- One of the methods we use to drive active alignment
is Check Your Goal.
It helps you and your team manage
the complexity of continually integrating
new insights and concept iterations
into the pursuit of your shared goals.
This 45-minute activity takes the team
through an efficient, time-boxed process
of reflection, goal realignment, and planning.
At the end, your team will have refreshed alignment
towards the big goals you're working for.
You'll have identified how the ideas have evolved,
and set a near-term plan of action to address that thinking.
Let's walk through leading the Check Your Goal activity.
You'll need a large piece of paper and some pens,
or a whiteboard.
First, at the top, make a space
for the goal you started the week with,
but don't write it in yet.
Then make three larger spaces side-by-side and label them:
"What We Did,"
"What We Learned,"
and "What We'll Do Next."
Finally, at the bottom, make a space for goal refinement,
or you can just snag the frog worksheet
from the exercise files.
Then gather your team.
In the first box, list out what we did this week,
with the main activities in the order which you did them.
Keep this to about five minutes,
and resist the temptation to talk about them,
because in the next box, you'll discuss the key learnings
and the decisions that were made from those activities.
That list in the first box helps guide your team
through the discussion,
so you want to capture those top learnings
and the decisions made in the middle box.
You keep this to about 20 minutes.
While this is focused on recollection and capture,
listen for debates raised
about the learnings or the decisions made.
These debates highlight areas
the team needs to investigate,
but rather than trying to resolve
these debates in this 20 minutes,
capture them on post-it notes
in the "What We Will Do Next" box.
In the next ten minutes, as a group,
decide what steps you will take to answer
the new questions and the debates that came up.
Try to keep those next steps pretty small and achievable.
In the last five to ten minutes, compare what you learned
with the previous goal or mission.
If the goal still holds true, reaffirm it.
But if the goal has shifted, capture why on the worksheet.
I like to stack these worksheets
one atop the other in my team room.
They provide traceability back
to when and where certain decisions were made,
and it's often surprisingly useful when communicating
the work and the changes that have happened
to your stakeholders.
Now you've aligned your team to both the long-term goal
and how the ongoing experimentation has evolved that goal,
as well as set some near-term steps with the team
that everybody understands.
This activity supports design thinking
by encouraging a mindset
that's flexible and open to change.
It keeps everybody on the team aware
of the progress that's been made,
even though the final product may still be ambiguous.
And, you've engaged the full team
in shaping that collaboration.
This act of actively reframing what will be addressed
in the next iteration of exploration
is really important to good design thinking collaboration.