Over the last three years or so, I’ve found myself working on very short, very intense projects. We’ll form new teams around specific client challenges, often a team of people who haven’t worked together before.

My work - creating new propositions for clients - is creative and ambiguous, but also time pressured. For our projects to be successful, the team needs to be a cohesive unit from the off, creating a state of flow and moving forward together unthinkingly. But those short timescales can mean that just as a project team gets into its rhythm, the project is over and the team disbanded.

To ensure great work, I needed to find a way to accelerate the process of cohesion, so I developed the Ways of Working Canvas.

How to use the Ways of Working Canvas

The canvas is a simple A4 sheet that each team member fills in and shares with the rest of the team.

Get every team member to spend half an hour filling out the canvas before the project begins. Then at the kick off session, get everyone to present their canvas while someone captures the group’s preferences and any tensions or conflicts that may arise. Use this to determine your ways of working principles for the project.

Treat your canvas as a living document - keep it updated as you’re exposed to new ways of working and as your lifestyle changes. It’s introspective, but as well as creating cohesive teams, honouring the canvas creates happier individuals.

The Ways of Working Canvas in practice

From a practical point of view the canvas helps teams to create an environment that works for everyone. I’ve seen teams go to great lengths to support people’s working preferences, something which only engenders camaraderie and cohesion in the team.

Underneath this logistical level, the canvas also works to bring the team closer together, faster. Through the process of sharing, you learn about the whole teammate, not just their work persona. That transparency breeds understanding and trust which, for the type of work we do, is incredibly powerful.

It’s been a few months since I introduced the Ways of Working Canvas at work and it’s having a huge impact. A colleague told me the other day that their team shared their canvases with each other at the start of a recent project and that the subsequent weeks were the best working experience of any project they’d done.

Give it a try on your next project and see what impact it has on your team. Remember, the more transparent and honest you can be, the better it works.