The Changing NHS

About a year ago I posted 8 tips about workshop design. Quite a few people have since told me they like the more practical posts, so at the risk of invoking the law of diminishing returns, here are 4 more tips for running workshops:

Physical Space

1. Set up the room so that participants are seated as near as possible to the point where any set-piece contributors are going to be. Sounds obvious I know, but I’ve been in hundreds of events where people are too far away and therefore are encouraged to disengage.

2. Use a room that is at least twice the size you think you need. That way you always have the option of moving participants to a new location, with a different layout, if you need to signify a new phase of the workshop, or the need for a change of pace. For example, if I have lots of table groups working on similar questions and we need to move towards a consensus I like to move people into a more intimate, chairs-only horseshoe type arrangement. This way all participants are seated close together as one group, focused on a nearby wall where competing ideas can easily be shared and affinity clustered. This type of layout (together with the symbolic act of all participants getting up from seperate tables and walking to a new location together)really helps to signal shared purpose and the need for whole group collaboration.

Mix By Attitude

3. Clients often say they’d like table groups to be mixed. Usually this means forming groups by mixing people by levels of seniority or the type of organisation they work for or gender. However, it can sometimes be more useful to mix people by their attitude to a key issue that has relevance for the workshop. For example, if the workshop is about Becoming More Effective at Strategic Commissioning it might be a good idea to mix people with reference to their attitude towards a question such as: How Effective Are We Currently at Strategic Commissioning? You can easily do this by asking people to quickly arrange themselves in a line where one end represents the belief that ‘We Are Already Very Effective’ and the other represents the belief that ‘We Are Almost Completely Ineffective Currently’. Then if you want 8 tables simply walk the line giving people a number from 1-8 in turn.

More Effective Feedback from Groups 

4. Someone once told me that they’d never seen any workshop evaluation where participants rated any formal group feedback sessions as the high spot of the day! So if you need groups to feedback to each other try this. Ask groups to:

• Write the 5 key points they wish to make on flipchart paper
• Post the paper on walls around the room (and give everyone enough time to walk the room and review all the posts)
• Take 15 minutes to agree on 3 key points they have seen that really strike a chord
• Take 2 minutes to share these 3 key points with the whole room.

PS It’s also handy to have a bell or (if you have a laptop and speakers) a nice computer generated sound, like a drum roll, that can sound as each group approaches the last 15 seconds of their 2 minutes of feedback time.

What tips do you have?

Steve

www.stevepashley.co.uk

change management

nhs

facilitation

OD