The Simplest Exercise to Instantly Align Any Team on a Goal

A couple of years ago, I was looking for a very easy exercise that would allow me to help teams set a goal for themselves. And the problem when a team comes together and they try to set a goal or a vision is that everyone sort of has a different vision and a different [music] goal. And it's really hard to come down to like one clear statement until I read the book Sprint and saw the exercise long-term goal and sprint questions. Really, really simple exercise. And I'm not going to waste much more time here just giving you some preamble. I just want to show you how it works. But this [music] exercise is one of the most commonly used exercises when I just need to help a team figure out, [music] hey, what's the common goal we're all focusing on? What's the common sort of long-term vision that we have? This is a really simple exercise mini workshop that you can run with your team. Now, in a couple of seconds, you're going to notice that I look pretty different, and that's because we're taking this clip from our program, Workshopper Master, which is our highest level online coaching program for facilitators [music] and workshop designers. And I've got different hair. It's a whole It's a whole thing, but I hope you enjoy it anyway and don't get too distracted by how different I look. Enjoy. Exercise number seven, long-term goal and key questions. Now, this exercise was actually called long-term goal and sprint questions in the design sprint if you're used to hearing that. But because this is separated from the sprint and a standalone exercise, it is called long-term goal and key questions here. So the point of this exercise is really to get everybody working towards a shared goal, especially when you're working on something that's a bit bigger and maybe a bit vague. This exercise gives the team a clear and agreed upon northstar to work towards. And it's a really fantastic reference point for a workshopper to be able to point to when you're in a workshop and want to keep people on track. Now, sometimes I'm going to use the terminology north star, and that just basically means that when you have this entire exercise finished, you can look towards the the remnants of this exercise and say, "That's where we're going." North Star just sounds nice. What you'll need two different sizes of sticky notes, two different colors of sticky dots, three each, and your good old trusty marker again. So, the main goal is really to have a one pager that summarizes the project goals and key questions. It's all going to be on one page, and this is going to be the thing you're going to be able to point towards as a workshopper. Introducing the exercise one more time. I've already repeated this so many times, I'm going to skip it, but don't forget these things. So, let's explain the exercise. At the end of this exercise, we'll all be aligned on the project goal or north star for this project. A north star is a simple statement that will guide us through the project and keep us on track. Our north star will be our ideal state 2 years from now. So, where do we want to be two years from now? It's going to be extremely optimistic, probably too optimistic, which is why we'll also create key questions which will help keep it a little bit more grounded. This will all make more sense once we actually jump into the exercise. Key questions will allow us to test whether the Northstar goal is really possible or if it's too optimistic. So, let's jump right into the exercise. Step one, create the 2year goal. Give every participant a block of rectangular sticky notes. Each participant should create two to three two-year goals. And a two-year goal is simply a statement about the most optimistic outcome for this project and how that would look in two years. So, like always, let's look at some examples. One example could be in two years time, we're the number one brand in Europe for car insurance by amount of customers. So, we're a car insurance company now, right? You just we change a lot. Another example, in two years time, our insurance checker app wins the Apple design award. So, these are just some examples of how people could write the 2-year goal. in two years time is always common. So they should just write that first and then fill out the statement of where they want to be in two years in the most optimistic case. I could feel my mustache kind of. Step two, we're going to visualize it. Each participant should choose one of their two-year goals and stick it on the wall or whiteboard. In this case, because we have four participants, there are four two-year goals stuck up on the board. As simple as that. they just discard the other ones that they don't use. Step three, we're going to use a straw poll vote. We haven't used one of these yet in these exercises, so it's the first time I'm going to show you how that works. Give each participant a voting dot and have them write their initials on it. Initials simply mean, "My name is Jonathan Courtney." So, I would write JC on the dot. Step two is set a timer for five minutes and have participants silently decide which two-year goal they think is the most appealing. Once they've decided which one they'll choose, they should write their reasoning on a sticky note, but they should not vote yet. They should keep their vote secret, so they're still holding on to their vote. Once the time is up, the facilitator can then ask everybody to vote at the exact same time so they don't influence each other. So, everyone's voting at the same time, and they won't have a chance to change their votes at the last second. That will look something like this. So pretty much some dots will be on some post-its. Now each person is going to present why they made that choice. And how this is going to work is the workshopper is going to go to each post-it and say okay JC why did you make this choice? Then I would go up to the board and say here's why I chose this one. I'm basically presenting to the group why I made that choice. And it's essentially just sequencing the conversation so it's not just a big open conversation. The workshopper also needs to make sure that the participants don't ramble. They should just read what's on their sticky note. I chose this because I think it represents where we want to go and I think this will make us the most competitive whatever. So, I'm just telling the group why I chose this long-term goal. Step five, the decider vote. Now, as you remember from the workshop building blocks, there's always a decider in every workshop. We don't run exercises or run workshops without a decider. So, I'm basically saying the decider votes happening here. But it's assumed that in every single exercise, you always have a decider on hand. The reason for this is that you need to be able to handle tiebreaker situations like this where there's no clear next step. This happens to be an exercise where you need a decider because we need to choose one thing and that's why we're using a decider in this section. So, the decider is given one voting dot and based on all of the conversations and based on all of the presentations, the decider is now going to choose one-year goal that the whole team is going to work with. They can also choose to take one or more of these sticky notes and bring them together if they can form a nice sentence out of it. But basically, they really just have one vote for I want this to be the main one, and maybe I'll take one little bit or one tiny little sentence from this other one. But the idea is that the decider now needs to choose this is the two-year goal. I've heard the presentations. I've seen the options, but this is the two-year goal. And that's really what the decider is doing. And by the end of that, you're going to have one clearly written two-year goal that the whole team is going to be essentially aligned on, even if they don't all 100% agree on the wording. Now that we have our two-year goal, long-term goal, whatever you want to call it, we focus on this two-year sort of vision. Now we can create our can we questions or the key questions. How this is going to work, and I'll show you examples in a second, is that we're going to be asking participants to write what could stop the team from reaching this two-year goal. And they're going to be rephrasing those problems and challenges as can we questions. Much like the how might we questions earlier, we're going to be creating can we questions here. By the way, the difference between can we and how might we, with the how might we questions, we're talking about an open-ended question with open-ended solutions. With the can we questions, we just want a yes or a no. That's the difference. So, can we just sounds a bit more solid, and I'll show you exactly how to do this in a second. So participants should write as many as they can in the time allotted, but they should only choose three can we questions to add to the whiteboard later. Before we get to that, let's look at how to make them. This is one of those exercises that confuses people. So I've decided to actually put in the text that I would say. So rephrasing our challenges as can we questions will allow us to answer those questions rather than just seeing them as obstacles. Writing a can we question is relatively simple. Just think of a challenge or obstacle to hitting that 2-year goal that we have. Then rephrase it as a question. Let's just say one of the challenges that I can think of is if people only ever use our app when they buy a new car, it can never really become an important part of their lives. So I'm thinking if they just use this thing once every 3 years, then how is this going to become an important and useful product? So the can we for that how I would rephrase it would be can we create an app that people want to use weekly or daily. So I'm just changing my concern and my issue into a question that we could use for user testing for prototyping but basically just making it into something useful. And here's another example. I don't think we have the right team for creating a marketleading digital product because we've never done that before. So my concern is like how are we going to make this amazing product even though we're not really a product company. So the can we question would be can we build a worldclass product team. So that would be the can we question that I would write. So these are examples that I would present to the group before actually doing that exercise. And once I've explained that, they then basically have to write as many can we questions as they can within eight minutes and choose three that they'd like to bring forward and stick on the whiteboard. And that's basically the next step is to stick all of those can we questions on the whiteboard once they're ready, once the eight minutes are up. As always, once we've got some stuff up on the board, we're now going to vote. In this case, we're going to give every participant but not the decider. So everyone besides the decider will now get three voting dots and they should choose which can we questions they feel must be addressed if they are to reach this optimistic two-year goal. Which things do we really need to answer if we really want to hit this goal? What are some of the real problems? What are some of the real challenges? Again, they can vote any way they like and it's very subjective to the individuals. And here's how that looks. As always, voting dots on sticky notes. In step seven, we go to another decider vote. So rather than revisualizing and reordering the sticky notes as we usually would, we're now going to ask the decider to choose one can we question that we absolutely need to address. And that's from the decider's perspective. So the decider is given one sticky dot and they add that to one can we question that they feel absolutely must be addressed and this can we question is going to make it into the final selection even if it didn't have any votes before. So basically this decider is getting a super vote that's overriding other can we questions. The reason for this is that the decider is usually the person who knows the most about the project and we just want to give them a final chance to filter through everything and have the chance to vote something up that maybe wasn't going to get voted up. Oftentimes though, they vote on something that was already highly voted. So here we go. The decider, for example, has voted on something that just had two dots, even though some other things had four dots. And so when we revisualize it, we're just taking the top three can we questions and the can we question with the decider vote makes it in even though it didn't have the highest amount of votes overall. That's just the technicality. The main point here is that we now have a long-term goal, two-year goal. And we have three questions that we need to be reminding ourselves. Hey, are we really able to do these things? Are we on the right track? The can we questions can just really help us to ground ourselves and make sure we're asking and answering the real questions on the project. So the final step is really just for the workshopper to take all of the information on the board and turn that into a one-pager. We often use this magic paper, flip chart paper and just basically rewrite everything out. And that just looks like this. So in two years, autoinsure is the number one car insurance app in the Apple store. And the can we questions are, can we find a way to get people to use our app more than once per year? Can we build a team that can create award-winning digital products? And finally, can we create something that's meaningfully better than our competitor, Car City X? And that's essentially it. What you have on this one piece of paper is pretty much a north star for the team to work towards. And with the questions, you can also use those in other connected exercises like user testing. These can be used to shape the types of tests that we want to create. And that is the long-term goal and key questions exercise. It's super simple, but it really is one of the best ways to get a team moving in the same direction and also to just agree, hey, what is it that we're working towards? There's so many super complicated exercises to get like company vision or product vision or even trying to get these north stars and we found at AJ and Smart that this is just as effective and much much easier. All right, let's move on. So that's a really simple exercise, one of 10 core exercises that we use here at AJ and Smart to just make sure we're always ready when any sort of challenge comes up in a meeting with a client or in a workshop with a client. That long-term goal exercise is just such a simple one to pull [music] out. It's it's very basic, but it works so well that I'm shocked every time. Now, if you want to learn more about workshop design, there's a video down below linked in the description. It's a 1hour long, pretty detailed training on how to become a top 1% facilitator. This is just if you're interested in sort of building a career in running these types of collaborative sessions or if you're in a company and you want to be that [music] person in your company, there's a video down below that will show you exactly how to do that. And [music] other than that, have a great day. Let us know if you like the video and check out our channel if this is your first time here. It's not always this chaotic. I'm just back from a conference and I just didn't have time to get set up properly. But uh yeah, have a look around. I hope you enjoy it and have a great day. Bye.