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🏁 🔐 🏁 FRONT MATTER 🏁 🔐 🏁
How to use: Use this document alongside the companion workshop that we’ve shared with you: [TEMPLATE] USTP: What I need from you
As for USTP by 18F based on 18F templates.
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This is a guide to an adaptation of the What I Need From You (WINFY) exercise from the book Liberating Structures. There’s a few differences from the version in the book that we’ll surface here.
How to prepare
- Read the WINFY guide from Liberating Structures; our version is different but similar to the “group or a team of individuals who are interdependent” variation.
- Duplicate the Docs template and adapt it to the specifics of your team
- Adjust instructions with team member names and the time allocated for each section
You will need around 60 - 90 minutes to run this exercise (roughly 15 min x number of participants).
How to run the exercise
This exercise has two main parts:
- What I need from you
- Expressing your needs
- Accepting or rejecting needs asked of you
- What? So what? Now what?
- Observations and assumptions
- Analysis and conclusions
- Adjusted beliefs and informed actions
Introduce the purpose of the exercise
In this step, you’ll share with the team the purposes of the exercise.
- Practice telling people about your needs and responding to theirs
- Learn how to articulate functional and/or personal needs clearly
- Learn how to give clear answers to requests
- Highlight interdependencies among the team members
- Learn what your teammates need from you to perform their role
- Build team relationships and trust
- Mend connections that have been broken
- Build trust so that group members can share accountability with integrity
- Reduce miscommunications
- Reduce frustration by eliminating preconceptions and rumors
- Get all the issues out on the table at the same time for everyone to see
- Reestablish and/or improve communication inside functional clusters
Set ground rules
Set the ground rules of the exercise; for a good set of starters you can use these ideas: