Robust solutions activ8or

Sometimes we find ourselves spread too thin among many problems without much time to think about possible solutions. Here is an exercise, that activates group thinking, where every voice can be heard. The decisions are based not on the charisma of the speaker, but purely on the quality of the idea.

Prepare:

1. In this activity everyone will be writing down post-its. Make sure the tooling is not a blocker. You can try this online. Make sure the tool you selected is reliable and easy to use.
2. If you have too many areas where problems can come from and you don’t want to touch all of them, select one focus area.
3. Plan an intro: give the “WHY” and run an energiser to get everyone up and running.
4. Invite relevant audience. Try to balance between the feeling of “left out” and overly crowded group, where people cannot be engaged.
5. Define the framework based on the amount of participants and the time you can afford to invest on this.

Run:

1. Open the meeting by energising the team and introducing the prepared framework. If you have a group of more than 6 people, you probably decided on splitting into groups of 3-4 people. You might have also considered limiting the number of problems that can bring to the table.
2. Ask everyone to capture their thoughts based on the framework you prepared. Learn “how to write post-its” if you haven’t done it before. Set the timer (for example, to 5 minutes) and let the creativity in.
3. Read everyone’s idea and converge. This is where you ask each group to select the most interesting ideas. You can do it by “dot voting” (everyone can put a limited number of dots on the ideas that he or she likes the most).
4. Select your winner ⸺ the most upvoted problem.
5. Now ask to think of the possible solutions for the selected problem. Set a timer and repeat the steps [2-4].
6. Now you should have results of your group thinking.
7. Thank everyone, and share you further plans with the group. What I’ve done in the past was building up on collected knowledge in a diligent way and presenting the outcomes later. You may consider creating a workforce for that, but keep it small and robust (you may want to assign the workforce driver at the workshop).
8. Get the feedback for the session and return to your daily tasks.
9. After the workshop, finish your write-up and don’t forget to demo the outcomes and get a buy-in from the group (for example, at the next Demo session).

Scrum vector created by redgreystock – www.freepik.com