The power of stepping back - 6 steps of zooming out to help you gain perspective and find better solutions
How to guide persons in your working session to see the big picture and then zoom in again into details?
This post is about simple steps you can do to guide your participants in a working session to see the big picture before starting to create solutions.
Why is it relevant to check the big picture before start creating solutions or ideas?
I will give you some possible situations why is it helpful:
It can be you do not want to arrive in the same situations, so to apply the learnings from the past and for you to be able to see this, you need to go to a broad view and then narrow again or vice-versa
It can be that you want to switch between opposing ideas in a fast way before deciding upon what to focus on
It can be that the perspectives of the participants are at different detailed levels and you want to bring them to a similar level before starting to create solutions/ideas
If you want to discover more ways to zoom in and out and also to find out an innatentional blindness game , check out tomorrow's post with more insights.
Our focus on negative things is rooted in how our attention works. There is a good article about why your brain has a negativity bias in this article.
The exact 6 steps to zoom out and in:
🎲 Ask the participants before entering in solution creation phase: how can you ensure that you get the worst outcome possible / screw it up? Creating ingenious ideas for achieving the opposite of their goal is the objective here.
🎲 Ask the participants to come up with as many answers to the above question in a timeboxed session of 8 minutes.
🎲 Ask the participants to share what they wrote/make a gallery walk where everyone reads in silence what was written.
🎲 Invite everyone to take each idea and flip it over 180 degrees to transform it into a positive action. Give them an example. Timebox for another 8 minutes.
🎲 Ask them to share what they wrote/make a gallery walk where everyone reads in silence what was written.
🎲 Invite everyone to place 3 red dots to the ideas that bring the biggest impact on achieving their goal. In this way, you will know what to focus on when coming up with new solutions/ideas.
🎲 Your participants are now ready to dive into the creation of solutions/ideas as they zoomed out seeing the big picture and thinking about their goal while knowing now also what to focus on in order for that goal to really happen.
I tried this activity with lots of teams in different contexts and worked every time because after thinking of what can we do to avoid screwing up the intrinsec motivation of performing comes along.
An example where I used it and a variation of it:
Last week I facilitated together with a colleague a big retrospective workshop with 14 persons (leadership team), inter-connected with a previous 30 persons (software development team) retrospective one week before.
One of the exercises we used was after collecting the challenges and creating a 360 degrees picture before jumping into solutions, we created a variation of the “double negative” activity from above combined with the “Triz” activity from Liberating structures (more details in Resources below).
🎲 We asked the participants to come up with the silliest ideas, crazy ideas on how to screw up the whole project.
🎲 They read it in silence and asked them to make a “heat map” while putting as many red dots as they wanted on the situations that were actually really happening in their project from the crazy ideas collection.
🎲 The goal was to bring awareness to what was happening already and avoid new solutions arriving in the same situation.
🎲 The solution creation was based on a lot of motivation to make it work this time.
This activity with this variation and in this context I have tried only once, but I wanted to mention it here. It is important to take care if this could work or not depending on:
the personalities of the participants
if they had the chance to take out their pain points upfront already (in the above context they did it separate in interviews we had upfront with them)
which is the emotional state of mind of the participants before doing this exercise
context
After running more than 200 workshops in 2 years, the advantage I have is that I can take in a few seconds the decision if this activity is the right one or not.
If you are at the beginning of the facilitation journey, I would suggest you do not use the variation yet in a high important session, but rather in a trial session or with a team you know very good.
One-phrase summary:
When you want to give a chance to successful and great solutions creations, guide your team to zoom out by thinking about what they can do worst to achieve the opposite of their goal, ask them to share this and then go into the creation phase. It is a big difference in team motivation, being able to check up on the goal again, and engagement in finding the best possible solutions.
Want to know how to make decisions and prioritize your work? Stay tuned for the next posts!
Resources:
“Interactive techniques for instructor-led training” - Double negative activity - by Dr. Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan
Variation of TRIZ activity from Liberating Structures: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/6-making-space-with-triz/
"What can we do to avoid screwing it up?" is so important to give new solutions a reality-check. Negative brainstorming (or TRIZ as you call it) sounds perfect for this.