Colored pieces of cardboard with black writing covers the walls in the small conference room and steels the attention from the dominant meeting table. SPRINT is on. And a group of four reporters and editors is focused on working on how to solve our challenge:
How can we create a behavior where we work naturally according to TV 2/Fyn's constructive compass?
The Constructive Compass with the four directions in journalism we can work with to adopt the constructive mindset – the directions being critical, focused on solutions, nuanced and active in engaging our audience.
Exclusive peek into test center for constructive journalism
The SPRINT is a piece of work that plays out at anything but the meeting table
I this – my first blog – I will let you have a peak into what a design process as a SPRINT, originally developed to engineers, can do in a creative world as a newsroom and even with an abstract task of developing a way to change a mindset.
And it’s all about the cardboards, pencils and an open mind. And about seeking knowledge, define challenges and turn them into possibilities and then make decisions and test them.
On the first day of our SPRINT the team was picking the brains of people who had knowledge on how to change culture in a workspace and the challenges in that process. A professor came by along with a business manager and a guy who works with changing culture in news organizations.
They learned that it is important to work with existing values and professionalism in the newsroom. And it is crucially important to know both the goal and how to get there if you want to build a strong culture. It is also essential to fuel such a process with resources – both knowledge and manpower. And most important – create a room for failure. They also asked colleagues about what had made previous developing projects work efficiently.
With that insight we moved on to turning them into possibilities. A turning point in the process. When all the challenges in working with cultural change suddenly became possibilities that we could work with.
When a sentence like: “It is important to understand why we do it” changed to: “We can work with the goal and the purpose”.
A foundation for designing a way to change the behavior in our newsroom.
Kristina Lund Jørgensen
More cardboard decorated the empty spaces of wallpaper with written opportunities we can work with in TV 2/Fyn when we want to change the culture into one that works naturally with constructive journalism.
A bunch of ideas was qualified and two of them were built into solutions on how to work with the culture. “The Bible” and “A Constructive Lab”.
Two solutions that contain the essence of what we will be working with the coming months.
A document that contains the “Why” we do this, and “how” to do it at TV2/Fyn. The “KJ lab” is firstly the room for the education of every member of staff in the newsroom. In the future it may be a space in which we develop new narrative models.
Fortunately, I won’t be sprinting every day I go to work because we have time to realize the goal of becoming a media house that presents a constructive approach to our stories whenever it is possible and inspire, suggest solutions and paint a more nuanced picture of our world to our audience.