Take this quiz to get your business idea off the ground
Find out which workshop offering will give momentum to a new or stagnant idea in 5 days or less.
We all have problems. For the sake of keeping this topic succinct, let’s agree to explore business problems exclusively. Problems like: we’ve been spinning on an idea for months without any traction. Or: we don’t even know how to define the problem we’re having. Or: we know what our problem is, but we have no idea how to solve it, and boy have we tried.
The good news? There’s usually a solution, and it often takes a workshop or planning session to lead you and your team to it. To get started, take this quiz to find out which workshop option is right for your business, then advance to the “about” section to dive into your results.
You got: 5-day Design Sprint
This is a collaborative prototyping and testing endeavor that’s an excellent solution for problems with a high degree of uncertainty. This might be a good fit if your internal product team isn’t making progress because of schedules or logistics, or if you’re up against cultural tensions and internal politics. The 5-day Design Sprint is a quick way to validate ideas, allow team members to co-create solutions, and get feedback from people who represent your customer. As the facilitator, I’ll help own the process to get you out of the muck and back on track.
Here’s a real-life example of how the 5-day Design Sprint flows, and pays dividends.
You got: 1-day Brand or Naming Sprint
This collaborative workshop focuses on defining the essence of a brand. Here, “brand” could mean a product, new businesses, or even an individual. To do this, team members come together to agree on the direction they want to head. Depending on how tangible you’d like to get, this workshop can result in specific ideas for:
Setting the brand’s foundational pillars
Defining its core elements
Brand names, position, and even brand language ideation
For example, let’s say your company has completely outgrown its brand name. Where do you start and how do you align the new name with the new values? Have you even defined those values? Did you involve your internal team in the process? That was the challenge my client Spring (formerly Holberg Financial) faced before engaging my guidance in a 1-day naming session. Here’s a look at the problem, process, and outcome.
As a note, when I lead these workshop, I tailor them based on the client’s needs. I love borrowing methods from the three-hour Brand Sprint, linked here, if you’d like a sample of what the process might look like.
You got: 1–2-day Strategic Planning & Roadmapping Session
This workshop is perfect if you already know the problem, but need help exploring possible solutions and landing on the strongest options. This is an excellent session if you need to align stakeholders around the problems to solve for the business. You’ll leave the workshop with a clear roadmap of the work to be done and clear measures of success to evaluate the work (e.g., KPIs, OKRs, etc.). Here’s a real-life example of what the process and outcome look like.
You got: 2-day Problem Framing & Idea Generation
This workshop is ideal if you don’t know what the problem is yet. It’s all about aligning the right work with the business. This workshop sets out to identify the possible problems to solve and, once defined, prioritize them. Sketching exercises and paper prototypes can take this one step further so you walk away with tangible and directional potential solutions.
Does it sound strange to not know what your problems is? It might be more common that you think. As an example, I worked with a healthcare system that wanted to deliver better patient care with telehealth technology (this was pre-pandemic times!). While they knew they could do better with the use of telehealth technology, they weren’t entirely clear about which problems were most important to solve for the patient. To identify them, we spent two days with doctors and business leaders from the organization defining the potential problems to solve, prioritizing them, and then generating ways in which the technology could be used to create a better patient experience.
What answer did you get when you took the quiz (comment below)? If you felt like your results weren’t spot on, or your answer indicated that you don’t need a workshop, that’s okay! I customize every single one of my sessions. That means your unique business challenge might require a hybrid approach, or something more specialized. And we can make that happen.