This week is about healthy pressure, breakout frames, and async decision-making.

Let's go!

– Arthur

Three Workshop Tips

1: Five ways color coding can improve workshops

Because all workshops can use some extra color 🎨.

1. Idea Categorization: Ask a group to assign different colors to various categories of ideas (e.g., Marketing: Blue, Product: Green, Sales: Red) after brainstorming.
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2. Participant Tracking: Allocate a unique color to each participant to make tracking easier.
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3. Priority Setting: Designate colors representing priority levels (e.g., High: Red, Medium: Yellow, Low: Green).
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4. Status Updates: Use colors for different project statuses (e.g., Completed: Green, In Progress: Yellow, Not Started: Red).
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5. Question Categories: Differentiate question categories with colors (e.g., Clarification: Blue, Suggestion: Green, Concern: Red).

​2: Not breakout rooms, but breakout frames 🖼️

Breakout rooms are great. They enable more meaningful conversations and collaboration for workshops with 6+ participants.

But breakout frames are even better!

They enable you to divide participants into smaller groups and give them a specific task in a Miro board.

Let’s continue with the example of 6 participants in a workshop:

• Split them into two groups of three to generate ideas or solve problems.
• After 15 minutes, bring everyone back to the main board to share findings.

(Always try to create breakout groups of max. 4. This makes it easier for the group to make decisions.)

You can use Miro breakouts and Butter (my fav), Zoom, Teams, or Meet breakouts together to speed up the decision-making process in your team.

1. In Miro, prepare content for breakout frames and link breakouts with frames.
2. Start breakouts in Butter, Zoom, Teams, or Meet, and assign your participants to rooms.
3. Make sure you have the same number of rooms in Butter and Miro. (Add & delete frames if needed in Miro).
4. Start breakouts in Miro and ask participants to join the same room they are assigned to in Butter. This will prevent you from manually assigning each person in both applications.

As the facilitator, you can observe all breakouts in real time and adjust assignments if someone needs guidance.

3: Create healthy pressure

Ever noticed how a dash of pressure can really get your team buzzing? It's like the secret sauce to staying focused and getting the most out of workshops.

But here’s the catch - too little of it, and we might find ourselves drifting off, maybe procrastinating a bit or losing grip on the task at hand.

Simple, yet oh-so-powerful, setting timers is like the unsung hero of successful workshops.

It maintains the pace, sets the rhythm, and brings in that dash of healthy pressure that gets the creative juices flowing.

However, I see that timers are still heavily underused.

So, before your next workshop or meeting, take some time and think about where timers can help your team get more done.

​Two Async Examples

Based on my experience, 90% of decisions can be made async. If you do this well, you’ll save your team endless hours of meetings (and they’ll love you for it).

I love this super-practical aproach from Peter Yang on async decision-making:

Step 1: Identify key people & set context

Every decision should ideally have one decision maker and fewer than five stakeholders to provide input. You don't want to have too many cooks in the kitchen.

The decision maker should start an async thread or decision doc with:

1. List of people involved
2. Context
3. Recommended option (remember don’t bury the lede)
4. List of options considered with pros and cons

Reminder: nobody has time to read long threads or docs, so be as concise as possible.

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Step 2: Use one channel for communication

Pick one channel or doc for people to provide input. Avoid starting a bunch of separate threads and then having to play a game of telephone to figure out who said what.

Step 3: Use nested numbered lists to provide feedback

Encourage people to provide input in a list format for easy readability. Use numbered lists vs. bullets to make it easier for people to respond (e.g."I agree with #1"). Here’s an example:

Discussion:

1. Peter: I like option B because of XYZ
2. Daniel: I hadn’t thought of it that way, will add it to the doc.

Step 4: Push for a decision

When it looks like people are reaching alignment, the decision maker should push for consensus:

"It sounds like people prefer #1, any strong objections to moving forward?"

Once confirmed, share the decision far and wide so that everyone is on the same page.

Close threads, document decisions, and share the link anywhere to give your team context.

​Read Peter's full article here (includes an example async decision doc).​​

One Question For Your Team

That's all for this week. If you enjoyed today's issue, please reply (it helps with deliverability). If you didn't you can unsubscribe via the link👇.

See you next Wednesday — Arthur​

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