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
Though very simple to use, a Stormz card can become much more than a basic sticky note. 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
- Files or pictures: to illustrate a concept or add some documentation
- Comments: This is the message board, where participants can react and discuss.
Manipulate ideas with card actions
When working with a lot of cards, you’ll find some options that help you organise ideas:
- 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 cluster, this gives structure and order to your creative process.
The Card View:
Sometime you just want the cards, only the cards. This is what the Card View does, presenting the cards in a vertical layout and sorted the way you need them to be.
The Canvas View:
Get a birds eye view of your cards, added into columns, matrixes or a structure that suits your preferred layout.
The Insight Cloud:
This view helps strip everything back and keep the team focused on the important keywords that keep emerging from the workshop. Better than a word cloud, you can click on a word to uncover the cards behind.
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, evaluations and list items 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, every list item in the card, every vote or rating are 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.
Lists : 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.
Voting: Time to Make Decisions
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.
Rating: the Strongest Survive, Assess Each Concept
Evaluate every concept with multicriteria rating
Multi-criteria evaluation is a collaborative decision-making tool to assess and compare several alternatives based on a set of criteria. Stormz offers one of the most comprehensive system for running a state of the art multiple-criteria evaluation.
As the facilitator, choose the criteria you know are important to assess the quality of each idea and concept.
- Criteria templates: add a predetermined set of criteria in just one click
- Fully custom scales: linear or non-linear, with labels
- Weight: prioritize the importance of each criteria
- Description: clarify the meaning of each criteria
Compare concepts in real-time with the Bubble Chart
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.
Assess the strength of each concept and facilitate a strong consensus
These real-time charts present the results of the ratings of your participants within the card. Analyse:
- The strength of an idea, to see how well an idea performed along the different criteria
- The average rating by criteria, to assess the level of consensus (or lack thereof) of each individual criterion
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 Import 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.
Assess Consensus
With realtime charts inside each card, you can quickly look into the level of consensus among participants since you can see how the evaluations are spread.
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)