A workshop used to mean a room where things were made. It connotated the most productive place on earth where hammers hammered, saws sawed and sweaty men got manual.
A workshop had benches, tools and hardware. It was always a noun as used by George Bernard Shaw when he famously described the industrial English city of Birmingham as “the workshop of the world”.
Nowadays a workshop is something very different for most of us in the corporate whirl.
We’ve turned it into a dreaded verb - “let’s workshop this” – and, in the process, created one of the least productive spaces on earth where the hardware has become software as we PowerPoint ourselves into projected nauseam for hours, even days, seemingly without end.
These company workshops usually involve an expensive facilitator deploying glib thought-starter techniques, scrawling indecipherably on a flipchart and hovering anxiously over breakaway groups before flashing the ‘vote for the best idea’ Post-It notes.
I know these insidious creatures very well because, it’s time to confess, I have been one myself more than several times.
All too often these events begin with the dreaded ‘ice-breaker’ in which people like me ask attendees, off the cuff, to come up with something like their ‘spirit animal’ – in answer to which most people, for some reason, will say either a wolf or an elephant although one colleague of mine memorably blurted out “the Energiser Bunny”.
The facilitator, of course, will always have something smooth and clever – “I am inspired by the bee because it breaks all the rules of aerodynamics when it flies” – because he or she is the only person who knows in advance that this awkward conundrum is going to be posed.
After the ice has been broken into a thousand little pieces there’s usually an 84-slide deck on ‘The Journey So Far’ which is either a criminal waste of time - concise material should have been supplied and read in advance so we can get straight to the nitty gritty – or a good chance to start the day with a gentle doze.
Many of the problems with workshops stem from the venue, which is usually chosen for the catering rather than for the qualities of the room where you will actually spend an interminable part of your life. The two things that matter in the space, and are rarely found in combination, are 1) air conditioning somewhere reasonable between the arctic and the soporific and 2) decent technology that doesn’t automatically power down when you are trying to power everyone up and also can deliver quality audio on the key piece of video without demanding three degrees in computer science to work out exactly how that happens.
The rest of the problems with workshops stem from obvious things like the lack of a clear purpose, too many people in the room and them going on way too long - all day is bad enough, three days and participants lose the will to live.
It’s also worth noting that a workshop is not an effective copywriting or crafting mechanism nor is it a decision-making body - at best it informs the process and the person accountable must make the final call and explain it back to those who attended.
However there is one final condition, no one must ever say during a workshop run by me “we need to really sit down and talk about this” when they are already really sitting down, for a whole bloody day nogal, and talking about it.
Aside from that, it’s all good with workshops and long may they continue because I need the money.
