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.
  

Leadership exercise in groups, working with practical leadership principles.

This activity helps groups to translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviours. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life application of leadership principles. The groups take multiple rounds to build upon the ideas of each other, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviours.

A Focused Conversation to begin to process traumatic situations for use with colleagues, friends and family, and how to respond to them productively. Often traumatic events become undiscussable and this enables persons to talk about them

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.

A critical thinking mindset supports people to reflect by using critical thinking questions when they discover and discuss new information. Critical thinking involves the evaluation of sources such as data, facts, media, stories, observable phenomenon, and research findings. Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve a problem or to make a decision. Critical thinking skills are key to making better, and well-informed decisions.

A SWOT Analysis is used in project planning, strategic planning and other processes where agreement is needed about the current situation of a project, team, department or organization. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

What is going on inside a group? Have we paid attention to all voices, both the quiet and the loud? Is everyone on board or are some lost at sea?

Temperature Check gives an instant visual overview of the thoughts and feelings of every group member around a specific topic, and from here, creates an opening for deeper conversation and understanding. At best, a non-threatening way of addressing the elephant in the room.

A method to capture notes and reflections in hybrid events

Using the Social Process Triangles created by the Institute of Cultural Affairs to identify a broad range of issues faced by a community, followed by the Consensus Workshop Method to see larger patterns of issues.

The story template is a method to help in the exploration or research phase of a project. It is especially useful during shorter processes such as a design sprint or a design jam. It can serve as a substitute for interviews if time/ context does not allow for it and it helps the workshop participants to create data connected to real experiences in their lives.