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Mark The Spark at Spark The Change India 2018

by | Apr 1, 2018 | Appreciation, Leadership in the VUCA world

Across the 2 cool days of Spark The Change India 24-25 Feb 2018, it has been wonderful to see this amazing ‘Mark The Spark’ wall with so many Sparking cards – tokens of gratitude, appreciation, enjoyment and smiles 🙂 .

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More than 85 Sparking cards smiling across the wall, each telling something unique about what the Spark participants shared on what they liked, enjoyed, were thrilled about, wanted to appreciate, share what made them smile or shared something they thought was cool or awesome!

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Since 2003, personally and also at work, I use this technique of giving Thank you and Appreciation cards. Almost all project teams I worked with are still motivated to use this too 🙂 .

There’s an internal spark, internal motivation and drive that allows teams to get into this approach of ‘giving’ gratitude and appreciation to someone else – whether this is done across regular reflect and learn points across a project (Retrospectives in the Agile teams) or otherwise across the whole project. And it totally gives an amazing sense of satisfaction!

Surely many years ago we didn’t use standard templates or so when we initiated the use of this technique in 2003. We just agreed as a team on a couple of approaches to do this. One of them being – we cut different colored chart papers into smaller Index Card size (approx), got stickers on them to make them attractive and/or even more meaningful to help convey our message.

The card content had at least 3 things to share our gratitude or appreciation:

  • Who the appreciation / gratitude is for
  • What – the appreciation / gratitude itself
  • Who the appreciation / gratitude is from

Few years ago when I chose to be a Management 3.0 Facilitator, I learnt the technique Kudo Cards / Kudos Box, by Jurgen Appelo the author of Management 3.0 and Managing for Happiness.

As a Management 3.0 Facilitator, I introduce the ‘Kudo Cards’ and ‘Kudo Wall’ right at the beginning of my workshop too and we use this across the 2 days of the workshop – Learning with fun and appreciation.

You can read more on this at the Management 3.0 website too using this link.

Having brought the Appreciation Wall to Spark The Change India, we have some Learning and Actions to take forward:

  1. With a good feeling of safety and something new that conference attendees were doing, that is appreciating each other for what they really really enjoyed or wanted to thank someone for, the engagement amongst attendees increased. At one point it was so much that there was quite a bit of crowd just to stick their kudos cards at a great spot on the wall! ✨😀
  2. Continue to use this in the future conferences, with even more sparks ofcourse 😉 Update: We used this again in the Business agility Conference Hyderabad in 2018.
  3. Share our experience with everyone on the usage of this technique at the Spark the Change India conference. Update: I’ve been doing this not just across my different business agility workshops but also in my coaching sessions across the globe.
  4. Help others keen on trying this technique in their contexts and then hear their stories of implementation and learn from it. Update: I’ve been coaching a number of scrum masters, Hr managers, agile coaches, senior leadership and change agents on this practice. Experiments performed by them so far have been successful.
  5. There is 1 additional learning that I like to highlight since not all experiments always work.
    Just before the Sparking business agility conference in 2019, I was invited to run a session with a business school. I decided to introduce the Kudos cards to them too.
    Approx 120 people I think, split into teams of 9-10 people. I clearly remember when we were closing that session and it was time to use Kudos cards and stick them to the wall, there were 2 groups that just stood there staring into my face. I thought perhaps I wasn’t clear in my instruction. So I walked over to these 2 groups and started to explain the instructions again. They told me that they had clearly understood the instructions. So, that was not the problem.
    Then one of them said well we don’t know how to say thank you, don’t see why they should tell the other person that they did a good job over themselves, didn’t see why they would value sharing what they enjoyed with their colleagues – isn’t that something personal to them? It’s not something that they did regularly. It feelt odd to them.

    Something that I would have thought was a done thing wasn’t a done thing! Listening carefully to a few of those who spoke led to a discussion about their upbringing, why they didn’t ever see saying thank you as a thing to do in any context. I agreed to have 1-1 with 2-3 people from this group to understand more and see if they would at least like to experiment with kudos cards just saying what they feel happy about their 15 days onboarding with the college thus far. These 2-3 people tried it out for sure. Would they try it again? Hmm.. 😉

Have you used this technique in your experience at other conferences – as an organizer or participant? How has your experience been? Would be great to learn from that too!

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