Images of Organisations® (online version)

• Improve management & workplace communications
• Increase team and organisational performance
• Improve personal or team development planning
• Manage difficult conversations by approaching otherwise difficult topics in a sensitive manner
• Build skills in giving and receiving feedback through practice 
• Improve learning transfer - using as a memorable opening (ice-breaker), or closing exercise
• Reduce conflict within a team through improved dialogue

This fully digital activity can be used with any internet connected mobile or dektop device (to open a browser window), alongside any popular Video Conference Platform such as Zoom, MS Teams, or Google Meet.
We decided to create this digital version to recognise the additional difficulties in building remote teams, and the need for them to be able to quickly build a sense of relatedness despite the challenges posed in communicating via online meeting software.

Some suggested uses of Images of Organisations (online version): 

• At the start of an online conference or training programme in which delegates do not know each other.

Ask delegates to choose an image that means something to them as individuals - this elicits far more information than simply asking them to state their name and job role as part of a 'creeping death' introduction!

• As a way of finding out about different perspectives amongst team members.

Are different individuals experiencing very different things at the same time? Is one person’s exciting change another’s nightmarish upheaval? Two people can look at the same image yet feel/imagine very different possibilities.

• As a lead-in to team action planning at the end of a team development programme.

The positive and negative nature of the images allows teams to choose an image to aspire to and an image to avoid.

• In exploring organisational values.

What do the individual images that team members have chosen say about their individual values? What is important to them about working in this team/on this project/ as part of this organisation? Values are more than words, and the use of metaphor can begin to explore what values really mean to people, and deepen their shared understanding.

• In performance appraisal.

The positive and negative nature of the images allows managers and subordinates to explore images that might reflect times and activities when things were going well, as well as those when things were more difficult.