Belated Ask Why Waza Blog

Better late than never

In finishing off the “Tech’ing up the office” Waza writings for this year, I was reminded that I had a half finished blog about last years “Ask Why” Waza.

So before it goes cold again here it is.

Asking Why in front of Wellingtons Te Papa

At the end of August 2019, EndGame had a Waza. We wanted to try something different from our previous Wazas, instead of having a theme “question” and have people answer it, we started with the why!

Right, so this time instead of coming up with a theme question that everyone pitched an answer to, we had everyone pitch a powerful empowering question. The idea here was to not to limit ourselves to answers, but to start with the EndGame value Ask Why, and work forward from there.

So two months before the Waza day, we got everyone together at a company lunch and had everyone pitch their questions. 26 questions later, I basked in the amazing job that everyone had done (and we were only at the questions). I must admit that one of the reasons that I love Waza so much is that the team really raise to the challenge.

Once pitched everyone then chooses a pitch that they would like to work on and this is how we form teams. A week went past and everyone had put there name against one of the questions, and after a bit of shuffling the final questions were:

1. How can we make reducing waste/zero waste seem easy?
2. What are you voting for with your money?
3. Why does it take us so long to find the answers, when they are usually in the room?
4. What if you could have complete visibility over your health at all times?
5. How would office cats affect work culture?

The next step in the process was to refine the questions to a solution they could achieve in the 24 hours of the Waza day. The teams did this by devoting some time each week to doing user research, ideation, and planning. Finally this resulted in a plan, once again presented to the company by the teams. The plans for each of the questions were:

1. A survey to help you to work out one action you can take to get to zero waste.
2. An app that would let you choose which coffee shop meet your ethical needs.
3. An slack and VS code integration that would detect when you were stuck, and ask known experts in the company for help.
4. An experience that would give the impression on what it would be like to use a mobile app that tracks aspects of the users health.
5. A slack integration that would poll you for your happiness both before and after seeing cute pictures of cats.

At the end of the day each team pitched and I was so pleased with what had been created. We created these videos to capture each journey.

Team 1 — The Planeteers

Team 2 — Money Yoda

Team 3 — Who Knows

Team 4 — Health Hackerz

Team 5 — Help Meowt

And finally a montage to capture the distance in between.

I have so much fun doing these Waza and the feed back we get from the team is overly positive. It is great to see the team pull together over ideas and really create something.

If this sounds like fun then get in contact with me: andrew.cox@end-game.com