Fundamental Workshopping Tools

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

Workshop facilitation is a huge topic and there are thousands of frameworks, models and activities to help run good 🧠Workshops & Brainstorming Sessions. It’s possible to run a pretty good brainstorming sessions with just two basic tools though…

1️⃣ Individual Thinking → Collective Thinking

1. Start with a problem statement, or series of prompts and put these on a shared whiteboard somewhere.
2. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes and ask everyone to turn their cameras & mics off and write their own thoughts on sticky notes, once thought per note.
3. When the timer is up, go round the room and have everyone bring their individual thoughts together in once space, discussing as you go. Look for groupings, themes and interesting conversations, and add more sticky notes as you discuss.

Why does this work so well?

The 5 minutes of individual thinking gives space for people to reflect and explore their own thoughts independently of each other. This tends to generate a wider spectrum of ideas than if everyone was talking while they did this – it helps to prevent groupthink. It also caters for folks who think best when they’re sat quietly on their own.

By purring one thought per note, we make it easy to shuffle thoughts around on the board as we discuss and refine our thinking together.

2️⃣ Divergent → Convergent Thinking

Divergent thinking is all about generating ideas. Nothing is off the table. Convergent thinking is all about creating clarity from a collection of thoughts: narrowing down options until you find a single answer.

An awful lot of brainstorming sessions end up following the Double Diamond framework – we use divergent thinking to brainstorm the problem space and then convergent thinking to hone in on a specific problem definition. We then repeat the process to brainstorm solutions and converge on a single solution.

Putting it together

Combining these two tools with an online white-boarding tool like FigJam (Intro to FigJam) can lead to surprisingly effective workshops. We might start with a goal and four prompts on a whiteboard.

And our agenda might look something like this…

Further Reading

Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking: How to Use Both to Think Smarter | Maestro

Convergent vs divergent thinking can be used to creatively solve problems. How well do you understand the difference between the two?

maestrolearning.com

Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking: Finding the Right Balance [2021] • Asana

Convergent thinking focuses on finding one solution, while divergent thinking involves more creativity. In this piece, we’ll explain the differences.

asana.com