How to achieve more in your workshop by using Kanban

In January 2019, I sat in a team kick-off facilitated by a colleague who used a Kanban board to display the agenda of the day. The different topics of discussion were written on sticky notes in a ‘To Do’ column, and they were moved to ‘Doing’ and ‘Done’ as they were being discussed.
I liked the visual representation of the agenda it gave us.

In December, I faced the challenge of having to plan and facilitate a 3-day workshop, not knowing in advance much about what would need to be discussed. Remembering the meeting I attended earlier in the year, I decided to adopt and adapt the Kanban agenda idea.

The objective of our December workshop was to define a development roadmap for a product we launched earlier in 2019 for a client. With that in mind, I envisaged that we would start by creating a backlog of discussion items that we would then review regularly through the workshop. Our backlog would also be used as a ‘parking lot’, each participant adding items to the workshop backlog as and when needed.

More concretely, this is what we did:

1. Initial agenda

On a large whiteboard, I created four columns: ‘Backlog’, ‘To Discuss’, ’Discussing’ and ‘Discussed’. I filled the ‘To Discuss’ area with the following items written on sticky notes:

• Welcome and Introduction
• Ice breaker
• 2019 Look Back
• Persona review
• Problems
• Opportunities
• Opportunities Evaluation
• Planning

I explained briefly to the team, the concept of the Kanban agenda and that these initial activities will lead us to build a backlog for the rest of the workshop. With that said, we cracked on.

2. Building the backlog.

My first objective for the workshop was for the team and our client to identify a set of opportunities that could lead to defining a set of product features. To reach that point, we started the day with a look back at what we did in 2019, followed by a refresher session on what our product personas were.

Next, I paired members and attributed a persona to each team. I then asked them to discuss and identify problems that their persona was facing with the product: what limitations of the tool were getting in the way of them achieving their goals? What did they wish the tool could do to make their job easier? I asked everyone to come up with as many problems as they could think of and write them on a sheet of paper.

After that, I asked each pair to swap their persona, and list with another team and, for each problem listed, I asked them to come up with opportunities using the ‘How might we..’ format. Once done, each pair played back all opportunities to the wider group.

We then discussed each opportunity and placed them on an evaluation axis (value for users/value for stakeholders), this gave us a heat map of about 40 small and large opportunities that we would then attempt to investigate during the rest of the workshop. We had our backlog ready!

We moved all items to our backlog board, and we were ready to dive in.

3. Running a dynamic agenda

We reviewed our backlog items against our workshop objective, and we agreed to move about 10 of them to our ‘To Discuss’ column.

With that prioritisation done, a new challenge started for me: facilitation-on-the-fly. Not having known in advance what topic the team would want to discuss I couldn’t have precisely planned adequate activities to support them. So I had prepared activities for all possible scenarios, such as:

• Ideation needed? Run a ‘Crazy 8’s’ or Brainwriting exercise.
• Does the team need to decide between unpopular ideas? Run a Systemic Consensus activity.
• Is there a need to break down a feature into small components to facilitate the discussion? ‘Atomise’ would be used
• Do people seem not to understand or want to hear the perspective of others? Change their hats (e.g. a developer acts as a designer)
• Are not all voices heard? Is not everyone engaged in a discussion? Use the 1–2–4-all Liberating Structures

For each opportunity or item discussed, I first asked our clients to give us a bit of context, and I gathered initial thoughts from the room. Based on these thoughts I would choose an activity to facilitate the discussion, or just let people talk, only intervening when I felt the team was falling down a rabbit hole and needed help to make a decision.

Multiple times during the three days, we reviewed our workshop backlog and pulled new items to our ‘To Discuss’ board, which led to further discussions and activities.

So how did it go?

The workshop was a success. We met our objective of producing our development roadmap for 2020 and we managed to discuss every item from our backlog. The client loved the fluidity that this dynamic agenda enabled and the team felt that this workshop structure kept them energised through the three days.

I was personally pleased with how it went. The high level of uncertainty before the workshop had got me a bit anxious, and it translated into a high level of preparation, which converted itself into a successful workshop. It reminded me that being well prepared is the core ingredient of successful experiences.

I also got reminded that sometimes all you need is a simple discussion and that a great facilitator also needs to know when no facilitation is necessary.

As for using Kanban as a workshop framework, I thought it proved itself as a useful approach that I would undoubtedly adopt again in the future, but not only in situations when topics of discussion are uncertain. This framework will work wonders too with a pre-defined agenda if the planned topics are considered as backlog items and get reviewed and pulled through the workshop. It would allow the team to adapt the content of their workshop based on the outcome of each discussion and on what would serve best the goal of the session, rather than sticking to maybe less relevant pre-agreed issues.

And in the spirit of sharing, here is what a definition and an illustrative representation of the Kanban Workshop framework could look like:

“In a Kanban based workshop, discussion topics are visualised to give participants a view of progress, from start to finish — usually via a Kanban board. Topics of discussion are collectively reviewed, prioritised and pulled to the agenda of the workshop as time permits.”

(adapted from the Wikipedia Kanban development definition).

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