Resources: 15-minute FOTO

15-minute FOTO – aka the And when X... game¹ – is our Creative Commons-licensed and Clean Language-inspired coaching game that’s not only for coaches – everyone gets a turn! Consistently, it’s a highlight of our workshops: it’s fun and surprisingly practical, generating not just insights but a good quantity of relevant outputs. It’s the main tool by which we generate outcomes – outcomes that can then be organised strategically.

FOTO stands for “From Obstacles to Outcomes”, and the game’s objective is to generate as any outcomes as you can in the allotted time – 15 minutes for a table group working together in the Lite edition, or 3-4 minutes per rotation (plus some changeover time) through the Classic edition’s roles of client, coach, and host.

As well as an objective, 15-minute FOTO has rules, two of them – it is a game after all! They make it a generative process:

1. You can only ask questions from the card
2. For the X’s in many of the questions, you must use previous answers or fragments thereof, verbatim

There are no wrong answers, but the intent of the questioning should be to elicit outcomes in a spirit of curiosity, not to fish for solutions (suggesting solutions isn’t possible within the rules). In view of the game’s objective, questioners – ’coaches‘ – are advised not to waste time digging into obstacles; however some quick clarification may be helpful.

Read more: chapters 1 & 2 of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021). See also our cheat sheet.

The 15-minute FOTO cue card

If playing in person (as opposed to online), we strongly recommend that the cue cards are printed on A5-sized card, one per person. It is difficult to hold face-to-face conversation when looking at screen! Accordingly, the facilitation deck includes some slides to be shown or hidden for online and offline use.

If you’d like access to Dropbox with all the original files for the cue cards, the facilitator’s deck, and the latest translations (versions of the cue card are available in German, Italian, and Swedish), just ask via the button below.

15-minute FOTO at the Agendashift Academy

Within the Agendashift Academy's core curriculum Leading with Outcomes, 15-minute FOTO features in the following modules:

• Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
• Outside-out Strategy: Positioned for success

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation prepares the ground with some introductory exercises.

Video

To see this game used in conjunction with the Agendashift True North, watch Exercises in Lean-Agile Transformation with Mike Burrows (youtube.com, 2017):

Facilitation tips

• Watch the video, familiarise yourself with the deck (even if you don’t intend to use it) and study these:
  • The generative pattern Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) and the Core Activities Discovery and Exploration
  • For further context, the pattern Right-to-Left Strategy Deployment and the Core Activities Mapping and Elaboration
• Consider attending a [Learning the Language of Outcomes] training workshop or one of our longer strategy workshops
• Table groups of 3-5 people. 4 is ideal
• When introducing the game, take the time to demonstrate how the Clean Questions work:
  • Taking the coach role, practice with a sample obstacle or two
  • Be ready with some examples of your own – see for example the blog post My favourite Clean Language question
  • Emphasise the three questions in bold – it’s possible to play the game with only these
• Set the expectation that they should be able to generate a good number of outcomes (a dozen or more) in the limited time available. Warn that if ever a minute passes without an obstacle being captured, something is wrong – either:
  • Digging into obstacles, forgetting to ask “What would you like to have happen?”
  • Being too strict in what they accept, missing intermediate outcomes in the search for the ultimate outcome perhaps
  • Discussing the process instead of trying it
• Give the reassurance that if they find the conversation repeating itself, congratulations – they have found a virtuous circle! Retrace to an earlier part of the conversation and take it in a different direction
• If you’re playing the Classic edition:
  • Make sure i) that each table group knows who is in each role, and ii) that the first client has chosen an obstacle
  • Every few minutes the roles rotate: “New client, new obstacle! And rotate the other roles”
  • Allow some time for changeover but maintain some pace and energy
• If you decide to extend the exercise after the time is up, that’s ok
• You can get your list of obstacles (a required input to the game) from a variety of sources, for example:
  • Your retrospectives, and more specifically by reflection on customer dissatisfactions and team frustrations (see chapter 3 of the book)
  • The results of an exercise to reflect on a generative image, of which our True North statement is a good example
  • After prioritising the results of an assessment (chapter 2)
• Don’t skimp on printing; reading the questions off a screen doesn’t work nearly so well, and it’s good to give everyone something they can take away
• Debrief afterwards:
  • The experience, by role
  • The results, organised perhaps into a Plan on a Page, a template for which is included in the 15-minute FOTO materials

Finally, do encourage participants interested in Clean Language to check out our recommended reading page as highlighed at the end of the deck.

Questions?

Depending on the nature of your question, try one of these channels in the Agendashift Slack:

• #cleanlanguage
• #workshops
• #coaching
• #agendashift-book

Alternatively, get in touch via our contact page.

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Copyright © 2015-2023 Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd). All rights reserved. The page 15-minute FOTO by Mike Burrows of Agendashift Ltd is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Source text maintained at github.com/asplake/agendashift-open/tree/master/resources/15-minute-foto.md (github.com)

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