Is there workshop magic in your meetings?

Is there workshop magic in your meetings?

For a second, close your eyes and place yourself in Orlando’s Universal Studios at the height of the August summer. It’s hot and humid, packed full of parents and kids navigating the landscape. You are in one of those never-ending lines to experience Harry Potter’s magic. Every time you turn a corner you hope to see the carriages pulling up but instead you see a sea of heads in that all too familiar winding pattern. Out of the corner of your eye, you spot the signpost that reads “about 45 mins from here”, ugh. The line drags on and on. Some commotion seems to be happening just ahead of you in the line. Someone’s Dad seems to be losing his s#*t, he’s having a meltdown, he turns and storms out of the line leaving the accompanying kids staring in awe. Room by room you proceed and the line continues, finally, the end approaches. The moment has arrived and you are being buckled in, you are off into the world of wizards and muggles. For 5-7 mins you are utterly transformed into the wizard tales of Harry and friends.

You emerge exhilarated, excited, alive and everyone is saying “let’s go again!”.

There’s a remarkable difference in the part of the experience that is standing in line for the ride and being on the ride itself, right?

Standing in line is the boring stuff, the dull routine, it feels like a waste of time and can bring out frustrations and bad behaviors in people (in fact that dad who stormed off in the story above, I’m married to him – a post for another day). On the other hand, being on the ride itself is amazing, uplifting, and liberating. People are jumping up and down and bouncing as it finishes, literally. We disembark wanting more, excited and bursting to go again. We can’t wait to share the experience and talk about how fantastic it was!

We don’t often talk about the standing in line part unless it’s to lament how long and exhausting it was or to tell the story of the dad’s temper tantrum.

When I think about meetings and workshops in organizational life it’s like a portkey to this Universal Studio experience.

Most organizational meetings feel like the “standing in line” part, they are inherited rituals of bringing people together. Allow me to share a selection, from my experiences, of damaging characteristics that align meetings to “standing in line”:

PURPOSE:

Often we don’t know why we have this meeting, when it started, or who initiated it. The meeting itself has no clear purpose and even less connection to the higher organizational purpose.

PRODUCT:

Nothing. Nothing is done, nothing is resolved, nothing has progressed, nothing is decided, nothing is produced.

PEOPLE:

There are people in the room who don’t know why they are there and who don’t want to be there. Key people are excluded, and the people who are there have no role or aren’t invited to contribute. There are ridiculous behaviors at play, from outright power dynamics to blaming and shaming others to passive-aggressive side comments and language that excludes others. No one intervenes to correct this. Perhaps, there is a meeting chairperson, but h/she is most concerned about what they need to say or leading the group to their ideas. People aren’t listening, they are constantly interrupting (if they bother to speak) and directing the conversation towards their hidden agendas. They are not focused, they are multi-tasking and continually distracted by their devices. They spend their time thinking about dinner, all the other things they could/should be doing or just how much longer before this ends.

PROCESS:

Most often a time-boxed checklist of items, which may or may not have been shared with the invitees and most of which never get discussed thoroughly enough for a thoughtful decision to be made. Or worse yet, a checklist of items that never even get discussed, that get rolled over week to week for the foreseeable future. It’s all tell, one way. Little or no engagement of the minds in the room. It goes on for what feels like an eternity. There was no preparation, there is no information shared in, before, or after the meeting, and there is no visible capture of outputs, actions, or decisions. Oh and did I mentioned it started 20 mins late.

PLACE:

A large square table in the same 4 walls people see every day. Or more recently TEAMS or Zoom conferencing, with a selection of people who won’t or can’t turn on their video or audio plus all the extra tech challenges of virtual working; “you’re on mute”, “we are losing you”, “you’re frozen”.

I’m sure we could go on and on, this isn’t all-inclusive.

However, in contrast to meetings, in organizational life, well-designed and facilitated workshops can be the “exhilarating” ride from my Universal story. Let’s explore how.

PURPOSE:

Workshops kick off with a clear purpose, it’s central to ensuring their success, they rarely happen without one. Even before concrete planning begins, just the recognition that “we need to have a workshop” means we see a need or an emerging purpose. We take time to set the context and to position the workshop in alignment with the higher purpose of the team or organization. Great workshops will even weave organizational values into the design and subtly reinforce the desired culture that the organization is trying to build.

PRODUCT:

As time and care are taken to shape the workshop we get clarity about the tangible outputs to be produced and the softer outcomes of what we would like the experience to feel like for the people in the room. These are overt, shaped by, and shared with the attendees even before the workshop takes place. In great workshops, the product is more than the outcomes or outputs created, the product extends to igniting in attendees the motivation and perseverance to make change happen in service of the organization’s mission.

PEOPLE:

Workshops consider carefully who needs to be in the room and if they are the right people to contribute to the broader purpose.

Taking this a step further we then think about the roles required for workshop success and how we can engage different meeting participants to take on these roles. A critical role often included in workshops, and not found in meetings, is the role of the facilitator. The inclusion of this role creates a focus and performance shift for participants. Facilitators offer an external perspective, their distance from the day-to-day happenings and conversations give them a completely different view.

Their distance permits them to ask questions that others may not feel comfortable asking and to challenge participants to reframe assumptions they may not even recognize.

Facilitators work to deepen the initial ideas of the purpose and products for the successful workshop before the session even begins.

Facilitators play an additional role that contributes to workshop success, they create and hold space for participants to do their best thinking. They create a container that reduces the fear we associate with entering into ambiguity. And in doing this they course correct and manage the behaviors that disrupt and damage the safety of this container. Having someone dedicated to protecting this container allows the group to go to places that they otherwise cannot reach, it encourages them to deepen their thinking and to be authentic and vulnerable with their contributions.

PROCESS:

The process before, during, and after for a meeting and a workshop can be quite different. As mentioned before, the most ineffective meetings have little or no preparation by the chairperson or attendees, they are a forced following of a timeboxed checklist and lack clarity about what is to be done next, by whom, or why.

Workshops invite deliberate preparation. Participants are often required to start thinking about the keyframing questions of the workshop well before the session as they are interviewed and consulted about their desires, expectations, and roles. Facilitators think considerately about how participants and leaders should show up in the workshop, they coach and shape preparation activities accordingly. Facilitators spend time helping to turn inputs from pre-reads into inspiration prompts. Workshop preparation is intended to excite and attract attendees, pulling at their curiosities.

For workshops to be a success, facilitators dedicate a considerable amount of time and energy to designing the workshop experience.  Experience, not agenda.

While facilitators work to design a participatory flow of questions and activities that culminate in outputs that everyone can buy into, they also think holistically about how expectations, environment, and engagement come together in a meaningful collaborative experience for the attendees. When they design a workshop flow it is a thoughtful multi-faceted approach. Experienced facilitators also know that this flow is never what happens on the day itself, so they are nimble and flexible. They continually reshape their in-session plan to serve the broader context and conditions of the session.

Facilitators know the importance of opening and closing purposefully and powerfully. They ensure that everyone leaves the room with better understanding and clarity than when they arrived. Great facilitators hold group focus by designing variation into the session and use visuals and artifacts to strengthen alignment and unearth connections.

Workshops don’t end when the session ends or the time runs out. Workshops are often just the start of much more work to follow.

The best workshops leave people inspired and motivated to start making changes. Changes in their work, in their team, in their behaviors, and the organization.

PLACE:

Most workshops happen offsite, this provides the potential to think creatively about how to use the gathering place to create both ease or comfort as well as creative stimulation for participants. Place becomes a key shaper of the experience.

Workshops are experiences thoughtfully designed to unleash collaboration and inspiration, leaving people empowered to make change happen.

We give them more care and attention than we do meetings, we plan them, we hold them to higher expectations of performance, we design them, and then we facilitate them (often with outside help).

Meetings deserve to be better.

They need more than a stroke of luck and an agenda to be valuable to the organization. We all know the costs of bad meetings, not just in terms of money and time but also in terms of damage to goodwill and the employee experience. Meetings are rituals, moments where people gather in a business, they are cultural touchpoints and should reinforce values and purpose. They should bring out the best in people.

Not all meetings need to be workshops but more meetings should be like workshops. We should be thoughtful about the experience we want people to have in meetings and purposefully design and facilitate with this in mind.

Written by Tricia Conyers, Founder Island Inspirations Ltd., INIFAC Certified Master Facilitator, and Certified Virtual Facilitator

More
articles

Scroll to Top

sign up for inspirations & gifts!