The Changing NHS

Endings are important. A bunch of people have spent several hours or maybe even a day or two together, working on important stuff. It’s important that, as a minimum, they leave with a shared sense of accomplishment and clarity on what happens next or on how next steps are too be agreed.

I sometimes spend too much time thinking about beginnings and not enough about endings. That's because I'm nervous. It's also because first impressions count and because endings depend on 'middles' - what's happenned in the workshop. Nevertheless, endings need thinking about beforehand. Mistakes I’ve made include:

1. The ‘Trickle Away Ending’

Here I scheduled a penultimate sesssion where participants were invited to place themselves into small groups that met outside the main meeting room, when the 24 hour workshop was finishing at lunchtime on day 2. Some of the break-out groups finished well before others and some people used the ‘free time’ as an opportunity to return to work rather than wait around for a final plenary to take us through to lunch;

2. The ‘We Aren’t Up for The Challenge Ending’

Here I encouraged people to volunteer, publicly, to be responsible for follow-up actions in the last session of a 2 day workshop when the work needing to be done (planning a new hospital) was really important and daunting. People were tired and overwhelmed with the scale of the challenge they had identified. Energy levels were low. Only a few people came forward, leaving everyone with the impression that their was no real appetite for ‘getting to grips’ with the challenges. It would have been much better to simply summarise the key challenges identified, get the groups’ assent to the summary and agree a process, to be undertaken within a week or so, for prioritising what happens next and who is to be involved etc;

3. The ‘It All Sounds the Same Ending’

Here 40 clinicians and managers worked in four groups for a day, sketching out possible futures for healthcare and wellbeing systems in 2020. All the groups produced interesting, plausible, rich stories but I made the mistake of inviting all groups to share their work in turn before seeking reactions from the rest of the group. By the time the 4th group had finished people couldn’t keep the stories apart in their heads. It would have been much better to seek reactions after each one in turn. Better still, I ought to have asked each group to finsh their feedback with a summary of 3 things they really liked about their story, to help listeners more easily grasp the distinctiveness of the material.

Oh well, live and learn I guess!

Have you either led or been a participant in a workshop with a bad ending? 

nhs

workshop design

facilitation