 Hi, I'm Jakob from AJ and SMART. In this video, I'm going to show you how to run a 30-minute workshop to align your team on the correct challenge to solve when you're kicking off a new project. And now, let's get into the problem-framer workshop. Okay, so to set the scene for this workshop, let's imagine that your product manager or a client called the meeting because Facebook advertising costs of their online products are increasing and they need to do something about it. The company you're working with sells online products that teaches people how to run workshops. Hmm, who could that be? So with that very broad challenge in mind, let's jump into the workshop. So this workshop takes around 30 minutes in total and you can run it with a minimum of two participants or a maximum of 10 participants. But we actually found that the perfect number of participants at any workshop is around seven for every facilitator that is present in the workshop. A great thing about this workshop is that you can actually run it in person and remotely like any workshop done. And if you're running it remotely, you can just use a mirror board or a mirror board or a similar tool. However, all the principles on how to run it don't change. If you're running this workshop in person, you'll need a whiteboard or a flip chart to write on. You'll need two different colors of square-posted notes for each participant. We use blue and we use yellow. You'll need a thicker marker. We use Sharpie and you'll need a few sheets of red voting dots for that voting at the end. And the final thing you'll need is a timer. We use Timetimer. And this is to show all the participants in the workshop how much time they have left. So we can actually set it up to 10 minutes and then everyone in the room will see that they have 10 minutes left to complete the exercise. But if you don't have a Timetimer, don't you worry because you can actually set it as a timer on your phone or on your computer. Oh, and by the way, we're not associated with any of these brands. We just love these tools and that's why we're mentioning them in this video. The main part of the problem-framing workshop is something called a sailboat exercise. And this exercise is used in retrospectives in many companies working on software products, for example. So a lot of people may actually think that the sailboat is a little bit silly but trust me, it's a fantastic way to visualize challenges present in the room before deciding what's really important. So the first thing you need to do is to actually draw that sailboat on that flip chart or the whiteboard behind me. So let's do it. So the sails actually represent what's moving us forward in the project and the anchor represents what's slowing us down, what drags us down, what's the problem in the workshop. If you don't have much time, sometimes these workshops are a little bit rushed, then I recommend drawing this beforehand. But if you have some spare time, draw it up front of the participants and explain it while you're drawing it so people really get what the sail, what the anchor actually means. And now on to step two, what's moving us forward. And here, just a little side note for facilitators. This step is more about a warm-up or bringing some positive vibes into the room to help the participants understand that there are lots of positive things happening in the team. Okay, now give each participant a block of yellow post-it notes and a marker. So next, you're gonna use your timer for the first time. You're gonna set it to three minutes and you're gonna ask your participants to write three to six things that they feel are moving us forward. And it's very important that they do it silently. And since the issue here relates to the cost of Facebook ads, you as a facilitator would say something like, when it comes to Facebook app costs, what's moving us forward? What positive things are happening? So now each participant will use their sticky notes and a sharpie to write simple statements, one per sticky note to explain what's driving the project forward. Once the time is up, you as the facilitator will ask each participant one by one to stick their post-it notes on the whiteboard. And while they're doing it, ask them to read them out loud. So for example, our brand really stands out. Our video ads are top class. Our performance marketer does a great job. People love our ads. We don't have too many competitors yet. We are super niche. We have a great click through rate CTR. The engagement is very high and people comment on our ads. And since this is kind of similar, I'm just gonna stick it on top of the engagement. And that's it. You don't need any further explanation. They just need to read them out loud. So once everyone stick their sticky notes to the board, it should look something like this. Now on to step three of this workshop, what's holding us back? Now, this is the more negative part of the exercise. And during this step, participants will be working together alone. This means that even though they're sitting in the same room, each participant will be working alone in silence. And at the end of the step, they won't be presenting their sticky notes. So now you're gonna give your participants eight minutes to write as many sticky notes as they can on what's holding us back. In this case, when it comes to Facebook ad costs, what's slowing us down? What's holding us back? What's hurting us? This is a good moment for you as a facilitator to remind the room that these sticky notes will be anonymous. They won't be reading them out loud. They will be just sticking them randomly on the board so they can write whatever they feel like. However, it's very important that they write clearly so everyone can read what's written on the sticky note. Once the eight minutes is up, ask your participants to stand up all at the same time, come to the board and stick the sticky notes on the bottom half of the sailboat as fast as they can and in a random order. By the end of this part, your board will look something like this. And in this particular case, the participants would have written something like, ad copy is not good enough. No time to explore other platforms like TikTok. We are using old ads. People don't know what workshops are. No time to optimize ads. Missing CTAs. We don't have an in-house copywriter to work on the copy. Facebook ads take a long time to prepare. New Apple privacy settings. People don't care about workshops. Landing pages sometimes don't work. We're using very old creatives. The algorithm changes. You might have noticed that there are some duplicates on the board and you as a facilitator should remove them. How do you do that? You simply take one sticky note and put it on top of the duplicate. So for example, we are using previous ads. It's very similar to we are using old ads. So I'm gonna stick these two together. And now on to step four. In this step, participants will vote on what's causing the most trouble. So first give each participant eight voting dots. These are the red dots that I'm holding right now. You're gonna set the timer to eight minutes and you will ask your participants to vote on what they consider to be the biggest issue holding the team back when it comes to the problem we're tackling. Remind them of the voting rules. They can vote on their own stickies. They can put as many votes on one sticky as they like and they need to use all the votes. And remember, no talking. Once the eight minutes are up, you're gonna ask everyone to sit down and you as a facilitator, you're going to organize all the stickies in order from most voted to least voted. And anything with one vote or two votes or without votes at all, you're just gonna discard it and not use it in this workshop. So as you can see, we now have a prioritized list of all the issues that the team considers to be the main problems when it comes to Facebook ad cost rising. Now imagine doing all this without a workshop. How would this have played out? People would still be talking about what the challenge might actually be. They will be shouting over each other and you'll probably be setting another meeting. However, by using this workshop, you're able to clearly see what this team believes are the most pressing issues. And now on to step five, creating the challenge statement. So now what are we gonna do? We're gonna take the most voted on issue and turn it into something we can actually work on. And for this, we're gonna use a technique called how might we. So the top voted problem is people don't care about workshops. And in this case, the team believes that the ad costs are higher because people just simply don't care about workshops and they're not interested in them. Now people don't care about workshops. It's not really a challenge. It's not an opportunity yet. It's just a negative statement. What are you going to do now is turn this into a more positive how might we statement. How might we is a standard phrasing that helps to reframe a problem into a question so the team can get into a solution oriented mindset. Try to take this challenge. So again, people don't care about workshops and turn it into a how might we statement, which in this case might sound something like how might we get people more excited about workshops. Now this form of phrasing makes it super easy for the team to understand the actual challenge. It implies that there are many possible ways of solving it, removing all the pressure of coming up with the perfect solution. And it also indicates that the whole team will work on the solution together. So you might be wondering what's going to happen with these top voted challenges. You can turn these into how might we statements as well. And if the problem is not solved by the work the team does on the first challenge, come back to them later. But there is a big chance that you want me to. And there you have it. You went from having a broad range of undefined challenges at the beginning of the project to having a well-defined challenge statement that your team can align on and can work on. Now, all this in just 30 minutes. Now imagine the number of hours you would have wasted in open-ended discussions just trying to figure out what the challenge actually is. I hope this video was helpful. If you have any questions about the problem framework workshop, leave them in the comments below. And if you want to learn even more about workshop exercises, make sure you join our free facilitation community where hundreds of facilitators gather to share their insights, resources and experiences. The link to that community is in the description below. Thanks for watching and see you next time.