How do you get a group of people to list and prioritise current problems, and then set simple actions in place to address the most important? And how do you do this in a way that fully engages the participation of the group in a virtual meeting?
The first question is probably the most common and straightforward requirement that team leaders and facilitators face. Oftentimes, it doesn’t need any special tools – it just needs a process (and even that is largely self-evident):
- Understand the situation
- Explore the issues
- Generate solutions
- Establish goals
- Agree a strategy
- Ensure teamwork
- Manage progress
The second question however, is probably the more important. We have all experienced the delays and frustration where people are not fully committed (or even clear) on the actions, and this is commonly as a result of lack of engagement in the process. The leader may think that they are. But if the leader has been doing most of the talking, he or she cannot really be sure.
To build real understanding and commitment (and better solutions) we need full participation from the group. They need to be able to contribute to the Identification and prioritisation of issues, solutions and actions if they are to fully understand them.
In a virtual meeting which is relying solely on a conference tool such as Zoom or Teams, this can be difficult. Words get said, and sometimes recorded, but participation in the overall picture is not clear and visible. However, the addition of a Whiteboard tool such as Conceptboard or Mural can make participation much easier, and its contribution to the outcome much more evident.
So how do you do this?The following is an expansion of the above steps using Conceptboard.
To begin, we recommend that you take a few moments to create a new board and ensure that your group understands how to contribute within it (basic instructions can be found on the board).
1. Understand the Situation
What you see often depends on where you stand. This is as true metaphorically as it is physically, and it can lead to separate groups within organisations having quite different perspectives on the same situation. Bringing people together to a shared viewpoint can help people to better understand what others in the group are proposing and why.
Begin by outlining a draft understanding of the context and scope of the situation we are seeking to address as a set of sticky notes. Then invite people to add in pertinent information that may be missing by adding their own sticky notes. The result can be discussed and further data added until the group feels that they have a picture of ‘what they are seeking to do and why’ which they can each adopt as their own.
In many situations, this can be done in minutes. And often people accept the initial draft as it stands. However, making this a Specific Activity helps to make the implicit explicit, and can save a host of subsequent confusion.
2. Explore the Issues
Once the context and scope have been made explicit and agreed, the group can move on to identifying the issues that lead to the situation being suboptimal. Simply ask people to add new sticky notes to the board – one for each issue. If many of the issues are obvious, you can prepare the notes in advance and invite people to add any they think are missing. This both helps to ensure a complete set, and broadens ownership for them.
Ask people if they are clear on what is meant by each sticky-note, and re-write those where there is confusion to ensure they are specific and unambiguous.
If people struggle to identify or agree the specific issues, there are simple white-board based tools that can help them to explore the situation more deeply. You can find a way to understand and access these in the last section labelled: Stepping up a Gear
If there are ‘too many’ sticky-notes (whatever that means to you and the group) you may need to bring these down to a manageable level. Using the Affinity Diagram technique can help the group remove duplicates and combine issues into meaningful sets that are best addressed together.
To reduce the issues still further, they can be prioritised by voting. This can be done by inviting people to ‘dot’ the three most important issues for them (using a black highlighter) and seeing which issues have the most ‘votes’.If people are concerned that the outcome is the result of misunderstanding, they can provide reasoning to support this view. Once everybody is clear everyone understands the basis for prioritisation, the black dots can be ignored and people can re-allocate their three votes in a different colour.
3. Generate solutions
The (prioritised) issues can then be placed in order going down the whiteboard, with the most voted-for issue (sticky note or group) at the top, and the least at the bottom. The group can then decide how many they have the capacity to progress over a practical period of time (shorter timescales work better).
Solutions can then be proposed for each of the issues that are to be progressed immediately. These can be proposed in a number of ways depending on your situation.
- Pre-existing solutions can be applied. This can be done by creating sticky-notes for each of the solutions, duplicating them, and allocating them against the priority issues. (It can also be done by means of a Matrix).
- Where pre-existing solutions are insufficient, new solutions can be thought out, either in plenary or by dividing the group into sub-groups to propose a practical solution. In the case of the latter, the ideas can be presented back to the main group for further refinement and approval.
- Sometimes the issues are insufficiently clear for the group to be confident in defining a solution, or the issues may be clear but they do not lend themselves to obvious solutions. In these situations it is important to schedule the time (usually in a separate meeting, perhaps in a subgroup) to apply the tools required to design and deliver success.
- Depending on the issues you are having in identifying viable solutions, consider using the tools proposed in the last section labelled: Stepping up a Gear
4. Establish Goals
Once a way forward has been defined, teams have a natural tendency, to confuse activity with progress. This is usually because the definition tends to focus on work to be done rather than impact to be achieved.
To overcome this, ask the group to generate sticky-notes which answer the question: “How will we know if we have been successful?”; or “What will be the evidence that we have made a difference?”; or “What would make you proud of what you achieve in this space?” – and add them to the right of the proposed solutions.
Clarify that our responsibility is to sustainably deliver the impact rather than to complete the activity, and invite them to refine their contributions into clear specific goals for addressing each issue.
5. Agree a Strategy
When ‘what is needed’ is clear, it is often the case that there is too much to do at once. Faced with this situation, it is unwise (but surprisingly common) to be over-optimistic and try to do it all. A good way of testing whether we are being over-optimistic is the $500 Bet – simply ask the group who would be willing to bet $500 of their own money that it will be completed. Then ask what proportion of it they would be willing to bet on and use their answers to stimulate discussion. (The image on the right can be copied and pasted as a template to your whiteboard. See this post.)If you are unwilling or unable to allocate more resources, then use this realistic assessment of capacity to limit what will be taken forward.
To prioritise the list down to a practical subset, you can use voting as described in (2) above – but you will probably need to get people to include the following considerations: urgency; early-benefits; inter-dependency. As with (2) the initial vote may be reviewed so that people can add in further insight and experience before a final selection is made.
6. Manage Progress
This final step of clearly defining the actions is often the most most rushed. It usually occurs at the end of a meeting, with too little time allowed for it, and that time further squeezed as a result of over-running on earlier items. The result of all of this is often the biggest issue in managing progress.
It is vitally important that all of the solutions to be taken forward in the immediate future have:
- Complete clarity over what is to be done, and what success looks like (What / Why)
- A timescale agreed for its delivery (When)
- The resources required to sustain confidence in timely delivery (How)
- An identified owner who would be willing to bet $500 (even money) on that timely delivery (Who)
- A pattern and schedule for reporting its progress, for resolving issues, and for communicating success
A good way to ensure this is to create a table to the right of the actions to be taken forward. The rows of the table are the actions, and the five columns of the table are headed with the bullet points above. Teams can then be asked to populate the cells of the table with sticky-notes that fulfil the requirements of that column.
A final advantage of doing this in a participative way on a virtual whiteboard, is that update can be posted on the board, and the board can be used as an integral part of progress review meetings.
Stepping up a gear
The process laid out above assumes that the issues and solutions concerned are sufficiently straight-forward that they can be discerned and resolved by round-table (or virtual) discussion. Given the proportion of meetings that currently rely on presentation and discussion, this is not an unreasonable start point.
However, it is evident (from the level of delays and frustrations typically experienced) that presentation and discussion is sometimes insufficient to engage and stimulate all the insights necessary for efficient success. And that increasing rates of change and complexity are making this more and more difficult.
And, the fact is, the complexity already inherent in our environment means that there are better tools to support steps 1-5 above than relying purely on presentation and discussion. Meeting Toolchest has been designed specifically to provide simple guidance and resources to people seeking to use these tools.
If you are open to using more advanced tools in the current meeting (for any stage of the process) there are surprisingly quick and easy ways to add them to your meeting. Use the matrix below to identify what you are struggling to do (left-hand columns). Then look across at the tools which support this. Then visit the Toolchest Templates Page to select the relevant (colour-coded) item and open it up as a new whiteboard ready to use with your group.
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.