Facilitating Hopes & Concerns Games

What is a ‘Hopes & Concerns’ game?

A ‘hopes and concerns’ game (also called ‘speedboat’, ‘anchors & engines’ etc.) belongs to a class of games that helps elucidate the hopes/threats/strengths and concerns/opportunities/weaknesses of a business idea or product. This is not a SWOT exercise even though I have listed down strengths and weaknesses above. Since this game is all about getting information from the stakeholders, I have found that it is good to keep the categories as broad as possible, at least during the game facilitation phase.

As always, you can tailor the phrasing to your context, as long as the intent is meant.

How is it useful

This game is a way of

• Bringing out various hopes & concerns that the stakeholders might have
• Promulgating debate, which sometimes leads to further topics of conversation
• Getting everyone on board with the shared challenges & opportunities that might exist
• Thereby, promoting empathy for each other roles in a disparate team

Facilitating a ‘Hopes & Concerns’ game

Preparation

I use a couple of sheets taped together for this. I draw the template that I want to use for this exercise on the sheets of paper. The template servers two purposes. The first purpose is to serve as a means of explaining the various aspects of the template to your audience. The second is to act as a place holder for the actual exercise/game itself.

I typically create example stickies and put them up on the template. I use examples that are specific & relevant to the context while being quite obvious. The idea is to give the audience meaningful examples to improve their understanding of the exercise while being generic enough to not constrain their thoughts & creativity.

Once you have prepared the templates, put them up in the area where the conversation is about to happen. Have a lot of stickies or flash card along with glue/blue tacs etc. Also, make sure that there is enough stationery to go around.

There is likely to be a lot of debate once the thoughts are put down. So budget a decent amount of time for the debate. I would recommend booking 1–2 hours for the entire exercise. This can go up or down depending on your context (how much do you know), the audience (are they all of one mind, are they from the same team etc.), what stage of the product ideation process is this happening at (earlier stages tend to be more nebulous) etc. I have been in games where we finished up in 20 minutes to games where we had to break, do our homework and come back for another session. At the end of the day, all that matters is if the team is committed to one clearly articulated vision.

Start off by explaining the purpose of the conversation and the outcomes expected from it. This gives the audience an idea of what to do as well as letting them understand that this is a place for them to express their thoughts. Ensure that safety is not an issue i.e. people are comfortable with sharing their thoughts even if their bosses etc. are in the conversation.

Symbols

I tend to use this tool in a generic fashion. That is, I tell the audience that the “island” symbol indicates their goals, the “anchor” indicates weaknesses/threats/concerns and the “engine” indicates strengths/opportunities/hopes. You can tailor what these symbols mean depending on the outcomes you want from the game.

In addition to this, I sometimes also add a “history” section. This section is intended to bring out the decisions/events in the past that have to lead to the current situation.

Running the session

Ask the audience to put down one thought per sticky and to put it up at the appropriate place. You can either allot a fixed time for each symbol or a fixed time for the whole exercise. Put together, the time taken for putting up the stickies is usually between 10–20 minutes. This will vary and you will have to decide depending on the context.

After all the stickies are put up, take some time to group them. Involve some of the audience members in this.

The next stage is the discussion phase. Walk through each of the groups and ask a member of the audience to explain what the thought was about. This allows other audience members to pitch in with their versions and leads to a good discussion. This might lead to letting the sticky remain as is, modifying the thought on the sticky, removing the sticky or adding new thoughts. A combination of the above might also happen.

You need to watch out for safety in the room. This exercise needs to have senior leadership in it to make it successful. The flipside of having senior leadership is that some time, some members of the audience might not be open about their thoughts. On the other hand, senior leadership will have a different perspective.

Conclusion

Once the thoughts under each symbol have been identified, you can consolidate and send out a copy to the audience for their concurrence. This can happen offline.