Everyone in the meeting should speak within the first five minutes. The sooner you engage them, the more comfortable everybody will share. Start with an icebreaker to warm up stakeholders. Then, use open-ended questions to spark conversations.
Here are six open-ended questions to get your team talking:
What would be the value of this to the user?
What business value could this deliver?
How would this add to the experience?
What could be added to improve? What is missing?
How is this different than the current experience?
How do competitors do this? How would they respond?
Welcome! Today, we will work on a visual canvas called 'rose, bud, thorn.' Leading up to [insert milestone], we need to reflect on how things are going and raise any potential risks or challenges to our goals and objectives.
To drive positive, future-forward change, we must capitalize on what drives us, intercept challenges and barriers, and build trust across the team. We will use a fun metaphor to help guide our discussion: a ship and its crew. I will explain more in a few minutes.
Review Agenda…
To optimize our time together and ensure we respect one another's viewpoints, I am proposing these rules of engagement to guide our conversation.
- Listen Respectfully
- Be critical of ideas, not people
- Allow everyone to contribute
- Ask for clarification
- Collaborate, don’t compete
Does anyone have any to add?
Meetings often have different types of participants. Some feel like it's a break from the day-to-day, others may feel they are being held hostage and are too busy to be here, and some may feel like they have all the answers. Therefore, workshops take time to prepare and engagement from attendees to be successful.
Today, I'll ask everyone to channel an explores’ mindset instead and be open to the discussions, themes, and activities we will work through together. Everyone here has a role to play and value to add. Does anyone have any questions?
Let's start with a warm-up game to help us better understand the concept of empathy and understand our users on a deeper level. Think of a friend, family member, neighbour, or someone you've recently had a minor conflict with and let's take their position in the disagreement and try to empathize with them.
It might be challenging, but it will help us get familiar with the concept of empathy.
Wonderful. Now let’s take turns and share what we learned about our Frenemies.
So now that we have walked a mile in a frenemy's shoes let's talk about empathy and how it will help us better understand our users.