Remote Problem Solve Workshop
My roles - Lead design strategist, lead facilitator
Tools used - Mural, remote meeting software
Number of participants - 12
Workshop time - Four hours split over two days
Setting the Scene
It was June of 2020, and I was immersed in a remote working environment. A stakeholder for another project I was working on reached out to me to ask if I could assist with planning and facilitating a problem solve as an effort to come up with solutions to improve a process for an internal team in the Finance division of the company.
The team experiencing this process had a high-level list of items to discuss, and leadership needed help formatting the approach to the problem solve.
The problem
My Approach
To start, there needed to be a shared understanding of the process and an identification of the pain points living in the process. Our stakeholder set up a discussion and we used the time as an opportunity for the team to list out their pain points, answer any initial questions we had, and so I could record the pain points to start organizing the information in a visual format. I used the online collaboration tool, Mural, to write each pain point we discussed on its own “sticky note”.
From there I put together a plan to incorporate divergent and convergent activities to get our participants thinking individually and collectively to prepare to generate the most effective ideas.
Due to timing constraints, we planned for the problem solve to be split up into two sessions and two Mural boards were created for each session. This is how the problem solve sessions were broken down:
The goal for the first session was:
To perform a root-cause analysis on 3 collectively selected pain points from this process
We started with an ice breaker activity to get our participants warmed up and to learn the Mural capabilities we’d be using in this session and the next.
The pain points listed in the discussion were displayed on the board. The team reviewed and discussed if there were any questions or if anything written down needed to be updated.
The team then spent some time individually voting on 3 pain points to move along the root-cause analysis activity.
The 3 pain points that received the most votes were then moved to the root-cause analysis portion of the board. The team discussed the symptoms and causes of each each pain point and wrote them on the board.
The goal for the second session was:
To brainstorm ideas for the future state of this process
We started with another ice breaker activity to get our participants talking (it was an early morning session), and to keep practicing the Mural capabilities.
The team spent some time reviewing the root-cause analysis we put together in the first session, asking for clarification on anything that was missed in our prior discussion.
We moved down the board to next create our problem statements based from the causes in the root-cause analysis. We used the statement starter, “how might we” to format our problem statements. This was a crucial part of setting up our brainstorming activity.
The team decided on 3 problem statements created from the activity to move into our brainstorming activity. I created a Creativity Matrix with the three problem statements at the top of the matrix, and four previously-created categories listed on the left side of the matrix. The team spent time generating ideas to fit into the four categories.
What happened?
When the second session ended, the team successfully generated 42 ideas which fit into the four categories:
These ideas including exploring new software, giving some people new roles to try, and also auditing large files to sort out any duplicative data fields for more efficient processing.
The sessions were also a lot of fun. After wrapping up, a participant reached out to me and said,
“I wanted to thank you again for leading that problem solve session this morning…I thought it was almost revolutionary compared to the problem solves I’ve been a part of! So I am excited to see where we go.”
Not only was I able to facilitate the team to generate a large number of quality ideas, but I was able to introduce the team to a new and interesting way of solving problems.
Why does this matter?
Carefully planning and facilitating brainstorming sessions are important. To generate our best ideas we need to follow a process to get creative and unlock our potential. If we can also make the process engaging and enjoyable, even better!