After a brief introduction of the presenters and technique domains (although we would like for the power of the exact techniques to be experienced rather than lectured - but we need some context), we introduce basic concepts (a “real team”, “care”, values) and run the first exercise to form session groups.

In the first exercise ‘Let’s form a team’, participants will form into groups of 3-5 people and play an improv game to define who they are collectively (a software team, a circus troupe!). The outcome of this is a name, members and context of what the group does/represents. The group members will each have roles they play throughout the session (although the roles remain e.g Blocker, Mr Enthusiastic etc, the roles can be dynamically assigned and change during the session).

Once formed, we run the second exercise ‘We care about…’. The teams use improv techniques to brainstorm what they care about as a team in their context (a circus troupe cares about trust!). They write it down.

We are now ready to run the third exercise - ‘We need to improve…’ - in which we use the improv techniques (Yes and…) to craft a story of something we want to improve as a team (each group will take up to 10 minutes to do this - let’s call this “problem story”). Facilitators will define the context boundaries and time limitations for this exercise.

In our fourth exercise - ‘And a Miracle happened…’, each group will be asked to imagine a perfect world where they have improved what they wanted (=solution-focused “miracle”…) and describe it through a new story (the “solution story”).

We will follow this with 2 iterations of our final exercise ‘What we did to get here…’ - facilitating each group to discover what step they can take towards their solution story (although in practice, we will taking steps backwards from the solution towards the problem). After each step discovering iteration, the teams will briefly retrospect to see how they could improve the next iteration of discovery.

We will close off the workshop with a deeper retrospective of the learnings, experiences of the whole session and a final challenge to the participants:
* As you go home, reflect on “What Do I Care About?” (Your own Relevance Story)
* Try to put it in one or two sentences. Yes, it’s hard! But this last constraint can bring interesting and surprising results. If you have too many words, try moving up a level, becoming more general or abstract).
* Don’t forget that your personal life and your work are intimately connected, and try to craft one “I care about” statement that covers both.
* Who will do this personal exercise and email us a first draft of their Relevance Story? Each one who does can receive free coaching on honing their own Relevance Story.

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