How do you get busy stakeholders to join your workshops?

Full transcript

Intro

These videos answer questions that I hear come up over and over again about product design & development, agile, design thinking, frameworks like design sprints and problem framing and of course, facilitation at the core of all of it.

In this video, this is Episode #3, I'm going to be answering the question, "How do you get busy stakeholders to join your workshops?"

Today’s question

Okay so in today's video we're asking the question, 'How do we get busy stakeholders to join our workshops?'

Well, if we peel that question back a layer or two, what are we really up against? We have these people, they're super busy, they're being pulled in a million directions, sometimes they're completely inaccessible, and they're the folks that have the budget, the vision, the initiatives and they're asking us, the team, to execute against those ideas.

But, we need their input in order to make decisions to move forward so we're stuck. And what do we do from there?

Well, we get frustrated and we say, "We're wasting a lot of time, we're going back and forth over emails so I'm going to design this perfect workshop. It's going to be a day or two, we're going to get everybody in the room, we're gonna have all the right people, the inputs, we're going to be able to make the perfect decisions so that we can move forward successfully together."

That sounds super linear and when is the process for building products and services or innovating, when is that ever linear? So why are we treating this part of the intake process, getting the ideas from stakeholders, any differently? So I've been thinking about this part of the process differently and I'm thinking, why not treat this like a prototype? Because when we're in our workshops there's always these moments in the workshop where we say, '

We don't know enough about this space so we're going to go and conduct a little bit more research, talk to a couple more people, invite this person into the next workshop with us,' why are we treating these stakeholders any differently?

So instead, if we treat our workshops like prototypes as well, then we can design them really light, we can set expectations up front with folks that are part of the process, we're missing this person and this person and we need them to make decisions, get budget approval, so for now we're gonna design it with some of our assumptions, some of these gaps that we know and then take that and visualize the outputs, create a story around it, share it with the stakeholders, this is gonna be a much different conversation than going to them with a blank slate and saying, 'What would you like us to do?'

They might feel like they were left out of the conversation and that's a perfect place for you to invite them to the next one and say, 'Of course, we would love to have you in there,' now the team, instead of spending weeks and months making decisions and going in a certain direction doesn't feel like this person's gonna come in and swoop in and change all their ideas. There's expectations set up front, now you have their input and ideas, they feel part of the conversation and you and the team are able to move forward with the gaps that they were able to help you fill. 

I hope this was helpful, go into it with a mindset of even your workshops, even the interviews and ideas that you're gathering from your stakeholders are a prototype. And hopefully you're able to move through the process, reduce some of the stress that you feel, and ultimately iterate your way towards having the decisions that you need to move forward.

See you at the next episode of "Q&A with Jay."

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