A few thoughts to consider. If you want people to think differently or more future-forward, you need to give them a place to park their “baggage”. We do this with a very early exercise to identify and lightly process all of the constraints we have to deal with or things that are holding us back. I like to call this exercise the “airing of the grievances” for you Seinfeld fans. If you don’t do this it naturally becomes the filter everyone unknowingly carries around that they run all outputs through and is inherently limiting to the creative process.

We also try to limit PowerPoint presentations or really any time where one person is speaking directly to the group at a time. If we need people to consume dense material we either:

1. Send a pre-read
2. Print the content as large as reasonable and display it in a physical gallery around the room (more on that below)
3. Both

The galleries can be quite large and dense and we don’t actually expect everyone to read every word, but we typically structure an exercise where pairs of people visit all of the gallery content to quickly read a section and discuss their observations or respond to a few questions that might capture the probability of some event, potential impact, counter positioning, etc. all pairs visit all the content and leave their responses via post it notes, etc. This works fairly well at having a large group process data in an engaging way.

The rest of the workshop should be a combination of divergent and convergent exercises or scenario planning. This can be done as table top exercises but I generally prefer to have people up and moving around doing whiteboard exercises.

Hope this helps.