Workshop techniques for facilitation.

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave?

Peter, I'm doing great. Full of energy. Finally, weekends coming, always full of energy at the end of the week, right? I'm so glad to hear it. It's uh it's good to be here in this close of the week. It is. It is. So, so we you you and I were just kind of connecting before we got up and running here. And uh you mentioned a topic which is really interesting. I mean, we both of us do this all the time, which is workshop techniques. How do we facilitate lots of people coming together? Um virtual, in person, whatever the challenge there, there are the the level of facilitation, skill around facilitation is getting higher and higher and higher, the expectations around that. So maybe let's just talk about some of our favorite facilitation practices that we're doing in in high-level uh workshops that you and I both have to deal with.

Yes, I I I think uh it's such an important part, and uh, and as we were talking about this and unpacking it earlier, we and we really started to unpack it. There's lots and lots to talk about in this area, and uh and lots of different spaces. We perhaps might need to spend more than one uh podcast on this. And I I think this this area of facilitation, especially in workshop techniques, there are certain pieces that I always like to make sure that we do, and uh, and one of those is this this uh making sure that you've put sufficient planning into it, that there's enough alignment, especially between you and the stakeholders that are bringing you in because they're they're bringing you in for a reason to make and they've got outcomes that they're looking for, and there are there's definitely um all sorts of things that we could potentially do, but finding the right things that are gonna get us to the outcomes that we're looking for is critical.

I I was just going to say I the the experiences I've had where workshops fell flat on their face, where participants were frustrated, and the kind of keeping everybody's attention was really, really difficult, fall into two camps. Number one, the most common reason that happens is lack of time to prepare. And and preparation is is I mean, it's weeks of time ahead of time. It's not necessarily weeks of preparation, but it you need to be looking at this several weeks ahead, many weeks ahead in some cases. And I think the second one is the objective, having a clear understanding of what the purpose of that workshop is. Uh, again, if that isn't clear, crystalline uh crystallized within the group and communicated to the group, that can really lead to mismatched expectations. Exactly.

And I and I find it's also very important that um when you're coming in, uh unless it's like a trade, particularly a training exercise, but if you're coming in to run a strategy session or to help people through determining and uh something and facilitating them through that process, it's it's best if it's the stakeholder is the one who's to providing what are the outcomes, is because they're providing it in their language and they're the ones who are there uh saying what it is that they want and they're communicating so that people are all on the same page as too. What are we here for? What are we trying to get to? What is what does that outcome uh look like?

Well, and and as a follow-on from that, and and maybe, and of course, this is an area both you and I spend a lot of time doing, so potentially there's a bias that I'm looking at this just because this is the lens I look at these sorts of things. The interpreter what I would suggest is that the the days of kind of everybody coming together and just having a conversation and brainstorming as a group without some structure in there, uh people aren't looking for that anymore. Whether it's a virtual or in-person, there needs to be structure to allow conversations to happen, to allow everybody to contribute, to allow ideas which are often squashed by the noise and the struct, you know, the extroverts in the room dominating the conversation. All of this requires structure, requires planning ahead of time facilitation, and that planning and ahead of you know, how do you break the groups down? How do you deal with um mixing the groups up? Do you you know how many people should be involved in any given conversation? All of those become com questions we need to address.

Yeah, if you've got if you've got multiple different um areas all up in a room, you don't want all those areas. If you're gonna break them into different groups, having them all sit with their own little cliques, you're not gonna get anywhere near as much value out of it as you as you will. If you start to mix people up so different perspectives get shared, and you start to build more conversation and alignment around those different areas. And and uh that other part of that is just breaking people up into smaller groups so that uh you do give people more opportunity to speak. If you've if you've got a if you've got 20 people in a room, um the then you it will almost certainly be dominated by whomever has the most extroverted personality and uh who wants to do the most talking and uh will he will dominate the conversation or she.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think this is something that um was was has been known for m decades, but was somewhat ignored for a long time, and you would bring 20 people together and people would it's almost like a debate. People would put their cases forward, the next person would put their case forward, and it was a back and forwards debate and conversation. Expectations now are are small groups really drilling into a topic, and the the key things, as you're highlighting, is number one is when the groups get above four, five, six people, you're now automatically beginning to lose the attention of some of the people in that group. So there's a there's a a maximum size for those discussion groups that have to be understood and addressed. And then the second thing is that diversity, and with diversity, we want to break up the I normally work with this group of individuals, so how do I break that up so I'm in a group with diverse experience, uh, knowledge, needs in that group, so we get some bright ideas, but it also we need to do a little bit of introduction there as well, because very often we've we've got to break the ice and smooth that out so that they can get into a conversation.

Yeah, very much so. Uh there's and once we get in and start to explore as well, there's really key pieces that we we need to look at. Like, don't try and do too many things all at once. Don't ask for um people to brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas and prioritize them. Uh ask them to brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas, then ask them to prioritize them and and make sure that there's uh there's breaks between these and that we're not uh overloading people because people will get all tangled up in that and they won't get through both activities. So um helping them through that, uh, especially in larger groups where you've got lots and lots of people, that uh can be very useful.

Yeah, that that's a great uh description of the diamond of participatory decision making, and we'll put a link in the notes where the there's the groan zone in the middle. How do I move from divergent thinking, coming up with lots of great ideas, and transition a group from that divergent thinking space into a convergent thinking space because where we start whittling down, filtering out the ideas, and we go forward. This sort of neatly brings us around, maybe in in the last couple of minutes just to close out, around feedback and evaluating ideas. Whenever you're in that workshop, ideas are very free-flowing. We want to get those ideas out on the table, but there's also a need to challenge some of the assumptions and the concepts and the ideas that are being brought forward. How have you seen workshop participants manage that feedback round, the challenging of the ideas?

There's there's a a number of different ways in which I do that. And uh, and we're actually going to unpack that a little because when I think of feedback, there's a couple of areas where I think it's critical within a in a workshop for that to be to be handled. Um the I I do like to run exercises which consist of, well, what would what would it be if uh if we didn't have this? If what what's the the anti-pattern that we could be looking at? Like, what's the worst possible way of doing this you can think of? Come up with all the really bad ideas you can think of, and when and then go through and look and see if any of these are things you actually do, or if there's things that you do that are aligned to this. These kind of the the negative pattern uh model from a from a coaching perspective to get people to start to think about the the critical area and not just the happy path of how things are done. I think the other place that feedback is critical is once you've got through a section of it, if it's like a multi-day workshop at the end of the day, ensuring that you've left time for a retrospective, that there's time for people to say, like what went well, what's even better, if so, and then actually have the conversation around what do we get out of today so that people can solidify the ideas and they can they know what they're taking away from.

I think that's a that's a great uh a reminder, if you like, is that whole concept of let's look at uh uh how things went today, and it could be went this morning. I mean, you know, you can retrospect between one phase to the next or one day to the next and so on. Um, I also just wanted to bring back uh your your uh comment about feedback on on the the negatives, looking at what we don't want as well as looking at what we do want. And I think this is that's a great point. Sometimes we sort of hone in on uh the things that we really that we're trying to solve for without considering the negative space as well as the positive space that we're trying to work into. And one of the ideas that I've uh seen work super, super well, and it's a lot of fun with it as well, is the idea of nominating a devil's advocate in the group. And that the role of that devil's advocate is to say, nope, that won't work because, or you're not thinking about this. And what's what I always love about that is because you you can give them a like you know, a title or a hat or whatever it is, give them the devil's ears, horns, hat to wear as they're going around, make it a bit of fun. But what's more important is that is that pull back to reality that can happen. Uh, and just uh and what I've found what's really important here is if you volunteer to be the devil's advocate, you should probably not be allowed to be the devil's advocate, right? It's almost like you've got to pull the name out of the hat of the people who go, no, no, I'm not going to do that. Because if I'm going to volunteer to be frustrating and challenging, that's not really what we're looking for there.

I I think we covered a lot in uh in a very short period of time there. Uh if we were to pull out like three three points out of all of that that you would want our listeners to take away, what would they be?

We did cover a lot. Three things. Three things, then number one, preparation. You do you've you've got to prepare for you know significant workshops like this, and minute by minute preparation almost, as we sort of hinted at. Number one. Uh number two, small groups, facilitating the conversation, not just facilitating the workshop, if that makes sense. We touched on you know how to mix the groups up, small groups, the value of those diversity, things like that that come in, I would say. And I think number three, and I want to pull out, I'm gonna come back to the devil's advocate, but not for the reason. I think I think the third one is having fun with it. Whether it's the retrospective, whether it's the the you know, the devil's horns on the devil's advocate or whatever else, however we're looking at it, making sure that the energy levels are high, that it's light, that we're not getting too bogged down with some of those things. So the idea that you mentioned about looking at the negative space, not the positive space. All of these just bring a bit of lightness to that discussion, which keeps the energies up and the ideas flowing.

Yeah, I like that. I think that's a really good, uh, really good point there. Well, with that, I think we should wrap up for today. So uh thank you so much for all of the uh great conversation as always, Dave. And uh look forward to the next time.

Always a pleasure, Peter. Looking forward to the next time we talk. And I think you were just about to say if anybody has feedback, uh feedback.

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