Decision Making & Goal Setting Workshop Activities

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

• Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
• Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
• Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
• Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
• Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
• In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
  

Often done at the end of a workshop or program, the purpose of this exercise is to support participants in applying their insights and learnings, by writing a letter and sending it to their future selves. They can define key actions that they would like their future self to take, and express their reasons why change needs to happen.

This workshop aims to help participants define, decide and achieve their goals. By supporting participants to envision where they want to be in a number of years on a holistic level, and defining the steps that will take them there, participants get a clearer picture of the action they need to take.

In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

MoSCoW is a method that allows the team to prioritize the different features that they will work on. Features are then categorized into “Must have”, “Should have”, “Could have”, or “Would like but won‘t get”.

To be used at the beginning of a timeslot (for example during Sprint planning) and when planning is needed.

You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. 

15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change. 

With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

At the end of a workshop, it's important to reflect on the things you've learnt, the things you still need to work on and how the things you've learnt in the workshop will help you improve. This activity encourages post-session reflection, and is suitable to be run remotely.

This is a small-scale strategic planning session that helps groups and individuals to take action toward a desired change. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. The group discusses and agrees on a vision, then creates some action steps that will lead them towards that vision. The scope of the challenge is also defined, through discussion of the helpful and harmful factors influencing the group.

This is a method for individuals and teams to define the structure, direction and first steps of a project. The individual or team works through a set of questions and documents the answers in a sharable digital format. This can either be a “living” document that develops with the project it can be left as just a clear and concise record of the starting-point.

IDOARRT is a simple tool to support you to lead an effective meeting or group process by setting out clear purpose, structure and goals at the very beginning. It aims to enable all participants to understand every aspect of the meeting or process, which creates the security of a common ground to start from. The acronym stands for Intention, Desired Outcome, Agenda, Rules, Roles and Responsibilities and Time.