to your lab team’s skills.
4) Reflection As a team, reflect on what you have learned through this exercise, and how it may help you moving forward.