Using Anchors and Winds to Solve the Right Problems

How a hot air balloon can help you achieve your goals

If you’ve ever sat in a room with a bunch of stakeholders to do roadmap planning, or asked leaders to select their biggest roadblocks to a successful organization transformation, you’ve probably encountered two types of problems:

• The most senior or extroverted person ensures their ideas are heard at the expense of all others. i.e. The loudest voice wins.
• Everyone shouts their personal frustrations, making it impossible to separate the signal from the noise and determine key themes.

Both situations make it very difficult to reach a consensus and thereby zero in on the opportunities that really matter. The focus is either placed on the wrong problems, or spread too thin trying to solve everything at once.

In my role as Innovation Facilitator at ServiceNow, I spend a lot of time helping organizations figure how to leverage our platform to digitize their workplace. To avoid the common pitfalls noted above, we went in search of a technique that elicits input from all participants, allows the biggest opportunities to bubble to the top, and also recognizes what is currently working so we don’t change what’s good.

What has worked really well for us is something called a “Hot Air Balloon” workshop. Originally described to me as a way to identify impediments to a specific project’s success, our team adapted it for a broader conversation. In the real world, a hot air balloon needs wind to help it get and stay aloft and is held on the ground by anchors. The travelers in the basket go nowhere when the anchors outweigh the winds, but enjoy a one-of-kind adventure when the winds overtake the anchors. These physics are used as the analogies that fuel this workshop.

To begin, we ask the customer to provide a strategic goal that has significant business value (getting business buy in is key to success, it cannot be an IT-only initiative). This goal becomes our Hot Air Balloon. The “winds” are the processes and technologies that support the goal, while the “anchors” are those things that prevent success. Through three rounds of contributions, the team can identify themes of Anchors and Winds. We then align ServiceNow capabilities to release the Anchors.

What I really like about this workshop is that its structure ensures everyone participates. We know that in large group exercises often only the loudest voices are heard. Within these groups we always expect to have introverts and extroverts and so the workshop is designed to ensure we hear from all participants.

As the participants cluster their Anchors and Winds around different topics, they naturally filter out less compelling items and begin to focus on the “heaviest” ones. By the end of the workshop we often see 3–4 key themes bubble up across all the sticky notes. We also see certain voices expressing interest in particular themes, so we ask them to be “owners” on the customer side.

Equipped with an understanding of the key themes holding our customer back from achieving their goal, we then huddle internally to map ServiceNow capabilities that will release the Anchors to each one. Sometimes ServiceNow is not the right solution for a theme and that’s okay — we consider it a “gift” to the customer.

While our clients often have a well-defined strategic vision, it is hard for them to articulate specific actions to take to achieve that vision. By running a Hot Air Balloon workshop, we help unlock their vision’s potential. From there, we can identify where an out-of-the-box product can solve an issue, or where a custom application on the Platform can be created. When it comes to custom applications, our team will often engage in additional workshops or ideation sessions to creation a Solution Prototype that helps visually articulate how the Platform would release the Anchor.

In summary, when your team or your customer is stuck trying to identify their strategic vision’s path and need to build consensus, this workshop may be the right solution. Its structure engages all participants, allows for collaboration and curation, and quickly identifies concrete solutions to work toward. Interested in running this workshop?

https://medium.com/@stegel/running-a-hot-air-balloon-workshop-2badb503b38b