This email is part of a larger series on Running effective accessibility workshops.
Last week, I talked about what it takes to build an effective action plan to solve the problem you've identified earlier in the workshop. It's good practice to follow up on that plan to check that everyone is still committed and things are moving along.
Having a plan and carrying it out are two different things. And how else would you know if it's being carried out without simply asking everyone?
That's what the follow up session is for.
You need to come together at a later point as a team and understand where you stand. What's working? What's not working? Is anyone blocked in any way? Can you unblock them? Or even, should you abandon the plan altogether? These are all valid questions you should be asking in a follow up session.
Instead of the review being one person's responsibility, in an effective accessibility workshop, you need to make it everyone's shared responsibility. I found that the key to a successful follow up session is the prep tasks that you assign to each participant before hand.
It's easy to just call a meeting with no agenda and then have the entire thing spin out of control. Been there, done that. Instead, I take some time before hand and divvy up some tasks to everyone. It's a different kind of exercise - one that you work on truly on your own in your own time.
It's called Start, Stop, Continue.
The objective of this exercise is to examine a problem from multiple angles and know how far you are from solving it. A few days before the meeting, send each participant an email with a document attachment. The document should have three headings on one page.
- Start.
- Stop.
- Continue.
Ask each participant to write down, actually write down not just think about, each section in turn. And answer these questions:
- For Start, what are the things that they think were missing from the initial action plan that they need to start doing to move closer and faster to solving the problem?
- For Stop, what were the things that held them back and they should just not do any more?
- For Continue, what were the things they thought worked and should continue doing?
Everything should be from the perspective of solving the problem.
Instruct them not to write more than the one page. And they shouldn't spend more than 30 to 60 minutes on it. This forces them to focus their thinking and also go with their gut - the short time frame will force their most powerful thoughts to come out on paper.
During the meeting, have everyone share their reports in turn. Give everyone a chance to listen attentively and then ask clarifying questions. None of that "well actually" crap!
After the review, you can end the meeting (and the workshop) with a voting exercise to see which of the things from Start doing would make sense to...ehm... start doing.
One of the most useful outputs of the follow up session is finding out what you know works and what you know doesn't before moving forward. As you fine tune your action plan, you'll get closer to a working solution, and, at the same time, you're going to see vast improvements in how you communicate and work together as a team.
The entire point of the effective accessibility workshop is exactly that. Improve the way you work together to solve large accessibility problems in your organisation.