Meet better
Find purpose: discovering what matters
A way of helping people think about what matters to them
This isn’t therapy: it’s a way of focusing people on what really matters - the why of their activity. It’s a simple way of using prompts for a group, and then harvesting the ideas.
Thanks to Fisher Qua.
1
Set up & prep
Take some time to think about the group and their priorities. Then prepare some prompts that you think will resonate. (See below for some examples.)
Ensure they have some pens and paper to hand.
2
First steps
Explain the exercise: we’re going to use some prompts for thinking about this as individuals, then share the ideas with one another.
Read out the prompts, and ask people to note their individual thoughts or responses. Read out - allowing a 30 second gap for people to respond. Check in if that’s enough.
This is important to us because...
The metaphors I could use to describe this project include...
This is part of...
The long term goals it is meant to help us make progress on...
The short term objectives we want to achieve...
The intangible outcomes of this could be...
3
Explore
Then invite people into small groups to share the most interesting things they wrote down and structure the conversation:
What did you write down? (the interesting things)
So what? - what patterns did we notice / hunches did we have?
4
Collide & articulate
Have each group write out a couple of purpose drafts / statements (show them an example) - write them nice and big on A3 sheets, and do some work to narrow down to a strong example. Check in with the overall group - ‘are we 80-% / 90% there?’
Don’t struggle to get the exact purpose statement. Allow time after the meeting to do fine-tuning and copywriting.
What we absolutely must accomplish is...
I am a little anxious about...
It would be really exciting if we could…
Specifically, what we need to get out of this is...
Something I personally want to practice, try, or experiment with is….