What is a workshop and why should you run one?
Workshops are more than just interactive meetings. They're a space for groups to come together around a shared goal, collaborate effectively and solve complex problems. If you're wondering what a workshop is, how they differ from training or meetings, or just want to start running them, you're in the right place!
A great workshop can create innovation, connection and transformation for both companies and individuals. In this article, we'll explore what workshops are, what benefits you can expect, and also show you some workshop examples that you can use for inspiration when working with your team.
What is a workshop?
A workshop is a structured and interactive session designed to create an environment for meaningful work and to guide a group through a process that will lead to great outcomes.
Workshops are designed to engage participants and foster their active involvement in the process. They are not training sessions where one person teaches everyone else in the room. Nor are they meetings where people give one another updates but rarely collaborate on a task with a structured approach.
Workshops typically involve hands-on activities, facilitation techniques, group discussions, simulations, and collaborative exercises, which allow participants to explore, ideate, and participate in achieving their desired outcomes. Whether that’s aligning on a perfect solution to a tricky problem or improving their skills experientially.
Workshops can cover almost any topic you can think of – whether it be a creative word workshop for school kids or a strategic planning session for company executives.
The key elements of these workshops are the same: they seek to create a dynamic environment that encourages participants to learn from each other, consider their own solutions, and apply the gained knowledge both inside the workshop and in the wider world.
What is the purpose of a workshop?
While the objectives or goal of a workshop can vary based on the setting or specific topic – a design sprint and a retrospective workshop have very different goals – but the purpose is roughly the same.
The purpose of a workshop is to create a space where participants can think together in a place of safety and mutual trust, engage in collaborative work and arrive at your outcomes in an organized and structured manner.
Whether it’s defining how to achieve a complex project, building skills or working on personal development, the purpose of the workshop is to create an interactive, participatory environment for people to engage fully, collaboratively and creatively and arrive at your chosen outcomes.
The purpose behind that purpose is what makes workshops a special and effective tool. When you create a safe space that empowers your team to find their own solutions, creativity is unleashed.
Your team finds solutions they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, they build meaningful and lasting connections with other participants and they’re especially engaged and able to focus on making those things happen.
What happens in a workshop?
All workshops follow a structured agenda designed to achieve the goals of the session. To give you an idea, here is a high level overview of what to expect in a workshop.
- Welcome and introductions.
- Presenting the agenda, goals of the session and setting intentions for how the session should proceed. This is often a great place to set workshop ground rules and discuss logistics too.
- Icebreakers and opening activities to engage participants in the process and create the ideal space for collaboration.
- Presentation of key materials to support the goals of the workshop.
- Divergence: discussions and group activities centred on exploration, learning and ideation – the output being insights and collaborative work that speaks to the goal of the session.
- Breaks. If you’re working for more than an hour, take breaks to allow the group to replenish energy and let ideas sit and develop independently.
- Convergence: discussions and group activities centred on reinforcing learnings from previous work and making decisions and refining solutions as a result.
- Reflections and feedback on the work done and the facilitation of the workshop itself.
- Closing and setting next steps.
Specific workshops will contain variations and deeper versions of this flow though broadly speaking, you can expect all of these things to happen during a workshop, whatever your goal.
Check out this guide to dive deeper into how to plan and structure your workshop.
If you want to see a workshop example that includes key timings and deeper information, the essential workshop template below is an effective skeleton you can use to create your session.
When should you run a workshop?
As we’ve explored, running a workshop can be one of the most effective ways to bring a group together to innovate, solve problems and connect.
This isn’t to say that every session you do should be a workshop. Far from it! There are times when a meeting is the right way to come together, such as doing a daily update or company all hands where people on your team have information to share.
You want to consider running a workshop whenever you want a group of people to do collaborative work effectively, often in a time-boxed or outcome focused manner.
Workshops are great at delivering results in a way that creates space for many voices and perspectives and if you know your group would benefit from this approach, that’s a fine time to consider planning a workshop.
Some of the common triggers for running a workshop include:
- having a complex problem without a clear solution
- a need for genuine innovation and new ideas
- team building or team development
- teaching new skills in an experiential manner
- community building
- working on a project in a deeply collaborative and emergent way
- opening or closing a project
Another great tip for running a workshop is to use a relatively small group (often 8-15 people) in order to create space for discussion, divergent thinking and ideation. When running workshops with larger numbers, you’ll want to add additional facilitators and perhaps run sessions in parallel.
Wanting to simply teach your group how to use new technology or share information from the executive team with the rest of the company? That’s probably not a workshop, and that’s fine! Use the right format for the results you want to achieve and the objectives of your session.
Workshop best practices
The art of designing and leading a workshop is something facilitators and leaders need to practice. While the best way to improve is often a combination of facilitation training and hands-on experience, here are some simple best practices to help you start getting the most out of your workshops.
Plan carefully and create an agenda
The agenda is the foundation of everything you do in your workshop. It is designed to expressly meet the goals of the session, whether that’s coming up with innovative solutions, building team culture or developing skills.
Typically, a facilitator or team lead will create the agenda by planning a sequence of activities to reach a goal and which fit in the time available. They’ll balance those activities to create engagement and support collaboration.
Good agendas are combination of art and science, though good tools and best practices also go a long way.
With SessionLab, it’s easy to create a structured agenda and optimize your workflow. You can drag, drop and reorder blocks to quickly design your session and export professional agendas in the format of your choice when done.
Need help understanding how to create an effective agenda? Check out this post on agenda design for specific advice on this topic.
Bring a facilitator
The best workshops are those in which collaboration is smooth and the group is able move effectively towards their goals. But this so often doesn’t happen. Conversations can break down, time can be used poorly or groups simply find themselves unsure of how to proceed.
A dedicated workshop facilitator will not only design an effective agenda, but they’ll help guide the group through the process and unleash collective intelligence.
Working internally and leading the session yourself? Bringing a facilitative mindset and deploying key facilitation skills will help you embody this role and improve the outcomes of your session with ease.
Keen to learn more? Check out our facilitator guide to explore what to expect from facilitators and what they can bring to your session or team.
Design for interactivity
Remember that workshops are not just long meetings or seminars in small rooms. They are interactive and collaborative by nature. Soliciting input from the group and using directly interactive games is a hallmark of an effective workshop.
Start early in the session with icebreaker activities that help set things off on an interactive note before moving towards more involving activities.
These kinds of interactive activities can include everything from brainstorming games where participants come up with ideas together or team building games designed to get folks collaborating and building bonds.
Whatever the goal or subject of your session, you’ll find effective workshop activities in the SessionLab library.
Get the right people in the room
Workshops tend to work best with small groups of people (8-15) who are invested in the topic of the session and have insights that can help with the collaborative work needed to reach your goals.
During a design sprint, for example, you may want to bring a cross-functional team together to solve an issue that effects your users. That doesn’t mean you need everyone in the affected teams to attend. Bring together major stakeholders and those people who will likely be responsible for the outcomes of the session for best results.
Workshop examples
Workshops come in all shapes and sizes, but you might be wondering what they look like in practice and how they are put together. Especially if you’re new to facilitation, seeing an agenda example can help show the value of a workshop before you try running one yourself!
Below, we’ll explore a few example workshops and detail when and why you might run them with your team. You’ll also find an agenda template for each, so you can see the workshop process in more detail.
Ideation Workshop
Workshops are a perfect space for creating innovation and coming up with ideas that you can actually move towards implementing. When you have a complex problem without an obvious solution or many stakeholders and perspectives, gathering your best minds and bringing them to a workshop is an ideal way to move forward.
In this ideation workshop template, a team first generates a heap of new ideas around a particular topic and then works through a process of analysing and selecting the best ideas by pitching them to one another. By the end of the workshop, you and your group will have discussed ideas thoroughly and used tools to develop the best ones into something you could implement quickly.
Companies that encourage this kind of creative ideation and invest time in enabling their employees are often more resilient and innovative. Try bringing such a workshop to your company the next time you need a new perspective or looking for your next great idea.
You may also find this post on how to run an engaging ideation workshop helpful when it comes to designing and facilitating your session.
Decision Making Workshop
Whatever your particular field, there comes a time when you need to make a decision as a team. A decision making workshop is a method of exploring various options, aligning on objectives and moving forward as a team. It’s a space for employees to discuss their thoughts, share how they feel and then converge on a final decision that is the best one for the company.
In this template, you’ll use consent based decision making to move from discussion to action and allow everyone from management to front-line employees to contribute. It’s an effective session for building a sense of community and making progress effectively.
If you’ve found that you’ve tried to include more people in your decision making processes and found it ineffective or messy, this workshop is a perfect antidote that creates space for all voices while also arriving at your intended outcome.
Retrospective
For complex projects that require innovative problem solving, workshops can be an essential part of both opening and closing the process. I’ve even found that groups working in university or training settings with an intensive educational program can benefit from using a workshop approach to closing the program.
In this retrospective template, you and your team will find space to reflect together and discuss what went well and what went better before choosing some actions everyone will take in the future to develop their skills and improve the next project.
After a week long event or a longer project, coming together in a retrospective workshop can both help you symbolically close and celebrate proceedings while also creating space for reflection and growth.
Looking for more workshop ideas? Check out our collection of the best workshop ideas to see examples of the different types of workshop you might run. You’ll find templates, advice and more.
In conclusion
Understanding how a workshop differs from a meeting or training courses is often the first step towards bringing them into your organization.
For next steps, you can explore our step-by-step guide to planning a workshop to learn how to put an effective workshop together.
Want to improve your facilitation skills? This article will help you see the key skills for effective facilitation you can use in workshops, meetings and in your general practice when working with groups.
We hope this blog post has helped you understand the what and why of running a workshop and has perhaps inspired you to facilitate one the next time you need to solve problems or create innovation in your organization!
James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.
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