How to Align a Team
with 5 Bold Steps
By Björn Petersson │ March 30, 2023
- Facilitation, Team Leadership
The 5 Bold Steps Vision® Canvas is a great visual tool to get a group of people focused and aligned. It provides the game-plan for a session and guides a group to identify 5 key bold steps needed to reach a vision or a goal. It also generates break-through thinking and strengthens group-planning skills.
In this article I will help you to successfully facilitate the 5 Bold Steps Vision® Canvas. I will also guide you how to make the session even more engaging and fun by pairing the Canvas with the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
The Canvas is quite easy to adapt to other situations. I have been using it for guiding product teams to identify high priority actions to increase products competitiveness. I have also used it with leading groups for rebooting business activities after a major crisis.
Step-by-step guide to 5 Bold Steps Vision® Canvas
Firstly, make sure that you and the group are aligned on the expected outcome of the session and how the session should look like. If you are a consultant or facilitator, make sure that you are also aligned with the person who requested the session. I cannot stress this enough. Unless everybody is aligned, the outcome might not be what was expected.
- Session duration: 2 – 3 hours
- Group size: recommended for 5 – 10 people
- Material: Sticky notes to capture ideas or use a digital whiteboard template for the exercise – whatever works best for the group.
Facilitation steps
Once everything is prepared, help the team to work through the Canvas areas step-by-step:
Step one
VISION: Help the group to define the vision statement or the change that they want to achieve. It can also be a process or a specific goal. It could be that the vision or the change statement was already set in previous meetings or sessions. In such case, use this Canvas step for getting the group aligned. The vision does not need to be perfect, but everybody must have a mutual understanding of the focus for the day.
Step Two
THEMES: Help the team to break down the vision, the goal, or the process into different themes. This could be services, capabilities, features, products, improvements etc. What should be tangible key results materialized from the vision?
Step Three
SUPPORTS: What are the key resources that will enable the group to reach the vision? The resources could be people, skills, stakeholders, funding, opportunities etc.
Step Four
CHALLENGES: What are the external threats or the internal challenges that will become roadblocks on the journey to reach the vision?
Step Five
BOLD STEPS: Based on what is on the canvas, what are the Bold Steps that should be done to reach the vision or goal? The 5 Bold Steps are the key take away from the session and they should be just that: BOLD. Ensure that your team or a group have enough time to discuss and define 5 Bold Steps. All group members should accept these steps as something that they can work with.
Step Six
KEY VALUES. If time permits and if it is valuable for the group, you can also include and discuss Key Values. What are the foundational values that will enable the vision realisation and support the 5 Bold Steps? These key values can be for example company values and culture, or the company strategy pillars.
Session outcome
At the end of the session the group will have mutual understanding and a clear prioritized action list that can be acted on the next days.
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