Workshop activities to Analyse, Understand and Innovate

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

• Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
• Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
• Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
• Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
• Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
• In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
  

Textra Games combine the effective organization of well-written documents with the motivational impact of training games. Participants read a handout, booklet, reprint, or a chapter in a book and play a game that uses peer pressure and peer support to encourage the recall and transfer of what they read.

Here is a fast-paced textra game for reviewing training content from product-knowledge booklets or technical reference manuals.

An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.

In this workshop groups examine the unintended consequences of new technologies and use those to inspire new potential business opportunities. It looks beyond the common understanding of new technologies, challenging participants to discover unexpected potential and how it might be harnessed. For instance, Instagram was created as a virtual photo album for smartphones, but through the human connection between the people who use it, it has the potential to affect something as deep as our grieving and healing process, as a recent example of this author’s daughter showed.

Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences.

To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.

This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.

Different teams receive envelopes labeled with different types of disruptive participants. Participants brainstorm guidelines for handling disruptive behaviours, record the guidelines on a card, and place the card inside the envelope. 

Teams rotate the envelopes and generate guideline cards for handling other types of disruptive participants. During the evaluation round, team members review the guideline cards generated by other teams and identify the top five suggestions.

A learning and presentation technique for sharing ideas

A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.