How To Run an Inspect and Adapt Workshop
Don’t sit around waiting for things to change. Make it happen with this simple workshop template!
I love to see a bunch of empty chairs and groups of people huddled around their ideas on post-its! It says to me collaboration, communication, alignment and human connection.
But some people really don’t enjoy working in groups. It says to them chaos, egotistical debate, frustration and colossal waste of time.
Of course, it’s not easy to come to a consensus as a group, sometimes you have to disagree and commit. So this workshop is structured around a really simple method to make sure everyone’s opinion is heard and alignment comes naturally.
The goal? Reflect on the good things, get to the root of the bad things and make change happen.
Materials needed:
- One thick pen each
- One thin pen each
- Some wide post-its
- 2 different colour normal sized post-its
- Voting dots
- Some white A4 paper
- A timer (I use a time timer)
- Snacks and water to keep participants energized!
Ideal group size:
5–8 people is a good size for this group. Split the group into two if you can for exercises 2 & 3.
Time needed:
You need at least 1.5h to be able to make it worthwhile but if you can I would suggest you make a morning or afternoon out of it and schedule breaks between exercises.
1. Introduction
Introduce yourself and show the agenda. Let them know how long the workshop should take and when to expect breaks.
Tip: Keep this part nice and short, save the details for the context setting.
2. Context
Ask the sponsor of the workshop to set the context for the group. Perhaps that’s you if you’re running this with your own team, but if you’re facilitating for another group then this might be their manager or main stakeholder.
Tip: Focus on answering the question “Why are we here?” in this section.
3. Workshop Agenda
If you’re anything like me you might want to write some notes for yourself so that you can focus on the 3 main questions every good facilitator should answer:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- How are we going to do it?
First of all start by answering these 3 questions for the workshop overall:
- What: “A workshop which should allow us to highlight our problems and challenges and try to get to the root of those issues.”
- Why: “It’s about aligning ourselves within the group and having our opinions heard. The goal for today is to create some actions that can be started with almost immediately to start changing things for the better.”
- How: “We’ll start with a reflection exercise, then move onto a challenge mapping exercise and finally create actions.”
Tip: Here you can also introduce the materials you’ve set out for everyone; post-its, paper, time-timer etc.
Exercise 1: Reflect and select (15 min)
- What: A short reflection
- Why: To find a starting point
- How: A “note and vote” exercise. (Expand on this with information from below)
- Positives: Give everyone 3 minutes of silent note writing. Ask everyone to write the things they feel are working well about the chosen subject. Go around the table and ask each person to stick up their stack of positives and ask them to say a little something as they stick them up.
- Negatives: Do the same thing again but this time with the things that aren’t working so well. This time stick ask everyone to stick up the negatives together without saying anything aloud.
- Categorise: Using the “negatives”, encourage everyone to come up to the board and put duplicates / similar notes together in categories.
- Vote: Give out enough voting dots to get a decent heat-map and ask everyone to vote on the things they think will have the biggest impact if solved.
Tip: If people are taking ages to vote, give them a 30 sec time limit and tell them any votes not cast will be lost.
Exercise 2: Find the problem (30 min)
- What: Define the problem and apply the 5 whys technique to get to the root issue
- Why: To make sure the right problems are being addressed
- How: Write problems statements and keep asking the question “why?” until a root cause is found
- State the problem: As a group, take a look at the category and associated notes and state the problem. An example of a problem statement is “We don’t have enough resources”. If the category is quite broad, write a couple of problem statements to tackle.
- Ask “Why?” (again and again): For each problem statement, answer the question “why?”, and to that answer ask the question “why?” again. It’s suggested that you ask “why” up to 5 times to try to get to the root issue (some even suggest 9 times!) but if you feel like you’ve found the root, go with it.
- Pick the root and re-frame as HMW: When you find the root issue, re-frame it into a “how might we” question. For example, if the root cause of “We don’t have enough resources” is “management doesn’t understand how important the resource issue is” re-frame that to “How might we make management understand the importance of the resource issue?”.
- Repeat as many times as you like / can!
Tip: Encourage the group to use a whiteboard / magic whiteboard / post-its to show the 5 whys process on the wall instead of writing on a piece of A4. This way it’s easier for everyone to collaborate.
Exercise 3: Solution Storm (30 min)
- What: A note and vote session and a group discussion to form actions
- Why: To come up with viable solutions that we can start implementing today
- How: Start with the “how might we” questions created in the previous exercise and brainstorm loads of solutions — think quantity over quality! Then stick them up, group them and vote for the best ones. Finally, create actions for each.
- Note (alone): Pick one “How might we..” question as a group and write as many solutions as you can (alone) for ~5 minutes. The goal is quantity over quality, sometimes the best solution is not the one you expect.
- Group notes & vote: Each person should pick their 10 best solutions and stick them up. Group any duplicate notes and give each person ~3 votes. Vote and prioritise.
- Create actions for the notes with the highest votes: Pick the top voted solutions and aim to create 2 actions for each. These actions should be tangible: something that can be completed within 2 weeks, well explained, and assigned to someone who can take responsibility for it.
- Repeat for as many HMW’s as you can / like.
Tip: If you’ve split into groups, give each group responsibility for their own timer so that they can keep track, otherwise you will soon run over time in this section!
Exercise 4: Agree on actions (optional — 15 min)
This part is only really needed if you’ve split up into smaller groups for exercises 2 and 3.
- What: Read out the actions and owners
- Why: So that we are aligned on what to do next
- How: Share the created actions with the whole group and check that the person who has been assigned responsibility is willing to accept
- Read out each action and its responsible owner: just as it sounds, go around the group and read out each action and the assigned owner. If there is no assignee yet, ask the whole group for input.
- Owner accepts / rejects responsibility: Hopefully the owner will accept responsibility for the action, but if this doesn’t happen then you should clarify the action further or change the scope of the action in order to get acceptance.
Tip: People will probably be a bit tired by now so make sure to schedule a short break before this part.
Ending the workshop:
When everything is finished, it’s time to bring the workshop to a close. Here are a few ways you can do that:
- Use mentimeter to get feedback from the participants (the bonus with this is that you can keep the feedback)
- Go around the group and ask them to name something they thought worked well and something they thought didn’t
- Use the fist of five technique: ask everyone to vote with their fingers on a scale of 0–5 how well they thought the session went
Are you a facilitator? Scrum something? Project manager? Check out a couple of my other posts below:
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this workshop in the comments below! :)
Happy workshopping!
/Joanna
