How do you build up engagement for an upcoming workshop?

Full transcript

Intro

In these videos I share tips and ideas that answer questions that I hear come up over and over again about product design & development, design thinking, facilitation & workshops design sprints, problem framing, all sorts of things that exist in my world as a facilitator and coach and trainer.

In today's episode, this is episode number four, I'm going to be answering the question, "How do you build up engagement for an upcoming workshop you're about to lead?" See you in the video!

Today’s question

All right so in this week's video I'm answering the question, "How do you build up engagement for an upcoming workshop?"

So in actuality, building up engagement, really kind of stoking and priming the folks that are going to be in your workshops, that needs to begin way before you actually run the workshop itself. The way that I do that is through pre-work.

So pre-work for me is a set of activities, it's collecting and organizing and sharing information that's relevant, it's getting people into the tools, it's starting the conversation, starting the relationships before the workshop itself. That way by the time the morning of or the start of the actual workshop, a lot of that pre-work has been done and the foundation has been laid so we can really dig into the topic itself.

The way that i do that through pre-work is I'll organize it a couple weeks before my workshop itself and I'll send it out then maybe as early as a week before the upcoming session because people are busy and otherwise distracted. That comes from an introduction from whoever has brought me into the company, they introduced me I say hello, I share some of the things, my background and with that I share a link to the pre-work and what I do is to set the context is this is something light and fun just to introduce the topics that we're going to be working through it shouldn't take you any more than 15 to 30 minutes which is sort of like I always design my pre-work to fit within that time constraint because I don't want to overwhelm people with pre-work.

I always refer to it as light and fun, as engaging, you know just as a way to bring down some walls and get the conversation started. So what you're looking at here is a pre-work that i designed for the Verizon Connect team they asked me to come and teach them remote facilitation a few weeks ago right so they were trying to build up their toolkit around facilitation working in this distributed and remote fashion that we have been throughout 2020 and perhaps going forward as we know it.

So what you're seeing here there's four activities that that I designed, the impromptu Q&A is this first one over here, in this one what i'm trying to do is two things one, what are the questions that the participants have as they're coming into it, what are the things that they're struggling through the challenges the topics that are important to them because I've designed my arc of the training or of the workshop based on what I know but there's always some things that are lingering that

I don't know that are important to the team members but I also not only do I give them a chance to ask questions but I invite other people to provide answers because I shouldn't be the only expert in the room. Everybody has ideas to this so this allows other people to step in, feel good about the questions that are being answered and covered, it also gives other people a chance to participate in that conversation which starts to build trust and relationship and conversation between the participants.

The next thing is an activity it's a game, it's one of many games, I use a lot of improv games just to bring down walls, get people comfortable with working with one another with having conversations in the tools especially if we're using a tool like Miro or Mural or Freehand or whatever it is Figma, and so in this one I invited them to just think about a talent that they could immediately have so flying invisibility being able to read a thousand words per minute whatever it was and I allowed them to just go wild, explore and be crazy and then on top of that to ask questions and get curious about other people's superpowers that they contributed and so what this does it's fun they get used to just having fun in the tool which helps them bring down some stress that they have about working in new ways and different tools with different people that they don't know, it also continues the conversation or gets the conversation started. And so what this looked like when I sent out the original email with the pre-work nobody did it at first and what I eventually had to do was encourage them a couple times through, eventually one woman went into the pre-work started doing it,

I celebrated her in front of the rest of the group over email and sure enough by that afternoon a whole bunch of other folks had jumped in there and done it. That was the game that we played, the other things that you'll see in the pre-work depending on the context and what I'm doing with the group is I'm setting some context for what will happen in the workshop itself so the third one here it was a chance for the participants to lead an activity, to play facilitator so I gave them some context and heads up and also allowed a few of them to raise their hands and sign up for that activity and then finally were resources so the last way that I use pre-work is to set the context of the conversation that we're having so the problem that we're trying to solve, the research that's been done, any artifacts or assets that have come from previous discussions, stakeholder interviews, and that way when we get into the workshop itself now if people were at different levels in terms of their experience and understanding of the topic that we're talking about we're on a little bit more even footing and so that way morning of, start of the workshop itself, we can just kind of dive right into the topic without needing to go back through that where people would lose engagement, people that are really steeped in the experience and the problem they would probably check out they'd be in their inbox that way we can really dive in.

This is how I help to build engagement for my upcoming workshops and in a future video I'll talk about keeping and maintaining engagement. But I hope that this video was helpful, I hope that it helps you prepare and run workshops where people show up ready and excited to dig into the topic. I'll see you in the next video of Q&A with Jay number five in a couple weeks.

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