Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Workshop has to have one goal because dependent on the size of it, for example, how long it is, how big it is, how much people you have there, you basically need to plan accordingly, right? So the starting point for every single workshop is what are you trying to achieve at the end or whatever is time resource that you have, right? So if you have only one hour and you have three people,
What can I do with this resource? And how can I learn as much as possible or inject or align whatever is the goal throughout this one hour? Once you have the goal and understanding of, you know, resources, then you can start accordingly.
Hello, design friends, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa, and today we will be discussing a question that was submitted by one of our listeners. Thank you for the submission. We will be unpacking the topic of running workshops with different stakeholders when you're new to a team, when you're new in a company, and that makes it further more complex and stressful and
How do you prepare for this new environment and how do you successfully run a workshop with different people? So let's jump into it. I think we have a lot of interesting tips to unpack. Before we move on, I just want to take a moment to thank our amazing sponsor, Wix Studio, which recently launched something very, very cool. WebGL effects in Wix Studio. So this is essentially a collection of presets that are offered in motion and effects panel and the inspector panel.
and can be added to the media in the background of sections. And these effects are simply gorgeous. I am experimenting with them. I find it very hard to choose one. I'm doing community voting with my Instagram audience and LinkedIn friends to try to figure out which is the best WebGL effect to keep on my website.
It's honestly extremely cool. So this made my agency studio website. So I'm running my agency, as you know, AR Studio, and I'm building a website and where the tagline is the future of experiences, designing the future. And so it really has to look futuristic. It has to look very cutting edge, high end, super professional. And I achieved this vibe with a motion effect in the background.
and thanks to this new capability in Wix Studio, which is I think my favorite one ever, because it really elevates your design. Motion is something that for me always felt very professional and sophisticated and difficult from a technical standpoint, and now I can have that in my website thanks to a couple of clicks. So this is amazing, and
it gives you a lot of control and there are six presets and all of them are super cool. So if you're reeling websites and you have a background, try animating it, adding motion with WebGL effects in Wix Studio and you're going to see that it feels like a completely different vibe. It takes it from a regular website to a high-end website and just agency level experience. So yay, props to that. Kudos Wix Studio. Now back to our episode.
I'm going to start with our regular routine. What have you been up to? How are your days going, Anfi? Hello, everyone, and welcome back to HonestyX Talks. My days have been, I guess, slammed because I am in this state of working, running a bunch of things, and also helping and supporting the Cicado. I'm in this, like, way of working when you have viruses of the week. I remember you, Joanna, was mentioning this in your time.
Now we are in this state and luckily the summer is almost here. So I'm hoping this is the last virus as we're experiencing. It's a bit tricky because we have a lot going on at my work right now. We are preparing for the conference. At the conference, they're featuring the product I'm working at. And it's very last minute. And also we have a lot of work, actually, like commitment work. And there's a lot of support going on. And just like it's a lot. Plus, obviously, I'm always excited about the community I'm running.
mentoring sessions I'm having and it's just been a lot of juggling on my plate and I cannot wait for the vacation already and luckily we're going to vacation on May. So yeah, I am looking forward to that. But other than that, yeah, surviving so far. How are you, Joanna? How were your trips recently? Well, I think for a long time when you asked me how I'm doing, I was like, well,
you know, ups and downs, adulthood and so on. But for the past couple of weeks, I'm finally doing great. I just want to tell people that I have dysfunction as well. So I am able to just feel very well most of the time. This is a very good and inspiring and creative stage of my career. When you start out on your own, you start with a lot of stress and ambiguity and lack of predictability and unknowns and so on. But I'm now at a point where I feel comfortable with my solopreneurship thing and
And I'm doing a lot of very exciting brand collabs. I have been booking company workshops and I have a very, very interesting and exciting client lined up. I'm not sure I'm under NDA or not. We'll see if I can announce it. But yeah, my consultancy and educational projects are going very well. Last week I was in Berlin. It was like my 10th time in Berlin, but the best
trip yet. And I think it had to do with the fact that this workshop I've done for the first time, and I think I will be doing in company settings with maybe people in the community. The workshop is called Identifying AI Opportunities in Your Product. It's very on point to this today's conversation. When you do a workshop for the first time, because workshops are so open-ended, it's not like a talk that you control very well. You know your slides when you're doing the talk.
But when you're doing a workshop, anything can happen. People can steer it in different directions. How do you keep on track? So I was a bit more nervous than usual. Very excited, but nervous a bit. And it went very, very well. And it was the first time delivering a talk or well, in talks, you can't really do that. In workshops, this person had the freedom of doing this. But what one person did was literally stand up during an exercise, come up to me and say, I don't even have my laptop with me.
But this is brilliant. I'm getting so many insights, connecting the dots between what you're saying and what we're doing here. It's incredible. Thank you. And I mean, that kind of sense of urgency to give positive feedback is what I consider a success metric when I'm doing workshops, like people just coming to say, this is great. And I had no idea how it was going to be received.
and I worked a long time to prepare it and stage everything and this is going to be part of our conversation as well. And it was very, very well received and the organizers loved it. They're considering making it part of their annual conference tour. So I might be doing more conferences in the future, running these workshops and yeah, just helping people gain tangible, tactical insights on how to get started with AI in their daily work. So yeah, it's a very exciting time. I'm doing a lot of things I love and
I re-found this enthusiasm to create and I'm now playing around with AI tools and it's not boring anymore. It's not predictable. I feel like I'm rebranding UX goodies and so on. So yeah, I feel I'm reborn in a way. I've reinvented myself like Madonna, of course.
something. But I have a newfound love for design and probably my traveling lately had to do with that. I've seen a lot of art. I've been to Tokyo. I've done a lot of things that restarted my mindset. So let's jump into the topic of today. I'm going to read a full question just for proper context and for everyone to build the empathy
for the person who asked it and probably resonate with it. And this is the question. I will start a UX role finally in the beginning of May after some long time searching. And they asked me if I can organize workshops for stakeholders of their clients. It is a design agency for B2B clients.
And can you make an episode maybe for UX workshops and B2B UX design? So the question comes through this lens of you're working in an agency and you're going to facilitate things for clients, which is very stressful because internally it's one thing when you're doing it for clients and you can impact the business.
with the success of that so directly, it becomes even more pressure inducing. I want to start by asking you, have you been running a lot of workshops? Did you ever run workshops with clients? I have some experience in that area. Now that's my career. Basically, that's my job.
And I do that a lot. But maybe talk a bit about your background in this and I can do that and we can then jump into how do you run effective workshops? How do you set up a workshop properly? I personally love this question because workshops is a big part of almost my identity. I wish I could
try and practice them more frequently in my work today. But unfortunately, in my team, we are very spread across the world. We have people literally in the same team working from Australia and then East Coast or West Coast of the US. And then many, many of us, I see people working from Europe. And so it's pretty, pretty tough to organize the workshops and align everyone at least in the same kind of meeting.
I've been working a lot and practicing a lot of async workshops recently and actually throughout the COVID as well. So that's almost like my specialty, but I really wish I would do them more because as for me, it's the only way to succeed with the project objective as well as alignment and making sure everything is thought through and there are no gaps, there are no misalignments, there are no problems, etc., etc., etc.
And unfortunately, also what really happens often is that in the teams, depending on how you work and how your team and company set up and how ambitious is your team with the plans and everything, sometimes there's just no time at all to plan and run the workshop. And that also is something I'm experiencing today. But if I were to live in the dream world, I would have workshops every day. For every single question we have, I would run the workshop.
It's very close to me. Instead, I'm releasing my ambition through the community. There is at least one workshop a week. We have workshops for whiteboarding challenges. We have workshops for kickoff for the case studies. We have workshops for planning, design critiques, et cetera. Literally every stage of the, I would say, packaging your portfolio, packaging your career cycle. That helps me a lot to kind of make sure that I have my muscles trained, keeping up to date in the shape, running the workshops.
Now, when it comes to workshops and just general setup for the workshops, I think it's important to know, and we'll probably dive into more in-depth talking about this topic moving forward. But when it comes to workshops, I think it is important to know that workshops come in all sorts of sizes, shapes, colors, topics, themes, etc.
So there's no one way to run them. I mean, of course, there are some sort of frameworks such as design sprints, lightning decision gems, design thinking gems, whatever, like different sorts of frameworks that you could be using. But if you're like some sort of trainee in the workshop world, you might start from the framework, but
Very often you have to operate with limited resources within your context, within whatever company you're working with or client resources. So very often you have to make them custom and you have to design them to the context you are operating with. So it is important to know that workshops is a very general topic.
It comes down a lot to orchestrating activities and orchestrating activities and know how to design workshops comes a lot with understanding the context, but also having an experience of navigating through different complexities, different design teams, design challenges. And so I think the workshop skill per se comes from experience. You could, of course, start from smaller bits like
frameworks, but it is important to know that effective workshop usually comes from experience and understanding how to navigate through different dynamics and different contexts and different problems that teams for you as a designer could be facing as well. And yeah, I'll get into more details around that moving forward. But what about your experience, Ioana? How are you dealing with workshops these days? I know you're working with a client, so I'm guessing you do a lot of workshops as well there. Yeah, I wouldn't say they're a lot because I'm trying to choose domain field and make sure that I deliver value. So, and this is
in a way, my first piece of advice as well. What I think is very important with workshops in general is just setting the proper stage. And that means being intentional, like we should be in design with everything with workshops, there's no difference, like what is the desired outcome and
What are the main themes? What are the topics? What are the, in a way, results? Or where do we want to get by going through this process? And then that will kind of trickle down into tactical answers, like what should we do in the first part? Who should be in the workshop? And so on. So for me, what's very important now is to figure out what are my goals now?
as a person this year and then how can those translate into educational efforts through workshops, the kind of workshops, the system for them, the type of information that's in there and so on. So that means that I'm very careful and not overloading or just going for the money. I'm really trying to make it meaningful and valuable.
But I'm doing workshops and it's very, very interesting. Somehow in the early days of my career, I was very scared by them. I did them. I facilitated a couple of workshops in my role at ING and then at EY Path as well, which was also a B2B company. I wasn't working directly with clients. No, at one point we did that with a client as well. But the thing is that I considered myself not good at facilitation. I just put that label on me and
And I said, you know what, I don't like this because I'm really not good at it. It feels very fuzzy. It feels so abstract. It feels a bit wishy-washy. It feels like, what are we really doing here? And there were a lot of moments in the workshops when I had this feeling internally like, I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this.
I'm not sure what we're doing here. And so that kind of feeling of ambiguity was unbearable for a junior designer and the open-endedness of it all. I hated it. And so I just wasn't into facilitation at all. And there was that trend of design thinking and everybody was doing that. There was a lot of innovation theater. Everybody was doing workshops, facilitation, mural boards, and so on. And I was like, ah, I just can't jump on this train because I hated it. I'm not good at it.
And then a couple of years after, I became more mature as a person and as a designer. And I realized that workshops aren't so much about holding on to control and having a very precise outcome and steps and everything happening according to your plan. Framing matters, right? So having a structure that you respect matters. But then you have to really embrace that open-endedness, the fluidity of it. And I became more comfortable with that. And I started enjoying it. And now it's one of my favorite things.
So the point I'm trying to make with this is that even in the beginning, it feels like what the hell am I supposed to do here? I don't think I can do this. I could have done it back then with a more relaxed mindset, right? But yeah, I've been doing all sorts of workshops. I didn't work in a design agency. I was a design agency. I am a design agent in a way, a consultancy studio. I touched on a couple of pieces of advice, but maybe if now we can go deeper into how to prepare and how to
to ensure success when you're preparing and thinking about these workshops. Just to frame the conversation, a successful workshop, from my experience, is made of two parts that both should be done well. One is preparation. I think it's key. If you prepare it well, it's going to run smoothly. You're going to feel in control. You're going to feel more confident. You're going to feel like I have an idea of where I start from and where I'm getting at.
Oh, and by the way, at Miro, I also run a lot of workshops because that's what we do at Miro. So coming back, preparing the stage, probably in a Miro board. And I would say have a board anyhow, even if it's an in-person workshop, have a board. Just have a board for the sake of, even if you do it on...
a wall you put sticky notes still have a mail board where you organize the process so preparation is one aspect and then the second aspect is obviously delivery and actually facilitating it and how to encourage people to participate and extract as much value as possible from the hours you spend together now with this framing how to prepare and how to run i'm wondering anfi if you have a couple of insights for both of these let's say boxes of what makes a successful workshop
Yeah, a lot. I don't even know if I will be able to go through the boxes. I'll just probably just start putting everything that comes to my mind. Apologies, because I have a lot of thoughts around workshops. Okay, so first of all, it's good that you mentioned that you hated it in the beginning, because I want to make sure people don't feel overwhelmed by the workshops. And it's a testament to what I was also saying earlier. I think that it takes experience to really be successful at running the workshops. You could actually not fail at running workshops.
as a junior, but I think it's a skill if you want to feel comfortable and confident and really extract value, like Ioana said, from the workshops, it usually takes some experience understanding how to navigate different dynamics. If you start from like a low level stress
the easiest workshop would be always to when you know the team when you know the problem space and when you can more effectively predict the types of conversations and points and it's more of this goal of alignment type of workshops in this case it's typically easier to plan you understand the team you understand the possible conflicts you understand the possible gaps and you understand how the conversation could go so it's easier for you to navigate that complexity but
But what you want to mention earlier as well is that very often what happens with workshops, especially for our listener who is going to run the workshop with a lot of new people, like that basically doesn't know she never worked with these people, then it comes tricky because in fact, what happens is that you don't understand what kind of people, who will be opinionated, how do I derive to the clarity? Some company cultures also affect the way people provide answers and how much you need to push or how much you need to pull and how much you need to stop and control.
It's a lot of different conversational, social dynamic ways of work, right, that you have to lead and not just say control. I don't like the word control, but definitely lead. So when you have a lot of unknown variables, when you work with people you don't know, then it becomes tricky. And it takes sometimes soft skills to really navigate through the challenge. However, I do know a few junior designers because they are juniors in terms of the hard skills, but soft skills were quite developed, for example, from previous backgrounds, from other transferable skills.
I've seen junior designers who are fantastic at navigating the workshops. For example, we have in my community Neil, Neil, hello, who is running the workshops for a book club together with his senior designer, CJ, and they prepare fantastic workshops every month. And Neil is fantastic at navigating, at asking questions and making sure everybody is able to speak up, right? So it's really about like including everyone while still deriving or arriving to something at the end of the workshop.
So that's just like a little disclaimer for you to keep in mind and be aware about how this usually goes and that it could be quite stressful and overwhelming in the beginning. It's mostly because there is lack of understanding on what could happen really in the workshops.
Talking about the tips and what we can do in order to prepare for the workshops. First things first, like Ioana mentioned, I think it is very important that you have very tangible, clear, specific goal for each workshop. It is important for you to have not more than one goal. I don't recommend to have more than one goal. Of course, if you have like, for example, five days, like a design sprint, yeah, you probably could have milestones throughout that whole sprint week, but still,
there are tiny things you learn in alignment with the one big goal. At the end of the day, workshop has to have one goal because dependent on the size of it, for example, how long it is, how big it is, how much people you have there, how much time you have there, how much resources you're able to invest in this, you basically need to plan accordingly.
accordingly, right? So the starting point for every single workshop is what are you trying to achieve at the end or whatever is time resource that you have, right? So if you have only one hour and you have three people, what can I do with this resource and how can I learn as much as possible or inject or align whatever is the goal throughout this one hour? And then once you have the goal and understanding of, you know, resource, then you can start accordingly. So what are the most effective
ways for me to achieve that goal if it's an alignment workshop for example maybe we just need to start sharing right and how can i structure my workshop in a way where everybody could share just enough for us to have a good understanding good solid ground if it's a kickoff workshop maybe you need to start by just outlining some sort of preliminary user flow or like all together align on the touch points align on the gaps align on the steps align on the visibility whatever whatever right
So kickoff workshop is one sort of a fruit because it's usually depending on how complex is your product or initiative. It could take more activities to fulfill the goal and make sure everybody knows what to do and what's the plan moving forward. While alignment is a sort of easier type of workshop.
Also, I would say that workshops typically, depending on how actively you are using workshops in your company and in your team, I would say if it's an active culture of running workshops, it's usually helpful to inject workshops in different stages of the process to make sure, again, everybody is aligned and there are no mismatches and no rework done. And so nobody is wasting time and money, essentially, on the product. And so what that means is that maybe the good practice could be to have workshops that
based on the stage so early stage maybe you're planning trying to understand discovering basically second stage or during the project stage maybe you might want to align regroup brainstorm solutions to possible problems all together and finally possibly reflect retrospectively on how it went and what we could do better next time right so even having three checkpoints in the workshop space could already enhance a lot the productivity and efficiency of the teamwork now i would
I would say when it comes to specific tips, besides having one goal per workshop, I always recommend to be very pragmatic with the timing. Because there are a lot of times where you just don't know what could happen, when sometimes something unexpected could come up and that could steer the conversation in a different way. And you don't want to stop it because it's maybe a very important nugget or insight that nobody thought about. And it is important because maybe it's the deal breaker for the whole effort.
Sometimes you want to get distracted from the original goal and let it go in a different direction. So it is important for you to be pragmatic. So if you plan super structurally and you have five activities, you have 10 minutes per each activity, and you want to go through them, boom, boom, boom, one by one, it could
end up being stressful for you because very often happens that people have more opinions and something comes up and then your structure fall out of the window. Again, be pragmatic. I usually try to target two, three activities per one hour. If I have more people, I would even be more pragmatic as to two activities per one hour just to make sure we achieve something. And again, I always try to prioritize the most crucial activities we need to do together in the beginning so that by the end, when it comes to kind of action points, we don't need so many people in the room, but the most important input
collection happened in the first activity or hour. Another thing I would also say for the workshop running, I really love the principle of together alone. I heard about this principle from a smart agency who was before COVID very active in the workshop in space and they were running a lot of content around the topic. The
The principle is about brainstorming together or writing down the thoughts together, but calmly without speaking. And then you as the facilitator might start pulling people, involving people, asking them questions all together. Like, so basically one by one, or just like randomly a few people, a few voices that haven't talked yet, for example. So it's up to you how you want to navigate that. But I think
allowing people to brainstorm together, be in the same space together, but calmly without speaking, and then asking what they thought, if there's anything to be shared, allows the whole team to invest and think through this. So kind of to commit to this topic, I guess. But then when it comes to sharing thoughts, A, you already have everything from everyone. So everybody already got their input.
on the boards, but sharing thoughts doesn't need to happen from every single person. You could, for example, pick two, three people per round to share their thoughts. At the end of the day, you still have a board where everything is shared. And now with the help of AI, you can summarize it more nicely and find the bigger trends and topics. But the reason why you want to still ask people to start talking is because maybe there's one important person topic that could become top mind for the rest of the people moving forward to the next exercise.
And also the way why you'd want to let everyone speak is because sometimes some people are more loud and they might spend so much time talking, right? And you kind of want to also navigate and control the amount of speaking every single person does.
So it's important to also kind of navigate conversations in a way that is still productive and sometimes stop it and sort of make sure we are aligned with the activities for the sake of time. Another tip I'll share from my experience would be to never ever try to be a designer and a facilitator in one workshop. You can be a supporter, you could be a designer and somebody who maybe helps the facilitator just to organize maybe stickies or boards or whatever, but try not to ever be a facilitator
and a designer in the same role, it's going to be absolutely hard for you to do both. I had the experience, I was naive and I was ambitious thinking I'll do both. I have no problem. I can definitely manage both heads. These are conflicting goals because as a facilitator, your goal is to control the time and activities and everybody, and you need to stay in touch with what's going on here. As a designer, you want to contribute.
So it's not about controlling the activities and time and whatever goal, but it's about like telling, sharing, asking, doing more, creating. You want always more time. And so those goals are going in conflict with each other because one wants more time, another one wants less. In a way, it's absolutely impossible to mix those effectively. I mean, maybe some people are great at this. I definitely didn't arrive to that state just yet.
I will leave it at this. I wonder if you have any other thoughts in your mind right now to contribute to, you know, the list of tips we have. Maybe a sort of a summary of what you said. I'm not sure if I can add a lot more to that because it's pretty much comprehensive. But for me, it has always been about setting the stage for two main reasons. It kind of helps achieve success, but it also helps me feel prepared and confident and show up with the right mindset and trust in myself. Right.
understand who the audience is very well reach out to your client this is for the specific question right getting back to it understand who's going to be from the client side in that workshop is it going to be designers or is it going to be just business people who's going to be on the workshop and then you can adjust the structure to the kind of audience because if you talk about very technical design concepts but your audience is like the accountants from that company you're probably going to have a language barrier right a vocabulary problem of
Okay, and then the other thing is align with the main stakeholders, the people who are kind of have expectations from these workshops, your agency partner, the agency owner, whoever is involved in the process, align on the goals. Like, why are we doing this? And what do we hope to achieve? And then always try to build a structure that kind of leads to that desired outcome and make sure to reinforce it. So when you revisit the entire process you've designed, will it eventually connect to the desired outcomes?
When you're delivering it, always keep in mind, is it going in the right direction for that specific outcome? So keep the outcome in mind because otherwise workshops can derail. I've been in workshops where the conversation became something completely different. Like we were doing a design studio kind of workshop and people started talking technical things for one hour because it was with developers as well. And they were like in the back end and I was too young to stop them because they were like very opinionated. And so we ended up losing a lot of time with side conversations.
What I've seen people from Nielsen Norman Group do, very seasoned facilitators, if you want, is kind of create this parking lot concept. So when you see topics that are not on point to your outcome or process or the things that you want to do, pause everyone, tell them, look, this is great. This is an important topic. Let's put it in the parking lot. And you create sticky notes that go in the parking lot and whatever you feel is off topic.
the path you want to go on can sit in the parking lot and you revisit it later. This was a trick that I encountered in my first workshops I attended on educational trips, and it was very helpful for me as well to start keeping conversations on track.
And then get as much context as possible. What are the struggles that that client has? What are the pain points? What have they tried so far? What do they know? What are the known knowns? And so just try to build as much context as possible and reflect it in the way you design that workshop in a mural board as my recommendation would be. And then
communicated with them. So ideally, you would send something beforehand. Hey, look, this is the agenda. This is what we plan on doing. This is what you can expect to achieve. And this will sometimes give people the platform to react. No, it's not what we want. Whoa, we thought we were on the same page. We're not. And so communicate early in preparation because you don't want to be in the workshop and then have people say, what are we doing here? This is not
what I thought we were going to do. I thought we were going to design mock-ups and build a prototype. And so you really want to make sure a thousand times that you're on the same page when it comes to what's going to happen in that workshop. So having the same mindset around the workshop is essential to its success and
then in running the UX workshop Anfisa mentioned a very very important tip don't be a participant don't be a designer don't get involved sometimes it's hard like in the workshop I just delivered in Berlin at some point we were doing AI prompting for the
design solutioning space and I was like I have to try it myself right now I can't it just can't help it and I tried prompting AI in a way and it worked and I demoed it live and so you can kind of slide into small moments of participation but if you
You're in the mindset that I have to do both and you're context switching between now I'm doing these mock-ups and then I have to tell people, okay, look what we're going to do next. Don't do that. You're going to feel overwhelmed. And also what's very important and works for me is that when people work, I get a mental break where I reorganize and then I think about what comes next. What do I do? I take a break. I breathe. I so on. So facilitators need those spaces where other people do the work.
It doesn't mean that you're sitting and they're working. You're just thinking about what comes next and revisiting everything that happened and then consolidating it into something that informs the next stages. And yeah, I think that's it. Be intentional. Tell people from time to time, hey, so checkpoint, here's what we did so far. Here's what we're gonna do next. That keeps them excited, on track. It keeps them accountable.
unintentional and they feel like okay we're doing something that is structured and the last piece of advice is something that I've experimented with on and off you play music in the background while people work in these workshops and for me I found that if there's no music in the background but it has to be very slow not disrupt people and it has to be the right kind of music when I attended a workshop by Jason Massoud which is a design career coach and a very well respected figure in the
career industry for designers he was playing fortet if you don't know fortet go on spotify and search for it and this was kind of ambiental but energizing music and he played it in the background and it really felt like it has energy it's lively it has life in it because if there's like 20 minutes of silence and the conversations are not allowed because you're doing individual work
Again, music goes well when you're doing individual work. And if it's very slow, you can also do conversation work and have it in the background. But again, there's a reason for which the timer widget in Miro allows you to pick music. It kind of helps the psychology of collaborating, ideating. It helps. You can use the Miro music from the timer widget as well. But I prefer Fortet on Spotify. That's my go-to music for when I'm running workshops. And I think that's everything I had to say. Oh, I do have a question for you, Ioana.
I think we didn't cover something important that many people might be asking themselves as if, okay, workshops take time to prepare, organize. It's energy consuming. You're involving people and resources and everything. Why not doing a meeting? Why would you opt in to go for the workshop versus the meeting? What would be your choice? When to use what? It's a very interesting question.
workshops are very much about going through a process to achieve a desired outcome. So if we are looking at complex problems or something that's very tactical thing, a tangible thing with complexity around it, then you want to dive deep into unpacking it. Of course, you can do that in a conversation, in a meeting.
but things are going to be missed. You're going to have to take notes. It's going to get messy. Workshops kind of provide a structure for solving complex topics. So the key to a successful workshop is to have some complexity to the thing you're doing. It has to be complex, involve multidisciplinary perspectives, or have to have blend technical perspectives with design perspectives, or it's a
problem that has a lot of ramifications in it. It's a system that needs to be mapped out. So it has to be a complex problem to be worth a workshop and not just a meeting. I think the level of complexity is what makes the difference and also the desired outcome. Meetings typically translate into a plan or a conclusion that's like next steps. Okay, we talked about this topic and now we're going to do this, this and that. In the workshop, you do this, this and that. And then you get somewhere, you arrive at a conclusion.
It's like a different result, if you want. This is my differentiation scheme. What's yours? Yeah, as for me, I think when I think about workshops, I see workshops as the way for everyone to contribute. What I see happens a lot in the meetings is that when you are in a meeting, there are people who are talking constantly and then there are people who are not talking. Unless you call them out and then they are not comfortable sharing, for example, or something, right? So obviously there are different personalities. But when you are in a workshop, it is...
Thank you.
And then at the end, everybody is heard. And yeah, there's still action points. I think in the meetings, if we have action points, the problem could be that not everybody was talking or not every single point was considered. While in the workshop, you have sort of
more horizontal alignment and everybody was heard. And at least there is one responsible person such as facilitator who will look through every note and sort of process it, right? Interpret it, comes up with a plan for the next actions. So that's the value of what I'm seeing personally. And if I kind of were to summarize this, I would use it as most likely alignment, making sure everybody is sort of on the same page.
and everything is considered in a way. So there is less room for mistakes. And so, yeah, I think that's where I see the value of it, even though it comes with a lot of commitment and time. And if you are a designer, it might sometimes not be efficient for you to run workshops if you are slumped with work, for example, right? And sometimes you have to make it
Async. And I personally am a big proponent today for the Async workshops when you might create like a structure and self-serve sort of guidance through the workshop and then just send your Miro or whatever web tool you're using to your partners, to your stakeholders, creating, for example, a Slack channel, group chat, and so on.
and send them, hey, by the end of the week, can you guys walk through this workshop? Can you block the time in the calendar? Or you even block the time in the calendar for them so they can run through those sort of activities. And then maybe by the end of the week, you can process that information in, again, a more asynchronous way where you don't have to make sure everybody is on the same meeting at the same time. And you kind of put the pressure on everyone to be present in a way. Async workshop is also a very good way for you to collect and make sure everybody is still aligned. But
if time allows and everybody has time by the end of the week to do this, right? So that's important as well to consider.
I will close off with just the last thought I had when you were sharing that it helps to share people what they did. I think I really love this point and it's very good that you noticed this because I feel like when you are explaining why people did something, so for example, when you're running the workshop and you are saying, we just did this for the sake of this, this was why it's important to do this, this is why we wanted to reflect on this. I personally think it's a very good tip and trick, which I haven't found mentioned in the books yet.
Simply because while reflecting back on why people did this, it creates the trust and it shows that you know the intention behind it. Like you allow people to stay sort of present and understand why we're doing this. It's not just like me doing things for our sake of doing this. You actually explain them the reason why we're doing this and why we want to learn this and what it contributes towards. Right. So you kind of always want to almost educate your partners through the workshops as to why we're doing this and what comes next.
This way, making sure they're engaged and also trust you with this process in a way. That will be the last tip for today. I'm pretty sure we could go on and on. And there are more ways we can diverge into talking about different sorts of workshops, different navigation tactics through different complexities. But I don't think we have time for that. And I'll probably stop it here. Yeah, maybe we need another episode where we continue this because it seems that we're both very much into workshops these days.
Thanks, everyone, for joining another episode. Make sure to check past episodes. If you liked our podcast or you like it in general, make sure to give us a nice rating on Spotify. It helps us stay motivated and also make sure to send us your ideas for future topics as we want to discuss relevant things. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Bye. Bye bye.