The value of a strawman

No, I’m not talking about using a strawman in an argument, that’s just poor form. What I’m talking about is making your life easier in workshops by creating a rough draft of the output (aka a strawman). The first note, this technique won’t help you with an ideation workshop, those are to extract fresh ideas from your attendees. The strawman is more helpful when creating specific artefacts such as customer journeys or user personas. In this article we’ll look into the reasons why.

Schema Theory

In my opinion this is the main reason (though there are likely far more intelligent people than me who may say otherwise). Schema theory is essentially the concept that we have mental frameworks (schemas) for things to help us understand the world. Anything that falls into an existing schema is immediately easier to process, this is why analogies work so well, they tap into an existing schema to help you understand a concept.

How this comes into play with creating a strawman is that you create a mental schema for the subject at hand and then your workshop attendees are able to utilise this schema and start to enhance the strawman without needing to both create a new mental schema and also fill it in. The reason this helps comes in our next point.

Dual Coding Theory

This looks at the workload on the brain. Dual coding theory says there are two channels of work; visual and verbal. If we’re creating something new we need to come up with both the concept and the representation, utilising both channels.

When you are creating something new your attendees need to both create a schema in their minds and also populate it. By creating a strawman you take off the load of creating the mental schema and allow your attendees to focus on the task of the content.

Intrinsic Load

This is the difficulty of the task itself. When creating something from scratch this carries a higher workload than editing something that already exists.

The case for a strawman should be fairly self-explanatory but just in case. When you have a blank sheet of paper, it will take more mental energy to turn that into a document compared to if the document already exists and simply needs changing.

Summary

The use of a strawman for workshops can really improve the outputs due to the effect it has on freeing up mental capacity in your attendees. By focussing their thoughts on the content you want to create rather than having to create the initial concept and also the content you will be getting the best from your attendees.

You will also benefit from the session getting started quicker since the first stage of concept creation has already been handled allow you to jump into the content. Further to this, since you have a strawman, it can be sent out as a pre-read (with sufficient provisos that it is just a strawman effort).

Finally, it can also help stakeholders who are unfamiliar with the documentation you are creating the in the session by giving them an idea of what the end result should look like. This can allow attendees who may have been quiet due to being unsure of the goal to be more confident to engage and contribute in the workshop.