The Relationships Heatmap is an interactive diagnostic tool that helps you explore your areas of strength and areas for improvement when it comes to building good relationships. The team at Enrol Yourself share their experience of using the tool, and what it’s inspired them to do.
Who are you and what were you hoping to achieve with the Heatmap?’
Enrol Yourself is a social enterprise redesigning lifelong learning by harnessing the power of peer groups to multiply individual and collective development. Peer to peer relationships are at the heart of what we do, whether that’s through the Learning Marathons we host, the Host Fellowship we’ve been leading, or the work we do with partners on bringing the magic of peer to peer networks to big challenges.
Having collaborated with The Relationships Project to create the Heatmap tool, we were excited to try out the Heatmap tool ourselves, and see whether there are any levers we could pull on further to strengthen our approach to relationships.
What did you learn from using the Heatmap?
1. We’re aligned as a team!
As a collective, there was a lot of alignment across our Relationships Heatmap and our Heatmap was pretty warm – especially in the ‘Your Place’ and ‘You’ categories which felt great to recognise.
“If people feel like they have the confidence and motivation to affect positive relationships in a workplace, that’s pretty ace. It’s a testament to Enrol Yourself as an organisation.
2. Intentions and rhythms > Goals and Plans
The coolest area across the board was ‘Your strategy’. Not surprising for a growing, agile organisation that uses emergent techniques to navigate uncertainty!
As a team we found ourselves somewhat allergic to the language of ‘measurement’, ‘goals’, ‘plans’, ‘policies’, and ‘incentives’ when it came to thinking about relationships. But a plan can be defined as ‘an intentional decision about what one is going to do’ – and this resonated with our ritual-loving intention-nurturing team! A shift in semantics opened up fertile ground for exploration.
“How might we think about ‘policies’ in a way that they become tools that liberate us rather than chains that hold us back?”
3. Relationships ARE the goal
Exploring how important relationships are to us across everything we do at Enrol Yourself led to us making a powerful collective realisation: relationships ARE the goal for us. This paved the way for a renewed sense of commitment to deepening our relational practice.
“I left the session with a renewed sense of explicit permission to prioritise making time on growing relationships, and after the session I had a chat with one of the team for an hour, where the explicit purpose was to ‘grow our relationship’.”
How are you putting your learning into action?
Following the Heatmap session, we carved out some time for a ‘Making Session’ to take action and create some tangible tools to help us deepen the role of relationship-making into day-to-day-life at Enrol.
1. Creating our own Relationships Map
We have lots of different relationships to think about, and they all have slightly different qualities, intentions, requirements. We spent time mapping out some of these relationships and their qualities.
2. Prototyping a relationships intention setting tool
We began prototyping tools that can help people in the Enrol Yourself community to set intentions for their relationship, across different types of relationships, including a tool to create intentions at the start of a new relationship, and a check-in tool to help people revisit their intentions cyclically.
3. Mapping relationships onto rhythms
Enrol Yourself have been establishing rhythms for themselves as a team, wider collective and wider Enroller community. They’re now planning to map relationships onto those rhythms, looking at which relationships each of the rhythms is serving, and how they can use this as an emergent, organic and pragmatic way to plan their approach to relationships.
4. Bringing relationship infrastructure to life
We have several ‘guiding principles’ documents in place of ‘policies’ that are shared within the Enrol Yourself community, such as ‘Conflict Procedure’ approaches. We’re going to design and offer accompanying ‘training bursts’ around these principles to the community, so they become living, breathing parts of our relationship infrastructure.
We host interactive workshops for organisations looking to dig into their collective heatmaps. If you’re interested in finding out more, please get in touch with immy@relationshipsproject.org
Read more
Good Business – Heatmap in Action
We know as a business that relationships are important to us and drive much of our work. We were excited to use the Relationships Heatmap tool to help us focus on relationships, and give us space and scaffolding to structure our thinking.
Carnegie Trust UK – Heatmap in Action
In our work on kindness and flourishing towns, we’ve thought a lot about how we create the conditions for relationships in communities. We were interested to use the Heatmap to see how it works and what we could learn about our relationships with a much broader network of people and organisations.
