#9 The road to a valuable workshop is paved with a single good intention
There is more than one way to skin a cat, so first one must understand the cat you wish to skin. This issue will help you understand the workshop you want to run.
Welcome back to the Facilitation Studio!
Since you're reading this, I suspect you also think workshops are an excellent way to bring people together to collaborate, address complex challenges, and come to impactful conclusions.
However, as we all know, a great workshop takes more than throwing people in a room with a vague direction and expecting them to make magic happen. Without clear aims and objectives, workshops can quickly become unfocused, with much of that latent potential being wasted.
To avoid that, there is one question that will set you off in the right direction. "What will you be able to do after?". Nine times out of ten, the answer is something along the lines of "The whole team will be aligned". You'll notice that this doesn't answer the question.
Today we will look at how you can lay the foundation for success by defining your goals and building towards your outcomes.
Laying the Foundation for Success
There is more than one way to skin a cat. So, to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point, you need to understand the cat you want to skin.
Understanding the goal and objectives of what you're trying to achieve is crucial to your success. It lays the foundation for everything you're trying to build on, whether designing your session or running a pre-defined one.
When you have clear intent, you and your participants will have a common understanding of what you're trying to achieve. This ensures everyone is working towards the same goal.
There are three parts of intent.
Goal
Critical questions
Outcomes
Start by defining your goal.
As a basic rule, if you can't explain what you'll be able to do after the session and why you can't do it already, you're not ready to plan your session.
The goal articulates why your workshop is happening. It explains the action(s) your workshop will enable you to take. Articulating this is more challenging than you might think. Resist the temptation to define the things you will create within the workshop, like alignment, ideas or a journey map.
Generally, when you first consider what the goal of your workshop is, you'll get an answer like: "To figure out what we should do to move forwards". This is a good start, but it needs some critical information.
A goal version of that statement could be, "The product team will be able to initiate cross-company action along an agreed strategic path." The shift that comes through framing the goal as a future action forces you to consider the information more deeply and dig into your and your co-collaborator motivations.
You now have a clear subject, "The product team". The point of the workshop is to enable the product team to do something.
You have an explicit action; "initiate cross-company action."
And the reason for it being a collaborative session is "cross-company" and "agreed on strategic path."
This framing gives a solid foundation from which you can start to plan and also sell your workshop.
Next, consider your critical questions.
Now you can articulate what the workshop will enable you to do; you can start mapping the questions you need to answer to achieve your goal. These will form the individual threads from which you'll weave the tapestry of your workshop agenda.
To create your critical questions, take your goal and work backwards.
To "initiate cross-company action along an agreed strategic path." what do I need to know?
I need to know what actions can be taken.
What do I need to know to "know what actions can be taken"?
I need to know what path we'll be taking.
What do I need to know to "know what path we'll be taking."
And so on until you have a clear starting point, which should be a question you can already answer (or find the answer to before the session). Then reverse it to form your agenda. Your questions could start to look something like this;
Critical questions:
What is the aim of our project?
What is our starting point? (Where are we now?)
What are the landmarks between now and the aim?
What is the best path for us to travel (based on what we know)?
What actions should be taken now?
Together these will lead us to our goal:
The product team will be able to initiate cross-company action along an agreed strategic path.
Finally, it's time to consider your outcomes.
Outcomes are the artefacts that'll help you answer your critical questions. Your questions don't always map 1:1 with an outcome; you'd be setting yourself up for a lot of work if they did.
Some of your outcomes might be throw-away; they're a means to an end but won't be referenced after. That doesn't mean they're unnecessary, but their value lies in the session, not in the documentation afterwards.
For the workshop we've outlined above, I'd lean towards two deliverables:
A vision statement (CQ1) supported by key horizon targets (CQ 2,3 & 4)
A set of key actions or challenges with metrics linked to the key horizon targets and owner/champion from stakeholders (QC 5)
To get those deliverables, you're going to go through a few rounds of ideation and refinement, so there may well be several levels of collateral, but that is the means to create these outcomes.
Now you're ready to share your intent.
Our initial invite would have said:
Please join us to figure out what we should do to move forwards. We'll be talking about vision and how we can get things going. If you have any information that will help us do this efficiently, please send it to me or put a call in my diary to run through it.
With a small amount of thought, we can now say:
Please join us for a collaborative session, after which the product team will be able to initiate cross-company action along an agreed strategic path.
During the session, we will create the following:
A vision statement supported by horizon targets
A set of actions or challenges with metrics linked to the horizon targets, with a defined owner/champion from stakeholders.
To get there, we'll explore:
What is the aim of our project?
What is our starting point? (Where are we now?)
What are the landmarks between now and the aim?
What is the best path for us to travel (based on what we know)?
What actions should be taken now?
If you have any insight or existing materials that will help us to answer any of these areas, please send them on to me or put a call in my diary to run through them; we want to build on our work so far, not reinvent the wheel!
That sounds better, doesn't it?
Bringing the goal, critical questions and outcomes together give you an excellent outline to share with stakeholders. It gives them a clear understanding of what value will be created in the session and why it's important. Getting stakeholders invested in those two points will go a long way to managing their expectations and creating investment.
It also gives you a better platform for requesting support and existing materials. Stakeholders can better assess the suitability of materials they might already have and will ign to share them with you in a way that feeds into your session effectively.
Now it's time to create the agenda.
One last thing to do before you run your session; time to go and flesh those critical questions out as activities! Now you can go think about crazy eights, service maps and presentations. We've defined the cat; it's time to think about how best to skin it. You've laid the foundations, and you're ready to succeed.
Until next time, happy facilitating!