The output of this part of a facilitator’s work is not the actual event: it’s the event’s schedule. Why is workshop design important?Ī workshop agenda is only one of many things required for preparing and designing a workshop (for more on that, see our step-by-step guide). Being able to describe your purpose in one sentence will be immensely helpful in communicating with clients, hosts, participants and, before all that, in preparing your workshop agenda. Workshops can be about many, disparate things. What do aim to get done by the end of the allotted time? Can you describe the purpose of your workshop in one sentence? Desired outputs can be tangible, such as creating a plan of activities for the next business quarter, or intangible, such as improving relationships between the staff of two institutions working on a shared project. Therefore, before you start to work on your design you will need to have clarity about your desired outputs. In order to assess a design’s effectiveness you will need a target to evaluate it by. Effectiveness: whether you have set out to choose five new product features in a design team, welcome rookie team members to a company, or decide what the renovated neighborhood playground should look like in an urban planning workshop, the task is done, or at least some tangible steps forward have been taken.Experiences such as navigating a conflict or raising difficult topics may not be fun per se, but the overall feeling should be a positive sense of energies unblocked, relationships strengthened, having been heard and seen Enjoyment: working together can be challenging and facilitation is not all about “good vibes”.
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Coherence: participants feel that what they did made sense and was directed to achieving a set goal.Other elements of a successful workshop design include:
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At the end of the workshop, everyone in the group will have learned something, or be on the way to transforming something in the organization, team or project.
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We could say a workshop is a bit like cooking: you put a bunch of ingredients in, run them through a series of steps and obtain something new, changed and transformed (hopefully, in a tasty direction).Ī workshop is a process of change, so a successful workshop will be one in which participants have undergone some kind of change, big or small. So, if it takes quite a lot of work and effort to design a workshop agenda, that begs the question: what should you be doing with all that time? Long before you actually meet the workshop’s participants, you’ll be at your desk (or sitting on the floor surrounded by a mess of sticky notes and markers) using your foresight, experience and imagination to create the best possible plan for your participants.īefore we go into our top tips on what to include in your plan to design for success, let’s spend a few words clarifying what we mean by a “successful workshop” in the first place.
![training agenda template training agenda template](https://images.sampletemplates.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Training-Agenda-Template-in-Word.jpg)
That means if you are setting out to host or facilitate a 2-hour workshop, it is likely to take you at least 4 hours just to craft the workshop’s schedule. In fact, there is a commonly quoted rule of thumb that says it takes at least twice the time to create a workshop design than to deliver a workshop (and that is not including the rest of the preparation work!). Innovation in template design What makes a successful workshop?Ī lot of preparation goes into creating a great agenda design.