 Okay, Dirk. Last technical things. And there we go. You should about to see something now. So I just realized that I changed the title of my talk. Don't worry, you are in the right place. It's still about workshops. And the weather is a little bit rubbish in Sydney, so I hope the stream does hold up. But if it does freeze, apparently a browser refresh will sort you out as well. So a little bit of housekeeping for everyone. Anyway, let's get this ball rolling friends. First off, hello. Thank you for dialing in and welcome to my office slash bedroom. I hope everyone's anxiety levels aren't too out of control with all of this election business. It's pretty polarizing, to be honest. Like my kid woke me up last night and couldn't get back to sleep. And I just found myself on that bloody New York Times website with the map thing and just constantly refreshing that over and over again. So that was my night. Yeah, so who am I? I'm Richard. I'm the user experience lead at previous next. And I wear a few hats, actually. I push pixels around, obviously, run user testing sessions. And of course, I facilitate workshops all remotely, of course, because 2020. So what are we going to talk about? Well, today I want to talk about workshops, specifically how this pandemic affected how we run them. I'm hoping this is a pretty practical talk for everyone. So let's get started. So first off, what is a workshop? I do like to make the distinction that a workshop is not a meeting. Both are important and both have their place, but they are different. So the way I see it is this. Meetings can often span multiple topics, they're helpful for providing information and updates and that sort of thing. They're mostly verbal and they don't really revolve around an activity. So that stuff. Workshops, on the other hand, focus on one topic. And in a nutshell, workshops are a structured collaborative exercise where participants contribute to this common goal. And workshops can be very helpful when you need to make big decisions and align people around a problem. And I especially like how they can provide this opportunity to make even the most introverted person make a meaningful contribution. And that last part is really great to see in person as well. So yeah, workshops are awesome. But as much as I do love workshops, there are some things that really annoy me. And you've probably experienced some of these. Getting an early to set up the room, for example, is pretty annoying. Booking a room that actually has enough whiteboard space. Again, remembering to take photos of all the post-its when the session is done and my favorite, deciphering everyone's scribbles at the end of the day. That's, and it's usually my writing, so I can't really blame anyone. The good thing about a remote workshop is that you don't have to worry about any of this stuff. Even documentation is just a matter of exporting the slides and you're more or less done. But I'm not going to lie, it's not perfect. By now, you've probably all experienced what it's like to be a remote team. So you're probably very familiar with all of these common phrases. And yeah, these still definitely happen in a workshop a lot. And as intuitive as tools like Miro are becoming, they still have a steeper learning curve than a sharpie and some post-it notes. So it takes a lot of planning and patience, basically. And some workshops do lend themselves to remote versions pretty well, whereas others not so much, like for example, workshops, which involve a lot of sketching. So much is just out of your control and it just becomes a little bit of a challenge. So even though previous NEXT has always been a remote team, workshops were just one of those activities that we ran in person, like most companies, right? But when everyone was forced to work from home, like our clients, for example, we had to seriously think about how we would run workshops remotely instead. And in doing so, we had to be much more intentional and structured about our approach and how we run them. The workshops are tough and they can get a little bit chaotic even at the best of times. So having some structure to your activities will make the experience much more cohesive and give everyone a common goal. And the concept which helped me plan workshops was grouping activities into phases. This makes it easier to visualize what the purpose of activity is and how it relates to the activities around it. So I looked back at some of my past workshops to see what they were made of and I started to notice some recurring patterns. Now, we've only got 15 minutes, so I'll save you the suspense, but most of the activities could be grouped into one of these phases based on its role in the workshop. Let's have a look at what those phases are. The first phase context is all about getting the team aligned. We're sort of answering questions like why are we here, what are we doing, what is the outcome of the session and how does it all contribute to the larger goal. I'll also share research findings in my understanding of the current state, if that's appropriate. This phase is usually pretty short and it doesn't have much participation, but it's an important step to get people into the right mindset and give them a sense of purpose. The diverge and converge phase makes up the lines here of the workshop because it's where most of the action is. These phases are named after this thing called the diverge and converge technique and it's a pretty common pattern you can see in a lot of workshops and they work pretty closely together. The diverge phase is all about exploration and typically revolves around understanding the problem space. The activities in this phase are usually about generating a lot of ideas and most of them are bad and that's sort of the point. The converge phase, on the other hand, is all about narrowing down your options and developing stronger ideas. To do this, it's actually pretty common to have several activities. Where the diverge phase is all about quantity, the converge phase is all about quality. For the workshop to feel cohesive, the activities between these two phases should play off each other a little bit, like the results from one phase should influence the next, for example, and we'll see what this means in a little bit as well. The last phase is where we commit to a direction, push ideas a little bit further and most importantly make a decision. The activity you want here forces participants to take the emotion out of their decision. We want to keep everything as objective as possible. You want people to think less about which idea they like more and more about which idea is the most appropriate for the projects. Put simply, a structured workshop process enables us to answer two big questions. Which problem do we want to solve and which direction do we want to go? So that all sounds good and all, but how does this all come together? Well, we're just going to break down a very simple workshop using some common activities. Let's get started on that one now. So during the context phase, I usually start with this thing called make a map and the map is basically a diagram to illustrate how the outcomes of the workshop impact the rest of the project. So for this, simplicity is better than accuracy. Like I'll usually start with the workshop and the nearest milestone. In this case, use a testing and then just two to three steps in between. And when going through the map, I always like to start at the end because I just find it easier to start with a goal and work my way backwards. So in this case, I let the team know that we're working towards some user testing, but we haven't decided what we want to test and how we plan to approach it. So to that we need to identify the opportunities that we are testing and that's sort of what this workshop's about. For the diverge phase, we'll have our first group activity and we'll be using the humble sticky notes. Sticky note based activities are the most popular format because of how flexible they are. And since we're trying to identify an opportunity to test with real customers, we'd ask the group a question like this and let them to start scribbling. So you'd give them three to five minutes to write as many responses as possible. And then when the time runs out, everyone puts their stickies onto the board and you end up with something like this. Now that we've identified a bunch of problems for the converge phase, we'll ask another question to help decide which problem we want to solve. So to do this, we'll use an activity called dot voting. And dot voting is a common technique for cutting through dozens of sticky notes. You basically give everyone some voting dots. Three is pretty normal. Give them some time to review the IDs and then they vote. After this is done, you'll usually end up with something like that. Now when you do this activity in person, the first votes can often anchor everyone else's. And what I love about online tools like MIRO is that it's all anonymous. So no one sees anyone's votes until everybody's voted. So what we're going to do now is we move on by taking the top few sticky notes through to the commit phase. So using our short-listed IDs, we'll finally decide which problem to pursue. And for this, we're going to use a decision matrix. So activities in this phase, like I said, should always guide participants to make decisions objectively. For example, a decision matrix forces us to evaluate each option against the defined criteria, not their personal preference. So for this exercise, we'll place each of the stickies onto the chart. And the general rule is to aim for things in the top left because basically anything there delivers high impact with low effort. So thanks for back on all that good stuff. It's often not this clean though. Like you'll usually have a few competing ideas that could be potential candidates. Now, depending on the workshop and the scale of the ideas, you could probably grab a bunch of stickies and then call it a day. And if the team agrees with that approach, then go for it. But if the post-its represent larger concepts and you can only choose one, you will need to put it down to a vote again. So what you do is you knock off any low impact ideas like that and give everyone one vote in a few minutes to look at the options. And once everyone's ready to vote, they cast their votes, the winning idea emerges, and the workshop is pretty much done. You wrap up by summarizing the outcomes, communicating next steps and thanking everyone for their time. And then of course, you log off. Now, it's a pretty quick fly through of a basic but structured workshop. And while we did keep the activities pretty simple, we were still able to demonstrate how each phase played a different role in the workshop. Context is about aligning the team. Diverge is about exploring ideas. Converge is about focusing on an area. And commit is about pushing through and making a decision. Again, what's most important about making a decision and reaching the outcome together is that everyone was involved and everyone contributed equally. So yeah, I'm not going to lie. Workshops do feel a bit different in 2020. It's like we get all of the video call memes and none of the benefits like grabbing a drink afterwards. But at the end of the day, workshops, regardless of the medium, are still a great tool for aligning a team around a problem, working through solutions and making big decisions together. And even if we aren't sharing the same space these days, at least we don't have to worry about posts falling off the wall every two seconds. And that's pretty much everything out to go over. I hope you found that helpful and hopefully relevant. If you have any questions, I'm pretty sure we got a lot of time for that. So feel free to reach out. But otherwise, thanks again for dialing in. I'll close this and I'll get back to the switcheroo thing. But that is everything. Okay, I need to kind of figure out this UI and see what the questions are. Whoops. Okay. Q&A. So we're all good now. Q&A. Sorry, this is like not good TV. Icebreakers. Okay. What do I do for icebreakers? I personally, I'm not the biggest fan of icebreakers. I always kind of find them, like the experience I've had with them is they're mostly awkward. Yeah, because I'm just like, I've tried doing them a few times in the past and just generally don't really, it doesn't really line up with how I like to run workshops. I'm very big on warm-ups in some capacity. And I think with remote tools like Miro, what we do for getting people skill-ready is having or incorporating warm-ups into the activities. So with Miro, like I said, people won't know how to kind of use to add a sticky note in all that business. So what I'll typically have for something like Miro is have a page where people can just go a little bit nuts. You kind of have some instructions on the page. And it's sort of like when you're in playing a new video game and you're kind of going through this onboarding process where you're kind of like learning the skills that you're going to be using for the actual activity. So I'm not sure if that's, it's not really an icebreaker, but it's kind of a little bit of a warm-up in that regard. So I hope that answers that a little bit. I hope it wasn't a bit too much of a cop out. Any other questions? When doing the post-it notes initially, what can you do to help engage people to actually find out the issues that you may have? Yeah, okay, so here's a good one. So what I do for, so here's answering Fraser's question, and what I might do is I'll repeat the question just so you know which one I'm going for. So the question is when doing the post-it notes initially, what can you do to help encourage people to actually identify and write the issues they may have? So one thing I do for this activity is, and I got it from a workshop that I got, like, which is one of my base workshops called the Lightning Decision Jam by Ajane Smart. But one thing, if I'm trying to get problems out of people, like if I'm trying to get them to capture problems on sticky notes, an activity that I do before that one is like I'll say, instead of like what problems are we having, I'll start with what is, what are we doing well? Because it's a lot easier, and it starts a workshop on a positive note to go, oh, we're doing this, well, we're doing that, well, our check-out post is good and all our business. And then when it comes to doing the, what problems are we having, because I've thought of the good stuff, it's easy to think of the bad stuff directly after it. So that's kind of one thing I do. And you know, the, what are we doing well, exercise is something that is essentially, it's a throwaway, like it's, I don't use any of that for dot-votes or anything, it's just to get them, to get their heads right for the activity that I actually want them to do. So I hope that answers that one. Do you generally ask participants to do any prep prior to a workshop? It depends, like the only, for sticky note ones, generally no. So this one I'll just say it again. Do you generally ask participants to do any preparation before a workshop? So yeah, typically no. Like I, because when, when that's a blocker, it's a point of failure and I just don't like to have those anyway. The only time that I will kind of have something where they need to do homework is if the start of the exercise requires them to share a website or a product that's doing something similar to what we're trying to solve. So that's kind of one thing, the only time where there's preparation, otherwise they kind of come in pretty cold. All I do is make sure that they're kind of reminded throughout, you know, throughout the process. Yeah, in the lead up I suppose. Any stories of workshop disasters? Yeah, so it kind of goes into what I just said. When people aren't reminded and primed like constantly, they, when they are kind of like meant to be in the session, I've only got a minute left to answer this one, they're just not there, right? They're just kind of not, the heads aren't in the right space to do it. And it's kind of a bit of a pain in the ass, to be honest, because people need to be in the right state of mind when they're getting into a workshop. It's kind of like board games. Like, if you've ever played board games with someone that isn't into board games, ruins the experience for everyone, kind of sucks the life out of everything. So similar thing, like when it comes to getting people ready for a workshop, make sure that you're being pretty upfront about the expectations, what they're going to be doing. You know, lowering the bar so people aren't afraid of being called out or being made to look stupid, because that's kind of like not the point of it. So, yeah, I hope that answers that one soon. 33 seconds, how do you handle dominant, sharp disciplines? Oh, it's a good one. So, yeah, the thing that's good about stuff like that sticky note exercise is everyone participates on an equal level. Kind of like the activity is to write down a bunch of ideas. And then, you know, as anonymous as you can make an activity, that's kind of what I'd aim for, just so it doesn't matter who's written it down. Like the ideas kind of rise to the top. I've got five seconds. I hope that answers that one well enough. Cool. So time's extended, but I hope that answered that one. If I need to elaborate before getting abruptly cut off, let me know. Cool. Well, I don't see any other questions coming through. Oh, and I hope I answered that one. Well, if it does get abruptly cut off, I will say thank you again for being a great group. Hope to see you guys in person. Hopefully next year or something like that. But, yeah, thanks for your time.