Purpose
The purpose of the 1 day workshop is to organize and facilitate collaboration across teams to achieve a common goal.
Context
Organizations many times require business units and teams to work together. Other times they are trying to find an answer to a problem in a linear way, and the collective intelligence sounds as the way to try to use a different approach looking for an emergent solution in front of complexity and uncertainty.
The 1 day Workshop is a full day where a team focused on a concrete strategic topic. We start with a concrete question (north star question) we want to find an answer. This question will guide us through a conversation looking at the competitive landscape, the details about how things are being done to look for the patterns and causes that drive you to be stuck.
Some examples of “north star” questions could be:
- What are the the next innovation initiatives to be launched?
- How can we make our HR employees work more efficiently using the new generation of AI solutions?
- What processes need to be improved and how?
- How can we improve the communications between departments?
- How can we substitute custom build code by cloud services?
- What is the market fit and the distribution channels to be use for our new product?
What is your “north star” question?
The problem?
To have this “north star” question is not the only issue. Many times we all fall in some of these traps:
- Not enough time.
- Not enough focus.
- Lack of a methodology to accelerate the collective intelligence within the organization.
- Defensive attitudes during the conversations.
- Blah, blah, blah…
You have heard this many times and you stay in the same situation.
So, what is the biggest problem then?
- Have clarity about the direction of the work done.
- And the massive and underestimated cost in reaching agreements.
Reach agreements between business units or different teams is very complex. Gaining clarity about the direction of each team and how efforts are aligned properly is complex too.
Our proposition
We organize and facilitate a 1 day workshop that promotes collective intelligence. We do it through the visualization of the landscape where the company, product or group operates. We try to find agreement on how we perceive the reality, but when it does not happen, we try to draw the concrete aspects where we disagree.
Once we have consensus, we identify focal points in the competitive context and we work on them.
Why this focus on context awareness? Because when you understand the problem in depth the solution emerges.
How do we do it?
The workshop organizes teams and people together with the purpose of working on a concrete context.
Before the day of the workshop we distribute content to explain the basis of Wardley Mapping and enable the people to have the basis of the language to understand the visual content and be able to participate.
We start drawing the common context. Once the context is clear, we work on the identification of focal points of the given context. From there, we decide how to work on the identified focal points.
Do we need to divide into subgroups? Sometimes we do!
These focal points drive the group to be divided in sub-groups. The subgroups work specifically on one or two focal points. After the group sessions we all review together the conversation of each sub-group had on each focal point.
When a group is small we just have a common conversation.
These are the main steps we take and how we organize it:
- Shape the workshop: we shape the content of the workshop, understand the profile of the people participating and draw some basic maps to do not start from scratch. This is usually done with the sponsor of the initiative.
- Intro to mapping: depending on the level of mapping of the participants we distribute some content to enable the understanding of the basis. We also provide a video guiding about what we are going to do the day of the workshop. During the day of the workshop, a copy of Draw your company Strategy is provided to the participants.
- One day workshop: the day of the event, we follow the defined agenda and enable conversations between all of us, we take note of relevant questions and we try to turn individual knowledge into collective understanding. All is around the North Star question we are willing to answer and the focal points we have determined.
An example of a dashboard we use, differentiating principles, strategy and execution.
The session of the workshop ends with a strategy snapshot that contains context description, assumptions, choices, decisions done and actions to work. This enables teams to navigate through these conversations and extend the collective intelligence beyond the session.
Benefits?
The format proposed in the 1 day Workshop has many benefits, the main ones:
- You and your team will have common understanding of the context where you will be coached in the use of a common nomenclature for strategy.
- The use of iterations will enable to quickly turn hypothesis into action and feedback that enable you to understand better the context.
- The identification of duplication enable teams to save time and resources, which drives them into actions of more value.
- There is alignment and understanding about what others are doing. This drives to the coherence of actions.
Testimonials
- “We did an innovation workshop with Joaquín and we learned a lot of new ways to ask questions and challenge ourselves. The maps avoid us to come back to previous conversations that do not enable us to advance” ( HR Director ).
- “We have learned a method to get alignment in our efforts, and we will continue with this approach internally” (CTO Lead).
- “Frustrated when navigating into conversations that were not going anywhere, but now I understand that they are needed to enable emergent ideas that are different to the approach that we used before” (medium size tech company CEO).
- “In one day we understood how “we play the game”, what is our style of playing the game, this enabled us to have our common understanding about to how play the game in front of the market and discard things and opportunities that do not fit with our competitive advantage” ( Marketing Lead of a medium size company ).
I would like to know more about it!
Contact me at: joaquin@mapasllc.com