A full Working Backwards program, from framing to PRFAQ readout

The situation

Friends is a Swedish non-profit working against bullying. Like most mission-driven organizations, it had more worthwhile things it could do than it could resource, and the usual difficulty: the mission is clear, the specific customer to build for is not.

What we did

The engagement ran the full mechanism over roughly a quarter, rather than as a workshop.

• Framed the challenge: an initial definition, and alignment on who needed to be in the room. Getting the participant list right is part of the method.
• Pre-workshop preparation: collecting what was known about the challenge, the customer and the problem, so the workshop started from evidence rather than recollection.
• The Working Backwards workshop: validating the challenge, working the evidence, answering the five questions, and drafting the first PRFAQ elements.
• PRFAQ refinement: the full press release and FAQ, prepared to be read by stakeholders.
• PRFAQ readout: a structured reading with a decision attached, producing specific questions and expectations that defined the next steps.
• Experiment and solution workshops, and a path toward scale.

What the method produced

The sharpest output was the definition itself: a specific customer, and a problem statement precise enough to design against. Today Statements compressed the answers, customer empathy maps and end-to-end experience mapping did the connective work.

The definition, in their terms

The customer resolved to a member of a school's safety team, which in Swedish elementary schools means counselors, nurses, senior teachers and sometimes a deputy head. The problem resolved to something more useful than bullying in the abstract: these team members cannot take correct and timely preventive action, particularly when building and implementing their prevention plans. They are busy responding to incidents instead of preventing them. That is a problem a solution can be designed against.