Reflections from my first two-day workshop with an executive team

Last week I guided my executive team through a two-day workshop focusing on how they might work on strategy with focus and continuity.

The challenge of formulating HMW-challenges and success criteria

I realize I need to practice formulating HMW-challenges to make problems actionable and broader. I struggled to hear what the team said and form that into a challenge that didn’t just restate the problem with an “HMW” in the corner. Similarly, the success criteria of each test from the action board were challenging to formulate to something else than “test completed”.

The executive team struggled to remain in the phase of deciding on a challenge, eager to get into designing solutions. When they were trying to formulate HMWs and ended up talking about various solutions I responded with “yes, that is one potential way that you could go about it but, in order to solve what challenge?”. I was weary not to say anything that would discourage them at this point and shut them down with “yes, but…”, “no”, etc.

Me and the team used at least double the recommended time to figure out the HMWs. I took on the advice from

@Shannon Wagers

and @Salah Bouchmar I received beforehand and allowed the team more talking time and even some detailed discussions. I believe it gave the necessary wiggle room for the team to understand everyone’s point of views and feel assured that the challenge aligned with their understanding. Although it took a while for us to get there, and the group obviously found it frustrating that I wasn’t letting them go on, it worked out well.

Starting with what’s already there

The executive team already possess a strategic plan and activities that go along with it. Therefore, the workshop shouldn’t focus on creating more activities. Instead, my manager wanted them to decide on how they were going to work with their strategy and make progress. That is how we landed in the broad challenge: How might we work with our strategy with focus and continuity?

I wonder if I could have used the existing strategy or activities in a different way to guarantee progress on their activities from the workshop and establish a backlog.

The first exercise could have been a voting session on what activities they experience progress with and what they struggle with. Top two voted problem turns into the general HMWs and for LDJ begins. That way, the team could have developed mini project plans for two of their highest priority tasks that would be easy to follow up during the year. I could also have asked my manager to pick their top two priority topics from the strategy. However, considering the brief was to establish ways on how to work with their strategy, not the activities per say, I understand why we landed in the broader challenge first.

The constellation of the executive team is rather new, so spending time on defining general issues and solutions to strategy was also valuable.

10 for 10 – how the heck?!

Out of six participants and over two workshops didn’t anyone manage to come of with more than then solutions. Most stopped around three or four. I don’t know if they were simply uninspired, time was too short for the solutions they needed to come up with or if they felt the pressure to only come up with good solutions. I couldn’t shake them enough, so I’ll need to work on this for my next workshop.

Do you recognize yourself in any of my experiences? Please share!

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