In a first stage, I like to meet with the people facilitator in order to establish the importance of everyone having principles in common. In a meeting with the facilitator, we try to create principles to support the mission and realize if it makes more sense to have principles rather than a mission, values, or goal.

In the case of Angry Ventures, I met with the MC (the Angry Ventures people facilitator) to discuss this topic. In this meeting, I presented the following current principles, which acted as the basis for the next steps:

At the end of this meeting, we realized that it would be important to review these principles, to better adapt them to the group and reflect what it feels/thinks.

In a meeting with the people facilitator, we try to understand if the principles defined in point 1 have value or not. I also like to try to understand what the main intentions behind the creation of these principles are.

In the case of Angry ventures, this discussion allowed us to reach a consensus that values are static, but principles are not. A vision without principles is not a vision with direction, since the principles will give autonomy, responsibility and motivation, as well as alignment and involvement. From this meeting, the 3 pillars of the principles were born: Deadlocks, Identity and Direction. The creation of a process for designing the principles based on dynamics was established in which:

1) People are educated about the principles

2) It understands what kind of deadlocks the organization has

3) It defines the identity of the organization

4) It defines the direction of the organization

There’s no point in creating principles for an organization if then employees don’t know what they are. Therefore, this point is the basis of the whole strategy defined in 2.

At Angry Ventures, a Slack channel (in this case the #learning channel) was created to provide an energy of sharing content on the subject. These were the shared contents:

We also share the following note: As you know, there was a group dynamic last week to define Angry Ventures Team Principles. If you still don’t know what principles are, we suggest you read our (several) blog posts on the subject. In short, they are an intellectual thread that unites us all, represents our common position on things and is also something that guides us in more challenging situations.

All organizations have their deadlocks, of the most varied kinds. This is normal. But as there is always room for improvement, it is good to understand what these deadlocks are and create principles that can help you solve them.

At Angry Ventures, we created a board at Miro so that, as a team, we could describe the deadlocks that each one encounters in their daily lives (in this case, we focused on a time window that included the last 12 months). Everyone had the opportunity to contribute to the board and share the most relevant deadlocks.

In the end, the virtual post-it were aggregated in order to find patterns and relationships of weight and priority between them. After this aggregation, a spreadsheet was created where some principles were created, that would help to solve these impasses. This spreadsheet is only a draft, but already helps in the definition of principles. For example, if one of the deadlocks was the difficulty to say no, a principle was created, stating that “no is a valid answer either”.

The next step was to create a group dynamic, where the identity of the organization can be identified more precisely. For this, one can resort to a dynamic called Is- Is Not – Does – Does Not.

We created a board at Miro and divided it into 4 areas (Is, Is Not, Does, Does Not). Then, each one could share what he thought the company was or was not, what it did or not, in the right place. In the end, the facilitators did the exercise of aggregating the opinions given and finding patterns and relationships between them. A spreadsheet tab was created, containing some of the principles that help to characterize Angry Ventures.

Finally, it is important to define the direction of the organization, through another group dynamic. This will help to consolidate some principles and bring to the table new ones, which had not yet been thought of.

In our case, we use the Hero’s journey dynamic, through Miro. We created 4 spaces, divided in “Hero”, “Guide”, “Cave” and “Treasure”, in which one should put, respectively, who was the hero of this journey (in this case, the Angry Ventures team), the people or things that guide the hero, the difficulties and obstacles ahead, and what one intends to achieve and accomplish.

The most important to define was the “Treasure”, since the other points only came to reinforce the previous exercises. The obstacles (in the “Cave” table) are not the same as deadlocks. Deadlocks are sometimes based on the past. The obstacles are focused on the future – what we must overcome to reach the “Treasure”.

From all the data obtained through the dynamics, it is possible to interpret the results and thus consolidate and create team principles.

We divided the team into small groups of roughly the same size and distributed for each group an area that constituted the Miro board of each dynamic. For example, one team would take the area of what constituted the company or not (identity dynamics), and another would take on the dynamics of the organization.

Not everything has to be represented by a principle, and some clusters can even be more represented than others. Throughout this process, one could also vote for a principle that had already been written and that represented well a cluster of post-its, thus avoiding another similar principle to be written.

At this stage, you should already have in hand several principles that represent your organization and your work team. The last step is to bring everyone together and decide as a team if there are principles that can be grouped together, because they are similar, or eliminated.

After this meeting, a small group of people worked on the semantic part of the principles and organized them into categories, for easier consultation by everyone.