How to track trends and signals of change. A team workshop.
Introduction
This workshop is designed to help you and your team to habitually track the external trends that affect your organisation. It is based around four exercises.
Organisations that pay attention to signals of change in their operating environment are able to identify opportunities and risks before their competitors. When teams create and share information amongst themselves, it can also lead to greater agility, innovation, a better quality and speed of decision making, than when it comes from a centralised source.
We can’t sit and wait for the new normal, we have to learn to thrive in times of uncertainty and this is where signal spotting comes in.
Signal spotting is a way to acknowledge the unknown in an organised and systematic way. It allows for experimentation, a regular challenge to the accepted order and to be nimble enough to change when necessary , especially periods of flux and uncertainty.
The purpose of signal spotting isn’t to create new reports to go to the board or for a designated strategist to compile the insight and ‘do the thinking’ on behalf of everyone else. In fact, we advocate the opposite: providing systems to bring in important information from the outside and distribute it (in as real time as possible) among those who can actually make sense of it and do something about it, namely the people doing the work.
We feel that this is particularly important for UK businesses in 2021. It’s human nature, in times of shock, to reach back to things that worked before. To go back to old ways of doing things with the idea of taking back control. And yet, it’s going to be nearly impossible for any team to pick up and start again from where they were when the pandemic hit, and there is a world of evidence to suggest that the time is right to move to a radically different way of planning for businesses. A move away from the top-down orthodoxy that still prevails today.
We’re calling this out here because it’s also human to look for centralised leadership in times of crisis. In Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed says that, “when faced by uncertainty, we often attempt to regain control by putting our faith in a dominant figurehead who can restore order. This is sometimes called ‘compensatory control’... This leaves us with a dangerous paradox. When the environment is complex and uncertain, this is precisely when one brain - even a dominant brain - is insufficient to solve the problem”.
In their book Corporate Rebels, Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree give dozens of examples of companies that have changed their structures and way of working to provide more autonomy to their teams. They cite examples from some of the most successful businesses on the planet - Haier, Nearsoft, Breman, DutchBuurtzorg, Finext - in a compelling argument against top-down, hierarchical strategy setting. They’ve also blogged about a phenomenon documented by Sidney Yoshida called ‘The Iceberg of Ignorance’, exploring how knowledge of front-line problems disappears the higher you go up the management chain. They write, “(Yoshida) found that company leadership was hardly aware of any of the real problems the organization faced. They were, as he put it, only aware of the tip of the iceberg”. Leaders who show humility can avoid this happening, and this workshop is a good way of bringing that principle to life.
The question of what the right strategy is will remain a pressing one over the next few years. We hope that through this workshop we can help support leaders who know that their team is the key to future success.
If we can help in any way, we’d love to talk.
About this workshop
The four exercises that you’ll run through during this workshop are based on ones that we regularly use in workshops we run with our clients.
They’ll help you and your team
Figure out what makes the environment around you tick
Agree what signals it’s useful to keep watch for
Design a way of sharing information (and decision making) successfully
Talk about your future, and act on insight from the world around you today
Continually review whether you have the right strategy
Successful strategy takes a range of external and internal considerations into account. Considering the effects of external forces on your business or organisation helps to identify opportunities, risks, market trends and unknown quantities. Taking internal considerations into account highlights your current strategic strengths, weaknesses, problems, constraints and uncertainties. Put them together and you’ll shape your strategy.
This workshop focuses on the external factors that shape your organisation. They could be customer segments, motivations and unmet needs, as well as competitor’s brands, new customer choices or technology. You might also want to keep a focus on market size, projected growth, profitability, entry barriers and trends.
Ultimately, it will be different for every organisation, which is why we’ve produced this workshop. It has been created in a way that you can pick up and use yourself, and we’ve also included links to a selection of the books that have inspired some of the ideas contained here.
Talk to us if you’d like to know more about the help we give our clients in thinking about change and future scenarios, or addressing specific issues and challenges.
The right mix of minds
Before you begin, it is important to get the right people in the room. You might be tempted to set a limit here, whether by selecting only your immediate team, senior staff or just those you trust, while omitting others. But this is less likely to be successful than bringing together a diverse group with different backgrounds and perspectives. Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas is a great read on the subject of pooling intelligence, and in it he reminds us that “we need to address cognitive diversity before tackling our toughest challenges”.
Once you’ve assembled a group that gives you the biggest breadth of coverage on the topic in hand, you need to think about a facilitator. This might be you (as you’re the one reading this!) or it could be someone else - just make sure that they’re independent and are able to improvise, read a room, guide people through the exercises and keep the group focused. Consider whether you’re the best person for this role or whether the workshop would be more successful if a colleague or impartial facilitator supported you.
What makes your sector tick? Running the workshop
This workshop is designed to make sure that everyone taking part has equal say, so you don’t end up with extroverts holding court, introverts holding ideas back or more senior colleagues steering others.
The workshop has been designed to be completed in less than two hours, if you successfully keep the exercises on track. You’ll need the following to make it happen:
A whiteboard, flipchart or online collaboration tool like Jamboard
Marker pens / Sharpies
Post-it Notes (loads of them)
Small dot or star stickers (for voting)
Exercise one. Which signals matter?
First of all you’re going to get everyone to create a list of the things they think are worth keeping an eye on in order to remain successful in the future. They’ll do it anonymously and individually, but collectively they’ll produce a great list. If doing the exercise in person you’ll need a whiteboard or paper, sticky notes and pens, dots or other small stickers for voting. If you’re running this as a virtual workshop then you might want to set up a series of collaboration boards (for example Google’s Jamboards) in advance.
Write a question on the whiteboard: ‘Which signals matter to us?’
The first step is to get the team to consider what the indicators of success or risk are for your organisation. It could be that your organisation thrives in certain weather conditions, political climates, economic situations, when new technology is released or when talented people are available to work with you. The signals that matter will be unique to your organisation.
The list will be vague and big picture at this point, but don’t worry -the detail will come through as you go.
One final note before you get started. Depending on the situation and team, you might want to warn them not to get overly focused on competitor analysis, especially at the expense of ignoring all other external signals. Competitor analysis is a very closely related and very important activity, and considering what has made competitors successful can be useful in determining external factors to track, but it is only one part of it. As Jason Fried and David Hansson say in their book Rework, “focus on yourself instead. What’s going on in here is way more important than anything going on out there. When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can’t spend that time improving yourself”.
How to run the exercise
The exercise has two steps. Step One:
Give every person in the workshop a block of square sticky notes and a marker pen. At this stage, everyone is working individually, without discussion or debate.
Ask them to write three or four things (one per sticky note) that they think lead to success for organisations that do what you do. You might want to help them by encouraging them to consider the key trends, technologies, customer behaviours, social and economic factors, competitors you admire or the things that have been successful for their team.
Give them five minutes to write their thoughts down, then ask them to place them on the whiteboard together (this helps keep it anonymous, honest and also saves time compared to getting everyone to present their thoughts).
You should now have a picture in front of the team that captures the team’s views on what makes the environment around them tick and things that you need to know about. It might look something like this:
Step Two:
Now the team will group these factors, and this second step of the exercise should take about ten minutes. By the end of this exercise, the team will have created a simplified view of those things that make the surrounding environment tick. We’ll use this to inform what kinds of signals it would be useful to track on an ongoing basis.
It is very straightforward, and is all about putting the team’s ideas into categories.
You’ll need to grab some sticky notes and a marker pen, read the sticky notes on the whiteboard and create broad categories that they fit under, for example ‘economic’, ‘legal’, ‘customers’ and so on. This should take ten minutes.
The team can help by pointing out categories they see while you write them down. The categories don’t need to be completely finalised and perfected at this stage.
Once you’ve created as many categories as you need, give everyone in the workshop a chance to place the original sticky notes physically into the categories - tidying up the list until you have columns of related ideas.
You’ve now have an easy to read summary. The next task is for the team to decide which signals matter enough to track and work on.
Exercise two. Which signals are the most important?
The next task is for the team to decide which of the signals are the most important to keep an ongoing watch on.
The team will vote for the signals that they feel matter most and will brainstorm ways of monitoring them. This will take around 10 minutes in total.
Start with the voting process, putting the ideas from stage one in priority order.
How to run the exercise
As in exercise one, you want everyone to contribute without discussion or being sidetracked by debate. That’s where the voting dots come in. You’ll give each participant ten voting dots (small stickers, stars - anything will do as long as it can be attached to the sticky notes).
Give everyone ten minutes to vote on which of the signals are the most significant
Ask them to place their dots on the original sticky notes, not the categories. They can put as many voting dots on each of the sticky notes as they like and need to use all ten of their votes. Remind them that they’re all doing it based on their personal thoughts on it, so no debating or talking while people are voting as this could sway how other people in the workshop vote.
Once the ten minutes is up, your board should look like this;
You can now take the sticky notes that have been voted on and arrange them from most votes to least votes - ignore anything with one or no votes on it.
It should look something like this in the end:
The next task is pretty ruthless - getting rid of the sticky notes that have one vote or no votes.
This can be difficult but is a fundamental way of providing focus by reducing the number of things that the team will work on. Sticky notes with one or no votes can be put to one side and forgotten about. If something later turns out to be important, it’ll come back up again in the future, so don’t worry about those for now.
Exercise three. Getting insight from the signals
You’re now going to ask the team to come up with lots of ideas on how best to track the signals they’ve identified as important. This will help make sure that your team can spend time listening and generating insight from the signals.
There are loads of different ways of tracking signals. A useful way of thinking about this can be to think of signals in a number of different categories.
Dominant: these are the things that are very obviously important today and are relatively easy to track quantitatively
Trends: what people are talking about, picking out the important themes by looking at what the industry, customers and competitors are saying. This tends to be a mix of qualitative and quantitative.
Indicators: Whispers of change, that are easy to miss unless you’re listening very carefully to the world around you. By their nature these are harder to track.
How many of the factors you work on during the workshop is up to you - you could focus on just the top voted one or you could work on a number of them. It depends how much time you have, but don’t be afraid to bank some of the opportunity questions and come back to them in a later workshop if you need to.
Think of this exercise as brainwriting - the solutions that the team create here don’t have to be completely thought through. As Seth Godin says, ‘good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them’.
How to run the exercise
Like the previous exercises, this one is based on everyone working independently, voting anonymously but creating a prioritised list collaboratively.
Everyone will need more sticky notes and voting dots, and hopefully their marker pens are still working.
The first step is for everyone to generate as many ideas as they can to answer the question ‘how could we track these signals, and share insight from them?’. Once again, quantity matters more than quality!
Get the team to write one idea per sticky note and tell them to write ideas down even if they’re incomplete. Ideally everyone should create 15-20 ideas.
Give the team ten minutes to do this step, working independently and quietly.
By the end of the step, everyone will have a stack of ideas in front of them (but not on the wall).
Ask each person to choose ten of the best ideas they came up with and discard all of the ideas they don’t want to shortlist - chuck the discarded ones away.
When everyone has chosen their ten, they should all be stuck to one big surface (in a random order).
Everyone’s ideas should now be mixed with everyone else’s on the same wall in a random order - no grouping or prioritisation yet. It is important that the ideas go up anonymously so that no-one knows whose ideas they are.
Remove any duplicate ideas.
It’s time to break out the voting dots again. Give each person ten voting dots and ask them to vote silently for the ideas that they think have the most promise. People can put as many dots as they like on one idea, they are not allowed to ask for more information about an idea (if it makes no sense, just skip it) and they must use all of their ten dots in the five minutes you’re going to allow them to have to vote.
Naturally, this doesn’t produce an unbiased spread of votes (people are likely to place votes where votes exist already) but it will give a good indication of which ideas have the most resonance amongst the team, and by doing it this way everyone has been spared the torture of endless debate that can emerge in unstructured brainstorming sessions!
The final step in this exercise is to arrange the ideas with the most votes. As before, remove all the ideas with one or no votes. Bin them! Then arrange the remaining sticky notes in order of how many votes they got. The aim of this exercise is to create a maximum of ten ideas - so if there are more than ten on the board start removing them from the bottom up.
You’ve now got ten (or fewer) ways of tracking the things that have the most significant impact on your business.
The final task of this workshop is to agree how you’re going to develop your signal spotting system.
Exercise four. Committing to a plan of action
Getting the team to commit to a plan, and making sure that they’re given the time and resources to do it, is important if the habit of recognising, gathering and sharing insight is going to stick.
In the first step the team is going to turn the list of prioritised solutions into an actionable plan by using an Action Board workshop. This step will take around 20 minutes to complete.
How to run the exercise
Draw the following scale on your whiteboard or flipchart. You’ve probably seen something like this before, it is a really simple effort-impact scale. The top right corner signifies high effort, high impact while the bottom right means high effort, low impact and so on.
You’re now going to ask the team to decide where to place each sticky note on the scale.
Take the most voted for sticky note and ask the team “Where it comes to helping us track things that could have an important impact on our work, does this solution have high or low impact?”
The team can only reply higher or lower, and you attach the sticky note once they’ve agreed on a position
Now do the same for effort by asking, “Where it comes to helping us track things that could have an important impact on our work, is this solution high or low effort?”
As before, the team replies ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ and eventually you pin the sticky onto the scale
Repeat for all the solutions created in part two until you have them all on the scale.
You can now see the relative impact and difficulty of each solution.
You can now come up with an action plan by explaining the meaning of each quadrant
Top left is ‘do now’ as it is high impact and low effort
Top right is ‘project’ as it is high impact and high effort
Bottom left is ‘task’ as it is low impact, low effort
Bottom right is ‘ignore’ as it is low impact, high effort
Next the team is going to turn those ideas into actions.
There are lots of ways to realise ideas successfully. In 2017 our founder, Tom was invited by Google to attend a trip to Tokyo where they were introducing leaders from eight UK digital agencies to a similar number of Japanese marketing and media agencies. They were introduced to a number of excellent agency teams operating in Japan and Asia-Pacific, one of which was Cyberagent who had an enviable track record of quickly turning ideas into reality. Tom asked their team how they did it and their answer was simple: Once someone had come up with an idea and presented it to the business, they were given full responsibility for it and had three weeks to test the idea and create the offer. If it looked like it would work, they backed it and carried on. If it looked like it wouldn’t work, they stopped and moved on.
They committed to testing an idea, gave someone responsibility and made them accountable for it - and had a habitual way of doing this in a way that didn’t burn time and, more importantly, didn’t judge people on the basis of ideas not coming to fruition. By having this culture embedded in their operation, and clear guidelines on turning ideas into reality, they were able to get more ideas from their team, test them and act accordingly.
In the final step, you’re going to turn all the solutions that landed in the ‘do now’ corner into actions with a clear owner. This could take 45 minutes or longer depending on how many solutions have been placed in that corner.
Chose a sticky notes from the ‘do now’ corner - ideally the one that you’ve placed closest to the top and nearest to the right (highest impact but lower effort than others in that corner)
Turn this solution into a plan for someone to complete - ideally a 1-2 week turnaround to test the idea. You’ll create a simple plan with the team that produces something like the image below.
Document and assign the tasks in the way that you usually do in your team
You’ve created a shared view of what’s important and what to do about it quickly - the important thing now is that you and the team commit to the ideas
Building on the success of the workshop
The workshop has hopefully given you and the team a new view on the most important external signals to track, reasons to track them and a set of immediate next steps to embed signal spotting into your organisation.
If you can be one of the few organisations to truly embed a habit of sharing this information widely amongst the teams, giving them autonomy to come up with creative responses to the changing world around them and then backing their ideas, you’ll see a big impact. It’ll take time, and as with any habit, you’ll need to keep repeating it until it sticks. The effort will be worth it.
And remember that if this is a topic that you’d like to devote more to than a workshop, we’re here to help.
You can find these books and more at our bookshop
From our bookshelf
Corporate Rebels: Make Work More Fun by Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days by Jake Knapp with John Zeratksy & Braden Kowitz
