A full Working Backwards program, from framing to PRFAQ readout

The situation

Friends is a Swedish non-profit working against bullying. It had more worthwhile things it could do than it could resource, and while its mission was clear, it had not yet defined the specific customer to build for.

What we did

The engagement ran the full Working Backwards process over roughly three months, with the workshop as one step in it.

• Framed the challenge: an initial definition, and agreement on who needed to take part in the workshop.
• Pre-workshop preparation: collecting the existing evidence about the challenge, the customer and the problem.
• 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 plan for scaling the solution.

What the method produced

The main output was a definition of a specific customer and a problem statement precise enough to design a solution for. Along the way, Today Statements summarized the answers to the five questions, and customer empathy maps and end-to-end experience mapping helped link those answers together.

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 statement was that 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.