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Hybrid working: planning for the future
Hybrid working: planning for the future

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Stage 1: Gather stories and share them

Discovering your ‘Why’ requires active listening, allowing those in the room to share their experiences and views, and not interrupting them – let them tell their story. Encourage participants to make notes as others talk and wait till, they come to a natural finish.

It can be useful to start with an icebreaker, which is linked to discovering your ‘Why’. This helps to make participants comfortable and build confidence to fully participate.

For example, an activity could: Share three things that you were proud about on the last thing you delivered. Write these on a sticky note. Then go round the group for them to summarise and identify common themes. Or ask everyone to draw a rich picture of their story on a piece of paper and talk through their story.

For example, an activity could: Share three things that you were proud about on the last thing you delivered. Write these on a sticky note. Then go round the group for them to summarise and identify common themes. Or ask everyone to draw a rich picture of their story on a piece of paper and talk through their story.

Discovery

This is time to focus on the ‘Why’ questions and allowing participants to share their stories, you could ask:

What is your understanding of:

  • your organisational ‘mission’
  • the role of your team to support that mission
  • your role as an individual to contribute to that mission
  • what our end users want.

Supporting the mission:

  • How do your team and you as an individual add value?
  • What can you solve, deliver, contribute?
  • What are your strengths as a team and individual?
  • How do you measure success?
  • What is the impact of what you do, both for students, staff and the organisation?

Do you agree with the mission?

  • How your team and you as an individual contribute toward the mission.
  • What would you change?
  • This is an important question, as to challenge the mission and your role, can help to identify areas that help with refocusing your ‘Why’ and generate areas for further exploration – if something is not quite right – why?

Learning from failure:

If your workshop is focusing on a specific issue, ask participants to imagine they are two years in the future, and the solution chosen had failed. This approach can help with reframing an issue but thinking of possible future outcomes.

  • How do they feel about this?
  • What might cause a failure?
  • How could it be mitigated?

Capture the stories in short story statements. These might be a bulleted list, a sentence or paragraph, or their ‘rich picture’ with a heading that reflects the focus of the story.

Reporting out Stage 1

  • How do participants feel?
  • What has been the impact on them?
  • What else do they want to know?
  • What else do they want to share?
  • Is this what they expected?

This is time to review what you have explored and the opportunity for clarification and further probing:

Then focus on the story statements and look for the themes that are emerging, and capture these for Stage 2.