If you're a senior designer, a new manager, or a manager who's struggling, this series of exercises might help. These are not advices. I believe folks have the capability and the right intentions but in the day-to-day, the basics get lost.

Consider these past exercises from the series as simple reminders.

1. Exercise #1: Work visibility

2. Exercise #2: Writing & expressing in private

3. Exercise #3: Gratitude & reading to apply

In this fourth exercise, you'll practice co-working and co-creating.

Very often, you'll find folks around you picking up a project each despite being in the same team. Even if you're working with a young team, each are involved deeply in their own projects. I credit a lot of good work and ideation to working together on the exact same thing. Since 2010, when I started my professional career, till 2020 when I joined back UC, in almost all companies we used to work on the same landing pages, app screens & flows, by designing different versions to paint our independent views. Then, we'd pick the best from each other's and discard the worst from each.

The last project that I did like that was during UC Plus revamp in 2021 when Amit Jaglan and I designed different versions of the same page multiple times and then finalised by picking the best ones from each of our versions.

When folks design a full flow by themselves, it automatically raises the guard of each person and blocks any inputs — given only one person is designing and the other is reviewing, and not designing.

Co-designing things together helps all folks stay excited to learn and outdo the other (in a healthy way), do more homework and so on. When you do this for long enough time, it becomes a second nature and you’ll find acceptance easier, help seeking easier and so on.

The exercise

Over the next two weeks, find a few folks (2-3 more) and do a group activity together.

Publish content.

This will serve two things:

1. All of you SHOULD publish content in public to talk about your work — the work you’re doing (Remember, if you don’t talk about your work, who will and why would anyone else will?)

2. You’ll get comfortable to work on deliverables together and learn along the way from each other, fight, argue, debate … and get better!

Specifics of the activity:

• Share pieces of content publicly

• Pick a medium of your choice (Medium blog, Instagram, Twitter, etc.)

• It just has to be one medium — either blogs (long form + visually rich), IG content (videos, carousel, posts, etc.), or Twitter (tweets, threads, breakdowns etc.)

• If it’s blog, there has to be 2 pieces of content per person in the group. If it's IG, there has to be 6 pieces of content per person in the group.

• All of you will design and create/ write, curate, ideate etc.; if any of these are not your natural day-to-day forte, learn to contribute in your own ways in the group from the above.

• Share specifically who did what. It’s not to evaluate but to see if all of you came up with versions (in ideation, writing, designing) that created conflict or made the final version better.

• Brainstorm and pick a single topic or theme.

• At the end of the activity, publish & party!

All the best!