Discovery Lab with Learning Connexions Ltd

Learning Connexions Ltd. is an Agile consultancy that helps organisations, and its people grow and improve. They provide consulting services, build products and deliver training for professionals. Following 9 successful years of business, the team as well as the services and products they offer have expanded recently. Due to this growth the management were keen to maximise the potential of the team and identify new products and services that best serve the qualities and experience the company possesses. With this in mind they approached The Familiar to help them facilitate a Discovery Workshop with the management team with a focus on company strategy. The key objectives were to identify and prioritise:

• Key business milestones
• Current strengths and challenges
• Areas of improvement
• New business opportunities
• Items for immediate action

Based on the time frame available The Familiar designed a hybrid workshop based around the structure of a Lightning Decision Lab but adding more in-depth exercises for challenge reframing, ideation and prioritisation. The activity structure in order was:

• Workshop Focus - Identify and agree upon key workshop outcomes
• Blimp Game - This collaborative activity is designed to help teams identify the positives and negatives of a product or service. The idea is to frame a particular product or service and through a series of short iterations participants are encouraged to write what they believe is going well with the product and what they believe are problems or challenges that need addressing.
• Problem Selection (voting) and Reframing into Challenges
• Active 8’s - This is a repeatable rapid exercise to generate and capture ideas. The goal of the activity is to help:
• Learn to quickly identify and prioritise goals and challenges.
• Learn a powerful technique to independently generate and record creative ideas and solutions.
• Learn how to evaluate, prioritise and select solutions.
• This is done through a series of short iterations where teams are encouraged to sketch ideas and solutions to a framed problem or challenge. The sketches are then discussed and prioritised and ideated into actions and experiments.
• Round Robin - Draw solutions, critiques and proposed solutions to the critique.
• Idea/Solution Selection group by theme and dot voting
• Idea/Solution Prioritisation using effort-impact matrix
• Define Immediate Actionable Steps for each High Impact/Low Effort solution, which could be done in the next 2 weeks.

All the key data and conversations the activities generated were captured and discussed at length. We conducted a number of rounds of voting and applied an effort impact matrix to help prioritise the outcomes for each activity. The key objectives we achieved included identifying and prioritising:

• Key business milestones
• Current strengths and challenges
• Areas of improvement
• New business opportunities
• Items for immediate action

The workshop captured a number of ideas to experiment with as well as solutions that could be actioned immediately. Some of the key business outcomes included:

• Defined a product roadmap for the next few years
• Agreed upon the direction and growth of the business
• Identified new markets and opportunities We continue to work with Learning Connexions Ltd, collaborating and advising on projects to support the continuing growth of their business.