How to pick a challenge that is worth solving in a workshop

When a team has to choose which challenge to work on, the conversation usually goes straight to money. What's the ROI? What's the business impact?

That question matters. It just leaves a lot out.

Some challenges won't bring in much money, but solving them would give the whole team a real lift. Others look small, but fixing them would make five other problems easier. If you only look at the business case, you miss both.

The Value Score looks at all three. Each challenge gets an emotional score, an ecosystem score, and a monetary score. Everyone votes alone and anonymously, and the group sees the average. So the decision belongs to the whole room.

We want to be able to look at each one as an independent lever.

When Tim Leake shared this activity with me, what I liked most is that it's fresh. I had never heard of it before. Most of the voting and prioritisation activities teams use are the classic ones, many of them straight from the Design Sprint. This one brings a new way of thinking into the room, and teams find it genuinely interesting.

Tim Leake is Vol. 06.

The order of the three scores is the smart part.

Tim starts with emotion and keeps money for last. If you ask for a euro amount first, people freeze or guess wildly. When they've already thought about morale and about what else this could unlock, the money question feels easier. They're warmed up.

The ecosystem score is my favourite. A lot of the time, the challenge on the wall is only a symptom of something bigger. This score pushes the group to ask: if we fix this, what else gets better? That's how you move from a small problem to the one that's really worth your time.

For the money score, Tim uses three years as the benchmark. Long enough for the results to show, short enough that people can still picture it. And when the group picks the right challenge, the number is often in the millions, even with smaller clients. That changes the mood in the room fast.

So why trust a group of guesses? Tim explains it with a jar of jellybeans. At fairs and schools in the US, people guess how many jellybeans are in a big jar. Most guesses are way off. But take the guesses of 10 to 20 people, drop the highest and the lowest, and the average usually lands very close to the real number. A group estimates better than any single person, as long as nobody influences anybody else. That's exactly why the voting is anonymous.

It also takes hierarchy out of the decision. When the score comes from the whole group, nobody can say “the CEO thinks this is important, so it is.” If a challenge scores high on emotion and low on money, you get an honest discussion about which one matters more. Usually money wins, and that's fine, because the group made that choice together.

One more thing I like: Tim often sends it as a form before the workshop. So on the day, the first thing people see is how much they themselves think this challenge is worth. The team walks into the session already agreeing that it matters.

The Value Score is a Choose activity, the third phase of the 6C framework. But a workshop is six phases, and each one needs to land.

Designing a workshop means wrestling with three questions: where do I start, does the flow make sense, will it actually deliver?

The Workshop Deck guides you through all six phases of the 6C framework so your agenda has real structure from opening to close. And if the Value Score isn't the right fit for your next workshop, there are more Choose activities inside the app waiting for you, alongside battle-tested activities for every other phase, all proven by hundreds of facilitators in the room.