A founder of a hospitality business approached me to strategically lead and faciliate a group to create direction for a new to-go food truck/food stall offering in Brighton. We started with a Zero → One workshop: I start clients at their point of uncertainty, ambiguity, or even complete unawareness ('Zero') and progressing towards a clear, definitive, and actionable vision ('One').
There were 4 individuals in the workshop and it was constructed as a half day (4hrs) with a 1hr break in between. I aimed for the group to;
Collectively decide the mission and purpose
Focus on next priorities
To do this we began with the format:
“We are doing X for Y because of Z”
| X | What |
|---|---|
| Y | Who |
| Z | Why |
Image of whiteboard with post-it notes of whats, whos and whys.
Everyone had to write down what they thought the whats, whos and whys could be on a post-it note and then explained one by one to the group. Afterwards everyone had 3 voting dotes to vote which should be made the finalised purpose and mission. Their agreed statement:
<aside> 💡 We are elevating the wrap experience, for street food enthusiasts during this economy, because we want to provide exceptional food that makes a real difference to the local community
</aside>
Image of whiteboard with post-it notes that have unknowns
Everyone then reviewed the purpose and mission statement and then wrote down what information we didn’t know that we had to acquire (known unknowns). I then tasked the founder to facilitate thematic sorting amongst the rest of the group. The themes were Product, Operations, Marketing and Promotions, Customers, Location, Legal, Outsourcing, Costs and Vendors. I asked them to give each theme a score of the impact on the business once the thematic information is acquired (1 being low impact to 5 being high impact), afterwards we gave a score for effort on a similar scale.
Image of whiteboard with themes organised into effort-impact graph
