Have you ever been in a workshop where the energy feels low, conversation seems strained, maybe only a few people have anything to say, and it feels like you’re hearing the same old ideas yet another time?
Given the right circumstances, anyone is capable of coming up with insightful and interesting ideas, the problem with most workshops is that assume that everyone has these great ideas on the tip of their tongues and are ready to share them with the rest of the group.
Quite often, people aren’t even aware they have great ideas, and sadly, some people think that their ideas are too left field to be shared.
I believe that slide shows, printed handouts, or standing in front of a whiteboard as a facilitator are just a few of the unintentional signals that may trigger to people that they should stay in a listening mode and prevent them from engaging in meaningful and original discussions.
As an alternative to this, when facilitating a workshop I like to plan a series of activities that basically forces participation from everyone, and also gives people tools to help think from different perspectives. A couple of characteristics of these sessions is that you can almost feel the energy in the room growing, and people are genuinely enjoying themselves. Because of these qualities, I like to think of these not as workshops, but instead as playshops.
One of the techniques that I use in some playshop activities is to encourage a friendly competitive spirit by getting people to work on a problem in small teams.
Something that both helps form a cooperative team, and also fosters a competitive attitude is a belief that the members of the team share a unique connection with everyone else on the team.
To do this, I like to run what I call the dream holiday activity, it generally takes from start to finish less than 5 minutes to complete and requires next to no preparation.
I run this activity by sticking to a wall a large sheet of paper with the following four holiday descriptions:
- People watching in Paris
- Relaxing on the beach in the Bahamas
- Skiing in the Swiss Alps
- Shopping and Nightlife in New York
(You might need to adapt these to your audience, e.g. you’ll probably want to swap out the New York option if you happen to be running a workshop in New York!)
Now ask everyone to secretly rank on a slip of paper their order of preference for each of these holiday options. Make sure that people are clear that they can’t enter a first equal choice and that all options need to be ranked.
When everyone is done (I tell people they have one minute) designate each corner of the room to one of the holiday options and ask people to move to the corner that matches their first holiday choice.
Amazingly, most of the time this works quite well to split people into evenly sized teams. But if does turn out that most people choose one particular holiday option you can use the second holiday choice to help more evenly distribute people.
By this method, people are formed into teams in which they share something common, and unique to the team (even if it does happen to be as superficial as a holiday preference!)
With four holiday choices this activity works well when you run it with between 10 and 16 participants. If you have more participants than this you will probably want to add more holiday options to aim for teams of 3-4 people. Instead of holiday destinations you might like to choose movie genres or favourite foods. When trying new categories it might pay to run a quick test via email with some colleagues before the workshop to gauge if there is a good distribution of answers.
UPDATE [14/12/2008] Here are some ready to print PDFs for this activity: Four holiday options on A3 and slips to write holiday preferences.
Try it out! You’ll have fun and from my experience form teams of people that work really well together.
Tags: Workshops/Playshops
that is a cool idea, will try it in my next workshop! and it takes peoples minds away for a moment giving a cognitive refresh :) ’scuse me one sec. *Relaxing on a beach in Samoa* and I’m back. Cheers!
Hey Pete :) Let me know how it goes for you!
Something else I didn’t specifically mention is that I never tell people that this is a team forming exercise – I always let it come as a bit of a surprise. I like surprising people :p
[...] If this is the first team activity in the workshop, start by forming the workshop group into teams. You might like to try this 5 minute approach to team forming. [...]