Decision Making & Goal Setting Workshop Activities

DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.

DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

By using the metaphor of a sailboat, teams can articulate what is working well and also, what is holding the organization back. Individually think about and note down:

What is moving us forward and What is Holding us back in as an organization or team.

Moving us forward: what's working for us, what's really good.

Holding us back: what challenges are we facing?

A great tool to kick-off ANY workshop! The hot air balloon is a metaphorical method that aims to identify strengths, weaknesses, external forces, stakeholders and goals all in a simple and well-structured process.

The charm is that you’re not relying on another dull matrix but actually going through an imaginary journey that engages us to think outside of our typical thought patterns. Just gather all participants and collect their input step-by-step in the process.

Used as a post-session follow up or multiple session activity, participants share their action plan or project success. Results can be posted and discussed on a shared network or brought to a later live session (such as a review session or informal group catch up). 

What made success possible? In less than one hour, a group of any size can generate the list of conditions that are essential for its success. You can liberate spontaneous momentum and insights for positive change from within the organization as “hidden” success stories are revealed. Positive movement is sparked by the search for what works now and by uncovering the root causes that make success possible.

Managing stakeholders can help you ensure that your projects are met with success where others might fail. This activity supports you to identify your project’s stakeholders. It helps you take into account everyone who significantly impacts a decision, or could be affected by it. Identifying who has various levels of input and interest in your projects can help align decisions.

Have you ever been in the middle of a discussion with a group that is trying to reach a decision about something and realized that you actually don’t have much of a stake in what happens? Or, have you ever been advocating for a group to take things in a certain direction and notice that others (for whom the outcome will not be relevant) are arguing just as passionately as you are?

Many times when we are trying to make decisions as a group, involved parties care about the outcome, but at varying levels. This tool helps identify who actually has a stake in the outcome and allows a group to get perspective on which voice(s) should be a priority in the decision process.

The Iceberg Model is a diagnostic tool that is used to analyze systemic structures and identify blind spots that cause a team/organization/society to collectively reproduce results that no one wants.