Fairway Sessions | Agile & Project Management Consulting

About This Workshop

Obeya is Japanese for "big room" — and the concept is deceptively simple: bring the right information, the right people, and the right conversations into one shared space, so that leadership decisions are made with real context rather than filtered summaries.

In practice, an Obeya room is a structured visual management environment that gives leaders and teams a shared, always-current picture of strategy, execution, quality, and flow. It replaces the weekly status meeting, the sprawling dashboard no one trusts, and the quarterly review that is already out of date by the time it is presented.

This one-day workshop teaches your team the principles, design patterns, and facilitation techniques needed to build and run an effective Obeya — whether physical, digital, or hybrid. Participants leave with a concrete design for their own Obeya room and the facilitation skills to run it from day one.

Best For

For leadership teams or programme teams that are drowning in status meetings, for organisations adopting lean or agile at scale that need a shared performance management space, or for any team that wants to replace information chaos with a structured visual system that drives real decisions.

Learning Objectives

Understand the origin and philosophy of Obeya and why visual management outperforms traditional reporting

Design an Obeya room structure calibrated to your organisation's strategy and operational reality

Create effective information radiators that communicate status at a glance without requiring explanation

Facilitate an Obeya meeting that produces decisions, not just updates

Identify and eliminate the most common Obeya design failures that turn the room into wallpaper

Adapt Obeya principles to remote and hybrid team environments

Common Challenges This Addresses

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Leadership spending 60% of meeting time getting status updates that should be self-evident

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Strategy and execution disconnected — teams delivering against outdated or unknown priorities

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Quality and flow metrics buried in reports nobody reads until a crisis surfaces them

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Portfolio visibility requiring manual compilation from five different systems

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Cross-functional coordination happening in ad hoc channels rather than structured shared spaces

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Decision latency caused by the right information not being in the room at the right time

Workshop Agenda

Why Obeya? Context & Philosophy

The session opens with the origin of Obeya in Toyota's lean management system and the evidence base for why shared visual context outperforms conventional reporting. Participants share their current information management challenges.

Anatomy of an Effective Obeya

We explore the four quadrants of a well-designed Obeya: direction (strategy and goals), performance (metrics and trends), execution (work in progress and blockers), and people (team health and capacity). Examples from real organisations.

Design Workshop

Participants design their own Obeya room in small groups, making concrete decisions about what information to display, how to structure the layout, and how to ensure the content stays current. Designs are reviewed and challenged.

Facilitation Practise

Role-play of a live Obeya meeting. Participants practise the facilitator role, learn the meeting rhythm, and develop the questioning technique that makes Obeya a decision engine rather than a status theatre.

Digital & Hybrid Adaptation

Practical guidance on running Obeya in digital-first and hybrid environments using collaborative tools. Includes specific Miro/Mural templates and tips for maintaining engagement with remote participants.