Best workshop exercises we know III

Facilitating creative energy and flow

Jose Manuel Redondo Lopera writes the Facili-station newsletter, and I (Dave Gray) write for the Gamestorming newsletter. We thought you might enjoy reading a conversation between the two of us about our favorite workshop exercises. We will each write three letters, responding to each other’s thoughts. This is letter number 3 of 6.

Dear Jose,

I really liked your ideas about a core “spine” of activities for any Gamestorming workshop:

1. Post-up to generate ideas.,

2. Clustering to sort the ideas into categories,

3. Dot voting, prioritization, and landscape mapping as ways to further prioritize, sift, sort and arrange the ideas.

Your excellent letter spurred some additional thoughts.

First, this backbone of activities is heavy on opening and closing and a bit light on exploring. For those who haven’t seen it I want to share a diagram I have used to explain this concept in workshop design:

Act 1, opening.

The opening act of a workshop sets the stage for the rest of the activities. Your last letter triggered a few more thoughts on how people can do that successfully.

Hero’s journey agenda: Introducing a workshop using the hero’s journey as a metaphor for the day can help put people into a great mood for exploring the unknown.

Squiggle birds is an excellent warm-up that quickly introduces people to visual thinking and makes the whole idea of drawing more inviting and less threatening.

Here’s another thought about creating space for creative energy and flow:

Meetings tend to favor people who are quick thinkers who like to “think out loud”but everyone doesn’t think in the same way or at the same speed. A “think out loud” meeting can be discouraging to quiet, more introspective types who prefer time to think before they speak, leading them to disengage. To level the playing field, design a rhythm into your meeting that respects all thinking types. One rhythm I like is something I call “solo, group, room.”

1. Start by giving everyone an individual activity. Give them time to collect their thoughts and write them down or even draw them.

2. Follow that with a small group activity. You might have people share the results of their solo thinking in pairs or with a small group at their table. In a Zoom call you can do this with breakout rooms.

3. If you’re working with a larger group, you might have each table share their thinking with the whole “room” (in a Zoom meeting this would be everyone on the call).

You can repeat this rhythm as many times as necessary, depending on the length of the meeting. For example, after everyone hears from the rest of the room, you might want to give them some time and space to reflect on what they heard. It’s like giving people space and time to take a breath. It respects the diversity of thinking types you might find in a group, it keeps a large group aligned as they work through ideas, and it’s a great way to keep energy high and flowing during a longer session.

Act 2, exploring.

Sorting and prioritizing ideas is helpful, but usually not enough. I like to give people time and space for percolation and emergence: for this you need exercises and activities that allow people to explore the ideas, enhance them, and evolve them. In act 2, I like to ask people to suspend their verbal mind and to start drawing and acting out ideas physically.

Depending on how much time we have, I might run them through a kind of short course on visual thinking, one or more exercises designed to get them thinking visually. This “short course” can be followed with activities like storyboard, draw the problem, or poster session. Another technique I have found valuable is bodystorming, where people think with their bodies and “act out” ideas for each other in short skits.

Act 3, closing.

In your last letter you already detailed most of the primary closing activities I usually use. For the sake of completeness, I’ll share my go-tos: dot voting, forced ranking, $100 test, impact/effort matrix, and who/what/when.

Another excellent closing activity is to ask participants to share one thing that they will do differently in the future based on what they learned in the workshop. I only ask for one thing because pretty much everyone can think of one thing they learned and how they might change as a result of that.

This has a couple of effects. First, it gets everyone to take a moment and think about what they have learned, how the workshop has changed them, how it might truly change their behavior. Second, by asking people to make a public commitment to their peers, it increases the likelihood that they will actually do it.

As a final closing activity in any workshop, it never hurts to get a bit of feedback on the workshop itself, so you can learn and improve for next time. For this I like to use plus-delta. Recently I’ve been exposed to rose-thorn-bud, which is also excellent. It’s not in the Gamestorming catalog yet, but I intend to add it because I think it really works well.

I hope you found these thoughts useful. Until next time,