Through this workshop, your team will create a draft of a new or refresh an existing ToC.

Create a Draft Purpose: Develop a lightweight, living Theory of Change that helps communicate the teams’ work to critical parties, foster team alignment, and serve as the foundation for adaptive management.

Refresh Purpose: Many factors can necessitate updating a teams' Theory of Change! Adjust your original ToC based on evidence gathered, to align with organizational priorities, and/or to gain wider input from a diverse group of perspectives.

Outcome: Theory of Change one-pager

Purpose: An annual (or more frequent) review to pause and reflect on an overall team strategy, To make a recommendation to Pause, Pivot, Persevere with, or Expand a strategy, to discuss the recommendation, and to make a decision on the path forward

Outcome: A set of prioritized, evidence-informed decisions about how the team will pause, shift or continue work in the coming quarter.

Purpose: Engage with key parties to better understand and center their needs, pain-points, ambitions, and behaviors  through conducting empathy interviews. Better understand the challenge at hand in order to support the team in making evidence-based, community-centered decisions. 

Output: Empathy interview conversation guide tailored to the specific project of the team. List of potential interviewees. Understanding of best practices for engaging with key parties through empathy interviews. A set of key party needs and insights that can inform next steps and drive design direction. 

Purpose: Kickstart your momentum of testing a new solution through our multi-day, deep dive, collaborative facilitated experience that focuses on building out a first draft of your idea and gathering early feedback on the prototype - setting teams up for continued testing and iteration.

Output: First draft of a concept (prototype) with initial feedback

In order to build the trust necessary for effective collaboration in high-uncertainty environments, Adaptive Teams cultivate an active conversation about how they are working together as a team, identifying and acting on opportunities to build team health.

Team Formation Workshop 

Purpose: To deepen interpersonal connections across a team, build trust and respect, create a shared vision for how to work together effectively 

Output: A clear set of working agreements developed by the team to establish a way of working together 

Team Health Survey & Retrospective

Purpose: The Team Health Survey enables teams to measure and track their progress on key adaptive management competencies; the Retro enables them to reflect on how the team is working together and collaboratively identify ways to improve team health 

Output: A set of action items related to team health areas of growth, to be carried forward in the coming quarter

Adaptive Teams learn their way to impact. They proactively seek feedback in order to co-create with key partners, they generate evidence in order to validate (or invalidate!) their assumptions, and they drop what isn’t working so they can invest in solutions that do create the impact they are aiming for. 

Mapping Assumptions

Purpose: To generate, prioritize, and refine critical assumptions associated with our Theory of Change.

Output: A set of critical assumptions about our strategy for impact that can be tested to gain greater certainty 

Testing Assumptions

Purpose: To build the skill of designing lightweight tests that can help us generate evidence quickly to learn more about our critical assumptions

Output: A first draft of several tests related to our key assumptions that can quickly be implemented to gather evidence 

Reflect & Adapt 

Purpose: To share and evaluate evidence and project progress, reflect as a team about the implications of the learnings, and create a strategy for integrating learnings into action.

Output: A set of prioritized, evidence-informed decisions about how the team will pause, shift or continue work in the coming quarter.

Adaptive Teams make progress every week and regularly realign around their priorities, incorporating what they learn and changes in their environment in order to adjust their answers to “What needs to happen next?”

Weekly & Monthly Meetings

Purpose: To stay in communication as a team about priorities, continually reflect on past work and learnings, and make a plan to address obstacles to progress

Output: Greater alignment across the team about what is most important, as well as between the daily work and strategic goals. 

Quarterly Review & Planning

Purpose: To reflect on project progress and data on impact from the last quarter, and confirm learning and implementation priorities for the coming quarter

Output: A set of quarterly goals to orient the work toward impact for the coming quarter, as well as measure of success.