Rather than driving action, they leave participants without clear direction or means to move forward.
This is where my insights from Jonathan Courtney come into play, and particularly his framework for running effective and interactive, action-oriented workshops. He is passionate about them and insists they can revolutionize how teams collaborate and achieve meaningful results.
The problem
There are three common problems he noticed when working with some of the world's leading companies:
- Teams don't always know how to best start new projects. It's difficult for them to achieve consensus regarding what initiatives should be prioritized.
- There is no unified, or robust system for how to run their projects, resulting in lack of alignment. Trying to decide on how to best run a project ends up taking longer than actually doing the work.
- Finally, poor communication throughout the project ends up killing creativity because office politics and hierarchies get in the way. The by-product becomes a lot of wasteful talk with little progress and discussions that go nowhere.
This results in disheartenend and frustrated professionals doing lots of "busy work" but with little actually getting done.
What is the goal of a workshop facilitator?
The singular goal of a workshop facilitator should be to help people unlock their superpowers. According to Jonathan, when people don't have to think about what processes to choose, they can focus on doing the work they were meant to do. With an effective workshop framework, a good facilitator should be able to land into any dysfunctional team and turn it into a powerhouse.
Become a good workshop facilitator
According to Courtney, there are four key steps to becoming a good facilitator.
- Mindset and theory - You have to understand the basic principles and mindset of workshop facilitators or "workshoppers".
- Facilitation skills - You have to develop your ability to lead a team of any size through a workshop confidently along its entire duration. This requires improvisation skills, ability to manage team dynamics, and a keen eye for participants' energy levels.
- The toolkit - Having tens of exercises to choose from and knowing how to combine them is a huge advantage. This will let you create even some of the most complex types of workshops with a lot of moving parts.
- Widely used & proven workshop recipes - There's no need to reinvent the wheel as there are some tried and tested workshop principles already out there such as the Design Sprint. Having a handful of flexible recipes in your pocket means you won't have to create custom workshops from scratch.
In this post we'll mainly focus on the first step.
Facilitation principles
The core principles that guide Courtney when designing a workshop are:
- Together, alone
- Everything is anonymous
- Creativity is a nice to have, but not essential
Above can feel counter-intuitive at first, but when you look deeper, they make a lot of sense.
Together, alone
Even when people sit at the same table, they should work individually. They shouldn't discuss or brainstorm next steps even if they work towards a common goal. They shouldn't speak or negotiate on how to best move forward. This counterintuitive idea is one of the best ways to avoid some of the major issues that pop up as part of team dynamics where extroverted people take all the control, and decision-makers start influencing everybody else in the room. The group's tendency will be to go along with the opinions of such members, or worst of all, end up not having any opinion at all. When you work "together alone", you don't get influenced by colleagues, and in turn, this leaves you time and space to work through a solution.
Everything is anonymous
In the same way as with the principle of: "Together, alone", this one has the added benefit of removing any bias towards a preconceived piece of the solution, helping participants be more adventurous. When drawing sketches, team members ideally shouldn't know who came up with what. When drawings or ideas are submitted anonymously, team members can vote without knowing who came up with them, helping everything stay more objective.
Creativity is nice to have, but not essential
Especially various design-thinking workshops have pushed the idea of requiring creativity. However, this results in putting a lot of people off who don't consider themselves creative. This is why workshops should be designed in a way where participants that don't consider themselves to be artistic or "designery" can still produce interesting, innovative and creative solutions. Workshops should ideally replace the need of being creative by providing a conducive environment and a step-by-step system to experiment with ideas while being guided every step of the way.
Workshop supplies
It is a good idea to keep some office supplies handy for an in-person workshop. This one is taken directly from Courtney's Workshopper playbook:
- Square sticky notes (two different colours)
- Rectangular sticky notes (yellow)
- 1.5 large black markers per participant (bring more than needed)
- Two different colors of sticky dots for voting
- One empty sketching notebook per person
- A block of plain printer paper
- Adhesive whiteboard roll
- Whiteboard markers
- A timer clock
The 4C's framework
There's a clear pattern to most workshops out there, and using Courtney's four C's will fit any variation regardless of the topic, length or outcome:
- Collect
- Choose
- Create
- Commit
Collect
In the beginning, there's always a stage having to do with infromation collection, be it challenges, ideas, inspiration, data, or anything else. This information must be visualized for all the participants. During the collect phase also the scope of work gets defined. This is especially important when the problems to solve are not all that clearly defined.
Sample exercise:
One exercise that is useful for the collect stage is the sailboat. The outcome of this exercise should be a categorized, non-prioritized list of challenges and issues. The duration is 30 minutes. Materials needed for the exercise can be the following:
- A whiteboard or a flip-chart.
- A block of square sticky notes per participant
- One sharpie per participant
A preparatory step is to draw the sailboat, but as their first actual step, the team is tasked to think and work on what is moving the team forward, and what are the positive things (wind in the sail). Taking around 10 minutes, this serves as a nice preparatory warm-up before jumping into the challenges.
Next, the team moves over to the more negative part having to do with the challenges and problems. This is done in a more anonymous fassion. After 8 minutes of thinking and writing down, the team members are asked to stick their notes to the bottom (next to the anchor) in a rapid and random manner.
As the third step of the Collect-phase, after the facilitator identifies a single sample common group and adds a sticky note to it, the team is tasked to help categorize the rest of the sticky notes into logical groupings during the next 10 minutes. This is not about choosing what to prioritize to be worked on as that is done later, but the outcome is a vertical logical grouping of topics.
Choose
Having collected enough data, it's time to select what to focus on and what to leave out. The team must know what it is working on so it doesn't create solutions to wrong or irrelevant challenges. During the choose stage, the workshop develops a clear direction that acts as the foundation for everything else.
Sample exercise:
One suitable exercise for this stage is the dot voting, where eight sticky dots are given out to each person. The outcome of this exercise is a prioritized list of challenges or ideas. Here, during the 8 minutes each team member thinks independently without having to discuss the topics with each other. Each member can vote also for their own sticky notes, and indeed, they can put as many sticky dots on each identified challenge or idea as they want. But remember, nobody is allowed to talk!
As the follow-up step taking approximately two minutes, everyone sits down and helps the facilitator arrange the ideas with most votes vertically in a descending order.
These issues, ideas or challenges can then be converted into opportunity questions or "How Might We's" (HMWs).
Create
Once everyone is on the same page regarding the scope of work and other relevant information, it's time to create solutions. The solutions themselves shouldn't be final or even very detailed. What's important instead is creating a multitude of potential solutions.
This is where the team begins to truly flex their solution and ideation muscles.
Even as there are many exercises for the create stage out there, it's recommended to use something along the lines of mass idea generation at first, and only then idea prioritization. Among others, one good exercise for this is Coutney's 10-for-10.
Commit
Workshops are useless without actionable takeaways. Unless the workshop is only aimed at inspiring people, the commit phase is about the facilitator helping team members commit to a small number of solutions to be executed.
Because ideas are worth nothing without execution, a system for committing to ideas becomes critical. The goal here is to take our prioritized solutions and create a plan to actually make them happen.
A fitting exercise for this stage is the action board which uses the effort-impact matrix and combines it with a simple system for creating actionable tasks.
Because this is the last exercise in the last phase of your workshop in this case, you should really end it one on a high-note and give everyone a big high-five! You can also reflect on how much progress you've achieved together!
If you liked this post or have any questions, consider subscribing to my occasional hand-made newsletter below. Talk to you soon!