Workshops as Catalysts for Change

Raise your hand if you have found yourself in a meeting that felt like an energy black hole. 🙋🙋

A study conducted by otter.ai found that employees spend over one-third of their actual working hours in meetings. When these meetings are poorly run, the effects are significant: people feel disengaged, frustrated, and exhausted.

For companies of 100 people, cutting unnecessary meetings would save nearly $2.5M per year and for companies of 5,000 people the savings rise to over $100M per year.

Source: otter.ai study

As a Product Manager, I spend about 15 hours in meetings every week on average. Given all those stats, I became obsessed with optimizing my collaboration time and buried myself in YouTube videos, courses, and articles to learn techniques to improve how I can better work together.

At their core, meetings are all about collaboration. Whether it’s making decisions, brainstorming solutions, or tackling problems, getting together to talk things through is key. Without clear goals and someone to guide the group, meetings can quickly go off track. As a result, often meetings end with the plan to just have another meeting.

So how can we make these exchanges meaningful?

The answer is ✨ workshops ✨!

What is a workshop?

Workshops are step by step systematized sessions that allow groups of people to make decisions.

Jonathan Courtney , CEO of AJ&Smart, a leading facilitation and innovation studio based in Berlin.

A few principles set workshops apart from regular meetings.

Ok enough context-setting! Let's dive into 4 of those principles.

Principle #1: Visualize the Discussion

The human brain can recall about "7 plus or minus 2 items," according to the American psychologist, George Miller. In typical meetings, information gets shared but not captured, making it easy to forget and hard to build upon. This can lead to overlooked key points and conversations going off track.

💡Pro Tip #1: A small change I implemented is using a basic Miro board to jot down ideas as people discuss. I then share the board with the team so they can see all the topics in an organized way. This simple trick makes a huge difference. It helps participants revisit specific topics, highlight ideas, and collectively decide where to delve deeper.

Principle #2: Sequence the Discussion

Say goodbye to circular discussions with this principle. One of the characteristics of a poorly-run meeting is that discussions lack a coherent path, with people jumping from one idea to the next without logical progression. As facilitators, it's our job to guide participants through a clear journey.

💡Pro Tip #2: I'm a huge advocate for meeting agendas, not only because they provide a roadmap for attendees, but because they force the facilitator to carefully plan the sequence of discussions. Consider the points of divergence and convergence: divergence is when ideas are generated, convergence is when you focus on a smaller subset of those ideas. Bad meetings often have too much divergence and not enough convergence.

💡Pro Tip #3: If the meeting is more adhoc and lacks an agenda, you can organize the stickies from the prior step together as a group: "Hey team, these are all the topics we discussed so far. We can't and don't need to solve everything right now. At a quick glance, what stands out for us to focus on in this conversation?" A simple check-in and steering of the conversation will go a long way in making the session more effective.

Principle #3: Source Ideas Effectively

Engage every voice. If you have invited someone to the meeting it is your job to capture their input and utilize their expertise. Meetings can derail because of personality clashes: the interrupter, the one with many ideas, the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) having the final say, and so many more reasons. It's important to get varied data from participants, which can be achieved if you can reduce group think, idea contamination, and source ideas from all participants without bias.

💡Pro Tip #4: To achieve this, use the "Together, alone" method- popularized by Jake Knapp, the author of the book, Sprint, which explains the Design Sprint process he ran at Google Ventures. In the together, alone mode participants have some quiet time to put down their ideas, next these are anonymized, and often, they are voted on for further discussion.

I used this in a project where I wanted my engineering team to capture their current process of how they complete a certain activity. By doing a simple task flow exercise silently, the team did not get influenced by each other. We learned that each member has nuances on how they go from start to finish, which led to a rich discussion later.

Principle #4: Always Finish with a Decision

We often spend most of our time discussing and very little time, if any, making decisions and ending strong. This is one the biggest reasons a follow-up meeting is set. Failing to allocate decision-making time can turn a productive collaboration session into something unproductive.

💡Pro Tip #5: When you run a workshop, appoint someone to be the Decider. If there is no such individual, ensure you still end with a decision. This can be done through a voting system, an Impact x Effort matrix that prioritizes ideas effectively, or an Accountability Assigner.

💡Pro Tip #6: A useful guideline is to allocate 5 minutes for wrapping up, recapping, and assigning next steps for every 30 minutes of meeting time. For a 30-minute meeting, spend 25 minutes on discussion and 5 minutes on a "commit" phase. For a 60-minute meeting, spend 50 minutes on discussion and 10 minutes on a "commit" phase. This timing works well for well-run meetings; otherwise, you might need more time. It's always better to allocate extra time for the "commit" phase and finish early than to not have enough time, leaving participants hanging.

And voila! These 4 principles and 6 pro tips are guaranteed to elevate your collaboration game. They are simple and with a little bit of practice will become second-nature. What I love most about workshops is their versatility. Once you master the basics, you will be able to adapt on the fly based on the room's dynamics and successfully achieve your outcomes.

Now, let's take your collaboration to the next level. 💪🏽