The Workshop Activity
Share thoughts, co-create solutions, determine decisions and take over the world (eventually).
Structure Your Session End-to-End, Before It’s Even Started
Use our templates to kick-start a workshop in a click
If you’re strapped for time, or you’re looking for inspiration on, explore one of our 50+ pre-built workshop flows. This is the quickest and easiest way to build a workshop and get started today.
How do our templates help you to facilitate collaboration?
- If you’re looking for a creative solution, our workshops for brainstorming, creative problem solving, and design thinking are ideal.
- If your ambition is to converge towards a consensus within your teams, consider our decision-making, strategic planning or collaborative learning workshops.
Design your own sequence to fit your exact workshop needs
If you’re more of a facilitation whizz, or you’re just looking for more control, you can fine-tune the exact steps of your workshop. A custom-designed approach is your best option.
With a custom design, you can have more control over the steps of your workshop by pre-configuring exactly what they’ll be and what they should cover.
- Customise every step with clear instructions and visuals.
- Decide for each step what can be revealed and control what participants can do.
- Control group biases by creating steps that randomise the order of cards or prevent people from seeing others votes.
Give Every Idea an Equal Chance
Express an idea or opinion with cards
Our card feature is the motherboard of any Stormz workshop, a powerful tool that encourages confident collaboration.
Participants can create a card for each of their ideas and enrich the cards of others by adding comments, images or builds. Cards can start as a sentence and finish as a full-blown concept.
The genius of cards is that they are all anonymous, so you can share ideas confident in the knowledge that they'll be reviewed without bias.
Content is king: turning cards into concepts
Cards are very simple to use, but there are a few ways to interact with them. Here’s what you can add to each one:
- Title: this should be the idea in a sentence.
- Description: A short excerpt to give a brief explanation of your idea.
- Lists: such as Pros & Cons or more complex frameworks to grow seeds of ideas into robust concepts
- Comments: This is the message board, where participants can react and discuss.
Merge, move and maximise ideas with card interactions
When working with a card, you’ll find some options that help you identify, combine and organise ideas:
- Add an image or a file to give illustration or further documentation to your idea. Perhaps there’s a relevant link you need to share.
- Move your card to various clusters or even over to a different workshop if its relevant. With Stormz, it’s difficult to ever lose an idea.
- Duplicate your card - had a similar idea but want to make a few differences? Double it.
- Show or hide your cards to certain participants, this way they only see them when you want them to.
- Merge cards together and make great things happen, by combining similar ideas.
Each card is easy to use, you can access all of these clever features by clicking into the card, or you can select multiple cards and apply - you know, like that tickbox you have on any good photo app.
An Idea Needs to be Visualised to be Realised
Arrange your content and insight in a way that suits your team
The Cluster View:
Categorising and organising ideas helps concepts bloom and solutions settle. Each card can be made part of a group, this gives structure and order to your creative process.
The Card View:
Like any good deck of cards, they need a shuffle. The cards can be re-organised which means voting on preferences is guided by the idea, rather than a group bias.
The Canvas View:
Get a birds eye view of your cards, added into matrixes or a structure that suits your preferred sorting method.
The Insight Cloud:
This view helps strip everything back and keep the team focused on the important keywords that keep emerging from the workshop.
Say Goodbye to Group Bias
Group bias is like building a Ferrari but only using first gear. At Stormz, we believe in giving every idea an equal chance so we built some tools to help give every participant the confidence they need to share an idea.
Hide the contributions
As the facilitator, you can choose to hide certain cards and also hide votes and evaluations on other ideas. This helps participants focus on the purity of their ideas and not get distracted or persuaded by influence.
Shuffle the cards
We can all get snowblind during the creative process. If you look at the same thing long enough, your retina’s start to play tricks. Moving the cards keeps participants engaged and ensures they are critiquing fresh ideas.
Truly Free Speech
Every card is anonymous, your participants can share ideas without worrying about what their colleagues thing, or more importantly, what their boss thinks. Hierarchical bias is a thing of the past, with Stormz.
Don’t let your ideas die: Nurture them!
A safe space to co-develop new ideas
Ideas are like plants: they’re incredibly fragile at the start, and need to be taken care of, nurtured and protected to blossom and reveal their true potential. Our “lists”, an exclusive Stormz feature and pillar of successful collaborative workshops, are specifically designed for that purpose.
Lists are sets of items located within a Stormz card designed to refine, enrich or co-develop the original idea(s) voiced by your participants. A visual and user-friendly space for everyone to work together towards bettering the original concept and turning it into a robust solution.
A million different ways to grow your ideas
The most common and basic framework to use in that case is the “Pros / Cons / Improvement”: participants are given to opportunity to say what’s good or unique about the original idea, before voicing their concerns, potential weaknesses or obstacles; and, finally, co-develop solutions.
But there are many different creative frameworks to use with the Stormz lists to grow your ideas: learn more in this article.
Time to Make Decisions: The Vote
Tailor the rules on voting to your workshop needs
The way you establish the voting system will change the dynamic of how participants make their selections. A simple like is quick and effective but using approaches like the $100 budget approach, encourages a considered and careful approach to voting.
The Budget is a method where participants assign points to their favoured or least favourite ideas. It’s a highly considered way of voting and ensures a spectrum of ideas are surfaced.
The Limit prevents one card from gaining too many points due to a momentum of spending, this is a cap on the maximum voting points a card can draw.
Positive and negative, sometimes you need to get rid of certain ideas, that’s the benefit of using positive and negative points for voting. Sometimes, it’s better to foster positive thinking and award positive points only.
Save the Intern from counting sticky dots: Real Time Results
Once you’ve tried a Stormz workshop, you won’t go back to the old ways of working. Our bar chart tool gives you live and real-time results on the upvoted and downvoted ideas.
The bars show the gaps between ideas so you can rank them accordingly and align on an idea by data rather than the opinion of one or two people. There are other data views available on Stormz, but everyone loves a bar chart.
The Strongest Survive: Assess Each Concept
Evaluate every concept with multicriteria options
This is where things get really smart. As the facilitator, choose the criteria you know is important to assess the quality of each idea and concept.
- Scale - each criteria point is allocated a scale, the traditional “0-10” is a popular option but you can also switch it out to “1, 3, 6, 9” to get your participants thinking in a new way.
- Weight - to get really granular and bring a higher level of accuracy to your evaluation, each criteria point is also allocated a weighting. For example, ‘aesthetics’ might be less important than ‘feasibility’.
Bubble charts show the score and weight average in real time
The bubble chart tool is a live feed of the average score and weight of each card. You can then quickly assess, and more importantly, decide which cards and concepts to proceed with.
Imagine a Creative Process with Instant Data at The End
We’ve all been there. After hours of old-school creative workshops, a daunting task ahead of sorting through hundreds of post-its. Well, no longer.
With Stormz, the data is ready and available in one click at the end of your workshop. You can export all the data gathered in the vote and evaluation stage in the format of your choice.
Now We Get Geeky, There’s Much More…
Mix up the view
Depending on your facilitation technique and preferences, choose to show only one type of map and a selection of groups based on the current stage.
Duplicate and important workshop steps
Those steps that worked? Duplicate them and import them into your next workshop, this means you are refining and evolving your technique over time. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time.
Assign Roles
You can also name observers and fellow facilitators to support you in your workshop or conclusive animation.
Look at the results, card by card
We talked about voting earlier, well the results of evaluation can also be seen at a card level so every snippet of good idea can be protected and extracted.
Activity Feed
Just like on Facebook, where you scroll back to 2013 and see those questionable decisions you made at a houseparty - you can revisit the entire decision making process of every participant throughout the process.
Discover our API
If you know your way around a set of code, you can use the Stormz API to combine it with other tools out there. (speak to a developer if this doesn’t make sense)