Restless Development – Values Day & Belonging Exploration

Restless Development
It was a great pleasure to contribute to Restless Development’s Values Day, their annual one-day internal conference.

Restless Development is a youth-led development agency, now led by more than 300 full-time staff in 10 countries: “Our mission is to place young people at the forefront of change and development” in some of world’s most impoverished and challenged countries.

The Values Day is an opportunity for staff and volunteers to learn more about the charity’s deeply-held ethos, why the values are integral to the work they deliver globally. The event connects colleagues all around the world to share experiences and hear from the most recent values champions.

Values Day – The belonging challenge
Our job was to bring more robust theory behind the values and to stimulate deep thinking about what it means to belong to Restless Development.

How Belonging Space solved it 
We set the foundations for the day, sharing our principles of belonging, and how values turn into values. We led a lively discussion on some of the implications for the organisation. We explored values in a practical every day context, for ethics, and as a guide for making difficult decisions.

For example, “What kinds of large donations would you say ‘no’ to?”

I knew it was going to be a great day when I was greeted by bright people in animal masks blowing bubbles down the street – talking animatedly about the success of a programme in South East Asia and young people influencing at the highest levels of the UN.

Outcomes achieved 
The session we facilitated showed all the energy of Restless Development, as well as the sharp focus on practical action and serious intent.

Our client’s reaction

Our first engagement with Belonging Space involved Isabel Collins running a session with our entire team around Line of Sight, Values and Culture, looking specifically at how we build these core assets in our agency and people for success.  Later, Isabel ran one-one sessions with me, as COO, at a time of strategy development across the agency, deftly advising and helping me to run a global strategic process across 10 countries that built upon, reinforce and grew our values both as a result of the strategic process and in the process itself. 

Perry Maddox, COO Restless Development

Belonging Exploration – The belonging challenge

Restless Development wanted to dig deeper into, not only their values and ethos, but their culture as a whole. They wanted to make sure that their culture would help and enhance their new global strategy, rather than harm it.

How Belonging Space solved it

We ran our Belonging Exploration session, taking a cross-discipline, cross0hierarchical team through each of our eight parameters of belonging. We explored the ways each parameter was affecting Restless Development in daily business, relating each back to their strategy and ensuring they were complimentary. By analysing the feedback from our sessions they focused in on key strategy priorities.

Outcomes achieved

We provided Restless Development with the tools to connect their strategy and culture. This gave them strong foundations on which they were able to build their five year development plan.

Our client’s reaction

Most recently, Belonging Space ran a deep session with 8 of our team digging deep into our values, culture and agency through Belonging Space’s unique approach and model.  We were very impressed with how deep the insight and action flowing from this meeting ran and how well facilitated it was. On balance, Restless Development’s values and culture are a huge part of our success, and Belonging Space has played a vital role in helping us to understand these elements, to grow them and to build our new global strategy around them.  I couldn’t recommend Belonging Space more.

Perry Maddox, COO Restless Development