Imagine doing a planning meeting is venturing into uncharted territory, where your mission is akin to drawing a map with the existing information available for your target’s duties. This map holds the key to a hidden treasure, a valuable prize that must be obtained within a specific time frame. As you carefully plan your trekking road map, it becomes evident that the path forward appears clear. However, through collaborative study and analysis, you and your team uncover potential traps that lie in wait, threatening your progress. With a strategic mindset, you devise ways to evade these obstacles and ensure a successful expedition.
1. The Importance of Futurespectives: Paving the Path to Future Success
In our pursuit of exploring the Project jungle, the need for futurespectives becomes evident. These purposeful activities serve as a catalyst, preparing our team to navigate the challenges that lie ahead and fostering a forward-thinking mindset. By engaging in futurespectives, we unlock the ability to anticipate and adapt to the evolving landscape, while cultivating a shared vision that propels us towards success. Through these activities, we empower ourselves to embrace the future with confidence, ingenuity, and the collective wisdom of our team.
2. My Preferred Path in Futurespectives:
Amidst the myriad choices presented by the Agile methodology, I have handpicked a format that resonates with our jungle expedition, focusing on our main course and fostering forward-thinking skills within the team.
• Setting the Scene: Carving our path with a clear objective, allowing participants to easily focus their attention on the journey ahead. Your may start with a simple sentence to draw the topic such as:
“This team will work together in a new project starting on next Monday.”
“This retrospective is a bi-weekly recurring Scrum retrospective for the ABC team. We are on the Sprint 17 out of 35.”
• Energizer: To foster team spirit and promote lively group interactions, we can consider incorporating an optional activity that ignites our adventurous souls. This kind of engagement helps to cultivate a friendly environment, making individuals more at ease to actively participate in subsequent activities. (I look forward to sharing another blog with fun activities suggestion to you later!)
• Check-in: Consider implementing check-in activities that gather insightful information, revealing how our fellow explorers perceive the meeting and the challenges that lie ahead. These activities can be seen as a quick appetizer, whetting everyone’s appetite for the main course. They provide participants with a sense of what’s to come while also offering valuable feedback on their level of engagement.
• Main course: The main course, the heart of our meeting, dedicated to fostering continuous improvement and growth.
• Filtering: Filtering activities that guide us in finding the optimal route through prioritization, voting, and comparison. We create commitment and alignment, paving the way for our next steps. A good filtering depends on how well the main course activity is explored.
• Action plan: Our team actively participates in a vibrant discussion, uncovering valuable insights. This productive dialogue generates actionable items that shape the basis of our action plan. Some examples include adding new tasks to the team’s backlog, sending the meeting notes via email to both the team and the wider organization, and scheduling or sending a reminder for the next meeting.
3. Some examples of Main course that you may feel interested in:
By following this curated path through the jungle of futurespectives, we equip ourselves with a focused purpose, energize our team, gather valuable information, seek improvement, and create a clear action plan. Together, we will conquer the challenges of the jungle and emerge victorious with our treasure in hand.
Futurespectives are activities to prepare the team for the future, inspiring the participants to look ahead and share a collective vision. Here are some activities we could use to detect any possible risks in our road to treasure.
Activity 1. Letters to the Future:
– Ask participants to think about the given context and choose a person they want to write a letter to in the future (e.g., product owner, project manager, team member).
– Instruct participants to individually write a short letter (one to two sentences) to the chosen person, expressing their thoughts, congratulations, or explanations about team accomplishments. The letter should have a future date.
– Read the letters out loud, facilitating a discussion about the content. Preserve the letters for future reference.
– Note the diversity of recipients to surface individual concerns, goals, and potential challenges.
Activity 2. RAID – Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies:
– Prepare a RAID canvas with four sections: Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies.
– Ask participants to write down their observations on individual post-its for each section.
– Initiate conversations and discuss the notes, delving into the identified risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
– Address any questions or confusions, distinguishing between risks and issues, and allowing participants to create multiple notes when applicable.
Activity 3. Hopes and Concerns:
– Draw a vertical line on a canvas, dividing it into two sides labeled “Hopes” and “Concerns.”
– Instruct participants to write down their hopes and concerns for the upcoming workshop, session, or period on post-it notes.
– Engage in a group conversation about the notes, inviting participants to share their hopes and concerns.
– Consider revisiting the hopes and concerns as the session progresses to gauge any changes in participants’ feelings.
By following these step-by-step instructions, teams can effectively utilize these futurespective activities to envision the future, identify risks, establish open dialogue, and set the stage for successful explorations into the Amazon jungle or any other endeavor.
