Establish mindsets through:

1. Physical Space (white boards, open space, food, sunlight, quotes): Brings participants out of their daily comfort into a space intentionally built for collaboration.

2. Improvisation exercises to open everyone’s mind, heart and will and embrace the “Yes And” attitude.

3. Badge Tree and Check-in for participants to leave their titles and hierarchy behind and commit themselves to the chaordic path of solving problems creatively.

Create Team Alignment through:

1. Team formation: Cross-functional and multi-departmental/organizational team members with a wide range of years of experience adds to the depth of understanding problems and richness of ideas that follow.

2. Downloading: An activity that lets the participants ring their expertise to the group discussion, ask powerful questions and acknowledge the past, lays down the foundation from which everyone can then move forward together.

3. Success Metrics and Guiding Principles: In order to create sustainable change, teams need to align on their success metrics and create guiding principles to act a beacons of light on their journey to innovation and change.

Define the problem through:

1. User Empathy: In order to understand spoken and unspoken needs of people at the receiving end of a challenge or problem, the team needs to adopt a learner’s mindset, actively listen to their stories and feel what the users are feeling.

2. Insight generation: Using established tools such as journey maps, jobs-to-be-done, persona development, How Might We… and many more, generating insights to reframe and sense the exact problem and need to be addressed.

3. Strategy and outcomes alignment: Aligning with key business and strategy leaders on prioritizing the need to be addressed and the expected outcome builds a strong buy-in from leadership and ensures implementation and scaling of solutions.

Design for outcomes through:

1. Idea generation: Suspending judgement and generating a large quantity of ideas individually allows the entire team to mix and match parts of different ideas to eventually come up with 5-6 solid idea concepts.

2. Outcomes Mapping: Thinking back to the “outcomes alignment” discussion and mapping each idea concept back to the desired outcomes helps in identifying assumptions and questions built in each idea.

3. Rapid Prototyping: Creating a rough and rapid physical representations of the idea to show all the nuts and bolts in it, allows the participants to create small experiments to test their assumptions with the users and build the idea into a working prototype based on user feedback in an iterative manner.

Bias towards action through:

1. Show don’t tell: Name says it all. If you can show an idea, make someone feel an experience you had, role play the story you hear, do it!!

2. Working with feedback: It is much easier to get feedback on a physical representation of the idea whether it is a sketch with stick figures, thought bubbles and flowcharts or a model build with cardboard, pipe cleaners and toy soldiers. Asking questions and accepting feedback from different stakeholders and users allows you to learn faster and cheaper before you get married to your own ideas.

3. Learn through reflection: Think for 30 seconds individually about the process, about the people, about your learnings, about your doings. Now take 30 seconds to share your thoughts with the person to your left or right, listen to their reflection as well. Finally, share you reflections with the entire team. We call this 1-2-3 reflections. This generates collective learnings as a group and moves you to functions beyond your habitual ways of thinking and acting.

Guided by Facilitation through:

1. Trained facilitators: Facilitators trained in CAPS framework guide teams through the activities. This starts the creation of agency among participants when facilitators provide direction and not answers.

2. Creating flexible agendas: “Read their eyes”. Are participants engaged? Do they need a reset of mindsets and improv? Build space in your agendas to flex. Don’t be married to your own agenda. Use it as a guide. Create moments of divergence and convergence to keep the group moving dynamically towards their goal.

3. Holding the space: CAPS facilitators understand the importance of holding the space while participants work through their discussions, doubts, fears and come out the other end with agency, tools, language and a cohesive team to implement and further test their solutions.