Alex Workshop

If you are about to facilitate a workshop, whether internally or for clients, these top tips should help ou avoid the most obvious pitfalls and ensure you have a highly productive and creative session that every participant will enjoy

 

• Get the brief right – projects often run into problems when you are not clear enough about the brief. Have you framed the right issue? What’s in and out of scope? At least half a day on this with the project team at the start of every project, will pay dividends later and avoid heartache from people having different assumptions and expectations.• Invest plenty of time in preparation. Ask yourself what you want to achieve at the end of the day – what will success look like and then work back from there so you can design it in.
• Don’t try to cram too much in. Estimate timings and get someone else to look at them and challenge you – have you allowed enough/ too much for each element?
• Make sure you have a good balance in the day of sitting and absorbing with moving and doing. How can you make things more interactive? At which points in the agenda is energy likely to flag? You need to think of ways to get people’s energy up again – a change of topic, of pace, of scene, of speaker, of type of activity.
• The agenda is your road map but you must always be prepared to take a diversion if this is appropriate to deliver the objectives. You may find a particular exercise takes longer than expected but is yielding rich fruit. You may find an issue you expected to be tricky is easily resolved and does not need all the time you allotted. Participants can also throw unexpected “googlies” – a facilitator has to be flexible enough to accommodate these.
• Think about the venue. Try if possible to go offsite. Look for an interesting and creative venue – natural light, ideally with somewhere nice outside for a bit of air at break times. Do you need space for breakouts? Talk with the venue before about room layout – if you are running a creative session avoid boardroom setups like the plague – chuck out those blotter pads and Imperial Mints! Replace with some funky notebooks and goodies – fruit and nuts if you want to be healthy, Celebrations or Haribo Mix if you want to make people fat and happy!
• Get there early and check the room is right. What can you do to dress it and personalise it?
• Do fabulous flip charts. Time spent on doing these well will pay off and the act of doing them is a great way to get yourself “in state”. Flip charts work much better than PowerPoint slides – they are less distancing, more immediate and feel much more tailored and personalised to the occasion.
• Use music – again a great way to get in state and to signal to participants – upbeat for energisers and in breaks, more chilled for reflections and for small group exercises. You can also turn up the volume then cut it off to signal the session is starting up again.
• Prizes can be fun to break the ice and get some competition going – depends on the group though – but in any event small jokey ones or stuff for people’s kids usually works well
• Always start with an icebreaker of some kind – think about whether the participants know each other – in big companies they often don’t – or at least not well. They are probably a bit nervous about what is going to happen and this is a great way to get people laughing and relax
• Spend plenty of time on the set-up. Short-cut this at your peril. This is how you create the atmosphere for the rest of the session and get everyone to agree about how they are going to BEHAVE. If you don’t do this upfront you will regret it all the way through the rest of the session. It is also key to reassure people and set some upfront expectations for the day.
• Make sure you give people plenty of breaks – opportunity to stretch legs, use bathroom, take urgent messages, recharge energy – but try to avoid them going off with mobiles pressed to ears
• Think about your OWN energy and your state. If you are feeling low you must make sure the participants don’t see it. Think about how you‘ll manage your state and keep yourself charged.
• Check in with the participants as you go along. Make them feel it is OK to ask questions or signal if they don’t understand or disagree with something. Ask how their energy is. Be sensitive to the atmosphere and body language in the room and if you sense people flagging do something quickly to change their state (e.g. get everyone to change places, or do a few stretches, do a quick energiser, take a break)
• Throw things back to the group – you don’t have to answer all the questions yourself. Ask what everyone else thinks (very useful when you haven’t a clue yourself! – it happens!). You can also ask them what they want to do at key points – or give them some choices, e.g. do you want to do this exercise all together or in smaller groups? Are you ready for a break now or do you want to press on?
• You can give participants roles – for example someone to be the timekeeper, maybe someone as a Jargon Buster, someone to manage the environment, another to watch for mood and energy. This is particularly useful if you are facilitating solo.
• Tell stories rather than giving lectures. People remember these better than factual descriptions or lots of “teaching”. Look for interesting anecdotes that will be relevant to the point you want to get across. If you can make the stories come alive by demonstration or by getting the participants to do an exercise – even better
• Remember different people learn and absorb information in different ways – make sure your day has something for all of them – visual, aural, textual, kinaesthetic, etc
• Remember that most of the answers lie within the group. Your role is to pull those answers out of them. They know more about their business than you do! Your role is to inspire, to challenge, to help build ideas, to manage the process, to keep everything on track and to steer them all to deliver the workshop objectives.

 

Clare Flynn
http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/how-to-facilitate-a-workshop-top-tips-672518.html

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