Problems that are vague or misunderstood have a harder time passing our internal tests of what matters and, as a result, go unaddressed and unsolved. Often, meetings that address problem-solving skip this critical step: defining the problem in a way that is not only clear but also compelling enough to make people care about solving it.
Creativity through pictures and images
Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.
A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.
This Pizza Game is a great way for new or established teams to understand the principles of Lean & Agile by diving into Kanban in a quick and fun way that is hard to communicate through words alone. It teaches you how to get from an existing process to a Kanban system, how to visualize the system, and start modifying it.
The Pizza Game enables the teams to have a hands-on experience feeling the pains, gains, frustrations, and fun throughout the process - and to reflect on improvements that the participants can share back in their workplace. Bonus: you get to make (paper or digital) Pizza!
Use Craig Raine's poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home to spur creative thinking and encourage perspective shifting in a group. After a warm-up, you can then use this martian perspective to describe your product or service and gain new insights and ideas.
Brief active response during a presentation or (shudder) lecture, can take 2 minutes or 10, can be silent or voiced.
A powerful tool to gain deep insights in the structure of the ecosystem.
Each person describes how they are feeling in terms of a weather system.
Participants tell a story of a shared (fictional) memory, adding details one at a time to create a cohesive picture and narrative.
Arguments, presentations, strategies, or other plans are sent to other teams for deconstruction in order to find gaps or problems.
* weather check-in
* photo card
* one word
* one song
* draw a symbol
* lego tower
* roller coaster drawing
* 1-2-3 with sound & motion replacement
