Team Tactics Pip Deck Reviewed
Are the Team Tactics cards by Dave Cunningham any good? I’ll give my experience showing how I use the cards to better collaborate with my design team and our clientele. Read on to see the Team Tactics Pip Deck reviewed.
By now you’ve probably seen these decks promoted on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms and wondered if they really help solve team challenges and help teams work better… I earned my MBA in management and strategy, and I’ve been using Team Tactics with my designers and clients to increase buy-in, get better team integration, and solve internal process challenges to better influence the client. To provide a sense of whether the Team Tactics deck can help you, I’ll share some of my experience and talk about how the deck might help your team as well.
I’ll also share an affiliate link with 15% off your entire purchase. If this information is helpful, you can get your deck, contribute something back here (I receive a small commission on each sale), AND get your 15% discount on your purchase. Ready to buy?
So, here it is – the good the bad and the ugly…
What are Pip Decks?
Each Pip Deck is a set of 54 cards that blend process with activity prompts laid out in categories built around specific business challenges. Basically, as your team scenario changes, so can your use of the deck. Topics include Team tactics (reviewed here), idea tactics, workshop tactics, storyteller tactics and laws of user experience (UX).
To see the full set of decks, click the image or button above (yes, it is an affiliate link, and it provides you 15% off your purchase).
The Team Tactics deck is a set of 54 storytelling cards that are broken down into recipes to address common team challenges.
The deck is built to establish the environment, support, improve the health of, increase collaboration within, and communicate about teamwork – not just to address problems but to empower teams.
Team Tactics:
- a “teamwork system” to help identify what stage you are at in team development and to build the trust, mindset and processes required to sustain team growth
- setting the “environment,” helps your team set the tone for teamwork
- “direction” cards help you clarify your vision and establish commitment
- “support,” cards structure resources and feedback for individuals and teams so they have what they need to move ahead
- get a read on your teams “health” with exercises that evaluate safety, satisfaction, attrition, and depth of experience
- “collaboration” cards provide techniques for project and process review to empower continuous improvement. “communication” prompts help your team communicate to one another, management, the company, and external stakeholders
- “recognition” cards give you processes for recognizing one another, individuals that provide a standout contribution, and results
- and last, but not least, “technique” cards provide ways to draw out information and to work collaboratively with the input you receive
Team Tactics Pip Deck Reviewed
The Team Tactics Pip Deck brings together important ideas and practices from Design Management, such as clarifying objectives and establishing workflows, and Design Thinking plus User Experience Design including experience mapping and cross functional teamwork, along with management practices like six sigma, productivity and workflow mapping, and role definition.
The card deck could be followed from start to finish as an organization establishes, develops and cultivates a team, but its most common application is as a set of mix-and-match exercises managers and teams can use to address and resolve challenges as a team adapts and modifies its practices over time. Many team challenges are cyclical, and the tools provided allow deck users to adapt to circumstances and scenarios as they arise. The deck consolidates a vast range of knowledge into quickly digestible bites. They even provide a timeline for an initial work session based on each card.
The illustrations on the cards are playful, conveying the concept of each card. They are a little less “direct” in their meaning than the illustrations on the Storyteller Tactics pip deck reviewed (click the text to read), but they are representing more conceptual ideas. The illustrations make sense in relation to the card content.
The playful quality of the images is an important attribute. By minimizing concepts like “accountability” and “deliverables” and replacing them with concepts like “exploration” and “ideation,” it opens the possibility to put a lot of ideas on the table and to work the ideas, not the people.
Speaking of his writing process with co-writer Ben Affleck while working on the script for Goodwill Hunting, Matt Daemon said, “Ben said to me ‘Don’t judge me on my worst ideas, judge me on my best ideas.'” The point he was making is that when teams work together they need the trust to put ANY idea out on the table to be worked by the team. Once you have a mess of ideas and start ranking them, no one is thinking about who contributed each idea. The team can work on extracting good and great ideas and refining and resolving them into high quality outcomes, whether that is a script, software application, product, or experience. Teamwork matters, and Teamwork Tactics by Pip Decks can help your team move to where it needs to be.
Dave Cunningham and the Pip Decks team provide a bank of videos and Miro boards (a digital team whiteboarding platform) that help individuals or teams work through the collaborative work of strengthening teamwork. In addition to purchasing a physical deck, you can include access to the Vault, an evolving set of digital tools (videos, miro boards and casework) you can draw on as you develop your team.
What’s included?
- PDF version of the Team Tactics for offline access
- A digital set of cards you can add to presentation decks, PDFs and anything that will accept a .jpg file.
- Miro / MURAL templates for each Tactic so you have an online way to collaborate
- Video Tutorials that provide examples of each card in application
- Access to all future Team Tactics exclusive content, events and discounts.
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