Going 100% Analog: Constraints Spark Creative Facilitation

100% analog.

This was our commitment when we prepared this full-day workshop for 30 Product Owners and Product Leads of the ERA Product Cluster at Elia Group Group.

Spending this day physically together yesterday was a game-changer for real interactions, spontaneous discussions and a relaxed vibe. But even doing so, there is always this part when we should have a look at a Miro Board or use some PowerPoint slides as a visual support. We’re working with these tools on a daily basis for a long time, so doing without them was a very interesting constraint that led to some creative ideas :

👉 Nametag energizer : No tour de table - instead we printed name tags and randomly distributed them in the room, so that they need to find the right person to assign it to
👉 You know this online tooling fatigue, where you have so much information shown that it’s just… too much to process? Well, when you give a team just a flip chart, sticky notes and some markers, they will stick to a high level information that directly goes to the most important things. If they wanted to deep dive, it’s good as we had also foreseen ↓
👉 Breakout sessions : As one of the goals of the day was to highlight and enable collaboration opportunities between the different Product teams, we printed pictures (+ names) of every participant so that they could “book” 10-minute discussions with each other

Thanks a lot Sven Dill for leading our group of facilitators, Thomas Rafflin for doing all the heavy lifting and Diana Klose, Luc Fourestier Simon Eichenauer, Iris Bröse and Christian Bosold for being such a cool group! hanks Ida Olsen for the trust and all the Product Leads and Owners for their engagement! 🔥

To more energizing working sessions! ✌️