I helped found Sky Labs and spent 5-years creating workshop frameworks, exercises and methodologies that helped business units and teams get straight to the point, and more importantly, come out with a plan.
I have a unique approach to workshopping, where the ultimate outcome drives everything and every minute in the room is valuable. I take your brief and work with you refine it. I then sweat the detail, using and customising over 200 bespoke exercises to create a narrative starts with questions and ends with answers.
Workshops can be hours or days, even weeks. I handle everything so there are no extra helper costs. They can be local or in another country, in-person or online. If anyone tells you an online workshop isn’t as good as in-person, they clearly haven’t put the effort in to make it the brilliant, seamless and accessible experience it should be.
My exercises don’t beat around the bush but are also multi-layered to ensure each one flattens hierarchies, give everyone an equal voice, reduce bias, avoid conflict but also encourage spicy thinking, honest sharing and collaboration. They’re as fun as they are effective.
Ideas to Action
A simple format that takes about 2 hours, starting with wire ranging ideas generation and ending with prioritised and detailed idea sheets.
Defining value
Often useful for VC-backed clients or companies facing mergers or changes to their market economics. This workshop is usually with leaders but includes production teams too. It seeks to define where the value lies, what need to change to increase value, what to stop doing and a detailed plan to delivery.
Project Retro
Even though we know it’s critical (and sensible), we rarely make the time to learn from the projects we have just delivered. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What would you change next time and which ones will have the biggest impact? Often the barrier to answering these simple questions is usually a mix of not having a robust and inclusive format and having someone unrelated to the project to ask the difficult questions for you. This is where the Project Retro format comes in.
Spicy Ideas
Sometimes, your teams gets stuck in a way of thinking and you need a way of breaking the shackles or you many just need to let loose and give you team the space to explore the curious, mischievous or impossible ideas. This workshop will help you get there and make it fun too.
Prioritise
Choice paralysis is real. But with a robust and open process, it’s possible to make even the most complex decisions and create clarity and agreement. Each situation is slightly different and this format can flex to suit. The general flow start by understanding if all the options are valid, identifying missing options, categorisation and sorting based on project-specific criteria, identifying those with the highest value/effort ratio as well as those that answer specific needs and then adding detail to understand what needs to happen to deliver on them.
Process Mapping
Even will agile delivery methodologies, there is still a need for robust and agreed processes to deliver a project, product or campaign. This can include content creation pipelines, accepting and processing payments, delivering seamless customer care or delivering entire consumer product lines. It allows the teams involved to map out the idea process, identify and address gaps, quantify and prioritise the importance, assign owners and flag dependancies.
Team Dynamics
Sometimes teams or departments need to come together in a hurry and roles and responsibilities aren’t clear. Both new and existing teams need to spend time to ensure their dynamic is productive and positive. This is where the Team Dynamics workshop comes in. It allows team members to understand how they fit in to the wider project or goal, appreciate the input of their team-mates and identify the behaviours that they need to encourage and or reduce. This workshop can be tailored to take account of specific situations or to move a team towards a desired culture or behaviour.
Start Stop Continue
Sometimes you make more progress by not doing something. This workshop quickly identifies what’s holding you back and what’s driving value, across multiple pillars. It then takes a structured approach to defining and refining what to stop, start and continue and more importantly, why.
Want me to create and run a workshop?
A selection of workshop clients to-date…
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