Sparking Meaningful Conversations with The Emotional Culture Deck

“Studies show the significant impact emotions have on how people perform tasks, how engaged they are, how committed they are to their organisations, and how they make decisions.” - HBR

Mapping Emotional Culture

I have been fortunate to work with organisations who care about how their people are, or should be, feeling at work. Having worked in the field of Emotional Intelligence for quite some time, I was excited to come across the Emotional Culture Deck (ECD) – a game to help organisations map their emotional culture.

The Emotional Culture Workshop is designed to be a hands-on interactive way for teams to come together to co-create the culture of their team.

Now that I have run a number of workshops using the Emotional Culture Deck I am impressed with its simplicity and complexity. Humans are interesting to say the least and when we get together, the dynamics can be fascinating. We make assumptions and can sometimes believe there is shared understanding and are surprised to find out our perceptions are different to others. Also, once we chunk down on information, we find out that certain feelings mean different things to different people.

A classic example is ‘courage’. Courage may be the courage to provide candid feedback to others, or courage to put forward new ideas. Courage to take on additional tasks or step outside your comfort zone. The reason why someone might want to feel courage can vary as well.

Creating Psychological Safety with the ECD

Facilitating the workshops, I was surprised at how deep the conversation got and so quickly. The way the workshop is constructed it enables psychological safety to be developed fairly easily.

Also surprising is how comfortable people are to talk about their feelings. I think because the cards act as a “third object” it is as if you are projecting your words into the card rather than the room.

The workshop has enabled groups to understand their motivations, desires, needs and fears at work, and those of their teammates. It also provides the opportunity to reinforce some of the great cultural things that exist within the team.

Just the other week, after a group had determined their top five feelings that they wanted to experience at work, they rated how often they were already feeling those things. This allowed for some celebrations as to what was working, as well as the opportunity for actions to curate the emotional culture they desired.

If you are ready to spark some meaningful face to face human conversations about the things that really matter to each of us and the way we work together then the ECD is for you!