Plan of Action raises the participant’s most appealing ideas. It brings a good balance on time and collaboration while encouraging participants to discuss and sign up to actionable work.
Running the activity:
- Ask participants to individually write actions on the specific format below. Each participant should write from one to three actions on index cards:
* Long-term goal: what is the long-term goal for this idea?
* Now-action: the very first concrete action toward the goal. - Split the large group into smaller groups.
- Ask the groups to decide upon the top two cards.
- Join two adjacent groups and repeat the step above.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 if desirable (depends on the group size and if you want fewer selected cards/actions).
- Ask participants to present each of the selected top cards to the whole group.
- Ask each person to write down their name on a small sticky note and place it on the card they want to work on.
This activity is especially useful for motivating large groups of people to: (1) elaborate goals and identify concrete actionable work items, and (2) to coordinate and collaborate upon the execution of concrete action items.
Plan of Action follows the same structure as described in the 1-2-4-All filtering activity.
Remote-team advice: This activity works well for remote teams. Use the team’s remote communication tool to pair up participants in separate chat rooms, then bring participants together incrementally until the whole group is in the same room again.