🎯 Theme: From meetings to momentum
This page outlines how cities can use structured workshops and discovery sessions to engage stakeholders, identify challenges, and build consensus for digital transformation initiatives
Effective communication, well-designed workshops, and ongoing capacity building are essential to starting a digital transformation journey which will guide a city toward beneficial outcomes in the digital age. Leveraging these sessions for early discovery work to understand the current state is critical to shaping the approach moving forward. Workshops are an ongoing tool that can be used to bring stakeholders together, gather their input, build consensus, and determine next steps.
Starting with Discovery
Before beginning a full digital transformation effort or developing and implementing a data strategy, the stakeholders involved must understand the current challenges, capabilities, and opportunities within a city. This can be accomplished through focused discovery work to develop foundational knowledge from which strategies and initial use cases can be developed.
During this exercise, you should prioritise gathering insights from frontline staff, leadership, and community members to identify pain points and areas where data can drive value. This way, you can identify what data exists, how it flows, and where gaps or duplication may occur across departments.
Then, use discovery findings to inform which initial use cases or interventions should be prioritized based on feasibility and impact.
How to Identify Pain Points through a Workshop - Design and Delivery
Workshops are a fantastic tool to leverage during the discovery stage and beyond to uncover insights and guide participants toward constructive outcomes. These are typically organised to bring together diverse stakeholders from across different departments, sectors, and industries in either a physical or virtual setting and spend the course of a few hours over a day or two addressing a specific challenge. In many cases, these begin with problem definition to align participants around an agreed-upon statement, which lays the foundation for solution generation.
At a basic level, these sessions are made up of various diverging (brainstorming, ideation) or converging (prioritisation, planning) exercises to address a specific goal. They leverage participatory methods (e.g., journey mapping, role-play, or data walkshops) to identify needs, expectations, and to make data relatable. Methodologies like design thinking and frameworks like the double diamond are useful when designing workshops, as well as pulling from specific exercises shared by organisations like Solve Next, Workshopper.com, and Voltage Control.
Prioritisation is often critical when looking at various problem statements. Often, there is too much to solve, which leads to the “deer in the headlights” problem whereby everything needs fixing. The reality, though, is that not everything can be fixed now, and some problems have been there for a long time. Prioritisation frameworks such as MoSCoW framework can help understand the relative importance of work. In some cases, the work that is prioritised is often low-risk, low-impact so another prioritisation framework that can be used is the impact-risk framework where attendees put add their suggestions on an X-Y axis of both metrics. The high-impact, low-risk items are then prioritised for delivery.
Planning and hosting these workshops typically requires a skilled facilitator who can guide the group through these exercises in the time allotted, while remaining flexible and adaptive to change direction should unexpected needs and insights come up. A useful framework for this is the Adaptive Leadership theory from Ronald Heifetz et al. The theory explains that there are 2 types of problems. The first type is a technical problem that has a clear problem definition and a clear solution. The second type is an adaptive problem, whose problem definition is not clear, and the solution is even murkier. These problems are often referred to as “wicked problems.” Additionally, the theory raises the importance of maintaining disequilibrium in facilitation spaces. Disequilibrium is the state of disruption that is required in any system to reach an adequate solution. With a technical problem, the level of disequilibrium required is quite small because its confines are so simple to understand. An adaptive problem, however, requires the distress levels to be maintained before an adequate solution can be reached. A skilled facilitator, therefore, can enable the team to reach this productive range of disequilibrium to solve adaptive challenges.
Source: Laurent Ledoux (by Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky & Ronald Heifetz)
Maintaining Ecosystem Engagement
Following each engagement, it’s important to stay connected with participants to ensure they feel their contributions led to a tangible outcome for their communities. Workshops are a significant investment of time and energy for those who attend, and it can damage trust with the host organisation should the ideas generated not be addressed in a timely manner.
In order to maintain a strong relationship with stakeholders on an ongoing basis, cities can do the following:
- Host city-wide learning events or data summits to connect stakeholders.
- Create open feedback loops to refine interventions based on user experience.
- Showcase successful pilots to encourage adoption and scale.