As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum strong enough, and I can move the world with one hand.” The leverage workshop is an approach to try different levers for a specific problem and solve the problem, identify potential or overcome challenges.
In this context, a lever is an effective action that produces a desired response.
Here is an example from purchasing: A supplier demands too high prices for his goods. One lever is to identify a competitor to whom I can give a portion of the sales. This pressure point leads to the fact that I can enter into negotiation with the original supplier and achieve more favorable prices with it. Thus, the lever is to build competition!
These approaches can also be found in the private sphere. Now, when their own child is once again not listening, parents like to use levers to achieve or punish a certain behavior. Some well-known levers include banning people from watching television or grounding them.
So what do leverage workshops look like in a business context:
The use of the lever workshops requires three elementary building blocks:
1. a concrete objective is necessary from the beginning (example: digital tools are used to reduce costs by 5% per year)
2. the implementation of the workshop usually follows a superordinate structural feature (e.g. product groups, organization, processes, product groups, etc.)
3. good information is necessary for the workshop. Individual preparation is important and so is the understanding about the methodology among the participants of the workshop.
If these conditions are met, the use of leverage workshops is a very powerful method to identify and define concrete actions from an idea.