Headlines puts you and your team in the future, thinking about how your achievements will be written about. This technique is great for focusing on the outcomes of your project in a celebratory way, without having to worry about all the steps to get there.
Design Phase: Ideate
Facilitator: 1
Activity Group: 4-8
Time: 45 Min
Materials: Sticky notes and markers, Whiteboard, Virtual Whiteboard
Before the Activity
Meet with stakeholders to discuss their goals. Are they looking to innovate a process or product? Re-design a department? Launch a new center? Whatever their goal, learn what the stakeholder is hoping to accomplish so that you can use it as the starting point for the session. Find out what their timeline is as well so you can build the prompt in a reasonable future time frame.
During the Activity
Start the activity by writing your prompt on the board. A template for your prompt would look like this:
Imagine it's 10 years from now. Your team has achieved your goal of _______________. Organization has decided to publish an article to highlight your achievement and share your story. What does the headline say?
Also, one of your users or customers is quoted in the article. How do they describe what you've done?
After everyone has created their headlines and quotes, break people into small groups of about 3-4 depending on session size. In groups, participants will share their headlines and quotes and work together to create a combined headline and quote that hits their best points.
Have each group share out their combined work. As a large group, discuss the different headlines and quotes. What was similar? Different? What are the key elements we want to pull into our project's mission or goal?
After the Activity
Record the results of the discussion and share with stakeholders. Include the headlines, quotes, and the elements to be built into the project's goals.