Thankfully, when the world went online last year, I was in front of the curve having already run online workshops for some clients. However for obvious reasons the demand for running risk workshops online has increased and I have been upping my game every step of the way to help guarantee workshop participants get as good, if not a better, experience than in-person.
One of the tools I use is Mural. Last week, in search of something new, I came across their “Sailboat Retrospective”. It was originally designed for scrum teams. It gave me a new analogy to use to get new perspectives from participants in risk workshops. Below is my “Sailboat Perspective” Mural.
You will see I have taken my three key questions for a risk workshop:
- What must go right?
- What could go wrong?
- What are we doing about all that?
…and asked them in a range of different ways.
For example, I took the first question about what must go right and created the following alternate questions:
- What are our tailwinds? The ones we depend on to get us where we need to be.
- What is the drag on our boat? The things we know are slowing us down.
- How will we know we have arrived?
- Do we have clarity of goals?
- Can we measure success?
All without using the word “risk”.
The result? I usually get great compliments from the likes of CEOs and senior leaders from my risk workshops. Comments like: “That was great. We’ve never had a conversation like that before.” However, this time I reckon I got one better. From the CEO: “Great workshop. It was illuminating!”
Can’t help but wonder if we would have had the same or better an outcome if we were in-person?