plazaPOPS Board Visioning

Co-design a visioning session for a burgeoning board

plazaPOPS was transitioning from a space of piloting new and experimental methods of placemaking, into an emerging organization with both experimental roots and anchors for the organization to grow sustainably.

I was brought into the project by ThinkFresh Group to co-lead a workshop with the board to help them reflect on their individual vision, and consider their shared strategic direction for the future.

• The board had just received significant three year federal funding to scale their pilot installation from 1 to 15 sites over 3 years

• Their team is comprised of researchers, urban planners, strategists who needed support in moving from pilot to program.

• The visioning session asked important questions to surface how each individual board member imagined the future, and then worked to coalesce and prioritize those visions into a working plan with next steps.

plazaPOPS: Visioning session

Tools, Methods, Approaches

• The session took place in-person in Toronto.

• “Price is Right” icebreaker with items I bought at the dollarstore. Participants had to put in their bids, and the closest without going over the actual retail price actually one that prize. I try to do this with items from local stores as much as possible.

  • Insert some positive, fun, relaxed activity to pump up the energy prior to getting into the nitty-gritty which can be cognitively taxing, particularly as this workshop was after working hours and board members are all professionals who are volunteering.

  • Helps connect people in a lightly competitive, unusual icebreaker, sets the stage for the unusual feeling of playing, imagining, together.

  • In visioning for placemaking, it helps to ground the process when we have artefacts that are from or represent the actual place we are intervening, especially if we don’t live there. It’s a way to keep tactile reminders that our visioning impacts real people who are not in the room at this moment.

• “Experiment or Established” activity

  • Individually, using flipchart paper + markers, each board member was asked to draw a bar - one end marked experiment, one end marked established.

  • They then were instructed to colour in the bar to correspond with where they felt plazaPOPS was in this moment.

  • We then brought everyone back together to review, discuss and pin-down (even if it’s a moving target), where the collective truly felt the organization was today, where it would be in 12 months, and how it would embed their love of experimentation into their organizaiton as it scaled and needed more structures.