Mining electrification workshop
The TLDR version
I worked with State of Play to devise three workshops for 40+ participants over 3 weeks to unpick how industry could lead electrification of mines in Australia and beyond. We rapidly tested platforms and iterated on the agenda to find the sweet spot where participants could effortlessly share insights and focus on aligning on priority areas for industry action.
What is a workshop? Is it when a bunch of people work together on the one task in the same room?
What if you can’t all be in the same room? What happens when you need to bring groups of corporate managers together for workshops that they have only ever done in-person but you can’t be in-person?
This challenging situation is where many consultancies found themselves on the eve of COVID mandates for isolation and working from home. It wasn’t safe any more to have a group of people crowd around a whiteboard or wall, putting post-its up and using that mechanism to facilitate their expression of a diverse range of ideas. At the same time, there was tentativeness when planning online workshops because it wouldn’t feel as organic as the in-person experience. How did we make this work for over 40 participants in three workshops, all facilitated online? Read on to find out.
Breaking a tradition of ‘in-person’ problem solving
State of Play is the global mining industry's leading research group focusing on strategy and innovation. They are very accomplished at leveraging online platforms for collecting survey data and fostering debate, stimulated by the insights from these surveys. Normally, they would bring leaders from the mining industry to one place (Perth) to distil insights and connect those stakeholders together to progress opportunities in the mining industry. In response to COVID and in order to maintain their cadence following the launch of a 2020 survey, they had to adapt, not accepting the option to postpone until travel bans were to be lifted. This turned out to be a great call for them because as of writing, 4 months later, Perth is still not accepting international or interstate travellers at all.
I got involved when State of Play got wind that I knew a thing or two about facilitating and enabling online workshop environments. The challenge was stated thus: “How might we we translate traditional strategy workshops in to an online environment?” My employer Synergy was so kind as to offer my time in support of the Future Batteries Cooperative Research Centre (FBICRC).
Scoping intent and platforms
We kicked off with a little diagnostic call to scope out what we did know in order to then uncover what we didn’t know yet when it came to workshop agendas and how we might enable and online format. The learning from this was that we would need to unpack how much we could expect a group of more than 40 participants to contribute and how structured or categorised their data should be. This was also key to understand how the State of Play team would typically run their in-person sessions - leveraging their tried and tested approach when it came to agenda and the path of thought for participants.
A snapshot of the quick Mural board used to unpack the landscape of tools that could be used to make the workshop successful
We followed this up with a call where I walked through the different online collaboration platforms available to enable their ideal agenda. They came in to two categories:
Asynchronous (pre-workshop) - When we send information with breaks in between.
Early data collection - Survey platforms like SurveyMonkey or MS Forms.
Threaded conversations and file sharing - Collaboration platforms like Slack, MS Teams and Dropbox.
Structured task management - Itemised tasking or idea categorisation enablers like Trello or Asana which also enable some threaded conversation.
Synchronous (all together, in the workshop) - When we communicate in real-time.
Video conferencing and chat - Connecting voices and faces while enabling instant text chat with platforms like Zoom and MS Teams Meetings.
Virtual whiteboarding - Keeping us all on the same page with visual facilitation, enabling participant communication via Mural or Miro. Familiarity in these platforms proved to be the differentiator in this engagement.
Simultaneous document editing and commenting - Google Docs, MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel all enable multiple users to co-create slides or other documents which may lead to playback of ideas and insights.
I chose to facilitate this meeting using Mural, the whiteboarding platform which was new to them and that I wanted them to experience on the call as a prototype for the experience that their workshop participants might use. I also included artefacts from our previous correspondence in the virtual whiteboard so they might understand how rich an experience we might be able to bring to participants including video introductions for self-serve consumption, right there on the canvas in the case that there were late-comers to the workshop and facilitators didn’t have time to give instructions beyond “go watch that intro video”.
Iterating on agenda
For previous State of Play workshops, constraints existed relating to physical presence, travel and accommodation. This would result in compressed workshop timelines. Big days, full of presentations and activities to optimise the hours that everyone was in the same location.
When those constraints go away, we have more opportunities to optimise agenda for quality outcomes. From the get go, we opted for blocks of not more than 3 hours a day with workshop time restricted to 2 hours a day. This allowed for more inclusion and simpler engagement with inter-state participants. With alignment on format out of the way, we could focus on the workshop experience within the three 2 hour workshops.
Most agenda design was done by the consulting team at State of Play and by checking in regularly, we could minimise re-work and address assumptions about user interface with our online platforms and we could easily play out scenarios of what the participant experience would be with running prototypes that I designed with the lead consultant. Before too long, he was able to feel more comfortable with the platform and was able to design more autonomously but not before we broke some things (intentionally).
‘The Mother of all canvases’ - When we pressure tested this prototype, it went up in flames so then we just moved on to something better!
Pushing Mural to the limit
Mural says they have tested Mural with stability with up to 100 participants and they recommend that boards comprise fewer than 1000 elements (lines, postits etc). I can now say that I’ve tested up to these limits and seen the effect. Earlier iterations of the agenda intended to show participants where they had come from and where they were going on the same board, making it easier to refer back to previous comments. For this reason, we initially brought all 3 days worth of whiteboard work-space and put it in to the same canvas.
We knew this would push the limit but by creating the expectation with stakeholders that we were always going to be operating at the edge of technical viability, we could quickly test, break things, learn and improve. By scheduling a pressure test with approximately 10 users, we tested out the biggest board we would ever explore together. It didn’t take long for the feedback to come in from all of us that interface lag was noticeable and that at full scale, we would run in to issues. This session served as alignment on the agenda, a test for access and as a change management mechanism to align stakeholders on the approach to split the ‘mother of all canvases’ up in to 3 different workshop boards that would be more nimble and allow us to adjust board design between sessions.
Faster iteration and prototyping combined with more transparent engagement of stakeholders and potential users meant that we could surface stakeholder reservations and address them earlier. It didn’t take that much effort before we had a design ready to deploy to the live sessions. The final design included more space between the six team boards to minimise distraction between teams from moving notes and also included a team list screen-shot from Zoom to help participants navigate to their nominated team-board once they landed in Zoom break-out rooms.
“Coming into this workshop, we had planned to run it in Western Australia over the course of a single day with many of our participants flying in from the East Coast. The combined cost of this was in the many tens of thousands. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, we were forced to postpone and then reenvisage how to run the workshop.
Tom’s knowledge of the world of online collaboration tools and systems, combined with his articulate facilitation, allowed us to quickly adapt our process to take advantage of the tools we preferred. Ultimately, Tom helped us design a series of workshops that achieved far more than we would have in the single day, physical workshop we’d planned. Among our older, greyer, less-tech savvy participants this also created dozens of converts to this new way of working.
Since learning from Tom how to do this, we’ve now run several subsequent workshops in this way, allowing us to continue to work productively with our clients through the chaos of 2020.”
A snapshot of the board from the day 3 workshop.
This example team space shows how one facilitator worked with some spare time to add value to the canvas with some prioritisation to align team members on key items that they would later play back to the wider group. This was done with a simple thumbs-up icon that the facilitator brought on to the canvas to simplify the experience for participants.
Game day
One of our earlier tests surfaced that without a well-timed email to participants, most of them would struggle to find the link to click to get to the Mural board because they wouldn’t intuitively find the Zoom text chat window. Simple and numerous usability checks like this meant that workshop 1 went pretty smoothly. In a debrief with the 6 team facilitators after the workshop, it seemed that each had quite different experiences depending on the connection quality of the people in their team of 5-10. This was the #1 factor that made it challenging for facilitators.
The preparatory calls I’d had with the facilitators had prepared us for most of the other quirks of online facilitation so we had another facilitator, at the ready to support participants who had technical challenges or had missed introductory presentation points beforehand. This freed up facilitators to concentrate on bringing each of the 40+ participants to the table with their ideas and to engage in lively discussion. As we moved in to the second and third workshops, these debriefs constituted an important forum for facilitators to refine and align on their approach.
“I had two main take a ways from the experience: The first was the pace at which precise input can be gathered online and how frictionless it can be to set up and reach a lot of dispersed people. We will not be going back. The second takeaway was that by going broad with participants, the process enabled a natural self selection process into a naturally goal aligned consortium which followed this process.”
Learnings
I’m very thankful for Synergy to consider engagement with State of Play as an opportunity for development rather than a distraction from business as usual. It allowed me to explore what the relationship looked like to act as an individual consultant to a strategic consultancy to accelerate their transition to online facilitation. It provided a way to test approaches I had already built at Synergy but then to do so at a larger scale and with a completely new and more senior audience than I had mostly worked with before. This is experience I bring back in to the business. The feedback was really positive for this set of workshops and I thank State of Play and the FBICRC for entertaining the explorative approach we took to designing workshops that were of a previously unfamiliar format to them. Here were some of the key take-aways for me in retrospect:
Ease of use is king - Avoid creating accounts and extra log-ins in for participants wherever possible. We canned the idea of using Trello for more structured data collection and also chose Mural over Miro for online whiteboarding because we could allow entry to the Mural boards without any login as an ‘anonymous guest’.
If nothing seems to work for a participant, get them on a separate call and get straight to a screen share. The most frequent fix was to open the link using a modern internet browser like Chrome or Firefox, not Internet Explorer.
Encourage participants to use a fit-for-purpose work environment. Having a mouse and larger screen made it much easier for most participants to engage for a full 2 hour workshop.
If seeking engagement, keep video on and keep it short. Remember to plan in breaks to get refreshed but also set visible timers to get everyone back together without loosing engagement and momentum.
Expect to test, fail and adapt. This engagement reinforced my test and learn approach as a way to de-risk uncertain deliverables. None of us knew what the final workshop design would look like but we agreed to lean in to an iterative process of discovery.
Distribute knowledge across a group of facilitators to build resilience and make the most of the post-workshop debrief. By assuming that participants would experience the workshop in ways we couldn’t anticipate, we built some buffer in to the system so we could keep moving the majority of participant through a great experience so they could focus on the ideas and great discussion.
Thanks again to the State of Play team for taking experimentation in to your stride and for being willing to test half-done prototypes with your customers. I think we both agree that an iterative and transparent approach to agenda development got us to a great set of workshops. It was great working with you all!
