The great elephant disclosure

Let's presume at this point that you have overcome all of the challenges of getting people in the same location (physically and/or virtually), you have obtained buy-in from the various management teams, have agreed some downtime, and have a safe environment set up in a neutral venue. You're almost ready to embark on the elephant disclosure—almost. What you now need to do is actually pull everyone together and run the workshop(s) to capture the data you need.

To make things a little less daunting it may help to consider your overall end to end process as four distinct stages:

Breaking the overall process into these smaller stages can assist in mapping out the flow and structure of the workshop(s) you'll be facilitating. For example, if you decide to run an all-day workshop you can break this down into multiple sessions, each focusing on a specific stage, then bring everything together at the end. An example workshop agenda would look something like this:

As you can see from this, these types of workshops can turn into a very long day—especially with a large group of people—so it's vitally important you are very organized and keep things on track throughout. Just trying to wing it will not give you the results you need. Some may consider compressing the overall time taken by removing the various breaks, however these breaks are very valuable as they allow for rapport building and guard dropping and also allow for the participant's brain to inwardly digest the information being disclosed and discussed.

It is possible to run these types of workshops over two days, however I would recommend that you don't leave too large a gap between them otherwise focus will be lost and participants—especially those key people you identified—may get dragged into day to day problems. If you need to split the workshop, I would recommend that you schedule the day one workshop to finish late in the day and start day two first thing the following morning.

To ensure things go as smoothly as possible—considering the challenges you'll have keeping everyone focused and on track—I would recommend you keep things as simple and obvious as possible, not only for your sake but also for the participants. To this end, you'll need to prepare two things:

• You'll need the staple tool-set of any agile practitioner/facilitator: some big blank walls covered in paper, some large whiteboards, some flip charts, some sticky notes, various colored pens, and various colored stickers, some space, plenty of snacks, and a little bit of patience
• You'll need to pick a tried and tested agile technique that provides the format for the workshop itself

With regards to point #2, this is where I would have loved to provide pages of detailed explanation on the many varied and proven techniques and exercises with wonderful names such as StoStaKee, the Starfish, and the Sailboat, however this would make a book in itself.

Let's move on from planning to doing.