🌏 IN PERSON:

Use a long piece of roll out paper (the back of wall-paper or packing paper works great). We find it best to roll this out on the floor, so you can walk along it as a group - but putting it up on a wall also works well too! 

• Draw a timeline from the very first day of the brand to present day. Include dates and key events / milestones along the way. You can save some time by preparing this before the session. It’s often easiest for a Founder or Team Lead to do this if possible, otherwise the longest standing members of the company or project.  

• Have the leader (or one or two leading members of the team) walk through sharing the story, encouraging discussion and input from the group particularly around highs and lows - stand out moments. Encourage some personal stories to arise.

• This ends the project history section. If you’d like to also use this activity to look into the future...

• Add the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) at the end (see tool description for further detail). Now that it is complete (with a small gap between the BHAG and current day) encourage discussion around the gap between the history map and the BHAG - what stands out? What is exciting, or worrying? What could some of the steps between the two look like?

🌐 ONLINE:

• Exactly the same facilitation applies, as above in the In Person section. All you do is switch your floor/wall and roll of paper, for a Mural or Miro board. Create your timeline on the digital whiteboard, pre-populating it with dates,  key milestones, highs or lows etc.

• TOP TIP: It can help to already add a section where your participants can ‘pick up and move’ post-its instead of creating their own. This gives you a chance to colour code the post-its. e.g. green for highlights, red for challenging moments etc.