After working agency side, and a stint at the BBC, I went freelancing to help fledgling product teams. I had one goal — build up their confidence in their facilitation skills and design processes so they felt empowered to take the reins after I had left. Ultimately, the goal was to make myself redundant from the team. One of my earliest gigs was contracting at a bank. After running a few workshops with their design team, I kept getting asked the same question: “How do you know what kind of workshop to run and when?” I realised that I couldn’t give a straightforward answer. The truth was, I’d have a feeling of what might work from my bank of tactics (no pun intended) and try it out. But from my team’s point of view, it looked like I knew what I was doing. I wanted to answer their question, even if I couldn’t be around to help them. So I put all of my tactics into a deck of cards with a simple set of questions that helped people find the right one. Now today, Workshop Tactics is used by teams all across the world. I’m proud to know from the success stories our customers send us, that I’m helping them feel more confident running workshops. Then we accidentally became a publishing business! I realised quite quickly that this format could apply to so many different areas of expertise. But it was naive of me to think I could write an entire library of different topics! So I turned the focus of Pip Decks to help other great practitioners and experts download their brains into our premium card deck format. Now they too can help you feel more confident by having the answers at your fingertips - and a solid structure to always work from - from workshops, to storytelling, to design and beyond. The most recent addition to the Pip Decks library is Storyteller Tactics by Steve Rawling, which raised a whopping £73,085 on Kickstarter! With many more decks in development for launch in 2022, I can’t wait to share them with you.