HELPFUL ADVICE ON DITLOS

SAVE TIME

The best time to create a DITLO is when you want to save time repeatedly explaining the same complex process over and over. A DITLO is a visual storyboard that explains a process in a step-by-step visual manner. This adds clarity and improved understanding throughout your team.

CHOOSE WHO’S STORY YOU WANT TO TELL

With a DITLO you’re in command because you can choose the perspective from which the story is told. Do you want to tell it from the point of view of the people, the technology, or the organisation as a whole? Think about your audience, who are you are trying to sell your vision to? So if it’s an organisational re-structure, do DITLOs for each level of staff involved. If you’re managing the introduction of new technology, then do it from the point of view of that.

‘BEFORE’ AND ‘AFTER’ DITLO

Add depth to your DITLO by showing a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ state for your DITLO. To encourage your team to embrace the process it’s often easier to agree on the content for the ‘before’ phase, and then move on to the more complex ‘after’ state.

A DAY DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A DAY

We’ve done numerous DITLOs, but very few are actually focused on a 24hour period. So consider how long the cycle of your project is? Here are some examples of time spans we have done DITLOs for:

A) A tunneling project covered 8 strands of work over a 17 week period.
B) A train refurbishment took 40-day and was repeated for 100+ trainsets
C) London Fire Brigade wanted to break down the first 4-hours of an incident response.

KICK START YOUR WORKSHOPS

Kickstart your workshops by creating the main characters (be that people or technology) before you start the first one. Not only does this save a great deal of time in the first workshop, but it also signals that you have set your intent on where you’re going.

BE MINDFUL OF OTHERS BACKGROUNDS

When creating the characters, it’s important to sketch a set that reflects the diverse world that we live in, people of BAME groups, LGBT+ people, and those with hidden and non-hidden disabilities. Even if your workforce is currently lacking diversity, do you really want to perpetuate this image?

KEEP IT GENERIC

In the early days of doing DITLOs, we’d just created a range of characters and forms of transport to be used in the workshops. We thought they were fairly average illustrations of people from all walks of life, but the client viewed it differently, and of course, they were right. You see, the group of illustrated people we’d created were all a bit too attractive and driving cars that looked like Aston Martins. The assembled audience kept making jokes about which character was dating which others, and how much they were being paid to be able to afford the fancy car. Whilst it was all taken in good jest at the time, it did distract the workshop attendees from the task at hand.