I ran a workshop this week for colleagues from across our consulting organisation. I wanted to find a way to allow people to explore an idea without being too constrained by their own views. I also wanted people to identify tangible actions that they could take away and do.
The theme for this workshop was improving hybrid working, but I think the technique could be used for many different scenarios where you want people to come up with a wide range of actions.
The game works like this…
The first step is to assign each participant a different persona. I used the character cards from my Business Meekat deck, but you could also get a list of roles, people, or companies and assign them to people.
I got some little wooden table stands for people to place their cards in –
I then gave everyone a single blank Artefact card, and asked them on the coloured side to imagine what the future might be like from the perspective of the character they had been allocated. One group I asked to imagine a Chaotic future, where hybrid working wasn’t working for anyone very well, and another group where hybrid working was working at its ideal best.
We then went around the table and each participant talked for a bit about what they had written, and there was conversation along the way.
I then asked the participants to turn over their cards and, from their own perspectives, think about one action that they could take to, in the case of Future Chaotic, try to prevent that future, and for the Future Ideal, how to create it.
We then again went round the table, with people talking about what they had identified and broader discussion, and I took note of other ideas as they came up.
At the end of the session, I collected all the cards and scanned them into Miro for review. In this particular case, the output will be a blog article in the next few days about things consultants could be doing to improve hybrid working practices, from what we do when we meet in person to how we manage our and other people’s time in a world of an infinite number of infinitely large virtual meeting rooms. A kind of retro on the sort of thing that people were talking a lot about in 2021, but we’ve stopped talking about today.
For a session with 10 participants each cycle (Future Chaotic or Future Ideal) took about 45 minutes, so 1 hour 30 in total. In our session it was a different set of people for each cycle.
I’m hugely grateful to Johannes Klesker, as our conversation on Monday helped crystallize this workshop format.
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