Workshop Tactics Review
Are the Workshop Tactics cards by Charles Burdett and his team any good? I’ll give my experience showing how I use the cards to workshop scenarios with our team – including founders and key stakeholders. This Workshop Tactics review gives you a better understanding of how this deck might support your project, product and service development.
Pip Decks seem to be running ads on every online platform with the promise to help teams workshop challenges to get to better outcomes, but first, are the claims true, and second, will they help your business become better, more focused, and result in improved outcomes?… I’ve led teams to improve internal processes, reduce customer friction, increase customer satisfaction, and create a more engaged working environment in college education, marketing, and design. I’ll share some of my experience in working through these constructive challenges and describe how these decks could become a go-to for any business or team looking for improved creative problem solving. Read the full Workshop Tactics review below.
If one or more of the decks seems right to you, get 15% off your entire purchase with my affiliate links (I do receive a small commission on each sale).
So, here it is – the good the bad and the ugly…
What are Pip Decks?
Pip Decks are card decks, each with a recipe for solving a particular organizational challenge. There are 54 cards in each deck that include processes with activity prompts. The cards are broken down into categories built around specific business challenges. As your team scenario changes, so can your use of the deck. The decks can be used sequentially, working through a challenge from beginning to end, but one of the most powerful ways to use the decks is to mix and match cards as your scenario changes. Topics include workshop tactics (reviewed here), idea tactics, team tactics, storyteller tactics and laws of user experience (UX).
To see the full set of decks, click the image or button above (yes, it is an affiliate link, and it provides you 15% off your purchase).
The Workshop Tactics deck is a set of 54 cards that are broken down into recipes to address common business challenges.
The deck is built to discover what your team needs to solve, understand and prioritize problems that need to be solved, clarify the problem, develop ideas, evaluate ideas, and put your work into action.
Workshop Tactics card categories:
- “goal setting” cards allow you to identify what needs your attention most
- “understand,” cards helps your team set the tone for teamwork
- “frame” cards give you the language to describe your challenge effectively
- “idea,” cards are generative, giving collaborators an environment to throw out as many ideas as possible
- establish and draw on organizational priorities with “evaluate” cards to select ideas for testing and development
- “decide” cards allow you to prioritize, scope and move forward with work
- “discuss” prompts help your team communicate with one another throughout the process
- lastly, “technique” cards give you methods of working with team input that can be used with any other card in the deck
Workshop Tactics Review
The Workshop Tactics Pip Deck brings together important ideas and practices from management strategy such as SWOT and stakeholder analysis, Design Thinking, such as applying divergent thinking before converging around core concepts for testing and using design dashes to quickly iterate and test concepts, and marketing, branding, and advertising skills like developing customer personas and mapping their experience across touchpoints.
While the Team Tactics card deck could be followed from start to finish as you build your team, Workshop Tactics is not linear at all. The workshop tactics deck is built for use in the thick of it – when teams and organizations are under pressure to perform, and ordinary processes aren’t sufficient.
The truth is that teamwork and workshopping business problems in the thick of things is never easy. Under stress, people get overloaded, they shut down. They say what they think the boss wants to hear. They say what they read on a magnet they downloaded from Instagram. Getting full, authentic involvement is important, even when it means hearing, “the company is creating barriers to its own success.”
The cards in Workshop Tactics help draw out authentic engagement by addressing not only business goals, processes, and objectives but also inviting individuals to toss in emotional responses, underlying assumptions, and perceptions of the solidity of various directions. The process of “blind voting” at key turning points provides input without putting pressure on anyone to say something that might be unpopular.
Each card has a recommended timeframe for the activity, and its easy to see how working through challenges can require commitment and spend to get key personnel on the meeting. The goal is to get good at these tactics so they become an ingrained part of how people work together to solve problems rather than pointing fingers.
The artwork and design of the cards are fun and light, reminding participants to come to the table ready to engage and contribute.
Having used many of the techniques in the deck extensively over a 20-year career leading teams and working on business problems, I appreciate the readiness of the information in these decks. Over my time, I’ve kept a library of books – some from my MBA program and others from my time teaching narrative design and design thinking while leading Design Management and Design Research departments at colleges in the US. To put it all together I’ve had to rely on recall and tabs in various resources, research documents downloaded to folders on my hard drive, and notebooks with my own sketches and outlines.
The Workshop Pip Deck provides these tools at my fingertips and provides a flexible, adaptable model to move across many domains of knowledge with colleagues and stakeholders.
I recommend giving the deck a try to see how it impacts meetings and workshops in your organization.
Pip Decks team provide a bank of videos and Miro boards (a digital team whiteboarding platform) when you purchase your deck with “The Vault.” These resources provide additional use cases and interactive resources that allow you to take your workshop anywhere you need to, in person or online.
What’s included?
- PDF version of the Workshop Tactics for offline access
- A digital set of cards you can add to presentation decks, PDFs and anything that will accept a .jpg file.
- Miro / MURAL templates for each Tactic so you have an online way to collaborate
- Video Tutorials that provide examples of each card in application
- Access to all future Team Tactics exclusive content, events and discounts.
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