The Uses and Misuses of Workshops
It can be a sentence that fills a marketer with dread: “I think we ought to workshop this.” Often times, workshops seem to mean little more than cheesy icebreakers, lots of half-baked ideas on an easel pad, a mediocre hotel ballroom lunch buffet, and the generic conclusion that, “we had a lot of interesting ideas today, stay tuned for more to come!”
If you’ve been scarred by workshops in the past, the idea that you might not only need a workshop, but that it might be a critical tool to advance your brand, can seem laughable. But a well-designed workshop, conducted for the right purpose, can be a springboard that moves your strategies forward. So how do you know whether a workshop makes sense?
You have a “distributed knowledge” problem. If you have all the information needed to answer your brand’s question, a workshop becomes mostly an exercise in consensus building. But if you need information and perspective from many disciplines, having the folks with that knowledge discussing what they know with each other all at once can help get to answers much more efficiently than one person discussing the problem with each individual stakeholder. Questions like, “what is the ideal launch positioning for our brand?” or, “how do we respond to this competitor’s increase in market share?” are answered best by considering multiple disciplines.
You have multiple viable answers. There are times when one answer to a marketing problem is objectively superior, or has the weight of evidence and experience behind it. In those cases, it is better to make an argument for the preferred approach rather than waste time evaluating lesser options. But when the available data supports multiple approaches, a workshop can help explore what the future looks like when taking different paths, and make you comfortable making a subjective decision.
You need buy-in for your strategy to be executed. There can be times when you might think a workshop is unnecessary because you think you have the answer to the question. However, your answer is only as good as the people who will bring it to life, so there is a place for a workshop that gains buy-in from organizational colleagues. The key is to not pretend it is what it isn’t: telling people you’re considering their input on a decision you've already basically made is sure to lead to a workshop that feels like theater. Instead tell them you're asking them to pressure test your idea, and then brainstorm ways to bring the strategy to life.
Some companies default to workshops as baked-in parts of their process, but the decision to hold a workshop should be based on whether that approach is the best way to solve the specific brand problem at hand. Here are a few really bad reasons to have a workshop:
"That's the way we did it last time." Last time was different than this time. And that begs the question of whether a workshop was a good use of time last time.
"Everyone's already going to be at the conference." It is great if the need to do a workshop lines up with a convenient event, but this rationale often leads to a meeting done at the wrong time, with the wrong people, or with inadequate preparation.
"We have it in the budget." While I appreciate the challenges created by "use it or lose it" budgeting, this is a surefire way to run a meeting that has everyone dying in their uncomfortable meeting room (or, for the time being, home office) chairs.
"It will help focus my boss's attention." Variations one comes up more than you might guess. Too often, marketers feel like a large workshop will seem important enough to get the boss to devote a day to the challenge at hand. But there are other ways to get senior leadership's attention and engagement that don't sacrifice the rest of the team to an otherwise useless meeting.
Despite these challenges, a great workshop can really jumpstart a strategic or creative project, and help teams find ideas they never would have come up with working in silos. I'm always happy to get the chance to design a workshop that actually makes people feel good about being in a workshop.