First forays into a problem definition workshop online
Can we take our post-its and sharpies online?
Theory of change workshops
One of the areas we often find ourselves working on with charities is theory of change. This tends to stem from charities wanting to measure and evidence their impact. Before we can start to define the impact, i.e. the meaningful, lasting change the organisation creates (in the lives of their beneficiaries), we usually start at the beginning with the problem they’re trying to tackle.
Cue participative workshops where we bring staff teams together to delve into some of these issues, armed with the facilitators staples: sharpies, post-its and flipcharts. Clearly in the days of Covid these workshops are no longer appropriate.
In any case we’ve been wanting to build our capability to deliver online/remote workshops. If we can do this successfully it will mean we can reduce our need to travel, reduce our clients’ need to make their teams travel and mean we can reach more people in more places.
A problem definition template
We developed a quick exercise to get people used to using the tool. Participants were sent to a break out room and each breakout room was assigned its own Jamboard. Each participant was asked to draw a square, label the square with their name on a sticky note and then, in a light-hearted competition, drag as many sticky notes as possible from a pile we had previously prepared into their square in 45 seconds.
An example (from an in-house workshop) of the orientation exercise
We decided we would have three breakout rooms so we had three Data Orchard folk on the call one for each breakout room. We decided to use a Slack channel to co-ordinate between ourselves.
How it went
The problem definition workshop was expected to last 75 minutes. Our 14 delegates turned up in a very timely fashion. Many of them have had to learn how to deliver their services mediated by video calling technology over the past week. They were, broadly, not daunted by the idea of an online workshop but there was a range of confidence and familiarity with different tools.
It took longer than we had anticipated to get everyone up and running on Jamboard. But once everyone had connected and run through the initial exercise the platform worked pretty well for everyone.
We ended up extending the workshop into a further hour that we had originally intended for an alternative purpose (but happily with the same delegates).
What we learned
I’m writing this very quickly after the workshop so these are very much gut reactions. As we reflect and as we get more feedback from the delegates I’m sure our thoughts will evolve.
But the key learning points it seemed to me were:
1. This is a viable combination of platforms for running participative workshops. Jamboard works pretty well and, once people are familiar with it, is fairly simple to navigate.
2. Time needs to be put aside to help some people get familiar with the tools. Things that we had not considered included: the Zoom chat does not allow people to click on links so when we shared the link to the Jamboard there it needed people to copy and paste the link into a web browser. Some people were more confident than others at having multiple screens/tabs/apps open at the name time and navigating between these.
Given the different combination of platforms and skills this was difficult to navigate and a web call with 16 faces is not the best way to handle this. Next time we’ll share the links in advance, hopefully with an introductory video. And we’ll ask people to join in specific times lots before the meeting starts so we can work with people one-on-one if they need that support.
3. Our exercise showed people how to draw lines and create and move sticky notes. We could have added in copying and pasting notes between boards, editing notes and resizing them as these were all actions that they actually needed to do.
4. Switching between plenary and breakout rooms and back again is quite disruptive and plenary sessions make less sense on a video call. I think we need to think about whether online workshops are better run as shorter workshops for smaller groups possibly culminating in a show and tell session which could be more of a webinar approach.
5. Related to this, as a facilitator in a physical space you can get a real sense of how the workshop is going, which groups are struggling and which are going off track just by being in the same place. None of that happens video. My instinct is that this points in the direction of smaller workshops but I’m keen to find out how others handle this.
6. Creating the templates as images worked quite well. It did mean people could accidentally grab the background and move it and also if someone tapped on the background it made the post-its vanish. I also think that over slow connections the images seemed to take a long time to load so that some delegates saw a blank page with random post-its where others saw a meaningful grid system. At least until their connection caught up.
7. This worked. We asked people for rapid feedback on what had worked well and what we should do differently next time. Unsurprisingly there was a strong feeling that we should get people up and running on the tech before the workshop started. What struck me was that the positive comments were much the same as you would expect from a real-world workshop: great to see colleagues from other teams, good to have the chance to focus on one issue and so on. So I think this is definitely an approach we should iterate and develop.
Overall
Overall I think we need to rethink the design of workshops a bit more fundamentally. Real world workshops have norms that are often related to the fact they are in the real world. They happen within the normal working day. They tend to be whole day, half day or multi-days in length. They are a physical change from the routine, a space where you are invited to think and behave differently.
Online many of these things make less sense. Our artefacts are digital, there is less need for people all to gather together at the same time to work on them. There’s less of a change for people joining this zoom call compared to another zoom call so it potentially has less of that feeling of a different space. On the other hand it is less expensive for people to take part in an online workshop than it would be a physical workshop. They could happen at different times of day, for different lengths of time and over longer periods of time than physical workshops.
So I think we need to think more fundamentally about the aspects of a project that need people to work synchronously (for which Zoom and Jamboard look good) and the aspects that can be done (may be best done asynchronously) in which case all sorts of tools might be appropriate.
We’ll be doing much more of this from now on I imagine and we’d love to hear from others on what works and what doesn’t.
*We haven’t mentioned the organisation here because this is really our internal reflections. I’m sure we will share something that involves them in due course.