Getting a team or a group of clients to collaborate can be a bit of work. Encouraging folks to open up and share can be even harder. As a manager or a team lead, you may feel the pressure of having to come up with ideas to keep people engaged.

But it doesn’t have to be a struggle. A simple “Fear and Wish” exercise can turn a boring 1:1 or a group session into an ideation powerhouse. And you, from a manager to something more like a powerful genie.

This isn’t a totally new concept. Teachers have used the “Two Stars and a Wish” methodology for years to help students express themselves when providing feedback.

And brilliant minds like Tom Keeley from the legendary design firm IDEO, use an “I like, I wish” exercise to take the edges off of group/peer feedback.

The “Fear and Wish” exercise is a bit different based on how it’s deployed. It’s not necessarily just for giving or receiving feedback. It can used to initiate blue-sky thinking, get a group to establish and agree on guiding principles, or a set of problems to solve. Or all of the above.

FIND COMMON GROUND

When you create space for everyone to express their fears and wishes, you can quickly cultivate empathy among members of a group. Most of the magic happens the moment people start to realize that the very thing they have been fearing might be expressed by someone else as a wish. Realizing these commonalities can be grounding and get people thinking collaboratively.

Anyone can have strong differences in approaches or thinking, yet finding even one thing you have in common can give you something to rally around and create a safe space to come back to.

GET TO THE CORE OF THE PROBLEM(S) TO BE SOLVED 

When we get a group together and start trying to find solutions, we often aren’t really sure that the problem we are solving is the right problem solve.

As you peel back the layers of complexity and chase down a problem, you may well find that there are other problems underlying the original that may not have been visible before.

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

This “Fear and Wish” exercise can work as a stress test for ideas as your team posts up their fears and wishes regarding any potential solution. Here’s how.

Warm-up: Start with a light little exercise that gets everyone contributing and possibly even laughing. One might be by having them each express what their favorite movie is, or even what they had for breakfast.

Intro: Introduce the concept of a fear and wish by expressing your own fears and wishes for this exercise. This can be very direct, as in: “I fear that I might not be able to keep everyone focused today. I wish that in today’s session, everyone will feel empowered to express themselves freely.”

Post up: Explain that you’re going to run four short ideation sessions with each one followed by discussion and synthesis. You will be setting the timer and giving everyone exactly five minutes to post up all of the fears and wishes that they can think of within these four categories:

• Fears and wishes for myself
• Fears and wishes for my team
• Fears and wishes for the organization
• Fears and wishes for our clients/customers

I recommend using a retrospective framework for this part. Breaking it out in this manner helps everyone channel their thoughts in a focused way.

When the time is up, have a few volunteers read out one fear and one wish that they feel is the most important in the first category. Make sure you run a timer for this part as well to keep things on track. I find that usually another five to seven minutes is enough time to get a few people to read out their fear and wish. Then move on to the next category.

While everyone is posting up that next section, you can take that time to finish synthesizing and grouping the like-minded fears and wishes from the first section, into themes.

Pro tip: If you want to be a super-facilitator, simply copy all of the fears and wishes from each category and paste them into your AI tool of choice. Make sure your prompt is descriptive and explicit.

For instance, “We are a group of salespeople who are establishing rituals and norms for how we work together in the coming year. We have run an exercise to get everyone to express their fears and wishes on how we might proceed. Please read through the following fears and wishes, and synthesize them into themes that can be used as a set of guiding principles for how our group collaborates moving forward,” and then paste your content in.

It is up to you, the facilitator, as to whether you use those themes as guideposts for problems to be solved, crafted into guiding principles, or even goal setting.

GETTING TO PRODUCTIVE OUTCOMES

Any or all of the themes that emerge from this exercise can be used as a focal point for deeper dives and discussion. The key is in the prompt you offer to participants at the start, as well as the prompt you feed into the AI for synthesis if you used it.

For example, I’ve used this exercise to align a leadership team to a set of objectives—ideas and ideals borne from their own wishes. The prompt, in that case, was: “Think about this leadership team and the work that lies ahead of us. As you think about how we’ll work together and the impact we might have, what are your fears and wishes?”

When I led a product team at Meta, we developed a two-year roadmap informed by the collective knowledge of the team—as expressed through fears and wishes.

In that case, our prompt was: “Putting yourself in the shoes of our customer (a user profile provided), what are your fears and wishes as you go through this journey with the product?”

Here, the outputs were themed as jobs to be done and helped identify key areas of opportunity for research and discovery well ahead of the development schedule.

I’ve seen it work the same way for running a retrospective on existing rituals where the prompt was, “Thinking about this weekly ritual, and knowing we all have a chance to make it better, what are your fears and wishes?

And finally, I’ve found that this exercise works well between a manager and their direct report to get to the core of what matters to the individual. It can work in identifying/reconciling strengths and weaknesses. And it unlocks creativity when thinking five or ten years out in terms of goal setting.

In that case, the prompt might be: “Given all that you know now about your strengths, passions, and the potential you have to make an impact here, what are your fears and wishes for the next year, or two, or three?”

BUILD TRUST

This exercise is intended to get everyone contributing. It works because it taps into two things we all share: fears and wishes. It also helps participants feel their voice has been heard. Consequently, this level of engagement also gives them a sense of ownership over the outcomes.

With this workshop tool in your toolkit, your team will never have to struggle to come up with ideas, and you won’t find yourself having to sell your vision to the group you lead. After all, they are the ones who shaped that vision. Their mission will be to make their wishes manifest.