Formats for show & tells
A show & tell, or sprint review, is an ‘opportunity to show the most important work you’ve done, talk about what you’ve learned, explain your plans for the next few weeks and answer questions’. It’s a way to invite people to hear about and feed back on your work.
Show & tells also do an unexpected job: project documentation. If you work on something for 3 months and do a show & tell every fortnight, you’ll have documented all the important twists and turns and recorded all the decisions along the way.
We want to do this more often on the GOV.UK Design System team, both internally and on our fortnightly community chats, so last week I pulled together a few storytelling formats that work well for digital teams.
There are hundreds of ways to tell a story, but these formats are useful for getting started. There’s a few must-haves for a good show & tell though…
The formats
Here’s four suggestions for getting started. What formats have you used that work well?
What? So what? Now what?
‘What? So what? Now what?’ is a simple model for reflection that works well for show & tells as it has continuity embedded in it. It’s the most common format because you can use it for all sorts of digital work. Discoveries, alphas, betas, tech debt, community engagement…
It has three parts.
What? is a simple timeline of what you did. You don’t need to go into tons of detail, but it’s useful to share new or interesting methods with people.
So what? is where you highlight what you learned, what surprised you, or any insights that should be shared. Quotes from interviews and data tell memorable stories.
Now what? is for telling everyone what you’re doing next. This might be continuing what you were doing, starting a delivery phase, or a new direction based on what you learned.
One main point
Make one main point and illustrate it with a few examples. Then reiterate your point at the end.
This is good for suggesting new directions, sharing the usefulness of certain methods, or challenging the status quo. If you want to inspire action in others, ask a specific question that you’ll collect answers on, like one thing we could change about our ways of working, for example.
The hero’s journey
A classic storytelling format that illustrates the journey a person or team made, with reflections or newfound wisdom at the end. It’s good for spikes and experiments, performance improvements, and whenever you took a risk. Also good for condensing long periods of work into a short story.
You might use this in interviews, where it’s known as the STARR format: situation, task, action, result, reflection.
Situation: Start the story by setting the scene, the characters involved, and the mood. Shakespeare opened his plays like this.
Task: What do our characters need to do? What problem do they need to solve? Is there anything that might make this hard?
Action: The main story arc. Play out the events as they happened, but highlight the key moments or turning points. The trials and tribulations.
Result: What were the results? Include useful data points, learning or validated assumptions. Mention the failures and the successes.
Reflection: Share the newfound skills or knowledge that you have. Would you do anything differently? When might this be useful in future?
Sparklines
A simple way of comparing expectations with reality. You can use it to share findings from research by stating the intended goals and what we actually discovered.
It works well for experiments too. State your hypotheses first, then the results of the experiment.
You can use it for comparing a future vision with where we are today. For example, you might use it at the start of a project to explain the current state of things and the end state we hope to achieve.
Must-haves and tips
You can find tips on doing show & tell well over on the Boring Magic blog.