What do you get when you bring ten creative strangers together for the very first time?
Magic.
At least, that’s what happened when I assembled my sparkly new Kooth Content team in Chicago to ideate, explore, and create — just days after they were hired.
In this week-long, in-person workshop designed and led by yours truly, here’s how we went from not knowing each other’s names to knowing each other’s hearts over the course of just six days.
The Culture
By together defining our team’s North Stars and Black Holes, we agreed upon shared values, ways of working, and rules of engagement. The cosmic total of those elements was greater than the sum of its parts, creating a sense of psychological safety which made space for trust, vulnerability, and creative risk-taking.
The Work
Over the course of the week, we explored our 12 unique user demos (through current trends and research), defined 12 weeks of content strategy (with pitches and feedback on 100+ new pieces of app content). But to bring it all to life once we returned to the real world, we developed a creative production workflow that would support the ambitious content goals we were charged with achieving by app launch. Needless to say, by week's end, we were spent.
The Fun
If you can’t play together, you can’t create together. So play we did, by:
• Getting to know each other through day-in-the-life photo collages, morning affirmations, evening gratitude, and personal story sharing (happy tears were shed on Day 1!)
• Bonding through an inspirational visit to the American Writers Museum and a team giveback event at the Greater Chicago Food Depository (so. many. green. peppers!)
• Rallying to solve the New York Times crossword every day of the week (although Friday bested us — next time!)
• Relishing in the week’s references to the cinematic masterpiece ET, whose hero story served as a metaphor for our team’s own journey. (Side note: that extra-special extra-terrestrial is now our official team mascot with his own Slack reaction.)
The Takeaways
In the end, we walked away from Writers Room with a human-centric team culture, deeply invested connection, and a robust strategy that would carry us through the rest of beta all the way to launch. None of the challenges we had yet to face would stop us. Because after this week, we had each other.
Like I said. Magic.