Team Review Workshop & Dotmocracy

Team Review Workshop is an activity ready-made for any team meeting. You can run in virtually any situation.

It helps you build a shared understanding within a team about what’s working well, areas in need of improvement and areas of opportunity.

It’s one of my favorite ways to get a team ready to do some positive action planning.

There’s very little facilitation involved as it’s easy for people to grasp what they have to do and why they’re doing it. It’s transparent, democratic and a great stimulator of conversation within the group.

I use this in one form or another at least once a month with my team and I encourage you to do the same.

Dotmocracy, the method used for prioritization of the resulting themes, is a popular technique for voting within groups using dot stickers. It's also known as “dot-voting”, “multi-voting” or “voting with dots”.

Objective

• To build a shared understanding within a team about what’s working well, areas in need of improvement and areas of opportunity.

When Would You Use It?

• In any team meeting when you want to review your team’s current situation.
• This activity also works well when assessing how multiple teams are working with each other.

Resources Required

• 1 hour.
• A large piece of blank paper up on a wall.
• Space around the paper for people to comfortably stand around and space to move.
• Lots of post-it notes and marker pens for each person in the team.
• A few sheets of dot stickers.
• Scissors (to cut the dot stickers out so each team member has a limited number for voting).

Process

1. The Facilitator starts the activity by explaining to the team that you are going to spend the next hour reviewing progress.
2. The first 10 mins are to focus solely on the question “what are we doing well?” EachParticipant picks up some post-its & pen and writes as many things as possible (one per post-it).
3. The second 10 mins are to look at answering “what could we do better?” Instead of focusing on the negatives try and keep people on improvements, e.g. “it would be even better is we did this …”
4. The third 10 mins are to look at answering “what more could we do?”. These should be new opportunities rather than improvements on existing activities.

5. The Facilitator asks the group to spend a few minutes collecting the points into themes.

6. The Facilitator then gives each Participant a fixed number of dots and asks them to stick them on the themes that are important to them. Be clear they can put them where they want, i.e. all on 1 very important theme to them or spread out over many.

7. Once the voting is finished you can lead a discussion on what happens next. One suggestion you can consider is take the Top 3 themes that received the most votes and run a Brown Paper Planning session to make sure you end with an action plan and a positive result.

Secret Sauce

• It is very important to tackle each question one at a time and not jump around. The temptation for the group will be to skip straight to things ripe for improvement without spending enough time on the things that you are doing well.
• If the group is large then give each participant 3 dots to stick on the paper. If the group is small then give them 5 each. This is so visually there are enough votes on the paper.