9 Ways to Brainstorm and Prioritize in MURAL

- How can you run a remote workshop to brainstorm and prioritize your team's ideas with digital whiteboards, like MURAL or Miro. In today's episode, we're gonna talk about nine ways you can use MURAL to run high energy and result-driven workshops so that you can take back control over your work group.

So let's go. (upbeat music) Okay, first things first, Miro, MURAL, they sound exactly the same, they do almost exactly the same. It's pretty confusing, right? In this video, we're gonna focus on MURAL. Feature-wise it doesn't really matter which of the two you use at this point, so just go for the one you prefer.

And when you think of a digital whiteboard, you automatically think of a normal physical whiteboard, but the problem with that is that a digital whiteboard is kind of like a normal whiteboard on steroids. So if you approach it in the same way, you're gonna miss out on a lot of the benefits. And that's why I'll show you nine workshop formats you can copy today.

I'm working on a new template in MURAL, and you might recognize some of the slides in here, and that's because I've copied them from one of the previous videos we made. So if you would like to see those slides, then link is down below in the description. So let's have a look at the benefits of MURAL over something like Google Slides.

For example, this specific slide, I ask people to write down their answer to a question, and I've created some post-its below it, where they can provide their answer. And this works pretty well. But what you will notice is that when people have smaller monitors, it becomes harder to read, and zooming is quite a bad experience in Google Slides.

And if you get a lot of post-its, then it can get crowded pretty quickly. And how MURAL solve this problem is by giving the option to zoom in and zoom out almost indefinitely into your MURAL board. So in this case, I'm zoomed out all the way, and you can zoom in really, really far, even up to this point.

So we have the same question over here. What are you excited about? And people can provide their name and answers over here. And there are a lot of options as well, which help you to sort and structure your boards pretty quickly. So if you select all the post-its, then you can create a column out of it, or you can transform it into row.

And this way it's way easier to manage your board and to keep it clean. In this case, I just want it into a grid, and I do it in just a click. And in this specific workshop, we're gonna do a lot of exercises where people first have time to think for themselves, and then we're gonna share the answers.

So they have their own colors during the workshop, and by setting the stage, asking people to choose their own color at the start, it speeds up the process during the rest of the workshop. So what you will see is that the colors will be reduced over the workshop again and again. A really fun way to make use of MURAL is to make use of the images functionality here on the left where you can search.

Let's say we search for desk, and you can move it into your MURAL board, or you can import your own images. And in this case, I asked people to make a picture of their desk. This helps to got a better understanding of how everyone is working at home. And for this specific exercise, I ask people to make a picture of their desk.

So let's add a picture, and this is way you can get a better understanding of the team, how they are working at home, and also maybe give each other some tips or share some ideas. An explaining models is also a great way of using images. So for example, this model about the five levels of autonomy, when it comes to distributed work, I ask people to watch a video first, and then I want to get their reaction about it.

So what I ask them to do is to place the post-it below the level they think they are currently in, and also a remark so that you can get a better understanding of what they think about asynchronous work in this case. When you do this exercise, you can quickly see where there's overlap in the team or where there's maybe a difference of opinion.

Within MURAL, there's a feature where you can start a quick voting session, and you can give people an amount of votes. But what I like to do for quick poll votes is to make use of these kinds of boxes, where you say, I agree or disagree, and people can drop the post-it in it, and they can leave a short remark.

I prefer this kind of voting because it's way more feasible, and you can also capture the remarks or comments from the people who put their vote in. And also it just looks better. As you may know, I love time-boxes because they help you to be more productive. And in this way you have more free time to do fun stuff afterwards.

In MURAL, you have a timer functionality, which is up here, you can set a timer, you can start it, and then everyone in the MURAL board will see this timer. And when the time is up, you can see a short notice here, time's up. You are the facilitator, you're the one running the workshop so it's important to remind people of that, because it's pretty small notice.

But it's super helpful to keep track of time. A workshop format that I use a lot is the 1-2-4-All exercise from the liberating structures. And what's so great about this exercise, that it helps you to get ideas within 15 minutes without group think. And it's really easy to do this exercise within MURAL.

If we zoom out a little bit, then you see that I created four columns, 1-2-4-All. And the first one I created boxes where everyone for himself can provide their answer within the minute. And then with the arrows, you see people paring up, they have two minutes for themselves, then four minutes, foursomes.

And then in the last box, you have all the best ideas within 15 minutes. The impact-effort metrics is a really easy way to set priorities. And it's also commonly used. So maybe you've heard of it before. If not, it's a metrics with on the left, the time-wasters, on the right, the impactful stuff, and the top, the easy things to do, and on the bottom, the hard things to do.

And by setting priorities like this, it's really easy to focus on the things you wanna replace, or you wanna remove. And how you can make use of this in MURAL is to ask people to grab the post-its one by one, be silent, and then place them on the metrics where they think they should be. So if this is one is really easy and impactful, it comes at the top.

And then the next person goes and he places, maybe this one on the bottom left. And then you go one by one. And an extra thing you can do is to give people the option to change a post-it they disagree with. So instead of grabbing a new one, they have the option to move something to another place. But when you do this, then mark the poster by giving it a border.

Maybe it's a bit unclear now, so I will give it a red dot in this case. And then after it has been moved more than two times, I usually put it on the parking lot because then there's disagreement about this specific post-it. And what you will see is because you did it in silence, that in a really short amount of time, you will see opportunities where your team thinks you should focus on.

And at the end of every workshop, I like to get feedback of what the people think about the results and the progress we made during the workshop. In this case, I want to know how confident they are about a specific experiment that we created with each other. And an easy way to do that is to make use of this dartboards where people can put their smileys on.

So if they are really confident about it, but maybe their current mood is a bit neutral, then they put it here. Or if their head is exploding, then they put it over here. And in this way, you can really easily see if it's necessary to plan some follow-up steps. This MURAL template will be available really soon.

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Thank you for watching. That's it for now, see you in the next one, peace. (upbeat music)