Workshops: five must-haves

Improve the odds of your workshop flying

Kevin McCullagh

Published on LinkedIn24 Nov 2024

My previous post looked at when and why to wield workshops. In this one, I outline five ways to make your workshop fly. Although each workshop is unique and tailored to specific goals, teams and timelines, focusing on these five factors will set you up for success.

1. Clear goal

A prerequisite for success is that the workshop team is focused on a clear and realistic set of workshop goals. Setting crisp objectives, outcomes, and outputsis about getting to the core of the challenge and communicating it concisely and cogently.

Ensuring the goals are realistic to achieve in a workshop (or two) requires a softer assessment of the knowledge and know-how in the room, and the time available.

Often, you may not be familiar with all of the workshop team or all the topics up for discussion. In that case you’d be well advised to meet with some of the key individuals to talk through the workshop’s goals, participants, hot topics and potential issues to help with this assessment.

2. Prepared team

Teams with a variety of experience, expertise, and opinions tend to be best at solving complex problems. This is what the writer Matthew Syed calls cognitive diversity, as opposed to demographically diverse teams – who could all share the same ‘echo chamber’ perspectives. To harness these highly creative teams, it is especially important to prepare them with not only a clear goal, but also to get them thinking about the challenge a few days before coming together.

Workshops get off to a much better start if the right people are in the room and have engaged with the topic in advance. The workshop’s goals and logistical details must be communicated before the workshop. In addition, some of the team should be briefed to prepare inputs, and all should be asked to do a pre-task that gets them thinking about the topic beforehand and produces more stimulus for the workshop.

3. Coherent flow

The team should clearly understand the goal and see a clear path to achieving it. The workshop agenda should orchestrate a logical flow of activities that deliver the objectives, outcomes, and outputs.

The activities should build on each other and follow a clear arc towards the ultimate goal. Designing the agenda is always a delicate interplay between inputs, discussion, tools and timings, and always benefits from plenty of reviews and iterations.

4. Priority conversations

The most pivotal factor of the five is ensuring that the right conversations happen while everyone is in the room. There will usually be too many issues to cover, so prioritisation is vital. Figuring out what these should be, happens in the preparation for and in the thick of the workshop. For the topics you identify beforehand, prepare relevant and inspirational stimuli for people to refer to and help make discussions more concrete and tangible.

As the team is likely to include a range of expertise, experience and opinions, the workshop is likely to prompt unexpected discussions, which should be welcomed as long as they are within scope. Polarised views often generate more insight and ideas, so encourage positive conduct and make time for the debate – even if that means dropping items from the agenda.

5. Punchy summary

One of the most underrated elements of a successful workshop happens in its immediate follow-up. The output of even the most productive workshop is usually incomplete and incoherent. There are usually some gaps, overlaps and contradictions, which often only become apparent when summarising the output. Resolving these with the project leader – and often adding additional thinking – adds significant value to the workshop and usually moves things forward significantly.

The next job is to boil it down into a snappy few slides. Sharing a clear, concise, action-oriented and swift summary with the workshop team is an invaluable way of maintaining the momentum created in the workshop.

There are no guarantees in life, and unexpected developments can disrupt and even derail workshops. But if you get these five factors right, you will improve the odds of your workshop flying.