The magic ingredient that improves workshop collaboration
By: Will Lester
Tags: Alone Together, Collaboration, Facilitation, Workshop, Design

The magic ingredient that improves workshop collaboration

How I’m using the ‘alone together’ approach as a designer

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

I love working collaboratively. I get a real buzz out of getting a group together, grappling tricky problems and bouncing around ideas. At its best, collaboration can be an energising experience. But is it always productive and inclusive for everyone?

My first experience with immersive collaboration was at Google’s +20 design workshop back in 2013. The all-day workshop was an experiment to see what would happen if you got a range of designers together to define and explore some truly blue sky concepts.

The whole day was carefully structured, even down to when and what we had for lunch. I left with 10 times the energy I started with and felt super productive, even though the whole day was a one-off experiment with no real follow-on actions. But in the years that followed, I rarely saw this impact from other workshops (and I’m sure it wasn’t just down to the copious amounts of free coffee they gave us). I wanted all the workshops I was involved in to be engaging and productive for everyone.

+20 UX Workshop with Google — Sydney 2013

So I did my research, undertook some training and began facilitating workshops for my team and others in the organisation. Through my experience, I realised that not all people enjoy workshops and team events.

Looking back on those experiences with my newfound learnings, the poor participation and workshop experience was not because they didn’t like collaboration, it was because not everyone was having the same experience. Some people were confident collaborating and sharing their thoughts publicly and others preferred more structure and time to provide their input.

It was clear that I needed a way to structure workshops so it gave everyone the same positive and productive experience, regardless of how participants preferred to work. How could I give people their own personal time and space, while also maintaining an open forum for collaboration and discussion?

Discovering ‘alone together’

One of the books I read on my journey to run better workshops was Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. It’s a bestselling book that details a multi-day workshop structure for validating big ideas, fast. I could see subtle similarities between the design sprint process and that of the Google +20 workshop I attended in 2013. Both had very intentional plans for workshops.

The author constructs the week-long workshop so each activity has a specific purpose and they all interlink and build off each other. Most importantly, workshop activities are structured so that participants are given chunks of time working alone on individual contributions to a shared goal, as well as time for sharing and making decisions as a team. This approach to collaboration is called ‘alone together’.

‘Sprint’ by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz (2016). My first exposure to the principal of working alone together.

It sounds counterintuitive, but it means that as a team, we are working together towards a shared challenge but we’re doing it individually.

‘Working alone together’ allows everyone to contribute — everyone’s voice is treated equally and there is no judgment. It allows people with different working styles to be given time and space to think through ideas and problems, with an opportunity to share them with the team without the risk of being influenced by other people or workplace dynamics.

It also cuts down the unnecessary discussion and group think that can often happen in workshops. For example, there is a strong tendency for groups to converge on a single idea instead of evaluating a range of ideas against each other. Someone’s contribution to a group and the response can also be influenced by things like level of seniority, unconscious bias, confidence and personality type. This can lead to fewer ideas that are less original. For more on that, check out Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and The Journey of Brainstorming by Hanisha Besant.

I still have the handouts from the Google +20 design workshop, and reading them again with years of experience attending, planning and facilitating workshops has made me realise why this standalone, all-day workshop was so effective. ‘Alone together’ was the magic ingredient that made it so special. We had the mental space to think through challenges in our own way, then come together as a team to decide on a shared direction.

Google +20 design lab workshop brainwriting handout (2013)

Practice, practice, practice

I have found this structure of alone time, combined with group collaboration windows, an effective approach to make sure everyone is included and given an opportunity to contribute during the workshop. So how does it work? Let’s step through a really basic example from one of my past projects at Xero.

One of our cross-functional product pods was looking to address some new business needs and customer insights for the project they were working on. They could only focus on one requirement at a time, so the team needed to get aligned on what they were going to work on first. This is basically how we approached it:

We listed all the business requirements and customer needs and put them in priority order. This reminded the team what they were working on and what to tackle first.

The top couple of business priorities were rephrased as How Might We? statements. For example, one of our priorities was to help partnering businesses grow. This was reframed as: how might we empower partners to reach more potential clients? This extra detail made it easier for the team to focus on the opportunity and generate ideas in response to the statement.

Everyone noted down their solution ideas for each statement on sticky notes. They did this alone, without speaking. This gave all the participants time and space to think individually without being influenced by each other.

The sticky notes were then put up on the wall and everyone had time to read through other people’s ideas. Again, this was done without discussion. We tried to save all questions for after the process, to mitigate any bias.

Everyone quietly took the time to place sticky dots (all the same colour) on the ideas they wanted to vote for (each participant got multiple votes, usually around 3–7). SILENCE AGAIN! The whole aim is to reduce the influence that participants have on each other. It can be a bit tricky at this point as participants can see the amount of dots on each idea and sometimes who is voting on what. It’s not a perfect system, but by giving participants multiple votes and all the voting dots being the same colour, it reduces the likelihood of groupthink. This is where running workshops digitally is actually an advantage, as tools like Miro have voting systems to keep everything anonymous.

The facilitator (me!) tallied the votes and read out the popular ones, sharing them with the team. I wasn’t involved in the voting process, so I could remain objective about the ideas being voted on.

The team then plotted these solutions on an impact effort matrix. Based on this, we could see what solutions had the least effort and most impact. This was a shared team process, giving the whole team ownership over the idea they would execute.

The team then discussed what action items needed to be assigned to each chosen idea, so we left the workshop knowing how we would move forward (rather than just a list of great ideas).

Everyone left the session feeling energised and aligned, and this continued in the following days when we started working on those actions. It worked because decision making was done anonymously and in silence, reducing the amount of influence that participants had on each other. But we also had the opportunity to plan our next steps as a team. It gave everyone a sense of ownership of our newfound direction.

Example of how to structure a basic remote workshop activity using the principles of ‘alone together’.

It sounds like everything in my workshop went perfectly, but of course it didn’t. There are a handful of challenges I’ve encountered while using the ‘alone together’ approach in workshops — here’s how I’ve tried to address them:

Sometimes people are uncomfortable with silence, so they try to have a discussion with their teammates, particularly while voting on ideas. This takes away many of the benefits, so try to enforce the silence — otherwise it can get out of hand. Another tip (from the AJ & Smart agency) is to play some background music to ease people’s discomfort with silence.

Participants may want to discuss items that didn’t receive a high number of votes from the team. This can undermine the people that didn’t vote for that idea, so as a facilitator it’s important to try and gently move the focus back to the ideas with the highest votes.

It can be really hard for a facilitator to try and run the workshop and enforce the structure, while also contributing ideas and voting. It can also seem a little biased to other participants. So try and have a dedicated facilitator who isn’t involved in the process.

There are always going to be people who want an extra few minutes here and there to finish their task. This time can really add up, so as a facilitator it’s important to try and keep each activity running on time. I like to keep 5–10 minutes up my sleeve just in case activities run over time.

Reimagining collaboration in a virtual environment

Of course, now that we’re all working from home due to COVID-19, the process can look a little different. But the approach remains the same (on the upside, you can mute participants to stop them chatting!). At Xero, we use Miro as a digital collaboration tool, so people can still put up their sticky notes and vote on them. There are a bunch of great templates available via Miroverse which can give you some great ideas and tips for improving your remote workshops.

Group discussion can be a little harder, but with a good facilitator it shouldn’t be any different to a usual remote standup. I still encourage the use of a timer to keep activities on track — I personally use the one in Miro, but there are some lightweight timers available online. If all else fails, just give people a verbal warning when an activity is nearing its end.

It’s still quite a new approach for me, but I can already see results. All participants have the opportunity to be heard, decisions are being made as a team, and everyone seems to leave the sessions energised. I encourage you to try the ‘alone together’ approach for your next workshop, so it’s not an energy-sapping talkfest, but a good collaborative experience for everyone involved.

Next on the reading list: The Workshopper Playbook by Jonathan Courtney

P.S. This just turned up at my front door as I was finishing this article: The Workshopper Playbook by Jonathan Courtney. I am looking forward to getting stuck into it! If you can’t get your hands on it some of the content is on the website workshopper.com. Happy collaborating alone… together 😉