TVW Design Gym - Better Workshop Deliverables
What is the best deliverable from Collaborative Design Workshops?
Many Collaborative Workshops result in a common "deliverable" at the end: 9000 digital photos of Post-It Notes and semi-legible whitewall scribbles.
The best deliverable from a Collaborative Design Workshop is a clear, actionable plan or prototype that captures the team's collective insights and ideas. This deliverable should serve as a tangible representation of the workshop's outcomes, providing a roadmap for implementation and further development. It should be detailed enough to guide future actions but flexible enough to adapt as needed.
What do we even mean by "deliverable"?
Here are some common deliverables from Collaborative Design Workshops:
Prototypes: Physical or digital models of a product or solution that demonstrate key features and functionalities. Prototypes help visualize concepts and facilitate user testing and feedback.
Journey Maps: Visual representations of the user's experience with a product or service, highlighting pain points and opportunities for improvement. Journey maps help teams understand and improve the user experience.
Action Plans: Detailed plans outlining the steps needed to implement the ideas and strategies generated during the workshop. Action plans include timelines, responsibilities, and key milestones.
Personas: Fictional characters based on user research that represent different user types. Personas help teams empathize with users and design solutions that meet their needs.
Storyboards: Sequential visualizations that depict how a user interacts with a product or service over time. Storyboards help teams understand the user journey and identify areas for improvement.
Common Challenges
Facilitators often face several challenges in scoping the best deliverable...
Your Team: Most facilitators are busy, um, facilitating! Many solo facilitators have their hands full: standing at the front of the room, coaching other presenters, talking down nervous clients, managing materials, and the room setup. You need a team. And, at least one member of your team needs to be tracking content related to the deliverable.
Aligning Objectives: Ensuring the deliverable aligns with the workshop's objectives, and stakeholders' expectations can be challenging. Facilitators need to balance different priorities and perspectives.
Defining Scope: Deciding the right level of detail for the deliverable is crucial. Too much detail can be overwhelming, while too little can be insufficient for guiding future actions.
Ensuring Clarity: The deliverable must be clear and understandable to all stakeholders. Facilitators must ensure the deliverable effectively communicates the team's ideas and strategies.
Better Workshop Deliverables
Peter has been working as a scribe and making deliverables since 1997. Over the years, the question of ‘How can we create something from collaborative design events that is useful to people afterward?’ has been a recurring theme.
He frames a deliverable as anything from a group of people coming together in a facilitated collaborative environment, exploring ideas, or creating assets. This is something that comes out of that time together and that lives beyond those moments.
This summer, Peter worked alongside Imaginal Labs where they facilitated a Nature and Spirit-Centered Design Shop in North Carolina for the Pachamama Alliance. This Design Shop brought together a diverse group of participants and practitioners, all of whom shared a deep commitment to nature and its preservation.
So, how do we use all these digital tools to preserve nature (and create deliverables)?
The first half of the Design Shop was highly designed with activities, assignments, etc. Throughout the Design Shop, the role of the facilitation team changed from producing inputs to capturing outputs using post-it notes, and flip charts, and documenting things in a way that can be used to create deliverables.
This specific process of creating a deliverable was very emergent. During the middle of the process at the event, they asked what are they going to make.
They knew they wanted an archive of materials and a landing page to share and portray the emotion, the spirituality, and the diversity of the experience. After speaking with the members of the Pachamama Alliance, they discovered that The Alliance uses Hubspot to deliver their content.
This was an extremely complex process because no one knew how to work Hubspot except for one member from the alliance and everything was happening on the spot.
These were some important questions that were asked:
Is this public or private?
Who is going to manage afterward?
Will it be our responsibility or will we hand it off to a member of the Pachamama Alliance?
For the landing page, they wanted it to be experiential with artwork, diversity, music, etc. Then they went into a Learning Management System to create something to reflect the general content structure of the event.
The Learning Management System treated each content block as an Earthshot. An Earthshot was the term they used to refer to the different focus groups that looked at specific goals.
There were a lot of moving parts in a short amount of time. They decided to put a summary for each Earthshot, and then link it to Box for the materials.
For reference, here is the Pachamama Alliance Web Deliverable landing page: https://pachamama.org/2024-june-gathering.
Resources
The main question is how we can help participants find deliverables more easily.
How can we become smarter at educating our sponsor team/facilitation team/IT team and go into these events with a set of frameworks/questions to produce the best deliverable with the least friction?
These are the different formats a deliverable can take. It could be a simple to-do list or a printed document.
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Important questions to consider are:
Are they physically and digitally widely distributed behind a secure network?
What is the size of the document?
Who owns the product and who is responsible for it?
For the apps and platforms who knows how to use them and use them well?
Before going into group discussion, Peter provided one final example of a deliverable from The Happening. This was a Design Shop network event that took place over the summer. Nick Lotes at KPMG led the design of the deliverable. It began with a touch point around logistics and establishing where and when this happened. Participants self-recorded all the content, and each day there were different waves (or timeslots) of discussions and breakouts. It was up to the participants to add photographs and record their work.
This format is self-managed by participants, the only downside is if they do not participate. It is a trade-off, which is key in designing deliverables.
The Happening 2024 Web Deliverable: https://happeningx.in.howspace.com/2024-topics
Group discussion
There were eight different topics posted on Miro. Participants went into groups to discuss one of the eight topics and come up with essential questions that would be helpful to ask and be answered around the topic assigned to them.
Here are some of the participant's reflections:
As a form of engagement, have a check-in after six weeks or three months. This gives you a chance to check in and see how successful the deliverables are.
Everyone receives emails daily. Maybe providing something physical as a deliverable would have more impact. Physical things linger around whereas emails can be lost.
AI as a deliverable. You can use it to summarise and suggest topics. The only problem with this is there are strict policies on privacy. Are there clients that are open to using AI?
The usability of the content is up to humans whether they are going to use it.
What is a good process for feedback? At the end of the session ask for participant feedback or have a post meeting with the sponsor team. In order to have feedback you need a way to measure that feedback.
Playing cards as a deliverable. Trading cards as a deliverable. Postcards from the future are written during the Design Dhop and mailed out weeks later.
