Most workshops end up as a pile of Post IT note garbage.

Everyone gets super excited in the workshop, gets super motivated and then…. It all dies down and nothing gets executed or worse the wrong solutions come out.

However, they don’t need to be that way.

Here are 5 of my tips to approach workshops:

1) Don’t treat the workshop as the end all be all work, it’s an activity to help you, but you need to reflect, validate, bring in evidence and then move forward.

2) Work with a logic model and keep it close to all the activities you do.

This should help you go from your challenge to your outcome, as each activity gets done, more of the logic model gets filled

3) Create each activity with purpose, really think about what you want to learn from each person contributing.

While you can for sure make the workshops fun and engaging, the purpose is to ultimately gain insights, not to play with post-it notes.

4) Don’t get so excited with ideation that you forget who you are creating the solution for.

Too often, when we ideate we come up with tons of ideas, so sound super great, and in many cases they are - but do you stop and validate to make sure your actor, behavior, drivers are accounted for.

5) Don’t make decisions in the workshop with DOT voting.

Instead use scoring matrixes with more parameters that can help you think harder on what you are voting to move forward.

Think spillover effects, acceptability, equity for example.

P.S - I do digital workshops now on Miro, so no paper is wasted, but the problem of garbage can remain the same.

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