Are you using workshops right?
I have a pragmatic and practical relationship with the role of workshops.
A workshop is not a creative explosion where everyone thinks new thoughts and develops new solutions and ideas.
It is still a very important mechanism. For two reasons.
1. In terms of creativity a workshop is not a ‘create brand new ideas’ exercise but a ‘let’s get these diverse experts into a room to look at the same problem from different angles, energize each others ideas and see if they can collaboratively open new solution spaces to find new answers to the problem’.. Unfortunately many workshops are designed to run like the former, like a wild horse postIt-marathon, not the latter.
2. Workshops are more often a coordination and anchoring exercise to gather knowledge / competence, create common understanding and commitment amongst the team.
At the Business Summit conference in Berlin in 2013 Stefano Mastrogiacomo, (https://www.teamalignment.co) pointed out that meetings are not bad, they are essential as they help people come together and create a shared language and a common understanding. This is true for workshops as well.
If you want to be creative, there are a range of other options that far succeeds workshops in efficiency and output. But if you want to build a project, organizing a workshop can be your super power.
- We can use workshops to involve decision makers and anchor the project
- To discuss and gather knowledge about the project from the point of view of each participants field of expertise / business unit
- To gain a shared language and a common understanding of the project
- To motivate decision makers to participate in the project and collaborate to secure its success
A workshop should not force people into being actors pretending to have imaginary insight into fields where they have little experience. You can’t just dream up insights and knowledge by putting people in unfamiliar places (e.g. discussing what the customers want — given that the participants are accountants, salespeople or top management — being confident is not the same as being right.). Asking people to articulate in detail something they are not experts in will generally lead them to conservative and cautious feedback — often not the goal of workshops.
“Forcing you to explain something, when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you towards the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice” — Malcolm Gladwell, PopTech
I can’t start to count how many times I have seen this trap play out in workshops, and it is imperative to avoid.
A workshop is a very important tool, but it has to be used right. PostIt explosions forcing people into the deep end taking a magic leap, impersonating experience and expertise they do not have won’t work. A workshop is a tool to tap into what is already there. To gather peoples expertise and insight into one room — and using the joint force of all as the power to succeed.
A workshop is a tool to tap into what is already there.
