Alison Coward - Great Workshops, Great Teams - #NUX7 - @alisoncoward

so our next talk is by Allison Allison's role as a strategist trainer and workshop facilitators to help teams in the creative and digital sectors to work better together get ready for some practical tips for designing and facilitating workshops that generate concrete outcomes please welcome Allison to the stage [Applause] hello what makes a great workshop so I want you to think back to the last time you were part of a fantastic workshop not one that you were facilitating but as a participant and what made it so great to just have a quick thing so it may be because of the content you created or you had some breakthrough ideas and you've got some carotene with your team but at the same time it's probably likely down to the fact that you had a good experience and how that workshop made you feel you may have felt engaged connected you may have felt more connected to your team and you may have felt heard as well being able to contribute your ideas so I need to keep that feeling in your heads throughout this talk because for me that feeling is key to developing a great team culture there's no reason why those experiences and those feelings need to be confined to a workshop itself so that's what I think I think workshops could be more than a one-off event you know they can be great in themselves you could have a fantastic day but there's so much more in the potential of workshops to contribute to the way that we work together so when we talking to you about how you create workshops of impact and some many practical tips for making your workshops better and then talking to you about how workshops can contribute to a better team culture now the reason I come from this angle is that when I started out I didn't really start out to be a workshop facilitator don't really start out thinking that I wanted to facilitate workshops I was really passionate about collaboration for me I wanted to bring and people with different skills and expertise to get them into teams and help them work brilliantly together to create great things and because I was bringing people together that perhaps had never met before and different disciplines whenever we kicked off a project it made sense to me to get everyone in the room and discuss how we would work together and what we would do together and how we would make great work for client and because I wasn't the creative producer I was the one that would plan exactly how we would deliver that discussion or how we've progressed the discussion and make sure we kept on track at the dock on the day and I didn't realize at the time that what I was doing was a workshop facilitation but I said it just made sense to me it was more about the fact that this format of bringing people together was a tall in that support in the way that the team worked together at all in supporting creative collaboration and it just turned out that also ended up loving the process of workshop facilitation as well so creating workshops with impact how do you how do you make sure that the event itself is purposeful but also needs to something bigger in an outcome for me it's about the workshop design so a workshop is a three-step process we may think specific throughout the day and you may think a little bit about the preparation but it's a three-step process and the workshop design is my craft I love it it's my creative outlet it's where I get into my flow thinking about the processes that we're going to go through together the discussions we're going to have how we're going to get that team on track and aligned when it's a three-step process you've got the design the preparation you have the facilitation on the day and then you also have the follow-up what happens after the workshop and the follow-up is the the the part of this three-stage process that we often forget about are we kind of leave to chance we don't think about intentionally how we're going to make sure that the results from it from a workshop have a really great impact afterwards and for me the the key to making a workshop an impact is to actually think about the follow-up when you're doing the design think about what it is that you want to achieve from the workshop what needs to happen afterwards what is this workshop contributing to and bake that into your design right from the start so these are the results that you might get from the great workshop collaboration creative see equal contributions great content clarity momentum those are all the kind of very tangible specific results that we want to get and in order to do that we also need to think about the purpose so when you think about it going back to my original journey into workshops and to run in these collaborative sessions a session in itself is always part of a bigger project it's a means to an end rather than the ends an end in itself so when you think about that you think about the context that our workshop six within you understand that there's part of a bigger picture there and you understand that this workshop is not a standalone event actually there's there's other things that you need to think about in order to make that workshop work so thinking about the purpose thinking about what is the bigger picture what is it that we're trying to achieve is really key in making that workshop impactful and purpose is important to us in the work that we do you know as creative individuals as people that work in the knowledge economy it's one of Dan Pink's for me principles for motivating and people like us the other to autonomy and mastery which I'll talk a bit a bit about a bit later but he describes purpose as this you know the deep motivation and engagement that people have when they feel they're working toward something much bigger than themselves again remembering that a workshop is not the event in itself actually it's contributing to something much bigger and the key to creating a workshop with impact is to think about that bigger picture and to bake it into your workshop design and then you need to think about what happens after the workshop so as I said you know the follow up is something that we often leave to chance but it's actually key in creating an impactful workshop or workshop that matters what is it that you need this workshop to do what project is it contributing towards how is it going to help the project progress how is it going to help your team stay aligned and motivated and once you have that outcome then I say bring it straight back into your workshop design and you break it in from the start so you might have your purpose you've identified your purpose at the beginning of the workshop and then you've identified your outcome and in your workshop design your task is to fill in the missing middle and this is where you think about your workshop activity but not yet you know you're kind of designing the purpose and you fill in the missing middle to start off with with questions so if you're designing a workshop where you're facilitating the workshop always say that questions and the main communication tool of a workshop facilitator because there's a workshop facilitator you're not there to provide the answers you're there to gather the answers from all of the participants in the room so you're going to be asking questions before your workshop as you're planning it what is it that I want to find out from the participants in the room what are all the unknowns we need to explore what are the problems that we need to uncover and then you're going to be asking questions in the actual workshop when you're trying to draw out that content from participants as well and once you've got your questions then you start thinking about the journey and the experience that you want to create for your participants so going back to the question that I asked you at the beginning you know with what mades the workshop great that you were thinking about was the experience that you had so what's the natural flow that you want to take your participants to so they can get that experience too they can feel engaged connected so these are some of the things that you might want to achieve from a great workshop in terms of the experience for a participant you know the engagement the connection isn't spoke about the Dan Pink's three principles for motivating creative people autonomy we get to an outcome in the way that works best for us mastery we're challenged in a way that engages us and enables us to develop but not too not too much not too hard and also not too too simple just at the right level to match our to our skills and purpose as we spoken about knowing that well the work that we're doing contributes to a bigger picture and also making progress having that feeling that we're moving forward in fact if even sure if any of any of you who read the book by trees and relay who's one of my favorite scholars on Team creativity and she wrote a book with her husband Stephen Cramer called the progress principle and she studied 238 knowledge workers and asked them to write a diary entry at the end of the day ended up with 11,000 diary entries and she Scout to all of these diary entries to understand what was it that may their days great and the single most most common fact him in all of these diary entries was that every person had made a bit of progress moving forward it didn't have to be massive just a small amount of progress moving forward so how can we again in our workshops encourage that progress and how can we continue that after the workshop to contribute to our canteen culture so some practical workshop tips are promised you some practical workshops hips first one have a facilitator that sounds so basic but I've been having a lot of conversations with people recently about the situations they find themselves in when they're both invested in the outcome of a project but also facilitating the workshop as well and I know that can't be avoided in some situations but it's not ideal for a range of reasons the first one is that the role of a facilitator is meant to be objective your mix to be able to take a step back and take an overview of the what's happening in the room and keeping an eye on the discussions and keeping an eye on time you're not meant to contribute to the content your bear to draw the answers out from the participants and secondly a facilitator is there to keep an eye on group dynamics you know as you mention about your experience of a great workshop it was all about being engaged and being heard and being able to contribute your ideas there's so many reasons why when groups get together those things don't happen naturally and a facilitator is a key role in making sure that those equal contributions happen so even though it's a really really basic tip this this idea of if you're facilitating the workshop not participating at the same time is really key second tip have time for individual thinking so we may think that in the workshop it's all about group discussions and all about collaborating intensively whereas actually we also need pockets of time and people are able to do their own individual thinking and work now again there's so many reasons in a workshop why there may not be equal contributions or something who may speak up more than others it may be the difference between introverts and extroverts introverts get their energy from being alone so they like to think before they speak extroverts get their energy from being around people so they speak in order to gather their thoughts and to develop their thoughts and the way that plays out in workshops is that the extroverts are talking a lot and the introverts perhaps don't have time to develop the thoughts that they want to talk about or they want to contribute so how do you kind of balance that out one way is to make sure that everybody has a little bit of time to think about responses the questions that your answer it asking before they discuss in a group something works for other situations junior staff more senior staff and the challenges that might exist between junior staff speaking up in front of more senior people but having that time for individual thinking can really make a difference in the way that people feel in contributing to a workshop this is another really simple tip that can make a massive difference separating out divergent thinking and convergent thinking so divergent thinking is all about generating lots of ideas thinking about possibilities opportunities you're going for quantity convergent thinking is when you want to select a few of those ideas you need to apply criteria to to whittle it down to a few now those two types of thinking will interfere with each other because if you have people trying to converge on ideas before you've had the opportunity to open out then you're going to shut down ideas too early if you have people in convergent thinking stage and you've got people still trying to come up with more ideas then you're going to go around in a discussion loop and it's going to get very very frustrating for people in the room so it's separating out those two types of thinking in the activities that you do and in the discussions you do can make a big difference in contributing to a productive discussion similar to that you want to make space for productive conflict so one of the things that you want to run workshops for when you're running workshops you want to avoid this idea of groupthink people thinking in the same way or avoiding challenging ideas just for the sake of keeping the peace that's the enemy of creativity and not the reason why we're working together in teams the reason we work together in teams is because we want to make use of everyone's skills and expertise especially in a multidisciplinary team so you want to make space for that create that productive conflict what's what situations can you create after having generated lots of ideas moving into the spaces that okay now is the time to critique these ideas let's challenge these ideas and it's not get defensive about them we want to make them better how can we make these ideas better really great example of that is Pixar brain trusts so Pixar have a specific meeting whereby the producer of an animation brings along the script and the work they've done so far and everyone's sitting around the table their role is specifically to pick up holes in that script into part provides constructive criticism to that producer and it's up to the producer whether they take it or not but the key thing is is that space has been created specifically for that productive conflict and make it dynamic you know there's again we associate workshops with post-it notes and sharpies and there's a reason for it because you know we can write things on post-it notes we can move them around and we can shape her ideas we can stand up we can stick things on the wall we want to make things with our hands and there's research that shows that when you engage people with their hands when you get them standing up in meetings they're more productive so how can you make your your workshops more engaging more dynamic more active so those are my five tips for effective workshops you know have a facilitator make time for the vigil thinking separate out divergent and convergent thinking and create space for productive conflict and make it dynamic and they're great tips for effective workshops but I also think they're great tips for meetings as well the thing is with our meetings is that they're broken you know we all have too many of them that unproductive they last too long some people don't get the opportunity to speak and I really feel that meetings don't fit the purpose for the types of teams that we need to work in today the types of organizations that we need and the type the kind of work that we need to do we work in multidisciplinary we teams we working taking it were working much more quickly the work that we do is more dynamic we're working as multiple as part of multiple teams we're working across geographical locations and the meetings that we have the typical meetings that we have don't fit that purpose so when I say a typical meeting this is the kind of thing that I'm describing you know known facts or decisions to be communicated that's okay if you know the answers a power dynamic of the loudest or most senior person in the room that's okay if the loudest person or the most senior senior person in the room always has the best ideas and passive attendees that's okay if you don't want to hear anything from the rest of your team members on the other hand great workshops you are there to explore lots of different possibilities and options especially when the answers are unknown equal contributions you know the facilitator is there to make sure that you hear something from everybody in the room so that equal contributions regardless of role the best ideas can come from anywhere and dynamic you know people are engaged they get involved people are walking around they're sticking things on walls they're actively participating in this workshop so there's three things that I want to share with you in ways that you can start to and change your meters to be more like workshops and use principals and workshops to contribute to a better team culture and your team working together and the first one is bringing workshop style activities to meetings there's no reason why we have to run four workshops all the time we can take activities with all five minute tasks and use them to tense up our meetings so one example is and a check-in check-in is a really great tool at the beginning of your meeting rather than launching straight into a discussion about your tea or your the work that you need to do and you can ask everyone around the table a question a question that's personal to them how did you get to work this one how was your journey into work how was your weekend what's the thing that's most exciting you about this week and take it from turns to go around and that instantly opens up the environment and creates a faith for space for people to contribute their ideas the other thing that I've seen that is really really powerful is given people a stack of post-it notes in the Sharpie put in a stack of post-it notes and a Sharpie at everybody's place I've seen how people's faces light up when they walk into room when they can see that they're sitting in the space where their ideas are specifically meant to be captured and heard so just that powerful of a placed in there giving people a stack of post-it notes and saying I want to hear from you I want you to write down your ideas and share them can make a massive difference second tip is take a design approach to your meetings so often when they're called in a meeting we just put a time in the calendar we've booked a room and we all bundle into the room and then decide what we're going to talk about or as I mentioned with the workshop the the work the process of workshop design is a is a craft it's my craft you're thinking about how you're going to get the best of everyone in the room how you're going to progress everyone through a discussion in the context of the larger project what is it the IDI to discuss what is it that you need to do so you wanted to for every meeting that you have you might want to look at all of the meetings across your your team will the meetings that you have regularly and really define the purpose because not every meeting is equal every meeting has a very different purpose it may be that you need a very quick status update meeting it may be that you need to have a longer brainstorming session they're all different and we need to find that purpose then you choose the right format for it and you design it accordingly and then what happens when you start to define your meters differently in this way you'll see that there may be a bit of a rhythm to the way that your team works because they'll be regular meetings that come up time and time again and based on what it is that you need to do and these meetings can start to form the heartbeat of your team keeping you in contact with each other and keeping you checking in and coming back and aligned on the same page so how can you make your meetings more like workshops what can you take from the principal pause of workshops make your meetings more engaging more dynamic and make sure that everybody's heard another tip is to retake the role of the facilitator so the facilitator has got a very specific purpose of a very specific role in making sure that everyone has equal contributions across the in the in the workshop in the session and also making sure that they keep an eye on the dynamics and keep an eye on time I mentioned you can't do both of those at the same time it's very very difficult to facilitate and participate at the same time but a workshop facilitator has very key skills but very useful for a team or team members or individuals in developing and creating interactions with other people so these are some of the key skills I think are useful for workshop facilitator first one being curious and asking great questions I mentioned this at the beginning questions the main communication tool or the facilitator a facilitator who's genuinely curious in what the participants have to say they don't have any of the answers they're there to find out the answers so asking those good questions is a really really good skill to develop and if you ask many good questions and you're going to get answers back and the key skill of a facilitator in this sense is actively listening really listening to what people have to say listening to what they say reflecting it back to them but also listening to what they don't say and reading the route the mood in the room and kind of trying to piece together the things that aren't being said and if you've done a good job in making sure that people feel safe and speaking up and contributing their ideas then you're going to get a lot of answers and probably conflicting answers and conflicting responses so one of the key skills and workshop facilitators to be able to deal with uncertainty being able to deal with that mess that comes with encouraging ideas and couraging creativity from people and it's always always happens in workshops there'll always be a point when it feels really messy and it feels like there's lots and lots of ideas that's a natural part of creativity so developing the skill to be able to deal with that creativity is something you that's used not just in workshops but generally in the way that we work together and it finally debut in all of that information and synthesizing that that content together the as a facilitator as being objective you're able to perhaps spotlit connections that the participants can't because they're so involved in the discussion so a key skills we know to step back and see what's going on to connect the dots and reflected back to the participants so these are all great skills for facilitation all great skills for workshops but also great skills in the relationships that we build in the relationships we build with our team and key skills for leading and managing messy creative projects as well I love this phrase it was someone on LinkedIn Dennis O'Bryan a colleague of mine that I met ages ago tied to me in one of his comments on another post and he was talking about employee engagement and he said Alison this is connected to the work that you do and these when people feel engaged and they feel happy at work these are the unintended consequences of your workshops and I love this and I've stolen it I'm using it all the time and because I think it's such a great phrase you know so we've spoken about the results that you might get through much that the real tangible hard results that you might get from work chat collaboration creativity etc spoken about the experience but when people are able to work together collaboratively in a session like that and when they're able to have their ideas heard these are the unintended consequences of workshops people feel heard think about how that changes the way that you work together you have better communication because you've been practicing this communication in the team you value each other's ideas you very venue as differences there's more transparency you start to trust each other more you start to trust in and believing that the capabilities of people and but as you open up and you're able to depend on your teammates more as well and if that's open up avenues for new ways of working these discussions this openness starts to help you think about how you can work better together as a team what can we do to improve this communication what can we do to make sure we stay on track so great workshops great teams I like to call this workshop culture so the way that I've seen you know workshops much more than a one-off event workshops could be great as an event in themselves but when people feel the the power of a workshop in the fact that they've you know encouraged that collaboration they've courage those encourage those contributions they might be tempted to run more workshops or start to turn some of their meetings into more workshop style events and the impact of meeting like this more frequently has an impact on the team culture and that's what I like to call a workshop culture when we start to see the principles of workshops spread out into the way that our team works together generally all of that great experience that you've thought about when you thought about a fantastic workshop isn't just confined to a 1 hour 2 hour 3 hour day event it's actually something that we experience with our teams generally so on that note how can you improve your team culture with workshops thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] right there's some Q&A if that's okay yeah so one of the questions that was asked and how do you approach workshops with team members that may not want to participate and already having you have negative preset opinions I think and one of the reasons that I see this happening is when people have lost faith in the workshop format and the reason often that they lose faith in the workshop format is because of that thing that I mention at the beginning the lack of a follow-up so you can come along and have a great time and you know spend half a day in a workshop and generating lots of ideas and then two weeks later everyone's kind of thinking well what happened to all of those post-it notes where did they go right so that's one thing making sure that the workshop itself is really going to have that impact the other thing is treating those people with empathy when somebody's being difficult or when somebody is kind of you know resisting something there's there's usually a reason why they're resisting and and again one of the key skills of a facilitator is that empathy understanding why somebody might be difficult rather than just labeling them as difficult so maybe you'll be curious about why finding out why it is that they're resisting this change or resisting this this format and speak to them have a chat with them another question since designers sometimes and often have a stake in the game technically should we be facilitating workshops so that's one of my kind of rules and principles of facilitation is just don't facilitate and participate at the same time I would say that it's very very challenging to do because of all the reasons I mentioned and I would avoid it if you can because it's one it's difficult for you because of all the work that you need to do and keep an eye on the commit dynamics like keep an eye on time making sure that everyone's contributing but it's also really confusing for your participants as well because you know as a facilitator they see you as objective but then if you're critiquing their ideas and contributing your ideas then are you facilitator are you it's really a good idea to try and keep those two roles separate if you can next question from Chris what's the most common or important misty you see inexperienced or ineffective workshop facilities as me sorry it's it it's what's the most common or important mistake you see inexperienced workshop facility as mean inexperienced and why don't we like to use that word I think that everyone's got I think everyone has got facilitation signals in them I just think it's about growing confidence so maybe and one of the things that I would say with new facilitators it's probably trying to do too much at the same time and it may be that you've seen someone facilitate great workshop and you're trying to emulate all the things that they did lead in the room and keeping the room engaged and taking notes and it's just really daunting and media overwhelming so I said if you're an e facilitate to focus on the things that are most visible to your participants focus on and things like note-taking because they're going to notice and content they came up with and focus on timekeeping because they're going to notice whether the workshop runs over time and focus on making it collaborative so spend a lot of time on the design trying to think about ways you're going to overcome some of those dynamics that teams can often fall into such as introverts versus extroverts and groupthink spend all of your time creating exercises as much as you can around circumventing some of those situations and just focus on that I do believe that it's really possible to facilitate a relatively good workshop without having very much presence on the day by focusing on those kinds of things bit of a personal one for you actually and what was the trigger that means you think yeah I actually want to be a workshop facilitator people telling me that they wanted to pay me for I really didn't know that people with you know it's just something that was so natural to me because I loved collaboration I really didn't know that it was something that people would pay for and it just so happened that people were saying to me can you come and do that for my team and that's actually how the switch switch happens it's a brilliant answer um somebody's asked I'm interested in how you validate what a good question is do you think it's a good question and the next question is why is the best way to convince people about workshops who feel they don't work well due to preconceived ideas that they involve silly games etc and effectively refused to see a part of it that type of person that made you sit at the back of the room and then work or break walk out after five minutes I would say I would say don't try to run a full workshop or four-day workshop take a work let's say take a workshop style activity into a meeting just take five minutes out of a meeting and do what I called and maybe a brain dump which is where you just ask the question and get people to write down and their response is one idea propose to note and sort those ideas and that's such a quick thing but it's not offensive it doesn't take up a lot of time but it can be very very effective in getting people to kind of clarify thoughts so it's a kind of take it slowly and do it in a really small impactful way and and start to kind of slowly convince people of the power of these workshops and then as I say show them the results of that show the follow-up you know that's where people start to reading these faithing workshops being you know just Johnny something that we do have a little bit of fun but they can really really change the way that your team your your team works together so showing that in the way that you take the content that was produced in the workshop and feeding it into the project that you're working on and you're changing the way that you work together thank you I think there's a lot of valuing up in that entire talk based on those you know the fact that we have often have to do a lot of facilitation just to start to learn new things and where we work thank you very much Alison thanks a lot [Music] [Applause]

Channel: northernux

Views: 335

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux7

Id: 0_YBJeOTM7E

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019