How to successfully design ANY workshop

The 4 phases and 3 states of thinking in every workshop

Any workshop goes always through 4 steps or phases (6 C’s) and 3 states and behaviours. Once you known them, you can successfully design and facilitate any workshop whatsoever with total confidence and make it work.

Drawing by Dave Gray from Gamestorming

Drawing by Dave Gray from Gamestorming

1. Connect and Collect

Every workshop needs to start with a phase of introducing the participants and creating a psychological safe place for all of them to connect, become a team and contribute.

Once the the people is onboarded and are “ON” then we gather and collect the information we are looking for from the participants collect such as challenges, ideas, data, inspiration, or anything that could come up in an open conversation.

The data collected then needs to be both visualised and standardised in sticky notes for all participants to see. This phase is where the scope of work for a project, the challenge and the context is defined.

The goal of the connect and collect phase is to both create a cohesive team and collect challenges and data from a them, then visualise it in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.​ This allows everyone on the team to be on the same page before deciding exactly what to work on, without any pointless or biased discussion.

In this phase the team has an open approach and uses divergent thinking or also called lateral thinking, meaning that the team creaties multiple, unique ideas or solutions to a problem that you are trying to solve. Through spontaneous, free-flowing thinking, divergent thinking requires coming up with many different answers or routes forward.

Drawing by Dave Gray from Gamestorming

2. Choose

Once enough information and data has been collected, it has been made visual and easy to understand, it is time for the team to choose​ a unique direction, what to focus on and what to ignore.

It is easier said than done. That might be one of the most difficult things for a group of people to do, is to agree and choose what to do and what NOT to do.

It’s important that the entire team really knows exactly what they’re working on and what is the expected outcome of the workshop of the so they don’t create solutions for the wrong or irrelevant challenges. The choose phase of the workshop gives clear direction and acts as a foundation for everything else.

In this phase the team has an exploring approach and uses emergent thinking, meaning that the team move towards completely unforeseen possibilities, that only become apparent when comparing and combining generated ideas.

3. Create

The goal of the create phase of a workshop is to generate lots of potential solutions to the prioritised problem, so they can explore, examine and experiment them . ​

This is where the team gets to use their creative and solution oriented skills.

At this point in a workshop, the team has collected and shared the relevant information and everybody’s agree and is onboard on on the same page with the focus and scope of work ahead. It is no time for team members to ​actually create​ solutions. We shifted gears here, going from PROBLEMS on phase 1 and 2 to SOLUTIONS mode.

Solutions don’t need to be final, or even well thought out or well planned, at this point it’s more about creating multiple potential solutions, focusing on quantity and not quality.

In this phase the team has still an exploring approach and uses emergent thinking.

4. Commit and Celebrate

Ideas and solutions are worth nothing unless they’re executed.

My own experience is that organisations don’t have a problem coming up with good ideas. The problem is that they can not agree on which ones to commit to, and execute and which ones to ignore. They don’t have standardised and formal systems for committing to ideas and seeing them through. They often try to do every idea at once and never do any of them well.

A workshop is useless without actionable takeaways, unless the goal was purely about inspiring the team. In the commit and celebrate phase, the facilitator helps the team to commit to a small number of solutions that will be prioritised, executed and discard others, while also helping the team define the next steps: who will be doing what and by when.

The goal of the commit to a small number of potential solutions to explore first, since the answer is always outside the room, and celebrate phase is to take the prioritised solutions and create a plan of action for actually making it happen.

Once we the team has committed to a clear direction and plan of action, it is time to be proud and celebrate such big of achievement. Give everyone a big high five and reflect on how much progress you made together.

In this phase the team has a close approach and use convergent thinking, meaning that the team focuses on reaching one well-defined solution to a problem. This type of thinking is best suited for tasks that involve logic as opposed to creativity, such as answering multiple-choice tests or solving a problem where you know there are no other possible solutions.

Summary

0. Problem 💩  → 1. Connect 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 → 2. Collect 💥 → 3. Choose 🎯 → 4. Create 💭  → 5. Commit 🧭 → 6. Celebrate 🥳 → 7. Direction & plan 👉 📝