Starting is often the hardest part of any data or digital product initiative — you have to gain buy-in and generate excitement with an often misaligned or distributed team. Too often, teams start with pitches and mission statements, eliciting feedback in boardrooms and by the watercooler. Is there a better way to get going? Yes! This workshop.
With the right people in the room, we’ll align on a vision and ideate on potential solutions in a lightning-fast engagement.
Time frame: 1 day
Examples of questions:
The first half of the day is all about discovery and alignment with our group. We go through exercises to determine the current pain points in the existing process or product (if any) and put everyone in the shoes of a user through empathy and design exercises. These exercises are about orienting around the problem — allowing your team to see from a variety of perspectives and validate assumptions.
In the second half of the day, we select key themes and begin curating ideas. Building on the discovery work from the morning session, we will use diverge and converge exercises to generate new ideas.
As important as discovery and ideation are, they’re useless without alignment on next steps. We end all of our workshops with a red light/green light activity. In this exercise, we surface the perceived blockers the project will face (red lights) and take time to create a plan of action for each one (green lights). When we can’t solve a red light in the moment, we assign an action and due date to the appropriate team member. This convergent exercise encourages group ownership and creates transparency for everyone involved.
You and your team will leave with a deeper understanding of the problem your business is experiencing and a host of potential ideas that will help build a future vision.
Afterwards, the strategy team will produce a vision deck to help you share the idea internally within your organization for buy-in and excitement.
The vision deck will include the following:
A healthcare organization was unable to make timely, data-driven decisions about their programs due to an overall lack of visibility into their data sources, uses, and locations.
We put together a plan for a data flow and management platform that would allow for the organization to better understand the impact and reduction of patient cost they are driving through engagements.
We then mapped out the various data sources that could be used to gain insights into those key focus areas. After the workshop, we started on a prototype with the organization to actually bring those data sources together.
A large furniture retailer needed to get a solution off the ground quickly. With the pandemic affecting consumer shopping habits, they needed to develop a way to offer a buy online, pick up in store option.
By focusing on their boxed mattress products, we identified jobs, pains, and gains that would go along with standing up this solution. Beyond the tech aspects, they would need to solve customer communication challenges with a new method of shopping, a changing fulfillment process, customer control and convenience — while also keeping their licensees happy.
Together, we mapped out a vision for a tool that would provide cross-channel communication, optionality to customers when their choice was not available, and an easy-to-use process for retail store associates to fulfill orders.
A vision workshop is tailored to our clients’ unique needs, so it’s not always the same. But we do always follow a similar, user-centric process: identifying problems, empathizing with users, then ideating on potential solutions. These workshops condense the effort most teams do over the course of weeks or months into a single, intensive day.
We typically run our workshops over the course of a day, but depending on the content may also run half- or two-day sessions.
You’ll need a workshop if…
Either! Although nothing can replace the energy of a room full of people getting excited about an idea, we are also accustomed to virtual working and have lots of tools to engage everyone involved.
Our workshops vary in cost. Although we have a tried and tested process, the systems, environment, and challenges are different with every client. Reach out to us and we can get you an estimate.