Workshop: How to use a ‘time machine’ to set long-term goals

As I established in an earlier post, 'Teams with a shared vision of the future achieve more'. That's good to know, but how do you achieve it? Let's now look at a practical way to collaboratively map out and synthesise our collective ideal future that can help orient us in a common direction.

In this post, we will cover one exercise that can contribute to the team's shared vision of the future for how they work and what they produce?—?I call this workshop 'The Time Machine'.

In preparation

Book a workshop with a decent amount of time allocated?—?for the sake of an example, let’s say at least 3 hours, but feel free to set it for longer?—?this is an investment, and as long as you have a workshop plan which manages the team’s cognitive load, a long session can work well). Push past feelings that there isn’t time for the luxury of spending time in a workshop and not being busy delivering?—?you are moving slowly anyway. It stands to reason that if we can lift the average velocity in achieving outcomes, then hours in a workshop are paid for soon after such an improvement is realised.

The main activity in the workshop is brainstorming. As I mentioned, there are various options for exactly how you run this, or you can devise your own using the outline in this post; I will focus on getting the gist across.

The first activity (first session or pre-work before workshop)

We need to set the baseline for the team on the realities of the present day?,?so we need to take the time to acknowledge and capture the current state with brainstorming. Brainstorms can be tiring, and this exercise suggests we do two, so as an alternative, the baseline might be something you can instead acquire through a survey or similar approach ahead of time. If you opt for this alternative, you can still use the questions below as a starting point.

This part aims to ask the questions below to paint a clear picture of the current state as a group. Check in with the team on the result of the brainstorming / pre-survey to get a feeling of alignment on the current issues and practices. Synthesise into specific topics?—?we can use these to help us later in the workshop.

Example questions we can use for each brainstorm (present-day and future)

Questions (examples only?—?generate your own)

• What tools are we using?
• What practices have we adopted?
• How are these working out for us?
• What results are we getting?
• How do our customers feel? What are they saying?
• How do our other internal teams feel (e.g. sales, customer service, marketing etc.)? What are they saying?
• Are we spending less time deploying?
• Are we able to deploy with more confidence? Are we having fewer failures? Do our engineers know our systems better? Is support reducing?

The second activity?—?time to accelerate to 88 miles per hour!

Spend some time establishing with the team that they are now imagining a time significantly into the future, which could be six months to 3 years into the future?—?it just needs to be long enough to be well beyond the present-day iterations and short-termism that the team may be locked into.

Conduct a brainstorming again now, imagining themselves in the future, having had tremendous success between the present and that day in the future. We are again asking our prompting questions but also open to whatever other description of the improved state they are providing.

Sometimes brainstorming can be very tiring, so I might typically break up the session with some different or other unrelated activity on a different topic using a different type of thinking?—?maybe something social or focused on the emotional aspects of team cohesion. Once recuperated and back in the right headspace, after an appropriate break from brainstorming, we next need to synthesise the brainstorming results.

This can be done in various ways, as a group, a subset of a group or by an individual. If done with less than the whole group, it’s advisable to walk through the full group, including how the synthesis was approached and the result. Help them feel part of the journey by checking in:

• “Does this reflect what they want to see in the future?”
• “Can we derive distinct outcomes we can be striving towards?”
• “What out of each of these outcomes is most important to customers? To internal staff? To the team?”

For a team to make choices that make more significant progress, they must have a clear view of what the new tomorrow looks like. Even better, once some short, simple phrases describe those outcomes, further effort mapping out relationships between these and the actions that the group hypothesise could help achieve these outcomes further helps to crystalise things that are important to try and what is important not to lose sight of.

From here, I often work with teams to further build this view of the future into a more helpful information asset they can refer to. This could be in various forms - Results Maps, Current and Future Reality Trees, Impact Maps or any of a variety of approaches that can show relationships between nearer-term and further-term outcomes we desire — more on this in later posts.

Have you tried a similar activity? What approach do you use? How well has it worked? Share your experiences with me in the comments?—?my goal is to make these posts the most helpful reference they can be, so share your ideas, and I will continue to improve each post.

Edited version - Originally posted here by me: https://open.substack.com/pub/wioota/p/how-to-use-a-time-machine-to-set-longterm-goals-43ad02a01931?r=6qaf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web