Staple Yourself to Something

Choose this exercise

Purpose: Map the current sequential path of a single work item across roles to reveal actual handoffs, loops, and idle time.

Use it when: Use when a team disagrees on how work gets completed, when cycle times are unclear, or when onboarding people into a fragmented process.

Skip it when: Skip when designing an entirely new future process from scratch or when the work is purely creative and has no repeatable progression.

Group arrangement: Whole group working on a shared visual timeline, or two small groups mapping parallel items.

Timing: Source recommends 1 to 2 hours; this plan provides a compact 60-minute session for a single item path.

Materials and tools

• Roll of butcher paper or wide whiteboard space
• 1 pad of sticky notes per 3 participants
• 1 dark marker per participant
• Blue painter tape for posting paper
• Visual timer

Before participants arrive

1. Mount at least 8 feet of butcher paper horizontally on a wall at standing height.
2. Confirm in advance which specific single item the group will follow.
3. Write Point A on the far left and Point B on the far right of the paper.

Say this to open

Today we are going to follow one specific item through our process from start to finish. Imagine you are physically stapled to this item. We are not mapping what we wish would happen. We are mapping what actually happens today: who touches it, where it sits, and how it moves from Point A to Point B.

How to run it

1. Define the item and endpoints 10 minutes

   State the chosen item clearly. Draw a simple icon of the object at the far left edge next to Point A. Ask the room to verify Point A as the trigger event and Point B as final delivery. Record these boundary conditions on the wall. For example, the object is an incident report ticket; Point A is customer clicks submit, Point B is the ticket status changes to resolved.

2. Brainstorm major milestones 10 minutes

   Ask participants to write major process stages on sticky notes individually, one step per note. Keep notes to verbs and actors. Have participants place them along the wall timeline in rough chronological order. Group duplicates and agree on 5 to 8 core milestones.

3. Trace the step-by-step path 25 minutes

   Move chronologically from Point A toward Point B. For each milestone, ask the room: Who physically touches the item here? What action do they take? Where does it wait, and for how long? Draw the path with arrows. Add stick figures for people and clock icons for waiting time. If the conversation branches into edge cases or side policies, write them on a side parking lot labeled Off Track and return immediately to the primary item.

4. Debrief and capture bottlenecks 15 minutes

   Walk the completed visual map from left to right as a room. Identify where the item sits idle the longest and where handoffs reverse direction. Run the structured debrief questions and record agreed observations directly on the paper.

Debrief questions

• Where did the item spend the most calendar time doing nothing?
• Which handoffs caused the item to loop backward rather than forward?
• What difference between our official process and this actual path surprised you most?

Finished output: A completed visual wall map tracking one specific item from trigger to completion, showing every handler, action, and wait period.

Remote

Use a shared digital whiteboard with a wide horizontal frame. Place Point A on the far left and Point B on the far right. Use digital sticky notes for milestones and connector lines with arrowheads to show movement. One co-facilitator moves elements as participants speak to maintain pace.

Hybrid

Appoint a digital scribe to mirror in-room whiteboard drawings onto a shared digital canvas. In-room participants speak into an open microphone. Remote participants add sticky notes directly into an intake lane on the digital board, which the facilitator reviews and integrates at each step.

Access and participation choices

• Offer seated participants the option to call out steps or write sticky notes from their chairs while standing contributors place them on the wall.
• Participants may decline to speak aloud by passing their notes to a partner to post.

If the session gets stuck

Participants argue about the ideal process instead of mapping current reality.

Remind the room that improvements come later; ask specifically, What happened to the very last real item we handled?

The map keeps expanding into complex exceptions and rare edge cases.

Capture the exception on a separate parking lot note, tie it off, and refocus the group on the standard 80 percent path.

Terms used here

• Point A: The exact initial trigger event that creates or enters the work item into the workflow.
• Point B: The agreed terminal point where the item reaches its finished state and leaves the workflow.