How to conduct an effective workshop?

Raise your hands – who has ever sat in a workshop and wondered, “What’s the purpose of this? Why am I invited, and when will this meeting end so I can get back to what’s truly important?” If you raised your hand, it’s likely that someone forgot to clarify some of the most crucial factors before the workshop.

Here’s the deal: to maximize the time spent during the workshop itself, you need to invest time upfront to clarify clear purposes, goals, and expected outcomes. While starting might be easy, starting effectively is harder and requires planning and detailing in advance.

Critical factors, according to our experience, include:

• Who attends
• Which topics are covered
• How long each topic is allowed

Without the right people in place, it never becomes a good workshop. How do you ensure the right people are invited? The answer is: by conducting a stakeholder analysis before the project starts and developing a communication plan to establish a common understanding of why workshops and other types of meetings are conducted and how they are intended to function. Below, we describe how this can be done:

Stakeholder Analysis (exercise approximately 60 minutes)

Gather in a full group and discuss:

• Which stakeholders have influence – start by identifying stakeholder groups (about 10 minutes) and then spend time identifying individuals within these groups (about 10 minutes).
• Which stakeholders are affected – repeat the above procedure.
• Ensure that everyone in the project becomes aware of the stakeholders we have within the project, and also write down their names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Communication Plan (exercise approximately 30 minutes)

Happy workshoping 😊

/Caroline Hallén