Designing The Perfect Workshop

Why Workshops? And How Long Should They Take?

You will have seen, from the previous articles that we are great believers in workshops. So much more can be accomplished in well-designed workshops than is possible in roundtable or more conventional discussions. One Undersecretary of the Navy said that we accomplished in 45 minutes with a group of 20 senior people (15 hours total) what would have taken him 100 hours with a conventional approach.

Many people believe that anyone can design and run a workshop. Not true!   Effective and successful workshops require time and attention to design in order to maximize the participation of, and output from, the participants – especially when those participants are General Officers or C-Suite Executives.

There is a lot to accomplish in vision and strategic planning workshops, and many people do not allow enough time to accomplish their goals. This chapter will provide some guidelines for planning and executing an effective workshop. While the workshops that I describe below are for strategic planning, we use the same design for innovation workshops, futures projects and more.

Plenary Sessions/Whole Group Sessions

The main purpose of plenary sessions should be to inform. Some people believe that they can accomplish useful discussions in plenary, but this is not the case. In this type of session, the format is that of a conference or seminar with one speaker or a panel that is speaking to the whole audience. If there is time following the presentation, then the audience may ask questions or make comments. This is a standard approach for starting a workshop. Think of it as an orientation, when all the participants need to be informed about what is going to take place.

In plenary sessions, the intake—or “data rate”—is very slow, and everything takes place sequentially. We do not recommend plenary sessions for exploration of ideas.

Plenary sessions can also take place during or after a workshop in which the large group has been divided into two or more small groups in order to work in parallel. Working in small groups increases the data rate significantly, and it enables every participant to have a say, which increases commitment to the end result. In this type of format, each group has a few minutes to brief the results of their group discussions to the other groups, and a few minutes for questions. Then, if there is time at the end, there is a short, general discussion of all the groups’ results from their working sessions.

Small Group Sessions

These sessions are where the real work gets done. Small group sessions are usually convened to explore a range of ideas, concepts, issues, situations, implications, and so forth. The keyword is usually “exploration.” They accomplish more results by working in parallel, they make best use of people’s expertise and interests, and they ensure that everyone has the opportunity to make their ideas known. They also provide the individuals with more time to get their ideas across and, since people like to speak, they feel as though they have accomplished more—and therefore are more committed to the outcomes.

Small groups can range from 2 to 10 people; the ideal number is about seven. However, due to time constraints, we sometimes have to trade off smaller numbers for time, as we will explain later. In our workshops, we sometimes have many different sizes and numbers of groups—sometimes up to six or seven groups working in parallel—so we have to ensure we have enough time for them to work on the topic and to present their findings to each other. The paragraphs below provide some guidelines about how to structure times.

There is frequently a debate among ourselves as the consulting team, and/or with our clients about how to structure the small groups. Say we have six topics to address: Is it better for all the groups to work on all six topics at the same time, or for two groups to work on three different topics each, or for three groups to work on two topics each? In the case of all groups working on all the topics, we get a greater breadth of ideas covered on each topic, since each group will have a slightly different perspective; however, time constraints mean they can only cover them very shallowly. When each group works on different topics in the same time, the results lack the different perspectives mentioned above, but they have much greater depth. We will illustrate this with numbers later.

There are three considerations for small group sessions:

• How the topics cluster, if at all.
• The desired range of exploration (breadth and depth).
• How much time there is for the whole workshop.

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