Hey, happy Monday,
This thing of doing workshops I think is a little bit overused now.
Let me confess something, the fact that someone wants to do a workshop is not a good sign, it is rather a desperate attempt to get the project back on track, to fix something that is not working: the team.
Let’s be clear, those who know me know that I love leading workshops; in fact, I can say that I specialize in designing, selling, and leading them, especially in complex, enterprise organizations.
And this is not an easy way to make money and work only on the day of the workshop, quite the contrary… Preparing a workshop requires many hours of preparation, design, and negotiation with managers to make sure you get the maximum impact from the little time you have.
It’s true: once the recipe is designed, the workshop is replicable. That is why I teach my Design Sprint recipe and deliver the slides of my JTBD Design Sprint only to Alumni participating in the Strategic Acceleration Program at STRTGY.
But 99% of the time the workshops make up for one, or more, of the team’s dysfunctions.
The first major dysfunction is that there is often no team. There is just a group of people with a hot potato in their hands who have to produce any output before the next SAL (work progress status). It doesn’t know where to start or where to get to….
Second, and perhaps most important, is to understand that every innovation project is a mini change management project. Always.
It is impossible to innovate if people continue to work the same way. But to really change it is not enough for the CEO to impose it. It is necessary first to make sure, when opening the organization’s refrigerator, that all the ingredients for the cake are present.
- Vision – Why are we doing this?
- Skills – Do we have all the necessary skills?
- Incentives – What is the reward for commitment?
- Resources – Do we have enough tools, budget and time?
- Action plan – Who does what, by when?
This model was first represented by Mary Lippitt, president of the Enterprise Management Group and is known as the “Model for Managing Complex Change.”
As you see just having all the ingredients ensures your success.
Otherwise all others lead to a dead end or at least to unpleasant feelings that I am sure you have already experienced.
How many failed projects can you now explain?
Do you have all the ingredients for the next project?
No more Workshops!
In an ideal situation where the organization already has all the ingredients, workshops are perfectly unnecessary because everyone should be able to co-operate.
If there is a vision, the skills are there, the incentives are clear, the resources are there, and most importantly, there is an action plan. All that is left is to get to work and deliver your “little piece” within the deadline. Each little piece will fall perfectly as in the first level of Tetris….
What happens if something is missing? You have to meet…
We come together because
- the direction is not clear
- Because it is not clear who does what or if there is budget for an outside professional
- Private chats with “who-done-it-to-me”…
- Poorly distributed loads and working late
- PM doing only finger pointing…
But then-weren’t we supposed to meet to do it together?
And this is how the work is transformed. Look at this graphic I drew for you.
The workshop comes on the calendar and the pressure comes out of the pot with a liberating whistle… We can spend the time doing other things while waiting for the workshop.
Are you familiar with it?
Check-in vs. Workshops
There is a subtle difference that I think is critical to have in mind especially in this time in history in which more than half of the teams are not physically present in the office and remote workshops are approaching as output quality to physical ones but at a much lower rate.
It is the difference is that between collaborating e cooperate.
Collaborate means in fact “To participate actively together with others in mostly intellectual work, or in the accomplishment of an enterprise, initiative, or production… (Treccani)
Cooperate instead means “to contribute one’s own work to the achievement of an end” (again Treccani)
What happens when you only have the opportunity to collaborate in one workshop? That you have merely moved the problem forward and with that also the deadlines.
Meeting to work together, in unstructured meetings that are mistakenly called workshops or worse yet “co-creation”, means working at a fraction of the possible speed.
A team of 6 people will work at ⅙ instead of 6× if they are all stuck in a room trying to bridge one of the gaps I mentioned earlier.
Cooperating, on the other hand, is more than that. It requires autonomy, discipline, agility and the ability to make an impact.
The people who work with you are there because they enrich the team with skills that would be impossible to find, with the same quality and speed of execution, in one person.
Imagine what it would be like to work if everyone could work independently and meet often but for a very short time simply to check in?
In check-ins, you don’t have to work in the project but on the project to make sure everyone has the resources to finish it in the best possible way.
So is the Workshops really enough?
Not a chance! Workshops are the least expensive medicine for
- Reduce dysfunction in teams
- Bridging the technical and design debt
- Return independence to individual team members by allowing everyone to have the same quality and quantity of information
Frameworks and Canvas are the vitamins. -> alone serve little purpose except to speed up reactions.
Workshops are the pain killers -> when something is wrong, you take one, you are immediately better, and you can improve what you were doing.
How do you see it?
Good cooperation.
👋🏻
