Last week, I shared some closers that are meant to create commitment and alignment from the team at the end of an effective accessibility workshop.
Today, I'd like to tell you about my biggest mistake I used to make in my early days of running workshops.
I was running workshops and everything went smoothly. People engaged. We made decisions faster and more reliably than in meetings. But still I faced real problems convincing people to continue running workshops. Why? It made no sense to me.
Then I realised my mistake. I would leave the workshop without recording all the ideas and next steps that we discussed. Everyone would go back to their job with nothing to show for the otherwise brilliant work they did. Why was I surprised that I was having trouble getting them interested in follow-up workshops?!
The objective of every workshop is to solve a problem.
And the best way to show how you solved it is to record the workshop outputs and share it with all the participants that took part in your workshop. This is your responsibility as a workshop facilitator.
I don't have any hard rules on how and what I create as an output summary. It all depends on the team and what the interactions in the workshop were like. But, as with any document that needs to communicate ideas clearly, I want the workshop output summary to have a high readability score. The main ideas I want to include in the summary are the basics of who, what, when and how.
- Who participated in the workshop
- What they discussed and what they decided
- When they met and when they will meet next
- How they want to proceed with what they decided
I usually go through all of the exercises and summarise each of the ideas. I use pictures or screenshots of the white boards for each workshop exercise to accompany the writing. This helps everyone remember the session. Plus it makes the entire thing come alive.
Some common pitfalls I had to learn the hard way:
- Resist the urge to add anything yourself after the workshop or in the summary. Don't invent anything or draw your own conclusions.
- Also resist the urge to remove anything you think wasn't that important.
- Do the summary as soon as you're done with the workshop, when everything is still fresh in your head. If it's a multi-day workshop, do it at the end of every day. You can use the previous day's summary as a starting point for the next day.
- Send the summary as soon as you have it and no later than one week after the workshop ends. People forget easily.
Bonus points if you can record it in such a way that it's easy to follow and understand by both workshop participants and people who haven't participated and come across it. This gets them interested in how they can solve other problems using similar formats.
Hint: A clearly written workshop summary is an amazing internal sales tool.