I just used a novel (I think) report-out design that might be of interest. We rarely put the same effort into designing report-outs that we do into designing team modules, but they are no less important. In this case, it was a spur-of-the-moment design intended to solve a timing problem rather than a reasoned design decision, but it could be useful in many circumstances. As usual, necessity was the mother of invention.
We were running rather late and we needed to shorten a report out from a Design Challenges module – one in which we bring the participants out into the future and give them a success scenario – “how did you achieve this success despite the fact that…” – and then give them variable that is exaggerated just to the far edge of plausibility: halve the budget, shorten the time by two-thirds, increase throughput by 300%, whatever.
This sort of module, which I frequently use just before a First Draft exercise, is useful in helping them ignore constraints and bring some of the possibilities experienced in Scan well into a Focus exercise. The team reports tend to be rather good, though no more than a couple of teams will come up with genuine insights or breakthroughs.
We simply didn’t have time to listen through all the chaff in search of a few gems, so here’s the simple design we employed:
Each team had only one minute (use visual stopwatch) to present their findings. After this quick round, we raised hands to vote for which team’s report the participants wanted to hear in more detail. The two top vote-getters got an additional six minutes each.
The solutions of the two ‘winning’ teams were both very good and elements of their ideas made it through to the final team work the next day.
Read more about Dan Newman’s work at Matter Solutions
