#7 There are four things you can do in a workshop
How you can select the best workshop activities for your session by grouping them into four categories: Dream, Map, Distill, and Prioritise.
Welcome back to the Facilitation Studio!
In this issue, we'll explore how you can select the best workshop activities for your session by grouping them into four categories: Dream, Map, Distill, and Prioritise.
When I started out facilitating, I was obsessed with workshop activities. I bought books, printed out and bound countless pdfs (yeah, I'm a geek for printed stuff). I had spreadsheets documenting every time I used each activity and how it went, modifications I should make next time and context-specific things to think about… I was activity obsessed.
That makes sense; the activities feel like the main part of what we do as a facilitator. Activities are actually the easiest part of what we do. Just google "Design workshop activities", and you'll see thousands of options. The skill comes in what activities you choose to use and in what order.
The main recurring theme of this series is always going to be "look up", look away from activities and towards the process. That's a differentiation I'll return to activities-methods-processes (a little more directly soon). For now, I will simply push you to think beyond dot-voting or brainstorming and ask:
What am I trying to achieve
Map, Distill, Dream and Prioritise
There are four things you can do in a workshop. You can dream. You can map. You can distil. You can prioritise.
As I've evolved my practice and run more and more sessions with a broader array of people, I've found that every workshop activity naturally falls into one (or more) of four categories. And every workshop intent, whether creating a future vision or understanding the detailed structure of an engineering model, is achieved by doing the same four things in different orders. By keeping these categories in mind, you'll find multiple activities that will fulfil your purpose and help you achieve your workshop goals.
Map - I want to understand the context of the challenge
Outside Designland, a map is a source of contextual knowledge. It doesn't tell you what way to go, but it tells you what the landscape will be like if you travel down any given footpath. Inside Designland, we've twisted a map to be a linear thing, a description of a single route. I want you to focus on that first meaning here.
Mapping is about visualising and sharing information. It's about laying out everything we know and don't know so that everyone in the team works from the same understanding. Mapping helps you create a shared experience and identify and fill the gaps in your shared knowledge. Mapping will bring to the fore lots of context, some of which may prove irrelevant. It may, however, surface the kernel of genius, those beautiful paths you'd never spot from the main track.
The map you create will likely be hyper-specific to your team, filled with in-language and references only they will understand. Therefore, anyone involved in future phases that use this map must be here for the creation.
To bring new people into the map that you've created. You need to use the distil phase, which we'll go over next.
Tools for mapping
Distill - I want to understand what this means.
In distillation, you take a wide array of materials, say 21 litres of water and 2.5kg of barley, and reduce it to the essence. In the above case, 750ml of whisky.
Distilling is where you take turn knowledge into information. You will focus on the key points and themes that can be communicated in a shared language with the right stakeholders.
To continue the mapping analogy I used before, distillation is where you review the map you've created and identify the most interesting paths, the commonalities you see across the whole landscape, and what areas you'd like to explore.
You can usually share the outcomes of a distillation activity with people who aren't in the room. It's often a good place to end a session and creates a summary you can use to kickstart the next workstream.
To make the most of the Distill activity, lead with a mapping activity to ensure a shared understanding of what's being discussed and use methods that encourage clarity and simplicity.
Tools for distilling
In-a-sentence structures like:
Dream- I want to create new ideas
Your dreams aren't (usually!) dangerous. You can take exciting paths and adventures without risk to your real body, but experience them as if you're there. In a workshop dream, you create a path and explore its possibility, pushing forward using the old improvisation trope of "yes, and".
Dream is the divergent phase where you create ideas and go wide. It's a phase where you develop multiple ideas. You can do this in any context, from strategic workshops to UX-focused workshops. The goal is to encourage participants to think in new directions, together or separately. You'll recognise this as closely aligned to the Green Hat if you've read the previous issues on de Bono's six hats.
In the Dream phase, creating a safe environment where people can express their thoughts without fear of judgment is essential. Encourage people to share their ideas and ask people to accept others' ideas as opportunities, not threats.
As with mapping, the results of a dream phase usually benefit from being distilled before being shared.
Tools for dreaming
Flipping the negative
Prioritise - what's the right way forward?
Collaboration is awesome. But making a decision as a group can be tricky. Making an informed, good and honest decision is even more challenging.
Just think about that last group chat you were dropped in, and someone asked an open question like "Where shall we go for dinner". My bet is that one of three things happened:
There was silence.
One person offered a "suggestion", and it became the decision.
Everyone chimed in, and chaos ensued.
Which way it goes depends on the social setup of your chat, and it's not to say the second two are wrong (I'm going to say the first one is always wrong). But none of those are objectively good ways of making an important decision. In a business context, you could view them as:
Paralysis
Highest Paid Persons Opinion (HIPPO)
Still chaos
Effective prioritisation lets you and your collaborators know the decisions that need making, on what basis they are being made, and how the options compare.
You'll quickly find the bulk of prioritisation is about defining the criteria by which a decision will be made rather than applying the criteria. As long as you get the requirements right, making the decision is the quick bit (which can make it quite a dramatic ta-da moment!)
It's essential to focus on the most critical information and make informed decisions based on that information.
Tools for prioritisation
Precedence (how-to incoming next week!)
Dot-voting (We'll come back to this dangerous activity soon)
Putting this into practice
You can set different cadences and rhythms to achieve your workshop goals by focusing on these four categories. Instead of being activity-led, ask yourself what you're trying to achieve and use that to select from the plethora of tools available.
Honestly, the further from "What are we going to do" and the closer to "Why are we doing this", you go in your facilitation thinking, the better, the more effective and the more nimble you'll become.
Until next week, Happy facilitating!
Excellent read and super useful for my practice! Thanks!