Module 11
To the self-facilitated team admin: Your special role continues; you are the leader! In each section of each session, play the videos at the right time, read out and share the text and instructions on screen, lead the activities, and record the outcomes from each. Don’t forget to allocate another team member as timekeeper to keep you on track!
What you need
A whiteboard, 3 flip charts, paper, post-its, break out spaces. For online teams, zoom breakouts and chat can be used in place of rooms and post-its.
How much time it takes
This workshop is designed to be undertaken as 3 separate intensive yet fun sessions, with a min. 20-minute break between each to mentally reset.
Change it up
Know how your team works best and customise the workshop for them. Longer breaks? More discussion? More breakouts. Do it!
One of Write Way Up’s founders grew up in a part of regional NSW known for breeding lambs and growing potato crops. Farming gives us a lot of valuable lessons we can bring back into the workplace, especially when it comes to strategy.
There’s a reason farmers don’t plant every seed at once, or try to harvest the whole orchard in a day. Growth takes strategy and timing. Before you even touch the soil, you need a plan: where to plant, what to water, and which crops are likely to thrive first. If you don’t have that plan, you risk losing your crop and damaging your field.
That’s the same mindset we’re taking into this activity.
During pre-work and other activities, we’ve gathered a big list of day-to-day BAU opportunities — small, smart shifts that could move the needle across People, Place, and Profit. But not every idea will yield the same return. Some are low effort and ripe for the picking. Others need more time, more resources, or more nurturing to grow.
So before we start harvesting wins, we need to sort the garden. Which actions are going to deliver the biggest results soonest? Which ones need to wait for the next season?
That’s what this activity is all about: prioritising the seeds of change that are worth planting right now, and noting down the ones we’ll hold onto for later.
Activity: The best of the BAU crop
40 minutes
20 minutes
Just over from our founder’s paddocks filled with lambs, is a garden and an orchard that has apple trees, apricots, peaches, nectarines and plums. Picture walking through that orchard. Some fruit is ripe and ready to pick, others need more time or are harder to reach. To maximise results, you start with the juiciest fruit first.
That’s exactly what we’re doing here. We’ll take our prioritised list and decide which actions are our ‘juiciest fruit’: the ones that deliver the best return on effort for People, Place and Profit right now.
Review the activities you identified above, there are likely quite a few of them, and it’s not always practical or viable to do them all at once.
Discuss all the ideas, focusing on those that are lowest effort for highest impact, pull them apart, really tease out the narrative of what they can deliver for the business, then vote to decide:
Which are critical to do now?
Which are important but not urgent?
Which will you do later down the track and how long?
Which are low value and likely not really needed
Finalise the list of 5 BAU activities that will be reasonably low effort, with high return, contributing to your 3Ps, and in turn, to more rapid growth.
Activity: Getting our hands dirty
In the 1980s, the New York Times profiled a woman named Ruth Stout who was known as the ‘No work gardener’.
For decades, she grew thriving vegetables in her Connecticut backyard without ever digging, tilling, or weeding. Her secret? She layered thick blankets of hay over everything. No weeds. No back-breaking work. Just healthy, consistent crops.
But here’s what most people forget: Ruth didn’t start that way. Success didn’t happen overnight.
Her first few seasons were just like everyone else’s: full of weeds, constant clearing, and plants that struggled to grow. It was only after she spent time understanding what was slowing her down that she changed her approach.
She didn’t give up on gardening. She just figured out how to clear the path once and keep it clear.
That’s exactly what this part of our process is about.
We’ve chosen the ideas we want to grow (and that will help our business grow faster and healthier). But if we don’t deal with the weeds now, the hidden blockers, the clunky processes, the habits that drain momentum, we’ll spend more time wrestling with resistance than making progress.
This is our chance to prepare the ground. To remove what doesn’t belong, and create the right conditions for action to take root.
We’re not pulling apart the plan, we’re just pulling up what might get in the way of it working.
40 minutes
Even the best crops won’t thrive if weeds take over or the soil is too hard-packed. Every growing season brings its own obstacles, dry patches, broken fences, unexpected pests. In business, it’s not so different. Even great ideas can stall if we don’t take time to clear the path.
We’ve just chosen the quick BAU wins we want to explore first; the ones most likely to deliver strong returns across People, Place and Profit. But before we leap into action, we need to pause and ask: what might get in the way?
This step is about risks and obstacles to success. Spotting the issues now means we’re better prepared to address them when it counts so energy goes into progress, not patching problems later.
Take the do now and do later BAU quick wins identified earlier.
Don’t try to solve everything now, just capture the key insights. These observations will help shape the support strategies we build into the plan later.
The clearer the path, the stronger the results.
Use the same results form for this and the next activity.
Activity: preventing the weeds
Anyone who’s grown tomatoes knows this: even the healthiest plant needs a bit of structure. Without a trellis or stake to support it, the vine sprawls, the fruit gets trampled, and growth becomes a mess. But with the right frame in place — simple, steady, intentional — everything grows upward with less stress and more strength.
In business, even our best ideas need something to lean on. Quick wins still need the right kind of scaffolding; not full-blown project plans, but light-touch supports that help them stay visible, get traction, and grow in the right direction.
That’s what we’ll focus on now: what simple structures, rhythms or reinforcements would help these changes succeed?
We’re not planning yet, just identifying what support might be needed to give each idea its best shot.
20 minutes
Working through the same list of priority quick wins:
For each one, note below:
Brainstorm ways to remove or work around each barrier, whether through communication, clarification, support, or small shifts in how things are done and list down in the ‘mitigation’ field in the form below.
This might include things like:
The goal here is simple: we’re building the trellis now, so when it’s time to grow, we’re ready.
Having considered all of this, reassess the timeline, what’s a priority for right now and what isn’t, and note if you have now decided some shouldn’t proceed, or should be pushed back.
Activity: ready, set, plant!
There’s something deeply satisfying about reaching this point in a growing season: the soil’s prepped, the weeds are gone, the support structures are in place, and the seeds are ready to go. It’s not just theory anymore. It’s action.
And it’s not about complexity. Most good planting guides are one page. They show you what to grow, where to plant, when to water, and what to keep an eye on. That’s what we’re creating now, a clear, simple guide to help us get our quick wins in the ground and growing.
This plan isn’t about bureaucracy. It’s about momentum. Getting clarity, setting direction, and giving the rest of the team the confidence to move forward.
Now is the time to put the plan on paper.
Using everything we’ve explored today: the priority quick wins, the potential barriers, and the support needed, complete your one-page Quick Wins 3P Growth BAU Plan below.
This isn’t about perfect wording or full project plans. It’s a short, sharp reference to guide immediate action.
For each quick win:
With this done, split up, and have each person responsible for a quick win jot down 5 short action points/milestones that will get them from now, the starting point, to having this inititiave/idea in place and functioning. Team admin, please also enter these into the form below.
You don’t need to overfill the page, just get the essentials down. Once this is captured, we can take it from here and support you to bring it to life.
Fill in the sheet below, one at a time, for each of the quick win initiatives.
10 minutes
We’re all done on session 3, that’s the first workshop in phase 2 completed, and we’re on our way to our plan for growth through the 3Ps! We are now really thinking in the right way, considering People and Place at every turn so we can better build enduring Profit through them.
