Often in workshops and team meetings, participants share a desire for the team to do certain things better, like "improve communication" or "send fewer emails". But without specific actions, these desires are unlikely to lead to any meaningful change.
We help participants to come up with specific tasks or actions that they can take as a result of the workshop's discussions - assigning either individual or collective responsibilities, along with consideration of resources and deadlines.
Through gentle challenge and questioning, we help people drill down into what individual actions will make these things happen, and how to incorporate these into their daily work.
Even a more specific idea like "hold more retrospectives" can evade action and fade away post-workshop. We might ask: "When should you hold your first retrospective? Who should attend? How long will you allocate? How will you run the session? How will you ensure learnings are taken forward as actions?" We might also suggest they put a date in the diary for their first session.
The point is to make sure we leave the workshop with tangible, useful actions to show for the time we've spent together.