How to Run an Amazing Strategy Workshop (Free Miro Template)

Hey, Jonathan from AJN Smart here, and today we're going to show you exactly step-by-step how to run a strategy workshop, how to run an amazing strategy workshop. The structure we're going to show you today you can use for a one-day workshop, a two-day workshop, a couple of hours workshop, a one-week workshop. It's super flexible. This workshop, which we internally call Strategy Signal, we also released a book about it earlier this year. You don't need to buy the book. Everything's in this YouTube video, so don't worry about that. You'll also get the template that we show you in this video, the Miro template, so you can just run it step-by-step yourself. And let me tell you a little bit about this workshop if you're interested. You can skip ahead if you're not, but just let me tell you about the workshop and how we use it at AJN Smart. So we developed this Strategy Signal workshop for three main reasons. One, to have a really clear way to kick off projects with our clients, meaning that when we're on a call with a client, instead of trying to figure out all the different things we could do with them and then going back and forth on calls, we always know, hey, we want to kick this thing off with a Strategy Workshop. Number two, Strategy Workshops create the work that we want to do for the clients. So we wanted a workshop that essentially generated the projects that we wanted to do. And Strategy Signal is a perfect workshop to start projects and also generate a roadmap full of projects that we can do for clients. So it's perfect if you're a consultant. You might be watching this and you're working internally at a company, and that's perfect if you just want to create a roadmap and create a strategy for your team. But if you're a consultant, what's cool is this workshop can generate projects for you. And we wanted that at AJN Smart. Number three, we developed it as a way to shorten the sales cycle when selling workshops to clients. Because for us, having a general sort of facilitation and workshop offering was very hard to sell. You know, telling a client, yeah, we do facilitation, yeah, we do workshops, it kind of confuses them. And so saying to them, hey, we've got this very specific strategy package. That's something that, you know, two days, three days, one week, whatever, it's easier to close that deal than trying to come up with a big kind of complex facilitation and workshop or collaboration deal. So we wanted to have a very simple, easy to sell, packaged up workshop that almost every client can understand. So I'm going to hand you over to Amr on my team in a second, who's going to show you the entire workshop from start to finish. I think it's like 40 minutes long. And so if you want to run this yourself, you can do it, you can rebrand it, you can do whatever you want. And all I ask is that if you like this video, just give the video a like, maybe subscribe to the channel, maybe leave a comment. We're not asking you to buy anything here. We're not asking you to do anything other than just hopefully enjoy it. And below in the description, you can download the template that you can see us using here. You can use that yourself, you can rebrand it, you can do whatever you want, like I said. And the book, as I mentioned, you do not need to buy it. You can run Strategy Signal just by watching this video. But if for some reason you want the book, you can also get it down below. We no longer sell it as a physical edition because it's just so, so complicated to do this self-publishing thing. And so you can get a digital version down below if you want it. Like I said, you don't need it. That's just if you want the thing. We don't care if you buy it or not. We just want you to watch this video. We want you to enjoy it. And we hope you get a lot out of it. Anyway, let's get to the actual Strategy Signal workshop. Enjoy. Thanks, Jonathan. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Amr. And I'm going to show you how to run the Strategy Signal step by step. And for that, I prepared a Miro template that you can use very easily to run the Strategy Signal remotely. So let's look at the template so I can walk you through the workshop's flow step by step. And I'll show you how we set up our own Miro template for this workshop. It's very simple. We have the two days set up here and it goes from left to right. So it starts very simply by welcoming people to the Strategy Workshop. We give them an idea of what's going to happen today and tomorrow. So we say, like, over the course of today and tomorrow, we're going to define a North Star and a strategic action plan to help us reach that goal. Right. And then we give people a preview of the two days. So this is very important whenever you're doing a long set of workshops to let people know what to expect. So they know that by the end of day one, they're going to have alignment and a bunch of ideas that you end the day with. But the decisions and the planning is only going to come on day two. Once you're done with that, then it's time to introduce everybody. So sometimes you'll have people who don't know each other or don't know the different roles. So you take a moment to do some introductions and here everybody takes one sticky note, writes their name, writes their role. And you also let people know who the decider in the workshop is and that you're going to be the facilitator. So you would put your own name right here. And from there, it's important to introduce some guidelines to everybody. So a lot of people haven't experienced what a well-facilitated session is and they don't know what to expect. They go into it thinking like it's like a normal meeting. So it's important to establish some guidelines here. So to tell everybody in this session, we're going to time box everything. And my job here as facilitator is to make sure that we stay on track and that we don't lose track of time. And so for that, I'm going to be using a timer for each part of today's agenda and for tomorrow as well. And it's very important to stick to that. Otherwise, we won't get to the end that we set out to achieve. And next, we say that we work often alone together. They'll see what that means later on, but you can just briefly touch on it at this point. And all that means is that there are going to be times where instead of immediately launching into discussion, we instead set a timer. Everybody has some time to think to themselves and come up maybe with some ideas. And then after that, we might go into a discussion step. Finally, it's very important to remind people that we kind of like go all in or not at all. So that means no multitasking. We want everybody to be fully locked into the session, no dropping in and out. And it's very important to set that expectation so that your session doesn't feel too chaotic for everyone taking part. And finally, always prioritize progress. And so we say we move first and we polish later. That means at some point, if we get into like a discussion, and it's going on a bit too long, we can remind people like, Hey, everybody, remember what we said in the beginning, where we said we're going to move first and polish later, we have enough to move forward for now. So we don't need to, you know, perfect everything and discuss everything to the nth degree. And it's best to move on now, right. So when you set these guidelines up front, you can call back to them later in the workshop. And that makes your job as a facilitator a lot easier, because you've already set the expectations for how you're going to run the session. So once you've set up the guidelines and set the right expectations for the workshop, you're ready to get started with the first exercise. And that is setting the long term goal. So this is all about defining what success looks like in the next 12 to 24 months. So we'll often say, you know, in two years, this is where we want to be, or in 12 months, this is where we want to be. And this is a little bit flexible. So you as a facilitator can decide what makes sense in terms of a time span to tell everybody for this exercise. And the way we do this is in three steps. So first, everybody works alone together. That means you set a timer for 15 minutes. And over that time, everybody writes a sentence describing what success looks like in 12 to 24 months, right. So you can even tweak this before the workshop and you might know it's like, all right, for what we want to do, I think it's going to be more of the 12 months. And so you just put that right into the instructions. And then you remind people to be bold, to be optimistic, to, you know, think of the best possible outcome. And you also remind them that we're not going to go into like numbers or metrics just yet. And we're not going to prescribe a solution. This is purely about defining what a great end state for our strategies. For example, we might say something like if we were talking about a coffee company in this template, we're kind of using a coffee company, as an example, similar to what you would have seen in the book. And for that coffee company, we might say something like in two years, our product is widely available, and is seen as a serious player in the premium coffee space, right. So we're not saying how we're going to do this. We're not kind of putting in like exact sales metrics, because that's going to come later. But we're just saying where we want to be in two years. And so you tell everybody walk everybody through that example, then you give them 15 minutes, and each person has a few sticky notes to come up with a few variations, maybe. So this template is set up for seven people. And obviously, if you have more people participating, you can just make some extra copies for the new people, then each person has their own working area in which they write their sticky notes. So once the 15 minutes are up, then everybody goes to a straw poll vote. And what that means is, you're going to set the timer for five minutes, you're going to tell people, we're not voting just yet. Over the next five minutes, I just want you to go through all of the sticky notes. And they're all anonymous. As you can see, we don't put names on the boards, but we just put numbers. So nobody's going to remember where each person was working. And instead, we're just going to focus on the contents of the sticky notes. For five minutes, everybody's just examining everything on the board. And then in maybe like on a like a physical sticky note, or some like outside of Miro, each person writes their own kind of mini pitch as to which goal they would want to vote for, and why. And then only after the five minutes are up, each person takes one of these dots. So I might, for example, take this one and put my name on it and say, I really think we should vote for this goal right here, right. And I will have my mini pitch prepared. And I will explain why I think that this goal is the best goal to to go for. Once the five minutes are up, everybody writes their name on one of these voting dots, they move it to the sticky note they wish to vote on, then they present their vote to the decider, they do their mini pitch, and each person has to up to one minute, right. So this needs to be quick. That's why you prepare your mini pitch in advance. And after that, the decider will have heard all of the pitches and will make a final decision on what the best goal to move forward with is. And a little discussion can happen here. And you might have a little bit of back and forth. But then at the end of the five minutes, you as a facilitator should jump in and kind of gently nudge the decider to make a final call on what a goal should be. And also remember that the decider might not be happy with any of the sticky notes on the board, or they might want to combine a couple of sticky notes. That's totally fine. If you hear the conversation going, and you feel like the decider is kind of torn between two goals that are not conflicting with each other and can actually be combined because they just highlight two different aspects, then you can quickly just write a new sticky note on the board, present it to the decider, and have them move their vote there. And then you can move on to the next step. Alright, so once you have the goal, now it's time to move on to the next step. And when you have the decider's goal, you can simply just kind of put it here and you put the decider's vote on it. That way, as we continue in the workshop, we always can easily refer back to the decider's chosen goal and remind ourselves with it. Because in this workshop, everything is going to build on what came before. And sometimes you'll want to refer back to a previous exercise. So the next step, once you have defined a goal, is going to be defining the metrics, right? This is part that we left out of the goal exercise, because it has its own step. It works very similarly to what we did before. Again, everybody works alone together for a few minutes, in this case, 10 minutes. And each person comes up with one or two metrics that will help us define like, how do we actually know that we've reached our goal, right? So earlier, we took the goal of like, we want our product to be widely available and be seen as a serious player. And it can be very tricky to define what that is, if we leave it at this level, each person could have a different understanding of what that is. And that's why we define the metrics. And so examples for that could be again, in this coffee example that we're taking, it could be like, well, it means that we have confirmed listings in, you know, over 300 retail stores across at least five countries, or we have 10,000 or more active monthly customers tracked through subscriptions or repeat orders. And that's how we're gonna define, you know, being widely available and kind of flesh out what our goal was all about. So once you've walked everybody through the examples, you set 10 minutes on the timer, and you let everybody work in silence, we typically like to have some background music to help everybody focus and get into their own headspace. And then once the five minutes are up, all of these sticky notes on the board will be filled in. And then we move on to the next step. But this time around, instead of immediately going into like preparing a pitch and talking to the decider about that, we're instead going to do more of a silent vote. So in this step, we're going to do what we call a heat map vote. And what this means is that everybody has unlimited dots for this step. And so you can just copy and paste as many of these dots as you want. And you have five minutes to go through all of the metrics on the board. And then you can start to paste them around any metrics that you think would be good metrics to attach to our goal. So I might go around the board here. And I'll paste a couple here, maybe three there. So the more you like a metric, the more dots you should put on it. And that will make it very easy later on to see where which metrics everybody gravitated towards. And it will make the deciders job easier for choosing which metrics to finalize and move forward with. And so after the five minutes are up, and everybody has placed all of the dots that they wanted to place, you'll very easily see that some sticky notes stick out more than others, and they will have a bunch of dots on them. And it's at that point that you as a facilitator would hand it off to the decider and ask them to maybe like walk the group through their thoughts and ask them to call out any sticky notes that they're kind of gravitating towards. And then over the course of five minutes, as they're discussing their thoughts, you have them come to a decision as to which two to three metrics they want to go for. If they only want to go for two metrics, or two metrics are enough, we don't need to enforce a third one. But if we really feel like we need three metrics to define and kind of capture the essence of our goal, then we can do that as well. But the important thing to keep in mind, both in this step and in all other steps, is to not get pulled into wordsmithing sticky notes too much and like then kind of arguing about different percentages or different numbers of should it be 10,000 or 12,000. It's best not to get pulled into these discussions and just have something that is generally agreeable for the group and the decider and move on and not get pulled into taking too much time with each of these exercises. And this is something that you'll need to remind the group of. And you go back to reminding them about how we have the time box for everything. And we need to move on. So you can let the decider explore some ideas, both here and both in the goal exercise and all of the exercises really, as long as it doesn't take more than the assigned time box, which in this case, five minutes should be enough to work that out. Alright, so once the decider makes their decisions around the metrics, you'll have two metrics that the decider is happy with. And again, you can copy them here. So you can easily refer back to them. And this is actually when we get to our first milestone. That means we just highlight the important decisions that have been made so far. And that includes obviously the goal and the metrics that we have defined, we have two by default here, but there's a space for a third one, if you ended up going with three metrics. And this is a good time to maybe give the group a break, and also celebrate them for getting to this point, because they've gotten very quickly to align on a long term goal and some metrics to go along with it. Once we have that done, and we can copy and paste the goal and the metrics onto here. Now it's time to move into thinking of how are we going to get to that goal, right? And how are we going to realize that vision or arrive at that North Star. And for that, we're going to go into some ideation. But moving from kind of a goal statement and the metrics into ideas immediately can be tricky for a lot of teams, because they're just going to have like a blank canvas. And now they're supposed to come up with solutions. So that's why we're always huge fans of using the lightning demos exercise, which is essentially a great exercise for collecting inspiration, you don't need to come up with any new ideas, you don't need to make any decisions. All you're doing in this exercise is collecting inspiration from maybe other people who have solved similar challenges, or have reached similar goals to the goal that you're trying to reach. So let's look at how the lightning demos exercise works. And to do that, you actually only need to fill in a template. And you can ask each participant to maybe come up with one or two lightning demos. So again, like with the other exercises, first, we work alone together. So the way you do this is you give everybody 25 minutes. And in those 25 minutes, all they're doing is looking for inspiration related to the goal that we would have set earlier. So in this case, you know, if our goal is in two years, you know, the product is widely available and is seen as a serious player in the premium coffee space, then we want to start thinking about other situations where companies did a great job of establishing themselves in the market quickly established trust, and were able to come in as a premium player into a space. So we'll want to consider a few options and maybe choose our favorites and bring those to the board and prepare essentially a demo for the rest of the team. So to give a few examples of that, we again, taking our coffee company as an example, we might look at things like liquid death and Oatly. So for example, for liquid death, we fill in this template. And essentially, we have the big idea why it's interesting, and a takeaway from it. So we say like, alright, with liquid death, the big idea is that they took a basic product, which is just canned water, and exploded it into a $700 million brand with bold, provocative identity. And the reason it's interesting is that they didn't invent anything new. They just made a boring product really special and unforgettable. And the takeaway here is how can we make our coffee feel like a movement, and not just another bag on the shelf, right. And so you can present a few examples to the team. So they understand what this exercise is all about, and what they're supposed to be doing, and also how to fill in the template. And once you've presented that you show everybody the templates, and you let everybody have 25 minutes, and at this point, it's okay to use devices, it's okay to go on the internet and search for inspiring examples. But it's always important to kind of remember and remind the team that we're not just going to Google what the competition is doing. And instead, we want to see what other companies from other spaces are doing. So if you'll notice here, we didn't go and look and see what other coffee companies are doing. But instead, we were looking at other products in similar situation to ours, right, whether it's canned water, or milk, or oat milk, in this case, or companies from different spaces entirely. So another example could be how Tom's established itself in the shoes market, and how they were able to set themselves apart, right. But it's a similar challenge to the one that we're trying to solve. And that's why it's relevant. And so once you've explained to everybody what they're supposed to do, what to aim for, then they can take the 25 minutes and they start to bring in their ideas. So the way they fill the template is they just put the name of the product or service or idea that they're taking inspiration from, they might bring a one screenshot or a few screenshot just kind of as a visual anchor, because that always helps with remembering what the idea was about. And then they fill in the big idea, why it's interesting, and the takeaway. And then once the time is up, you'll have this entire board filled with different lightning demos, then it's time to share and present. So whereas typically, we would care about, you know, anonymity and not knowing where ideas came from. In this case, because we're not making any big decisions, and it's only about sharing inspiration, then each person just presents the demos that they brought to the board. And you can time box each person to two minutes. And then they can talk about the lightning demo or a couple of lightning demos that they brought to the board and highlight what's special about them, and where they thought we could take inspiration from these demo for our situation. So once everybody is done presenting, then we can have a quick group discussion, no more than five minutes just for us to see like, which demos did we gravitate towards the most. And maybe we write down some key ideas that we want to bring forward with us into the ideation stage. And maybe we just have a little bit of back and forth to process all of the presentations that we all heard just now before moving on to the next step. So with that, we'll have all the inspiration that we need to go into the next step, which is coming up with ideas that will help us get to our long term goal. And for that, we'll start the concept creation exercise. And similarly to lightning demos, we have a specific template that everybody fills in to kind of structure their idea and what they want to present to the team. What we're trying to do here is ask everybody to think of the long term goal and look at all of the inspiration that we've collected so far and come up with one detailed plan essentially, or concept or solution idea for how we might get to our goal. And this could be a project that we undertake, it could be a new product idea, a new service idea, it really depends on the context of what you're discussing. So the template for coming up with a solution concept is as follows, you have you give the solution a title at the top, this is just to keep everything anonymous. And we don't have to call it Jonathan's concept and Rebecca's concept. And instead, we just give it a title. So my concept could be called liquid death, but for coffee. And this is kind of playing on the idea that we're going to do something similar, but executed in the coffee space, right. And it just gives us an easy way to refer to these concepts. And the way we fill this out is by creating a hypothesis, where we say, if we do x, y, or z, so if we take this action, then we get this outcome. Once we've done that we come up with a six week plan for how we're going to execute that. So let me give you an example to make this a lot clearer. So we have three examples here. And I'll just go over this one right here. So we have a concept called shelf magnet strategy. And the hypothesis here kind of like the the idea that we want to maybe experiment with or test or explore is that, you know, if we get our coffee into well known premium stores and supported with eye catching displays, then we'll grow visibility, credibility, and sales across multiple regions, right, that is kind of the main hypothesis, we don't know that this is going to succeed. And that's why we call it a hypothesis, this is just kind of placing our best bet, based on all the discussions from earlier in the day, based on all the inspiration that we've collected, we're kind of coming up with an experiment and something to test. And the way we're going to go about doing that is with this six week plan. So it starts by making a list of target cafes and specialty grocery stores. Then we build out a simple sample kit, and outreach email campaign. And we send a few samples and pitch meetings to store owners. Then we design signs and shelf talkers for in store support. And finally, we launch in store displays and start tracking early sales, right. So whatever that is for your product or your situation, the idea here is to come up with a well thought through plan for how we might execute this idea. And this just makes everybody think through maybe like a an idea that sounds cool on the surface. But then once you start thinking about execution, you find out that it's maybe too complicated. And then somebody finds that out and maybe starts maybe pivoting a little bit or changing the idea to be something that's more realistic for us to achieve. So with this template, you'll have somebody kind of expressing a big, bold idea in the form of the hypothesis. And you're going to understand how we can make this a reality, all contained in this template, you can walk everybody through the examples that we have on the board here, we have three examples just to make sure that you know, everybody's crystal clear on what we're trying to do, then everybody kind of proceeds to come up with their own version of this. And they're going to have 30 minutes to do so. And we also give people some tips along the way. So the first one is reminding them to address the main goal that we set earlier in the session. Because at this point, it might be easy to get pulled into one direction from one lightning demo that somebody saw. And then they're kind of building an idea on top of that. But it's always important to remember the goal that we said earlier. And we literally read that out to the group as they go into the concept creation exercise. And second, we focus we remind people to focus on differentiation. So we don't want to come up with something that already exists in the market or that is not differentiated. After all, the role of strategy is to help us differentiate ourselves in some shape or form. So remind people to really focus on new and novel combinations of ideas that haven't been done before. And also at this point, because this might put pressure on the team, and some people might not be sure about what to create or what kind of ideas to go for, we remind people that the strategy signal is a great time to explore high risk high reward ideas, because everything that we're going to be coming up with is an experiment. And that's why we use the phrasing like that it's a hypothesis, we don't know if this is going to work yet. But we're just going to experiment with a big bold idea. And we're going to come up with, you know, a six week plan for testing out this idea. And then if we find out it doesn't work, then we can iterate from there, right. And another tip is to not skimp on the details. So this is just reminding people that being too high level with your concept will make it hard for others to understand what you actually mean by it, and what it looks like in practice. So try to be detailed, especially when it comes to creating the six week plan. And that will make it a lot more concrete for people. Because remember, your concept is going to be anonymous, and you're not going to present it by default to everybody else. So the concept really needs to stand on its own and be self explanatory. And adding detail to that helps a lot. And that brings us to the last point, which is to be your own first critic. So since you're not going to be your concept, just make sure that it's easy to understand and that it addresses the goal clearly without needing to be explained by you or anybody else, and that everybody can just read it and understand it immediately. And with those tips out of the way, then you can let everybody start creating their concept, and you time box them for 30 minutes. And again, you remind them of the rules as they're working on the concept, everything should be anonymous, should be self explanatory, everything should have a title, the words are important. And once they're finished with their concept, they shouldn't, you know, immediately like put it up and kind of let others talk about it. And instead, what we do here is once you're finished with a concept, then you can, for example, take it and add it to the concept gallery. And once you've done so you can just cover it up with one of these covers and leave it until the next day because this is actually the last exercise on day one. So we end day one by having everybody come up with ideas for how we're going to reach our goal, then everybody can just sleep on it and come back the next day to look at all the ideas with fresh eyes. So now let's look at day two. And day two has fewer exercises as you can probably see, but it has a lot of important discussions and decisions to be made. Day two starts by you welcoming everybody back to the strategy signal and you as a facilitator will have copied all of the solutions from the solution gallery from day one, and you put them on this board here. And the next step from here is to walk people through a few exercises that will help us get to a decision as to what are the concepts we're going to move forward with. So how does that work? We first start with a heat map, which is a step that we saw on day one, where everybody has unlimited dots, and we work alone together to vote on all of the concepts. And we just paste dots around all of the concepts that we like, as you can see in this example right here. So each time I see an idea that I gravitate towards, I would paste a dot next to it. And the more I like an idea, the more dots I paste next to it. And once everybody has done that, it'll be very easy to see where the most compelling ideas from all of the concepts are. And this makes it easier to go on to the next step. So in the first step, everybody's just reading through all of the concepts, and they're kind of registering their interest with the dots on the board. And then from there, you have the facilitator go around the board and just do a quick overview of how the heat map voting turned out. So the facilitator can call out where the hottest area on the board are and where people seem to be most excited around which ideas and we don't do a lot of discussion here. But this again, just helps everybody remember what the most compelling parts of each concepts were before going on to the next step, which is the straw poll vote. This is again, a type of voting that we saw in day one, where each person would write their name on a sticky note, and they would prepare a mini pitch that they would pitch to the decider for the decider to finally make their call on the concept to move forward with. So in this step, everybody will get another 15 minutes to look through all of the concepts that have been voted with the heat map, and it's going to be very easy to skim through them again. And then once you find the concept that you want to vote on, you would take one of these sticky notes. And for example, you know, I would put my name here. And then I would type my explanation, like I vote on this concept, because and I put in my explanation kind of like what we have here. So you'll have a concept, and you'll have somebody putting their name and their explanation as to why they believe this concept should be carried over and should be one of the concepts that we start executing on or exploring to see if this is an idea that will work for us once we try it. So once everybody has picked a concept to vote on, and everybody has placed their votes, everybody takes turns pitching to the decider, again, one to two minutes per person pitching why they believe this concept should be chosen to move forward with. And after that, then it's over to the decider to choose the winning concepts. So everybody in the previous steps only gets to choose one concept, but the decider can actually decide to move forward with three to four concepts. Because when it comes to strategy, you often need multiple projects to realize a long term vision. And you might be experimenting with different approaches to see which one works out. And so you'll often need to select multiple concepts to turn into projects to explore. And that's why we allow the decider to pick three to four concepts to get started with. And then the decider proceeds to do that the same way that everybody did. We put the decider's name on a sticky note with a different color, and we capture the decider's rationale for choosing each of the concepts that they wish to move forward with. And at this point, it's normal if some discussion happens. That's why we have this time box for 15 minutes. So we always like to start by asking the decider to think out loud and walk us through which concept they saw themselves gravitating towards. So again, I have this board full of concepts, and everybody will have already done heat map voting, and they will have pitched to the decider. And in this time, the decider has been kind of processing all the ideas, and they will have some initial thoughts. So we have them start to think out loud and kind of explain to the group which ideas they gravitated towards and which concepts. And then we slowly move towards having them pick three to four concepts that they want to bring forward to the next step in the workshop. Okay, so once we have that, we'll have reached another milestone. And that is having the chosen concepts that everybody created on day one. And then we went through all of the concepts and discussed them and pitched them to the decider. And the decider finally made a decision on what to bring forward. And this is another great milestone, we can take a break here and we can remind the team of everything that they've accomplished up to this point before moving on to the next step. And that is the roadmap. So this is the final exercise in the strategy signal. And it's the most essential part for giving everybody clarity about how the vision will be realized, because we're going to be talking about what happens next, in what order, and who's going to do what, right? So the way we go about doing that is first placing all of the concepts on a timeline. And when it comes to roadmapping, we strongly believe that granular roadmaps never work out the way that people expect that they will. So we have much broader and a lot more flexible timelines. So the timeline that we have looks like this, we talk about what we expect to happen over the next 30 days. So sometimes that could be one project, or it could be starting a couple of the projects. And these are the concepts that we're bringing onto the board. And then there are things that are going to take multiple months to finish, we might start them now, but they can only be done within like six to nine months. And some things could take even more, what we're doing in this step is literally taking the three to four concepts that the decider has chosen. And then we start to have a discussion. So initially, all of these will be off the board. And then our first step in the roadmap is to ask the group, you know, when would it make sense to start this initiative? What needs to happen before this can begin? And how does this relate to our other priorities? So we're asking these questions for each of the concepts. And it doesn't really matter which order you start them with. Sometimes there's a natural concept that everybody knows will be executed on first. And so you could start with that. In our case, it could be, for example, the second one right here, and say, Alright, this is the one that needs to start immediately. And we actually need to have this done within 30 days. So we typically place a concept where we think it will be done. And it could start as soon as immediately, but only be done later, right? For example, another concept, you might also begin straight away, but we know that it will probably happen within the next three months. And then maybe we have another one of these projects that gets completed within the next three months, and another one that will take a little bit longer. So this board will look very different for each team based on the initiatives that they're bringing onto this board. And that is the first step of creating the roadmap. And you shouldn't again, as with any exercise in the strategy signal, you shouldn't get pulled into very granular details and discussing the minutia of each project. But you should instead be placing kind of your best bets as to how you think everything will go. And in the end, every plan is a work in progress, and you'll start executing on these plans, and might decide to change the timelines and tweak things after you get started. So all we're looking for is a starting point. And for that, we don't need to discuss this for hours and hours. But instead, we can place our best bet and within 30 minutes have everything mapped out on the board. So that is the first step, we do a first pass. And then from there, we set another 10 minutes to do some quick adjustments. So once we have the first pass of the roadmap, we can make some quick adjustments. And at this point, we just ask the team, whether they feel anything is out of place, or whether we missed anything big that might change where we place these concepts on the timeline. And from there, you might have noticed in the beginning that we have these two other kind of tags on the concepts. And this is a very important step, we don't want to end the workshop without being extremely clear on what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and who's going to be responsible for making it happen. And so at this point, we want to assign owners and dates to each of these initiatives or projects or whatever you decide to call them internally, this is something that might happen kind of in a group environment where you might have people that might naturally take lead on certain projects, or you might have the decider come in and assign people different projects and assign different dates, right. And so I might take one of these tags here, and come to the first project, I might say this is something that Jonathan will be leading. And then for the date, we're really looking just for the first time we're going to meet regarding this project. And this is not the deadline for when it will be done. Because that is more captured on the timeline. This is just us saying like, all right, after this workshop, what is the next step? Well, the next step is that Jonathan is going to lead this. And that might involve, you know, certain immediate tasks, setting up certain meetings or getting in touch with people organizing a team, all of that. And the first check, and we're going to have around this project might be next week or something like that, or next Friday, to be more specific. And that just means that we're going to be meeting very soon to discuss next steps for this project. And it means that we're leaving this workshop, knowing that each project has a clear person responsible for it and owning it. And we have a date for discussing the status of that project. That way, nothing is kind of falling through the cracks and nothing is forgotten about. So when we end this board, everything will have a clear timeline and a clear owner and a date when we're going to talk about this separately from everything else. And that just gives everybody clarity around what happens next. And again, these are just initial dates, their dates for us to get started. And we're going to adjust as we go along. And these are not set in stone. And if the actual timeline doesn't unfold, like the roadmap, it doesn't mean that it was a failure, it just means that we learn new information and we needed to adjust from there. But that is how you do the roadmap exercise. Once you have the owners and dates, you do kind of a final decider sign off. So at this point, the decider should be super clear on everything in the roadmap, and they should be content with how the roadmap is. And to do that, we just ask the decider to walk the rest of the group through the roadmap. That way, they can almost be thinking out loud. And if they have questions along the way, then we might clarify those. And we just make sure that the decider is clear on the roadmap. And of course, we make sure that everybody else is clear on the roadmap, what's happening next, who's owning what, and when are we going to do our next check in for each of these initiatives. And that brings us to the end of our workshop. And we bring everything to one neat board that we can export and then kind of share via PDF or email and share it with whoever needs to know about the outcomes of this workshop. So this is how you run a strategy signal step by step. Of course, you can run this in person, you can run this remotely with this template. So I hope this was useful. And now back to Jonathan. Hey, Jonathan here from AJ and smart. Again, if you enjoyed that video, we've got plenty more like it on this channel. We've got like every type of workshop you could ever want to run on here as a detailed tutorial. All we'd love you to do, you know, if you enjoy this sort of thing is just let us know by hitting the subscribe button, you know, interacting with the video in some way that sort of tells YouTube to show it to other people. And if you're if you watch this entire way, and you want to work with us at AJ and smart, and you want us to run workshops for you, just go to AJ smart.com, go to facilitator.com. You can find all the ways to contact us there. Thank you so much for watching. Have a lovely, lovely day.