What’s a chef without a knife? A gardener without a spade? A painter without paints? Every professional needs the right tools to do the job, and it’s no different when it comes to workshops.  

Workshop tools and techniques help facilitators to maximise the collective intelligence and creativity of a team within defined boundaries.  The workshop leader’s main is to consider how to help your team to look at the problem from new angles, otherwise they risk creating boring, predictable, unoriginal or uncompetitive ideas.

There are three tried and tested workshop tools that work, no matter the objective:

The Mini Case Study, the Rule Breaker and the Idea Stretcher.

  1. Mini Case Study

Case studies from outside the industry or category can ignite creativity and inspire fresh thinking.

How to use it: Identify and prepare 3-5 case studies (1 per break out group) that will help to provide inspiration that is adjacent to the workshop objective.  For example, on customer service in supermarkets, find out how luxury hotels train their staff to deal with high net-worth individuals, or for toothpaste claims around whitening, a case study about a skin care serum that brightens the skin.  Think about companies, individuals or organisations outside the category you’re working on who are targeting the same audience or meeting the same broad needs in a fresh way.  Write up the case study with pack or website images, the claims and benefit language they use, and provide a couple of thought starters to link between the case study and the workshop objective.

In the workshop, ask each team to review a different case study and use the template to list 10 reasons why that brand, product or company is so successful. Teams then generate new ideas, using each of these reasons as inspiration. For more detail, please see Chapter 16 in the new edition of The Workshop Book.

Why it works: Case studieswork because they provoke teams to think outside of their own categories and provide inspiration to mine for potential new ideas.

What to watch out for: Make sure to choose fresh case studies that people aren’t familiar with, avoiding the obvious and often used ones like Google, Amazon and Apple. Also, ensure that you make the link between the case study and the objectives of the workshop crystal clear, so workshop participants aren’t left asking “so what?”

  • Rule Breaker

The Rule Breaker is a simple and effective way to help people think controversially about a topic to come up with rule breaking ideas.

How to use this tool: Each team lists 10 or more rules for a topic, category or brand that are usually followed (e.g. toothpaste always comes in tubes), then they write down the exact opposite of the rule, making these as extreme as possible (e.g. toothpaste doesn’t need packaging). Finally, the broken rules are used as new angles for fresh thinking about new directions (for our toothpaste example, this could lead to new ideas for refillable packaging or a solid toothpaste format that doesn’t need a tube). For more detail, please see Chapter 15 in the new edition of The Workshop Book.

Why it works: Rule Breaker forces teams to confront implicit assumptions they have about the area they work in and consider new angles or directions they may never have considered.

What to watch out for: Always show the team an example of a rule and a broken rule before they begin, otherwise they may try to create new ideas immediately or play it too safe and write broken rules that are not easy to springboard ideas from.

  • Idea Stretcher

The Idea Stretcher tool helps teams to stretch ideas to their most ambitious (yet achievable) version.

How to use this tool: teams write down a promising new idea (from a previous round of ideation), and then write the most extreme version of the idea, without worrying about feasibility. They then take the extreme version of the idea and dial it back into something more possible yet still challenging, and then finally into an achievable, yet ambitious idea. For more detail, please see Chapter 16 in the new edition of The Workshop Book.

Why it works: teams often generate new ideas that are still quite safe and predictable; by provoking them to think of extreme and sometimes ridiculous versions of their ideas, they are provoked to stretch their ideas into more innovative versions.

What to watch out for: Always provide an example of a completed version, and a template so that teams understand the exercise and push them to think of really extreme examples as the first step, otherwise they won’t be able to dial them back to anything useful.

Buy the new edition of The Workshop Book for 30 tools and techniques that always work, coming soon.

If you’d like help structuring or facilitating your next workshop, our team at Paraffin would be very happy to set up a call to discuss your project.