Do you know how powerful a speedboat workshop can be in moving your team’s projects forward?
With the Metaphor activity from Beekast, discover how the speedboat method can facilitate discussion and help generate collective ideas quickly and easily. Everyone is invited to share their sense of the situation and to reflect on a project’s successes and constraints in order to achieve a common goal.
Why should I organise a speedboat workshop with my team?
The boat analogy makes it easy to visualise what helps a project to move forward and what slows it down. Whether it’s to take a broader view or to review your progress, to brainstorm or to prepare a final assessment, the speedboat workshop is an ideal choice for a wide range of situations:
- Are you a manager or project lead? Resolve problems one-on-one or as a team, giving everyone the chance to express themselves about what’s working and what isn’t.
- Supervising a project? Bring your teams together for a speedboat activity in mid-project. A progress review to identify sticking points can help resolve situations that increase the risk of failure and missed deadlines.
- Are you part of a sales team that’s behind schedule in meeting your sales objectives? Use the agile speedboat to start a discussion to identify the factors that are slowing you down, and develop an action plan to reach your monthly objectives.
- Are you part of a marketing department? Do a Metaphor activity with your team to talk about which campaigns are doing well and which ones aren’t showing results.
Starting from an image of a boat, participants explore what helps a team (represented by the boat) to move forward (driven by the wind) toward its objectives (an island), and what slows it down (the anchor). The whole team is involved, and chooses the most important topics to work on in order to achieve their shared goals.
Creating a Metaphor activity is a great way to strengthen team spirit and promote collective intelligence.
How do I host a speedboat workshop in Beekast?
In your Beekast session, select the Metaphor activity. Find the illustration of the boat analogy and the visualisation of strengths and constraints. Strengths are symbolised by the sun and the wind, with constraints represented by the anchor, the rocks and the shark.
Once everything is configured, launch the activity to start the speedboat workshop with your team. Each participant is asked to provide feedback on their own individual experience, and to classify each point as a strength or a weakness. The group brainstorms, then shares their thoughts and ideas for what needs improvement in a friendly verbal discussion. The Metaphor activity doesn’t require any special skills.
Try a speedboat workshop by importing this template:
Speedboat
Assess what pushes the team forward and what slows them down.
What happens after the speedboat workshop?
Everyone is engaged with the project and the issues around it become clearer: the power of the speedboat marks the start of a promising new cycle.
But the workshop doesn’t need to stop just when things are going so well. If the discussion is constructive and the bonds between the teams have been strengthened, the next step is to define an action plan for the following weeks to bring the project to a successful conclusion.
With just a few clicks, call a Vote to have the team identify which topics are the highest priorities to work on, then turn their major ideas into an action plan using the Board activity. It’s fast, simple and effective.
Plus, the ideas that were generated in the brainstorming session are stored in your Beekast session. They’re retrieved automatically, so there’s no need to copy them over again.
Speedboat: a method to support any kind of collaborative effort
The speedboat has long been a very popular innovation game with agile teams looking to move their projects forward. Now it can adapt to any team for any project.
Especially common in agile retrospectives, the speedboat game is an important ritual at the end of each iteration to discuss a project’s successes and weaknesses as a team and help drive continuous improvement.
In the agile methodology, the scrum master leads the speedboat sessions, and everyone takes part by writing their feedback on sticky notes and placing them in the appropriate place on the illustration. The team then discusses all of the successes and weaknesses to move the project forward.
With Beekast and the Metaphor activity, speedboat workshops use a digital format for greater efficiency and agility. With no need for sticky notes or a whiteboard, everything flows much more smoothly.
