Process guide

How to use this library

The workshop guides are the operating manuals — they tell you what to run and in what order. This library is the reference — it tells you how each technique works when you need to look it up. You don’t read this top-to-bottom. You land on a specific page when a workshop calls for SWOT or fishbone or 5 Whys, get what you need, and head back.

Each page follows the same structure:

• What it is — the technique in one paragraph, with its origin.
• When to use it — the cases it’s designed for and the cases where it’s the wrong tool.
• How to run it — a step-by-step facilitator script with time-boxes.
• Worked example — a concrete illustration, usually with a visual (ASCII diagram, table, or quadrant).
• Common failure modes — where facilitators get tripped up.
• References — the canonical source, plus any useful secondary materials.

Tools by category

Root-cause analysis

For when the workshop knows what happened and needs to find out why. Each of these digs down from a symptom toward a cause you can act on.

• 5 Whys — Toyota’s deceptively simple cause-chain tool. Five minutes to run, useful when the causal chain is relatively linear.
• Fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram — for problems with multiple contributing factors where 5 Whys would tunnel-vision onto one branch. Adapted for software teams with people/process/tools/data/environment/external categories.
• A3 problem solving — Toyota’s single-page method for any root cause whose fix spans more than a single sprint. Template included.

Prioritization and decision making

For when the workshop has a list of candidates and needs to pick the right ones to act on.

• Pareto analysis — the 80/20 rule applied to your own data. Sort the hours, sum them cumulatively, circle the categories that together reach ~80%. That’s where the action goes.
• 2×2 prioritization matrix — the workhorse of workshop decision making. Usually effort on one axis, value on the other.
• Theory of Constraints — why automating (or fixing, or improving) anything other than the bottleneck doesn’t speed anything up.
• Force Field Analysis — Kurt Lewin’s change-management check. For every proposed action, list the forces pushing for it and against it; if the restrainers outweigh the drivers, the action won’t stick.
• Lightning Decision Jam — AJ&Smart’s 45-minute compressed retrospective, for when you have one specific problem and no time for the full workshop.

Discovery and mapping

For when the workshop needs a shared picture of what’s actually happening across the team, the pipeline, or the customer journey.

• Value stream mapping — the Toyota technique codified by Rother and Shook (Learning to See, LEI 1999/2003) for seeing where time, waiting, and rework actually live in your delivery pipeline. The single highest-leverage discovery tool for automation candidates.
• Journey mapping — follow one real story end-to-end from idea to production. Surfaces the seams between roles and the wait states nobody talks about.
• Event storming workshop — Alberto Brandolini’s sticky-note-driven technique for mapping domain events onto a timeline. Long-form workshop on its own; also the design counterpart for the rework workshop when unclear business events are the root cause.
• Gemba walk — Taiichi Ohno’s “go see” practice, codified in English by Masaaki Imai’s Gemba Kaizen. The facilitator watches the work being done in situ and brings the observations into the workshop as seed material.
• SWOT analysis — the strategic-analysis framework from the 1960s, adapted as a team self-assessment opener.
• Impact mapping — Gojko Adzic’s four-level structure (Why, Who, How, What) for working out whether we’re even solving the right problem.

Facilitation patterns

Meta-techniques that shape how any exercise runs — who speaks, what gets surfaced, how the group converges.

• 1-2-4-All — the Liberating Structures pattern: silent 1 minute, pairs for 2, fours for 4, then share to the whole group. Prevents loud voices from anchoring the discussion.
• Dot voting — the three-dots-per-person convergence technique. Each participant places their dots on the board items they believe most important; the highest-dotted items become the shortlist. Cheap, fast and resistant to the loudest-voice problem when paired with a silent-generation step.
• TRIZ — the inverted brainstorm. The Liberating Structures (Lipmanowicz and McCandless) narrow adaptation of Genrich Altshuller’s Soviet-era framework. Instead of “what should we do?” ask “what could we do to guarantee we never fix this?” Teams admit to their own sacred-cow behaviors safely because they start as hypothetical.
• Pre-mortem — Gary Klein’s forward-looking retrospective. Imagine the next sprint failed and work backward from the failure to today’s risks.
• Example mapping — Matt Wynne’s 25-minute acceptance-criteria exercise for stories entering the sprint. Yellow story, blue rules, green examples, red questions. Red cards mean the story isn’t ready.

A note on authority

Every tool on this list has decades of practitioner literature behind it — ASQ, the Lean Enterprise Institute, Cucumber’s BDD community, Liberating Structures, Atlassian’s Team Playbook, SessionLab, and the original authors themselves. The individual pages cite the canonical source so you can go deeper than the summary if you want to. None of these techniques are invented for this playbook; we adopted them because they work, and we cite them properly because their authors deserve the credit.