Using Zoom-Out with a Team | Zoom-Out Library

For team coaches, scrum masters and facilitators. Using Zoom-Out in a Coaching Session covers one-to-one work; this guide is for when your client is a team: an opener that gets a group zooming-out, a team review with the Teamwork Cards, a session on a conflict, better meetings, and what to do when a team has too much on.

Why teams get zoomed-in

Each person sees the team from where they sit, and every view is partial. A team can also zoom-in on one part of how it works and lose sight of the rest: pushing for speed when what is missing is trust, or for results when people have little personal connection.

“My view is one part; what other parts complete the picture?”
The Zoom-Out on The Whole Elephant card

Your job is not to supply the missing parts. It is to help the team put them together.

Open with a zoom-out

A few minutes at the start helps a group step back before it gets into the detail.

Zoom-Out Reveal on a shared screen: the group calls out what the picture is as it zooms out. Afterwards ask how sure people were from the close-up, and where that happens in your work.
Half the Story: a story arrives a line at a time, and the group decides together what it makes of it and how sure it is. The last story has a twist that makes the point better than a slide.
A one-minute video: Blind Men and the Elephant, on partial views.
An experiment from the Signposts: the lines that look different lengths on Context is everything, or the dot on Attention control is power.
One slow breath together, the first tool in Mindful Meetings: a clean break between whatever everyone was doing before and what you are about to do now.

A team review with the Teamwork Cards

Zoom-Out on Teamwork maps 26 aspects of teamwork in eight dimensions of teamwork. The front of each card has a definition and a Poor to Great scale with a statement at each end; the back has the hallmarks of that aspect and the cultivators that help it grow. The deck is built around three steps: Clarify, Check and Cultivate.

Clarify. Choose a few cards, or one dimension of teamwork, and read the definition and the two statements together. For example, on Trust: “I can’t rely on anyone here and everyone is covering their own backs” at one end, and “I know my team has my back and we can rely on each other even when things get challenging” at the other.
Check. Each person places the team on the scale for each card, quietly first (on a sticky note or in the chat), then everyone shows at once. A wide spread is the conversation worth having; a low score everyone agrees on is a place to focus.
Cultivate. Pick one or two aspects and turn the card over: the hallmarks show what good looks like, and the cultivators suggest what to try. Agree one thing to try before you next meet.

Then come back to it. Check the same cards next time: did teamwork improve?

Before you zoom-in on the lowest score, look across all eight dimensions of teamwork. The problem a team talks about is not always the one holding it back.

Twelve of the 26 cards are on the website in full. To use the full deck with a team, message Rob on LinkedIn.

When the team is in conflict

Most disagreements are argued on the surface: the email, the meeting, the decision. The Zoom-Out Conflict Model looks underneath, at four sources: Why, How, What and Who.

Map it together. Open Conflict Source Mapping on a shared screen. Each person, or each side, ticks the factors at play from their own view, then switches to “Their shoes”. Where the maps match, you have common ground; where they differ, you have found what is worth talking about.
Start with yourself. Ask people to map their own side before they guess at anyone else’s.
Name the source, not the person. “We have different priorities” is easier to work on than “they’re being difficult”.
Bring in a card: Their Shoes (“What do they see that you don’t?”), Third Person (“How does this look to a neutral observer?”), Mutual Purpose (“What are the mutual gains?”), or the Zoom-In Trap on Fundamental Attribution Error (“They’re just that kind of person.”).

At the centre of the model is one of the Zoom-Out Signposts: All perspectives are wrong but some are helpful.

A team session is for working through a disagreement together. If it has become a formal complaint, or someone does not feel safe, it needs a different route.

Better meetings

Mindful Meetings has eight practical tools for being present together, in the room or on a call. Three to start with:

Anchor. One slow breath together at the start.
Signpost the agenda. Keep it in view and mark each move: “We’re moving on to item three.”
Ask what everyone wants from it. It is often the quickest way to find that a meeting needs to be shorter, different, or not to happen at all.

When a team has too much on

For agile coaches and scrum masters:

The Agile-ometer: place the team on a 0 to 5 scale for how often value reaches the customer and feedback is acted on, now and where it wants to be.
Epic Asteroids lets a group feel the cost of multi-tasking, and Flow Highway the cost of too much work in progress. Play, then talk about where it shows up in your own work.

In the room and on screen

Share your screen on the Teamwork Cards. Every card has its own link, for example zoom-out.co/teamwork.html#trust, and the Grid view shows a whole dimension of teamwork at a glance.
In the room, printed cards on a table let people pick up the one that matters to them.
Nothing anyone types into a tool is sent anywhere.
For one-to-one work with someone in the team, see Using Zoom-Out in a Coaching Session.

Using the cards with your teams

The web cards, tools and questions are free to use in your sessions, in the room or on screen, with credit to Zoom-Out (zoom-out.co). Please don’t resell or reprint them. For printed decks, message Rob on LinkedIn.

This guide is new. If you use Zoom-Out with a team, I would like to hear what worked and what didn’t: message me on LinkedIn. More for coaches is on Zoom-Out for Coaches, and for leaders of a team on Zoom-Out for Leaders.