March 08, 2025 • By KWD
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The present document outlines seven constructs to help facilitate the overall success and productivity of UX/UI teams. Without a reliable and valid compass, teams are particularly vulnerable to failing.
Practicing these seven agreements will ensure team productivity and overall success. For UX researchers and designers, success is often defined as attaining the goal of creating a final product through collective creativity and productive action.
Beyond material, Hajer's ultimate hope is for teams to move on with greater self-insight and growth.
Step 1: Get your team together.
Step 2: Replicate this document with signature lines.
Step 3: If all team members agree, sign the document!
The Team Contract
1. PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY:
We all agree to ensure psychological safety for ourselves and others. Simply put, psychological safety is about cultivating a space where failing forward is not only welcomed but encouraged. Here, we understand the irritative creative process. No first draft is ever a success. Things take time, so any creative contribution will be treated with intellectual respect and honored for what it is. This is our goal even for creative contributions that deviate from existing creative trends.
2. TRUST:
We agree to demonstrate, both internally and externally, collective trust. Our team definition of “trust” is not based on extremes. Here, trust doesn’t mean giving up personal responsibility for coasting pleasures. We agree to all be responsible for our final productions. Alternatively, we don’t trust by thinking experts are infallible. Knowledgeable and skilled team experts are human and are subject, therefore, to err.
3. RECEIVING & GIVING FEEDBACK:
Creative iterations often involve returning to the drawing board and starting from the beginning. We agree to provide feedback to team members by being direct, frank and explicitly sincere. This will help ensure clarity, and therefore, efficiency. We acknowledge that mitigated speech isn’t conducive to intellectual creativity. When receiving feedback, however direct it may be, we will remember that it was provided from a sincere, well-intentioned place.
4. SEEKING SOLITUDE/CREATIVE DORMANCY:
We acknowledge creativity isn’t a consistent process. Spontaneous creativity can take shape at any time and should never be forced. Here, we agree to acknowledge the inconsistencies of creative thought. In this way, team members are welcomed to seek creative solitude. Paired with speaking sincerely and frankly, seeking creative solitude won’t be misperceived as “doing less”. Instead, it will be seen as a means to explore outside the team to collect creative resources, ensuring increases in team productivity.
5. PARSIMONY:
Our contributions don’t need to be complex to be creative. We agree to see that creativity can be simple in nature and form. We have the wisdom to acknowledge that collective contributions, however well-intentioned, can take wonderfully simple ideas and complicate them unnecessarily. Practically, we will engage in a neutral third-person perspective to help us re-examine our final productions. If we can make a final production as wonderfully creative but simpler in both design and execution, we will.
6. GOALS:
We agree to make “SMART” goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals. In this way, we acknowledge the wisdom in expecting the unexpected. Whenever possible, we will certainly forecast challenges. However, no creative initiative successfully accomplished was done so without unpredictable challenges. In this way, we treat unexpected challenges not with surprise, but with pragmatic wise reasoning. Certainly, we are not exempt from the unpredictable and so, will look toward pragmatic solutions, based on collective action and insight, to overcome them.
7. CONFLICT:
Should a conflict arise, we will ensure to utilize all the above points to help explicitly acknowledge it, understand all contributing factors and resolve it in the most effective and efficient manner. We acknowledge the difference between “problems” and “obstacles.” Problems have solutions while obstacles can only be managed. While it is impossible to know with 100 percent accuracy whether potential conflicts will be solvable or manageable, we tread forward with the wisdom that sincere dialogue will facilitate the best outcome.
Author’s Background
Hajer Al Homedawy received her Master of Arts in Social Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (Honours) from the University of Waterloo, and her business education from Schulich School of Business (York University). She is now pursuing her Master of Arts in Digital Experience Innovation (MDEI) from the Stratford School of Interaction Design & Business (University of Waterloo). Her graduate psychological research focused on facilitating wisdom (via self-distancing) among conflicting cultural groups in the United States:
Al Homedawy, Hajer, “Negative Intergroup Contact: Self-Distancing Facilitates Wisdom for First-Generation Immigrants” (2017). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 1993. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1993
https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/h2alhome/home
Article credit: Hajer Al Homedawy
