How do you conduct collaborative work more effectively with groups on projects? In this week-long course, individual team members will receive hands-on practice in leading team activities that will help them start, advance, and wrap up projects of any shape and size.

Workshop Dates: July 27-31, 2020

Enrol here!

Faculty: David Sherwin & Mary Sherwin

What is this workshop?

Today's teams want more alignment among their members, better decision-making processes, and a greater sense of ownership over their work. In this hands-on course, you’ll learn the essentials for forming and norming cross-functional teams, as well as how to lead inclusive design activities that capture the strengths of each individual from start to finish of projects.

At the start of the week, you’ll learn practical rituals for finding a common purpose at the beginning of a project. From there, you’ll get a chance to work on multiple teams and practice how to get unstuck when your team needs to move forward. At the end of the week, you’ll learn best practices for how to wrap things up and move on to new teams. And along the way, we’ll give you plenty of tips for how to facilitate team activities in a variety of contexts.

By the end of this course, you’ll have plenty of practice in both practical and tactical collaboration skills, as well as new toolkit of activities you can use with your teams.

This course draws from material in our book Turning People into Teams: Rituals and Routines That Redesign How We Work.

What will you learn?

• Understand the importance of taking a team-based approach to design work


• Understand how teams are best formed, normed, and perform over the course of a project


• Understand how your personal perspectives and bias factor into team decisions and performance


• Practice forming and working with teams on a variety of short design projects


• Learn how to use adaptive learning techniques such as timeboxing to improve overall team performance


• Learn how to form and apply criteria to improve the quality of group decision making


• Improve your overall communication and collaboration skills


• Have fun!

How will you learn it?

In this course, you will spend most of each day moving between brief mini-lectures and hands-on activities in a variety of team configurations. This is different from most other courses at CIID Summer School, which focus on a week-long project with a single team.

Is this for you?

Yes, if…

• You’re a designer or individual contributor with professional experience, seeking to improve how you participate on cross-functional teams. You’re being asked to lead team activities, but may not be comfortable doing so (yet).


• You’re a new team leader, seeking to improve how you support your team from start to finish of projects. This includes those who work in project, product, or program management, as well as design and engineering.

To get the most out of this course, we strongly recommend that all course participants are currently working with cross-functional teams in the workplace.

What do you need to bring to the workshop?

• Yourself


• A computer


• A camera or phone that can take video


• A willingness to reflect on how you currently work with teams, and try new things!

Enrol now: There is a maximum number of 20 places available for each workshop, first come first served. Enrolment will be closed when the workshops are full.