here's how i would design a 30-minute problem-solving workshop for seven people first step is to get the structure and the structure i would use is called the four c's the four c's is a very simple method to structure any type of problem-solving and decision-making workshop basically the four c's look like this collect choose create and commit each of these phases needs to be complete to get to the end of a great workshop first collect we're going to use an exercise that helps collect all of the information that the group has all of the challenges all of the issues essentially all of the conversations and visualize them and for this 30-minute exercise i'm going to take the sailboat for the collect phase this is going to allow us to collect all of the challenges get them all visualized in a really simple way and then we're going to be able to prioritize them in the next phase which is the choose phase the choose phase is all about choosing which one thing we're going to be able to focus on over the next 20 minutes and we're going to use the how might we method to turn a problem into a usable challenge that we're going to be able to take to the next phase which is the create phase the create phase is where we're going to be coming up with solutions for this challenge and for this phase we're going to be using an exercise called 10 for 10. 10 for 10 is a really simple very fast brainstorming exercise that can last up to 10 minutes but we might even need to take less time here maybe we're going to go for five minutes so we're going to be doing this very simple brainstorming exercise 10 for 10. at the end of that once again we're going to be prioritizing which of these ideas do we want to experiment with before we move to the commit phase where we're going to be using action board an action board is my favorite exercise for taking a lot of different things a lot of different elements and putting them in the order of priority of which experiments which ideas do we want to try first it's essentially a little project management exercise before you move out of the workshop and into day-to-day life at the company executing the tasks what you've just seen there is an extremely quick overview i haven't gotten into any of the exercises i haven't gone into any detail but if these types of things excite you then i've created a one hour free training where we can go much deeper into all of these topics down below it's free and if you're interested in facilitation workshopping any of these types of designing sessions where you can help people solve problems and make decisions this is the perfect training for you it's free it's available only for a limited time and i'll see you on the other side