From top to bottom: Photos by Crew and Serge Le Strat on Unsplash.

Workshop Design Has Never Been More Important than Now

Zoom fatigue is real. But I also want to challenge the hype around this and say: don’t confuse Zoom fatigue with bad meeting fatigue.

As someone who brings large gatherings of people together face-to-face to explore problems and solutions, the pandemic has been quite an adaptation for my facilitation practice!

But when I put my organizational development consultant glasses on, I see the same need as before, in the midst of new digital constraints: working together effectively requires forethought and planning.

Meetings shouldn’t just happen.

Thankfully, by working remotely for much of the past 2 years, I’ve been able to practice my facilitation skills in a digital environment, and plan and design gatherings with my collaborators and peers at a distance.

But until now, none of my clients had ever asked me to host a workshop online. Fellow peers and collaborators? Absolutely. But clients? Never. The assumption was always that I would travel from wherever I was and facilitate the group work in person.

And it wasn’t just me travelling.

Sometimes it was everyone in the workshop, conference or meeting!

Months ago, we all secretly held a wicked question in our minds: “how can we physically connect with one another and hold meaningful conversations about the sorts of change we needed to see in the world, and burn up a ton of fossil fuels to gather in the first place?”

Culturally speaking, it was completely OK for us all to hold this question unanswered, and habitually continue these practices of gathering.

But now we all live in a dramatically different world.

Gathering people together for workshops in rooms just isn’t a thing (and maybe it won’t be for a long time). And the brokenness of that has drawn our previous gathering habits and practices into stark relief.

Clockwise from upper right corner: ål nik; Daniil Kuželev and Justin Buisson. All from Unsplash.

But does this absence of physicality mean that groups of people still don’t need to gather effectively with the support of folks like me?

Absolutely not.

Our collective challenges haven’t gone away. If anything, they’ve become more apparent and urgent to us as we reflect from home on our changed world. And to work through these challenges (let alone solve them), we still need to gather together in groups, and we need to make sure that these meetings are good meetings.

And so, the well-designed workshop — whether with stakeholders and staff or with friends and neighbours — is still as important as ever. We have no choice but to gather online.

So, as someone who has been transitioning clients, collaborators and peers into the secret magic of participatory online workshops, here’s what I’ve learned:

Practice Makes Imperfect

A well-run online workshop requires even more thought being put into the design and preparation than before.

Why?

Because now you are designing with more than just the familiar constraints of time, techniques, people, etc. Now…

1. Digital tools are a critical part of any workshop: they directly mediate our shared experience of group work — constraining how we interact to a digital portal, or by enabling new collaborative possibilities. What happened before and after the gathering itself (what we call “asynchronous”) was always a part of our collaborative work, but now it has become an additional space to design your workshop within: you can sustain engagement outside of the workshop itself, flexing the constraints of time to work in favour of your purpose.
2. The facilitation techniques (the breakout room activities, the prompts, the group problem solving exercises, and so on) are more important than ever. When combined in an agenda, techniques produce affects from one to the other, transitioning and amplifying sentiment and engagement from activity to activity. Intentionally designing the agenda around participatory activities like this becomes even more important in a “room” that is impossible to read.

And because of all of this, practice makes “imperfect.” And by that I mean two things:

1. You need to practice using your tools and techniques even more when planning an online workshop;
2. You need to accept the fact that more will go wrong during your online workshop (some of it human error, and some of it completely out of your control), and so you need to stuff your back pocket with some backup techniques and un-design accordingly. And most importantly, you need to design for creativity, humour, pause, reflection, physical connection, breaks, compassion, and so on.

So what can we do?

Well, for starters, we can find a group of peers to practice with.

The Liberating Structures Community has been an amazing commons that I happened to stumble upon at the very start of the pandemic this year: through it, I have met mentors and collaborators, and participated and led many, many workshops (comment below if you want a Slack invite!).

Where’s Waldo? (hint: look for the “hand wavy” guy in the black hoodie)

And if you want to go deeper, you can practice with us!

Along with my peers at Greaterthan, we provide training to anyone who is keen to take their practice of hosting digital meetings to the next level.

So, we invite you to join us in the fight against “bad meeting fatigue” at our Liberating Structures Studio — come learn how to use Liberating Structures to “Include and Unleash Everyone”, online!