Doing more with less - virtual workshops in a remote age.

Written by Ernest Tan

We’ve seen a lot of trends in the last five years—from remote working practices, design thinking everything and even toilet paper hoarding. Hopefully, only one of these things is a trend and remote working practices and design thinking become the new modus operandi for organisations across the globe. Globally, 18% of workers work remotely full-time and 52% of workers work remotely at least once a week, [source: Owl Labs].

Therein lies a tension. Design thinking—for all its power to bring diverse people together to simplify and solve complex problems—is predicated on thorough, even feverish, person-to-person collaboration. Working remotely, however, effectively removes the physical aspect. And with most organisations (including us) fully embracing remote working arrangements, how do we continue to harness the collective intelligence of talented human beings that are now locationally disparate?

You’ve probably seen, heard, or experienced ‘Design Thinking’ in some capacity. You might have taken part in a focus group or interview, or been in a meeting where the facilitator did nothing but put post-its furiously on the wall. But if you’re not one of those people, design thinking is essentially a highly collaborative process anchored on the principles of putting the human at the centre of the solution, while working in an iterative manner.

At Hatchd, we use design thinking in almost everything that we do. A big part of that, especially for an Experience Designer like myself, is facilitating workshops. There are a few things we try to focus on getting right during a workshop. These are:

Objective-based
100% positive engagement
Fun

There’s a long laundry list of things to consider when planning these workshops (i.e. personality types, energy levels, activities, physical space etc.). Now that we’re shifting workshops into a remote setting, some of these considerations, such as the physical location, disappear completely and are replaced by brand new ones. Some just get a whole lot more complex.

That being said, we have successfully carried out a number of workshops in this brave new world with a platform called Miro. If you’ve never heard of Miro, it’s an online whiteboard where multiple participants can access at once. It has features such as post-it notes, voice and video chat and diagramming tools built-in to the system. These are pretty good proxies for many of the in-person workshop activities.

What I’ll share with you next is the end-to-end process of planning and facilitating a workshop and comparing the differences between a physical in-person and a virtual in-Miro experience.

The lifecycle of a design thinking workshop is as follows.

Plan.
Prepare.
Facilitate.
Consolidate.

Plan

You know what they say, fail to plan? Plan to fail. Planning is possibly the most important step in the life cycle of a workshop. Planning is important because:

It helps you define and focus on the main outcomes of a workshop (i.e. why you’re even having a workshop).
It gives you time to think about all the different considerations and design the workshop purposefully for them.
It helps you think about what could go wrong and mitigation strategies for those scenarios.

In a traditional, physical workshop, we tend to define the outcomes first, and then think about how we can orchestrate the participants, activities, timing, space and energy to achieve those outcomes.

It’s the same for a virtual workshop, but aside from the participants, every other variable changes. The activities you have at your disposal now have to be done virtually. While being in a virtual workshop doesn’t warp time and space, you will now have to consider how participants interact with the different workshop elements and how some things might take longer, while some things might be quicker. Energy-wise, you’ll have to consider how you will gauge, assess and react to participants’ energy levels in the workshop, now that you are not face-to-face.

Prepare

Preparation is also very different when it comes to a virtual workshop. In a physical workshop, you’ll have thought about the space and how you will set it up. This is typically not a very hard step and, arguably, in Miro it might be easier. You can set up virtual spaces and boards and fill them up from the comfort of your chair (or sofa or beanbag if that’s your thing).

Then, prior to the session, you have to consider whether all participants have access to the Miro board. Are they other people within your organisation or are they outside of it? Have they used Miro before? How familiar are they with Miro or attending workshops in a virtual environment? Depending on your answers to these questions, you may have to perform additional checks and preparatory steps. In our case, we had to create guest email accounts for our clients, make sure they had a stable enough internet connection, and at least a tablet-sized device, so that they could access our Miro boards.

Facilitate

Facilitation takes on a whole new form in virtual workshopping. Moving to a digital platform means that there are many more requirements to check off before the workshop is good to go. In the case of using Miro, we had to make sure that all participants:

Can access Miro.
Can use voice and video chat.
Can use the basic Miro features that are required for the workshop.
Know how to toggle between following the facilitator’s screen and navigating the board themselves.

In our experience, checking this off for even two to three people can take up to 30 minutes (not taking into account tech-savviness or familiarity with Miro). This necessitates the introduction of a practice session with participants. Here, we were able to suss out technical issues and nip them in the bud, ensuring that the workshop kicks off well and doesn’t sputter out awkwardly before it even begins.

When it comes to the actual workshop, you lose facilitation tools—like your physical presence—in a virtual setting. Clear instructions and participant compliance then becomes paramount. This is where the practice session sets up the workshop for success. Without the practice session, the likelihood of participants of becoming disengaged and ‘going rogue’ is significantly higher.

Consolidate

Consolidation is perhaps where virtual workshops offer a distinct advantage. After an in-person workshop, we’d take photos of all the beautifully marked up walls and whiteboards, then go back to our computers and spend hours digitising the outputs of the workshop. With a virtual workshop, and especially with Miro, it’s all ready for you to copy, paste and screenshot wherever required. The accessibility of Miro is also a benefit here, as it allows for integration with many popular agile and productivity platforms such as Jira, Confluence and Invision.

So what can you (yes you, the reader), take away from this? If you’re a facilitator of workshops yourself and are looking to move it to a virtual arena, you’re welcome for the tips. If you’re a potential client and are wondering if we can still get to the desired outcomes using design thinking in a virtual setting, the answer is absolutely! If you’re just looking around and looking to pick up some tips for facilitating a virtual workshop, we hope you get to use some of the thinking you’ve seen here. Whatever the case, here at Hatchd we’re fully embracing this new virtual workplace reality. While it is not without its challenges, we’re fully confident that—like design thinking and remote working—it’s here to stay.