3 Traps to Avoid When Using Sticky Notes in Workshops

Before you start your next meeting or workshop with sticky notes, check that you’re not falling into these traps first.

I can’t remember the first workshop I was in where we used sticky notes. I can’t remember whether I was participating in it, or running it. But one thing’s for sure: I can certainly still remember the nerdy facilitatory exhilaration I felt, when I realised what a total game-changer they were for any meeting or workshop.

What’s not to love? They’re such a fast effective way of capturing ideas! They work whether they’re made of paper or pixels! They give everyone an equal voice, from the shy wallflower to the overbearing HiPPO! You can move them around to give a conversation visual structure! No onboarding or user manual needed! They don’t need recharging or updating! They’re pretty!?

Their versatility is a blessing and curse

There are tons of uses for sticky notes outside of meetings and workshops, too. It’s hard to find a more versatile business tool. But therein lies a big issue with sticky notes! Because they’re so versatile and commonplace, it’s also easy to fall into some pretty big traps when using them in workshops. And those traps can spell disaster for those workshops, let alone productivity and morale.

Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But given just one 2-hour workshop with 10 people (based on the average Australian manager salary and this HBR calculator) costs a business roughly $1,260, wouldn’t you want to optimise how you use those stickies, for the best outcome possible?

Onward to the traps, then.

#1 Treating the sticky notes as wallpaper

Once everybody has scribbled all their ideas on sticky notes (whether paper or digital), it’s customary to read over them, perhaps group them, and then prioritise the more resonant and relevant ones. Which is all well and good.?

But often the focus drifts away from what was written by all people, back to what is spoken by only a few people. The sticky notes are treated only as a catalyst for getting the initial superficial thoughts and ideas out, and then forgotten in favour of a plain old fashioned chinwag.?

Remedy: Keep the focus on the sticky notes, so that everybody’s input is honoured equally. If you don’t, you run the risk of letting some people’s input get left behind, and giving too much time to the more verbose and opinionated people in your workshop. Treating what’s written on the sticky notes as the primary record keeps it equal and fair for everybody.?

Here are some examples of facilitator statements you can use, to help with this:

• “That’s a great new idea, Greg. Can you jot that on a sticky and add it to the board? That way, it’ll be included in the next part of the workshop, where we prioritise all ideas.”
• “Before we put all these stickies in order, I think there are a few missing, based on the conversation we just had. Can someone write those down and add them?”
• “This conversation has been great at building on our initial post-up of ideas. Let’s spend 3 minutes distilling and capturing that new set of ideas before we move on.”

#2 Writing meaningless garbage

Oh yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine. How many workshops have you been in, where people just write single words or simplistic statements, like “AI” or “One-stop shop”? It’s laziness of the highest order. It puts all the effort onto the facilitator and everybody else to make sense of it, let alone work out how to group it, prioritise it, or do anything with it, really.

This trap exposes another trap (below), where people often assume that they’ll be able to talk to whatever they wrote. This trap also plays right into the hands (and mouths) of any HiPPOs in your workshop too, because you’re basically requiring them to talk more, to explain what they’ve written.

Remedy: Model the intended behaviour first. Remind everybody about the good ol’ principle of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Demonstrate what makes a bad sticky note and a good sticky note. Hold up an example of a bad sticky note (e.g. “AI”), and explain how it’s just not enough information to do anything with. Then, hold up an example of a good sticky note (e.g. “Use machine learning to predict the best next steps for customers”), and emphasise that specifics make it easy for everyone else to understand and use your ideas.

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Which brings us to…

#3 Treating sticky notes as tickets in a queue for each person to explain them

This one’s pretty subtle, but it can really undermine great idea generation and squash any emergence of new insights. You see this trap in action when (and I’ve been guilty of this many times), there are 5 minutes spent generating ideas, but then 15 minutes spent explaining (or ‘talking to’) those ideas… but nothing in that 15 minutes is ever captured.

Remedy: Decouple every sticky note from its owner. Set a tone at the start of your workshop – and back it up all the way through – that once any idea is written down, it stands or falls on its own merit. It’s not ‘talked to’ or explained. It’s interpreted, grouped and prioritised on its own merit. It’s not treated as some kind of ‘ticket’ in a queue for somebody to take their turn to explain it.

“Oh no!”, you might be thinking. “We need to talk about them!”. I’d argue that it’s better to save this time near the beginning of the workshop, to spend it having a richer discussion in the latter half of the workshop.

Plus (as I’ve learned from Dave Mastronardi and Gamestorming), some amazing alchemy, synthesis and emergence of new perspectives and ideas can happen when people just interpret ideas on sticky notes however they want to, without needing any verbal commentary attached to them.

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What? So what? Now what?

I’ll finish with a bonus fourth trap. It’s so tempting straight after a workshop to walk away from that metric ton of sticky notes (paper or digital), and switch to something else. I know I’ve done that way too many times, and of course by the time I come back to them, I’ve forgotten all those little connections and summaries I had in mind before, that weren’t written down! Arg! I look at those sticky notes that say things like "leverage UTY" and wonder what on earth to do with them.

It’s so much better to do a quick sweep while all the material is fresh. An easy trick to help with this is to ask What, So what, and Now what.

• What? What is the essence you could write down from each group of sticky notes?
• So what? What do all of the sticky notes mean, as a whole??What do they mean, according to the intended outcomes of the workshop?
• Now what? What are the next steps to capture, based on these sticky notes? What questions need answering? Who needs to do what, by when?

I hope this helps to improve the quality of your workshops, and the impact of your facilitation. It’s always weird trying new things in meetings and workshops, but everyone will appreciate that extra effort you make! To your success!