Improve meetings using workshop principles with Rebecca Courtney

In this episode of Delivered, you can learn how to turn your meetings into engaging sessions that deliver results using proven workshop principles.

We sat down with Rebecca Courtney, a facilitation coach and collaboration designer at the award-winning product design and strategy studio AJ&Smart. For 10+ years, she’s been leading workshops for some of the most well-known companies. 

Key learnings:

• Identify the root cause of poor collaboration and learn how to fix it
• Find out why workshops ‘work’ and help teams achieve more
• Explore the surprising benefits of workshops across industries
• Understand why idea validation is crucial before launching a product
• Get practical strategies to improve your group sessions

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About Infinum
Delivered is brought to you by a leading digital product agency, Infinum. We've been consulting, workshopping, and delivering advanced digital solutions since 2005.

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Transcript

Hello, Rebecca Courtney, welcome. Hi. Welcome to Delivered. Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Hey, it is absolute pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to join me on this emotional journey on the live. I was trying to really convey the skills and the knowledge and everything that you have at AJ&Smart in a really concise way. But I think it's so vast and so important that we get this correct for the audience first and foremost. So should we just start talking about you and talk about your career and how you became part of the AJ&Smart team as a facilitation, I guess champion guide.

Whoa. First of all, thank you so much for the amazing intro. I feel very honored for the way you introduced me. But yeah, I've been working with AJ&Smart for a few years now, but before that, as you said, I was a teacher, so I was a primary school teacher. I did a bit of Montessori teaching as well, and I really, really liked it. I really loved it. And that was like I kind of worked all my life towards becoming a teacher, but when I actually got into the thick of it and got into the thick of teaching, I started to feel a bit disheartened about the actual career path. It felt very predictable to me. I felt like my skills were just getting a bit stagnant. Maybe some people listening here might also feel the same in maybe a career that they're in right now.
And that was kind of scary to me because I dedicated so much time to actually working towards that goal. And while I was having these doubts in my head about the career path I had chose, I was also in conversation with my brother, who's Jonathan Courtney, he's the CEO of AJ&Smart, the company I'm working at. And he was talking about just loads of the same issues that I was experiencing in the schools that I was teaching in. So a lot of collaboration issues, like how people work together, meetings, going nowhere, all of this stuff. And I was kind of like, oh, okay. I thought that he was doing something. I had no idea about UX design, all of this world that I was totally confused about. I was like, how the hell would I even ever connect with what he's doing? But when he was talking about facilitation and workshops, I was like, oh, that sounds really cool.
And he started talking about maybe a job opportunity there because they were moving more into the world of education and teaching people about how to run workshops and design them and teaching people how to become facilitators. So he offered me this job and I was like, I just leave everything behind, give everything up and just take the leap and try something new. And I did. And yeah, it's been a few years now and it's amazing. I do so much at AJ&Smart now. You need to be a jack of all trades to work there. I'm a facilitation coach in our higher tier program workshopper master. I'm also designing courses and trainings. I'm also doing a lot of the social media content in our YouTube channels. So doing a lot and really loving it.

I love that. And I also, I think every respect to you going all in on this as well, from having the master's degree in education to do education, teaching the predictable going, do you know what? I'm just going to move, just go all in. I think that's a really powerful message. So people just want to pursue their dreams. It's a bit cheesy, but I think that's very much true though as well. And also Absolutely. Yeah. And the fact you do multiple things now as well isn't, I just teach people. It's like you teach, you workshop, you facilitate, you build syllabus, you do a lot more of this stuff as well as the marketing that I see a lot on LinkedIn and things like that. I think you do a lot of things, which in some respects I think is a big, big part of being successful anyway, in any career. You kind of like your own personal brand slash operator of your skillset and your craft. And yeah, I'm very impressed. So in short, yeah, I'm just trying to wrap that up into a nice little, that's pretty cool. Thank you. Thank you.
I think also what stuck with me there in your intro is like all this stuff happened out there at UX and design, because Infinum, we do a lot of these technical things and design things, big complex words. But what really stuck to me in this career, I'm, it's the same sort of thing where workshops, facilitation, just collaborating with people, it's like a universal language where people just need that to kind of solve big challenges better, faster together. It kind of transcends any industry, any kind of skillset. So in some respects, I think being the guide and being the educator and having your skillset is the best level of you can probably give most people in the world just generally whatever they do. So yeah, I think exciting times for what you do. I want to jump into what workshops are, first of all. Cause we're saying the word workshops a lot. I think we probably should just clarify from the expert what workshop is and how it's a bit different than a meeting, for example.

Yeah. So I think there's loads of definitions out there of what a workshop actually is. And if we were to define it at AJ&Smart, we'd say the fluffy definition would be that it's a highly structured meeting or a session where the facilitator guides a group through some exercises so that the whole entire group can come to the very end and all be aligned on a solution that they want to go forward with. But basically, to me, I just feel that they are, how I actually put it is that if you think of a workshop or a meeting where you actually just talk about what you should do, and the workshop is actually where you do the real work, I believe, anyway, it's where you gather everybody in the room, all the right people that need to be part of the decision making process.
You get them all together in the room, get them all aligned and keep them in the room, lock them in there until they go away, until they leave there with some real solid solutions to the challenge that they're trying to tackle. And we want to make sure as well with workshops that they always end with very clear next steps to follow. Because what we see a lot of the time, and I think maybe a lot of the listeners will also relate to this, is that a lot of meetings that are happening, they always end with just basically scheduling another meeting. You just talk a lot about what you should be doing rather than actually doing it. So yeah, the workshop, I believe gets the real work done.

I love that. Yeah, I love that. I mean, we don't condone locking people in rooms. But we do condone getting things done. So I do appreciate that and I think it's a really good way to look at it. I think everyone, people's listening has been in this situation where meetings are spawns more words, more meetings, more things where actually workshops, it's like stuff done stuff decided stuff done stuff, decided it really drives forward stuff. I can speak for my world in innovation, it's so important because everyone's got limited ideas, but reality as a company has limited resources. We have to really hone down on that complex idea and really just drive it forward and align on that. I think you're right. Workshops help that rather than just a generic meeting type thing. So also I believe that meetings aren't going away anywhere. They're going to be there to the end of time. But I think the main thing is can you learn and apply workshop principles in meetings to maybe help them be more efficient and a bit more just purposeful and efficient, I guess, things. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And I think as well, not all meetings need to be a workshop and that as well. There are so many different types of meetings that happen. There's meetings that are just like these dailies. There's just these check-in meetings. They don't need to be turned into a workshop. They definitely don't. They would definitely benefit by having a facilitator in the room and having somebody who has the facilitation skills and the knowledge to actually use some workshopping techniques to make sure that people move from A to B and that it's not just an open discussion that goes nowhere. But then the more strategic meetings where real decisions need to be made, where the complex decisions need to be made, they can be turned into workshops and they should be led by a facilitator who's skilled and who understands group dynamics, who understands how to manage discussions in a way that's actually productive. But yet, meetings are, as you say, they're not going anywhere. And it's up to us to improve them and can. And the whole title of this entire podcast episode is "Improve meetings using workshop principles". And there are a few really simple ways that you can just improve your meetings. Maybe we'll talk about them now. I'm not sure if you want me to tell you some tips and tricks, but I'm not sure. Is that a bit later?

Well, it feels like it's a nice segue to get into it because I think I won't go into the exact benefits. That's definitely your bag. But I always talk about we do discovery or strategy or whatever up front, workshops front. I'm always like, for the 10, 20% investment you spend on these things to do the big project, they're going to basically make that 80, 90% much more risk averse and much more aligned, and people will have a lot more clarity as to what to do. So I'm a big advocate doing this at the start. It's an investment. It's not necessarily just a cost. It's actually help. You're investing in the people to do great work as opposed to that's just do work. So that's just my spiel on why I always promote these things is. Workshops are my world. But the benefits, let's talk about the benefits.

Oh my God, the benefits. There are so many benefits, let me start with, I suppose the word is just so obvious, alignment, getting everybody in the same room and understanding what they're actually working on. I work at a very small agency. It's probably about maybe 15 people at the moment. And by God, the amount of misalignment that goes on actually there. And our whole entire job is to be facilitators and to make things better. But it just happens. Sometimes. It just happens that people get siloed. People are working on their own projects. And then there's a moment in time where we're all like, wait, who's doing? What are we meant to be doing? What are we working towards? And I know this from talking to so many companies and organizations that this is a huge problem. So workshops are amazing for getting everybody into the room, the right people.
That's a really important point. Doesn't need to be the whole entire company. It just needs to be the key decision makers that you need to get into the room so that you can get them all aligned and moving forward. That would be number one. I don't know if in order would I put that number one because there's something that kind of beats that. And that would be the second benefit, which is workshops allow everybody to be part of the decision making process. And this is huge. There's so much data out there, there's so much research done that people need to feel ownership over the solutions and the decisions being made in a workshop or a meeting. If they're not. And if the solutions are just kind of passed down from above and just decided for them, then people won't actually be excited or have the energy to execute any of these solutions or ideas. They won't feel like it's theirs. They won't feel excited about it. And there's a really nice quote, my apologies, because I have no idea where the quote came from. I fully stole it. Let's say it's from me. I'm joking. It's not somebody really established. But the quote is basically that people support what they help create. And I really love this. If people are actually part of right there at the beginning, creating ideas, creating something, and they're all a part of it and they have the space to get their ideas in, they feel like they don't feel worried that their ideas are just going to be ignored or sabotaged when they're part of that process, they're way more likely to implement these things and those ideas are more likely to succeed then in the business. So yeah, everyone's being part of the decision making process and this whole experience is probably one of the biggest benefits for me. With workshops, again, you've mentioned it, saving time and money is huge. The amount of time you would save if you ran a three hour workshop in comparison, you probably will get, no, it's a fact. You'll get more done in a three-hour workshop than probably six months of meetings about the same challenge. If you just dedicate that time and energy to one day and get all the right people in the room and basically, just have that energy and momentum to get the work done, you're going to save so much time and money. Yeah, there's so many other ones, but I'm not sure how much time maybe,

Yeah, we'll start with the three. Three is a good number. I mean, obviously going backwards, I mean time and money. I think every business in the world would never turn away from that. And you are right. I think the one you mentioned actually about the idea of jumping into a project and not having that alignment on what you're doing, and it's kind of a blend of the first and second you mentioned, but it's like, come into a project, just do this piece of it. You don't really know how that contributes to the bigger picture, therefore you're not incentivized to do big great work to do just generic work. So actually why not spend that first, what, two, three hours just to do a micro workshop? I suppose a macro one just to align people. I think some people, at least in my experiences, people sometimes go, oh, workshops and then comes over them and they're like,

days to spend in this session. I'm like, it can be half a day, it can be remote, and it can just be about let's get you all to speed. Let's get your collective intelligence on this project because you might have some stuff that hasn't been thought about and you are like a new fresh pair of eyes. That's important. And I think having that structure to workshops rather than just like, we'll have a meeting and the meeting know, and that's what makes me shy. I'm like, oh, okay, so why am I even here for? And you can't really leave if it's not valuable because that's rude unless you look at the way you can do that, I think. But you're right, it's super important to get alignment of incentives, I suppose is part of it. But alignment of focus and actually purpose of work I think is such an undervalued commodity that people don't really think about. And as a facilitator or a workshop, you are that person that can unlock that I suppose, and help bring that into a team, which is on a macro scale can be infinitely valuable. We can collaboration talk about what can create good collaboration.
What about poor collaboration? What's the leading cause of that? In your experience, what advice could you give to leaders trying to avoid this sort of thing so much? I think that that question could be broken down into, I have two answers for it. Basically, I think the number one cause of poor collaboration is that communication in general is insanely complex. It is so, so crazy. And there's this amazing diagram that I always share. I don't know who it's by, but it's basically a few images of a team of three people. So it just shows three different dots. A team of three people has three lines of communication. If you just add three more, so you have six people in there, you suddenly have 15 lines of communication that are going on. And then if you add in literally two more people, eight people, this is mind blowing. The number jumps to 28 lines of communication. So you have eight people in a room. There's all of these different lines of communication going on. No wonder there's so much misunderstanding and miscommunication and no wonder things actually just stall. And people give up because they're exhausted from communication problems. They're so tired of it. So the more lines of communication you have, the greater the chances of failure and another meeting being scheduled. So that's number one. So I think our facilitators are amazing for this and for managing that because we understand how communication works. We know how to manage the discussions that are going on in the room. We limit the number of people that we bring into our workshop so that it doesn't go too wild and get too chaotic. So that would be number one. The second thing, and I think this is so important, is that people aren't taught how to actually collaborate or work together properly. It's not something that you're taught in school, unfortunately, yet. I hope that it's coming into the curriculum somewhere, but we're not taught how to listen to each other properly. We're not taught how to actually share each other's ideas in a space where it's actually productive. And people nowadays are just thrown into the role of meeting leader and they're expected to lead the whole meeting, manage all the group dynamics, and also come out at the very end with some amazing outcomes and results. And it's unfair. It's unfair that people are expected to do this. And it's not like, it's not a surprise that these meetings just go nowhere and people just get tired halfway through and end up scheduling another one. So I think those are the two main causes. Communication is chaotic in general. The nature of it is wild. And if you don't have somebody just steering that and managing it and harnessing it, then it's going to go sideways.

Yeah, that's such a really good point. I've never thought about it in such, like I say, a large scale. It's almost like we're set up to fail, potentially. We don't have it baked into our education system. It's like when you become a manager or a leader, most of the time you don't get trained on that. You're just like, oh, you've been head the longest or the most senior, go and lead and manage people. And you're like, okay, but there's no training in that. I think you're right. So great point about educational parts of what we should be doing. Cause we actually did a survey on LinkedIn fairly recently just to the head of this conversation. And it was like 45% of people on the survey said most of the meetings feel like a waste of time. And I suppose that doesn't surprise you based on not even the fault of the people, which because maybe an education revolution needs to happen, which potentially is on your shoulders now because we just talked about it.

I'm definitely trying to get that up and running in our communities. I'm like, the minute a teacher comes in, I'm like, Ooh, so you might want to get workshop facilitation and get it into the curriculum, please God. But yeah, I think it needs to start there first. But then also for leaders, my advice would be learn facilitation skills. A lot of people don't even know what facilitation is. Basically facilitation is you are making something easier. The definition of facilitation, like the Latin word is facile, I'm pronouncing it wrong, but it literally translates to make easy. And you as the facilitator, your job is to come into a group and unburden them from all of this poor collaboration that's going on. You take it upon yourself, take the weight of it off their shoulders, take the communication issues away from them as well, and let them actually just do their real work. So if you're a leader listening, learn facilitation skills, and those are really, if you're in education, if you're working with people, you probably have them well developed already, but active listening. So really truly listening to people and what they actually want. Asking powerful questions, giving clear instructions, managing the energy of the room, understanding group dynamics. All of these skills are super necessary to try combat this problem that we have of poor collaboration, collaboration, chaos is what we call it at AJ&Smart. Sounds better.

It sounds great. It sounds perfect. And also I think it is prevalent in companies and I think it can't be escaped to identify and diagnose it. And then obviously solution is like you are saying, to have someone to make things easier, which sounds great. And I think because we're talking about not doing too much talking and doing actual action-based stuff and validation, to kind stick to the theme of this, could we maybe delve into some companies that you have worked with, for example, at AJ&Smart, just to prove this does work. It's some of the larger, bigger companies in the world. Just to give that validation.

So we here at AJ&Smart as if I'm in the office. What? But at AJ&Smart, we've worked with loads of different companies all over the world. Google, Slack, Netflix, LEGO. Actually, LEGO was my first workshop that I ever ran, which was absolutely terrifying because I was still teaching and I was still deciding whether I wanted to take the leap and leave teaching behind and go into work shopping and facilitation. And Jonathan knew what he was doing when he was like, oh, well, while you're deciding, just come over and help me co-facilitate this workshop. It's going to be great. And then I think it was the day before the workshop, I heard that it was LEGO. I knew the outline and everything and what we were actually doing and we were planning it and everything, but it was like, oh yeah, by the way, it's Lego what?
So that was a really cool experience. We did a three day workshop actually at the Berlin office, and we taught them a lot of workshop facilitation techniques. We help them with one of their challenges, which was right now I'm like, so I know that the original problem and challenge that they had was that they wanted to make their instruction manuals a bit more, I think, accessible for their customers. I think if anyone from LEGO here and listening, I'm sorry if I got that wrong, but the reason I didn't really focus too much on that challenge is because once we got into that challenge, we realized what the bigger challenge was and that was misalignment in the team. So we basically took them through a two day workshop and trying to teach them how to better collaborate and better communicate with each other so that they all knew what was going on.
They were all working in different departments, but towards the same goal and it was getting very messy and hard for them to keep track of things. So that was a really cool experience. And also LEGO, like Jonathan, a few years ago, he went to Tokyo and he ran a massive, really big workshop with LEGO there too, and had brilliant, there was a podcast episode actually on his older podcast, it's called Jake and Jonathan, where he interviewed somebody who was working in Lego, somebody really high up there. And he spoke about them taking this massive break in the company and changing everything internally to using design sprints. And now they still use them to this day. So even just bringing workshops and that way of working into work really transforms them, transforms teams, companies, organizations.

It's such a good way to look at it as well. And the design sprint for anyone who's listening is one of the most powerful, I'd say workshops for sure. It's something that I think I've done since 2017. We do it all the time at Infinum. It's the best way just to get ideas out, people's heads, visualize flows. It's the great way to visualize and make people align around it. But I think I'm going take a quote from someone, it's not your quote this time, but done old Rumsfeld, and it's that kind of classic, there's no knowns, no unknowns, and then no unknowns that come up. And that kind of makes sense until you're in a workshop. And when people say to me, okay, we want to build innovative and build stuff, we want to build this technology. I'm like, cool, what are we doing for it? And they have a general idea. But what I find by doing any kind of group work, facilitation, group dynamics, whatever, what's going to come out of it generally, and you might get a slight deviant from that, but then the magic I think is when you find the unknown unknowns and stuff comes out of it, the ideation or even sometimes even the conflict, like that's the time to find the conflict, hash out the conflict before you go into a production state and start spending loads of money building this new idea, whatever that idea is, I think that's part of it. That's a really part fine to find conflict and failure in these safe spaces around workshops. And the facilitators will navigate that. Yeah, I can never stress enough. I think that's why I think for myself personally, why I'm so leaning into this as a tech guy strategy guy, I think this kind of work is so important just to protect people's sanity and budgets and time.

Doing the right work at the right time. So I thought I'll just try and match your quote for quote.

Yeah, no, I loved that. I really liked that one. I'm going to steal it and say it's mine.

Yeah, you still wise, Rebecca, Courtney, whole bible. So in terms of workshop success for everyone at home, what does success look like in a workshop? How do you measure success in a workshop? So I think it's so funny, if you would've asked me this maybe three years ago when I started, I would've been like, well, keeping the client happy and making sure that we met all the key objectives and that we have all the results and all of that. I think that's still incredibly important. And I think that having tangible results and having a team leaving the workshop with a list of action steps to follow and them all aligned on what they're going to be doing next rather than leaving and being like, so yeah, that was great, but what the hell are we actually doing? And who's doing what? So having that set up is a key metric for success for a workshop. But also now what I'm looking out for, the main thing I'm looking out for is people having fun. That is a huge part for me.

People actually getting the opportunity to come together and do their real work, do what they were actually hired to do in meetings. Now what I've noticed, there's so much research out there on this as well, and there's so many people I'm talking to, they're hired for a particular job, they have a particular skillset, but they spend all of their time jumping from meeting to meeting, talking about what they should be doing rather than actually doing what they were hired to do. And it's exhausting for people. They're trying to do their real work in between the meetings, they have all these different tabs open and they're like, my God. And even bringing their real work home and doing it after hours. So what I think is amazing, and what I love seeing in workshops is the joy in people's faces when they actually get to do what they're good at and they have that space to just be like, okay, oh my God, this is what I should have been doing this whole time. So yeah, so I think tangible results, people all being aligned and all bought into the workshops, success, fun, and making sure that they actually do something with what came out of that workshop.

So good. Yeah, it's so good. And actually sort trigger a memory. We have quite a lot of large corporate clients, we'll say, similar to what have NY, and we do these sprints and workshops quite a lot to get things moving. I remember specifically being in a large New York skyscraper with a large management consultancy with one of my clients, and you think, oh man, I can't do certain exercises or so nice breakers because they're so serious and they're so right.


You're right, naturally, I started the whole session off. There was 12 people in this room, three dialed in, one all had huge titles, big titles, globalists, VP of that.
And I started with the classic, my first job icebreaker, which you all know, but people obviously who are listening, it's like you simply start the discussion by rather than just saying what's your name? You say, okay, what's your name? What's your first job? What did you learn from that first job and how has it affected your to get your job now? And it honestly illuminated the room of people just going back in time thinking about their old jobs and their first paper rounds, all random stuff they used to do. And it's a nice way and it sort of broke down these barriers of client agency and titles and titles and it was just like we're just all human beings working to try and solve a problem together.

You're right. I feel like it's such a powerful way just to connect people and break away the stigma of who's the most senior, who's the most loud, who's the most whatever, and then we can get on with the work and start to solve big challenges together, I think. Yeah, it's a great memory. 

Yeah, no, I love this. It's funny you just mentioned icebreakers there. I literally just recorded two videos on Tuesday and Wednesday about icebreakers and about basically we were talking in the video about most people when they hear that word, they hate it, they cringe and they're like, oh my god. They think back to school when they're sitting in a circle and they're about to be asked what their fun fact is and it's torture. But there are, and also a lot of these senior leaders who have been working for years and years and years, the minute they're presented with this word, we're going to do an icebreaker right now, it's going to be so great. They feel like it's irrelevant. They don't see why it should be part of this workshop. They want to get down to business and they want to do the real work.

But what people don't know is that these activities is what I call them, actually, I never say the word icebreaker, because people don't like that. They're so important and they're proven to help boost team morale, to get people in this mindset that they need to be in to solve problems together. They're just so necessary. And I think the more silly, the better rock paper scissors, that one is my favorite. If anybody is doing a workshop with a large group, try that. It is literally, if you want the room to be filled with energy in the space of one minute, then that is the one to go for. It's amazing.

You should definitely link this later. I've seen a video of you doing this. It is super powerful. But yeah, you're right.
It's so important to do these things. I think also as well, it reminds me of just, it breaks down the barriers immediately, not just from a facilitator and team, but also the teams themselves like, oh, I used to do this, or it connects them in a way that makes working together in this really intense manner feel less strenuous. So yeah, I think it's super important. I think it's also worth just to delve into some of the myths about workshops as well and maybe debunking some of those. I think as much as there's this idea of it can bring joy, maximize happiness and efficiency, all the mix and things that we want to just get rid of whilst we're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, well, for me, when I started at AJ&Smart and when I was going from teacher to facilitator, something that I struggled with the most was because as a teacher, you have to be a subject matter expert. It's just a fact. You need to know all of the subjects. You need to be able to impart that wisdom into the children. So when I moved from teacher to facilitator, I also felt this huge pressure to be able to understand all of the people that we were working with, problems and challenges in detail. But the great thing about being a facilitator, and this is one of the myths that's out there, people think that in order to be a great facilitator, you have to be a subject matter expert. It's not true. In order to be a successful facilitator, the best thing, sorry about being a facilitator, is that you don't need to be a subject matter expert.

And we have this principle here at AJ&Smart where we call it Chris, be the guide, not the hero. And the best thing about that is that you can go into any company, any industry, tackle any challenge, and why can you do that? Because you don't be part of, you don't need to get into the weeds with the challenge. You're basically there to guide a team through a workshop, through some recipes and get basically them coming up with the decisions, coming up with the ideas. You're basically unlocking their superpowers so that they can solve the challenge themselves. And that just took so much pressure off me as a facilitator. I was like, oh, I can go into a pharmaceutical company, know nothing about them at all. But because I understand group dynamics, because I have all of these recipes and systems and frameworks, and because I have this ability to just work with people now and understand what collaboration really is, I can get them from A to B confidently.

So that's one definitely. The second one, and I'll keep the second one short because I maybe we're tight on time, and this is important because if there are people out there who are like, yeah, that sounds all great, but facilitators have to be extroverted in order to be successful, that is another massive myth that needs to be debunked because you do not have to be an extrovert to be a successful good facilitator. Actually, the best facilitators at AJ&Smart are the introverted members of our team, and the reason being is because they're better at listening than the extroverted facilitators. They're able to slow down, step back and really listen and be a proper guide and not get too involved in what's going on. Yeah, that is something that I really want to just let people know. You do not need to be a performer, entertainer, extroverted personality in order to do a good job as a facilitator and run successful workshops.

That's very, very needed. I think people do assume you have to be this jazz hands. It's fun time. We're doing stuff. It's definitely not that. It's completely the opposite, and it's so true about being the guide, not the hero. And the amount of workshops I've ran with starting off with a Lord of the Rings slideshow going, Hey, the fellowship, this guy's the decider because he's the sponsor, and they're like, oh, I get it. Makes sense. And I'm making these, oh, it could be Yoda and it could be Beverly Alliance, whatever your lean is. Matrix has got another one as well. But I'm making these decks before I go into these sessions, these big companies, and I'm like, is this the right thing? But then you have to remember, you are painting it with pictures and using metaphor to help them understand we're all just in it together.

It's just that everyone has a role in this collection of stuff to do. So yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. I'm going to just delve slightly into digital products, light touch, don't worry, I'm joking, but it's more about the importance of validation. So before you launch digital product, the importance of validation and running that through the workshop process, what's your advice around that? And also obviously teams sometimes might want to skip that step to just get on with stuff, but in terms of just validation through this process of workshopping, where do you sit with that?

Well, to be honest, I think if people skip idea validation, yeah, they're going to be in massive trouble. It is crucial. It is crucial to do it, to really figure out what people want. Will people use this product? Do they want it? A lot of people actually get very attached to their own ideas. I've noticed this a lot in workshops. It happens. So often somebody comes up with an idea and they're like, yes, this is the one, this is it. But they fail to ask anybody else, do they think it's a good idea and do we actually need it? So yeah, first thing you have to figure out whether the customer actually needs the thing rather than putting all of your time, energy, money behind something, putting it out to the world world and then it failing. That is so, so important. And the design Sprint, as you know, is a tool that you can use for this idea validation phase, and it's such a perfect recipe, a perfect workshop for you to quickly test these ideas, figure out, okay, who's our customer? What's the problem? What's the pain point that, what are we actually solving here? How long is it going to take? Is it actually even feasible? All of these questions should be clarified before creating the actual product. So yeah, so much so in that I feel like I could go on about this for so long, and I have so many stories as well around it. But yeah, it's saving time and money straightaway. You avoid building somebody something nobody wants. You're defining and clarifying the problem. So straight away you're validating whether what you're solving is the right problem for the right audience. And what I like to ask myself as well, when I'm doing design thinking workshops or if I'm doing design sprints or any of that, anything like that, I always ask myself, does this idea and ask the group, does this idea directly address a pain or a need? If not, get rid of it. Get rid of it. Love that. I just found the Sprint book there right next to me, never thought, validate everything. So glad you said that. It's kind of a loaded question. It's like, please validate everything people, when you do anything to do product innovation or just generally any idea, right? Oh, I actually slightly lied a little bit there because that's one tech question. I have one more question that is also in tech a little bit,

But it's horrible, overused word, but super important. AI.

I actually, I like this. I'm getting a bit more into it definitely lately and especially there's, okay, I don't know too much right now about what's going on, but I do know that for the next 12 days, that is a ChatGPT or something is releasing some new feature. Yeah, it is ChatGPT. They're releasing a new feature every day, and I'm kind of slightly invested in that whole thing. So yeah, maybe it's the perfect time to ask me this question.

Build could back bot or something like that. But in terms of how it influences at the minute, it's influence in everything, of course, and everyone's talking about it for every single industry and service. But in terms of your world, in terms of workshops, how do you see AI being useful to help solve problems or influencing the workshop in process? Do you see a place for it in such a human-centric space? Do you see it being additive or do you see it being destructive?

Destructive? No, I definitely see it as an additive. Absolutely. I believe that AI, and especially I'm looking at these tools like these digital whiteboarding tools now, like Mural, they're using AI in there, and it's amazing for what I see, this is going to be amazing for if you're running a design sprint and you want to really quickly make a prototype to just check whether it's going to work or not and just test it. Mural right now are actually after changing, or they've added a feature in there where you can quickly design prototypes using AI. So for these specific, my God, that word specific cases, and I think AI is amazing for that, and especially if you want to actually summarize what happened in workshop really quickly, rather than having to write that all out, document all of that, it's going to save you a lot of time as a facilitator with prep work and post-workshop work and all that. I think it's amazing. What I do struggle with AI right now is that I see a lot of people using it replacing the idea generation phase with using ChatGPT or all of these AI tools. And I have a problem with that because even when I use it at the beginning when I started writing LinkedIn content or if I was trying to come up with ideas for workshops, I'd use it and then I'd feel dirty because I was like, sorry.
Yeah, it makes me cry too. But yeah, I was like, oh God, I feel like that's not who I am. Or this idea, sorry, we've all been there. I didn't know that that word was going to come out of my mouth that before I said it. But yeah, I just felt like it was interfering with my creative process and that felt like cheating for me. So I believe that it is definitely relevant in some parts of the workshop, but I really believe that it should be kept out of the idea generation phase because that is where you need all of humans brains for this. You need people to come together and to be inspired by each other and natural for the ideas to naturally come out of the group's energy and everything. I just, I'm very strict about that.

Totally fine. I mean, yeah, AI is amazing, but also, yeah, it's dirty, so it's not cross falling.

Yeah, it's dirty. But no, I will say one more thing, sorry, Chris. Another thing I will say, and I think this is a big one because I think that AI can definitely replace what regular facilitators can do. And what I mean by regular facilitators is that people who follow rigid recipes, people who have to stick to a very rigid agenda like an AI generated facilitator can do all of that.

Cookie cutter workshop, is that the right word.

It? Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think they can replace, AI can replace that type of facilitator, but you can't replace what we call at AJ&Smart, an emergent facilitator, and that is the type of person who's able to be thrown into any situation, any workshop situation, and deal with any unexpected challenge that might be thrown their way, like challenging participants, skeptics, somebody arriving late, having to change things really quickly. You can't beat that in person or human experience or human, what's the word? I'm gone. She's getting too warm.

Human creativity, human agility. Yeah, I know what you're saying in terms of,

Yeah, the intuition, that's the word. You can't actually replace that.

True, because I think the way AI is, it's great at producing a bunch of stuff, but it needs human beings to then be like the editors and the actual people that make the decisions as a human would say. Obviously you don't want to make any to take over that. So I'm going to pause on my questions because actually my last question is very similar to the first question from our guests.

Actually. Do you know how many people are here or do you have the idea, oh my God, I knew it. They'd all be here.

All AI. All AI people coming to get you many people. So I'm going to pause my questions and move to the audience questions. And this is a really great first question actually, because we talked a lot about principles, we talked a lot about how to help meetings be better. How do you apply workshop principles in a sense that you can go in there respectfully and try and guide and do things in a structured productive way with these principles without being a jerk who steps on people's toes?

That's a great question. Okay, so basically if you're working in a company and you want to try out some workshopping techniques and you want to dabble in facilitation, my advice to you would be in the next meeting that's coming up, if there's no real leader who's steering the ship, I would suggest that you volunteer to be that person. And you don't want to just go in there and be like, I'm going to facilitate this. I'm just going to redefine the whole way we work. No, you slowly ease into it and you just ask politely, would you mind if I actually facilitate this meeting? And that basically means that I'm just going to be visualizing the discussion a bit, taking some notes. It's not like a meeting note taker or anything. It's different. You're just going to be visualizing some of the key points of what's happening.

You're also going to be slightly managing the discussion a bit, and you're just going to make sure basically that people are going to leave the session with very clear action steps to follow and a clear direction. So you can ask whoever is in charge of that meeting, would they mind you taking over and just trying out some new techniques that you're learning yourself? Then I feel like once you do that and you demonstrate some of these are the principles now that I want to talk about visualizing the discussions, very simple is just like you going in with sticky notes and a sharpie and just writing key points of the conversation down that is happening and placing it up on the wall. Actually, once you do that, it takes so much pressure off the group of people that are in the room because they now don't have to store all of the ideas and all of the discussions that were happening in their head while also trying to be present.
They can just relax and focus on what's going on and what's being spoken about in the moment, because you are taking charge of keeping track of everything. The next thing you can do as a facilitator in that meeting is you can sequence the discussions. Basically what that is, is that you are making sure that everybody is getting an opportunity to speak. You're kind of just like, okay, so Sarah, what do you think about this idea? And you give them a bit of time. You can time box it if you want, but if you want to just go in easy first, you can just in your head, maybe think of a minute. So Sarah has a minute to talk. So Sarah gets her point across and you say, thank you so much, Sarah, what do you think of this, John? So you're sequencing the discussion and you're making sure that nobody is taking over the discussion, just jumping in and hijacking the discussion and making sure everybody has a chance to speak.
The next thing I would do as well as a really great exercise, well, it's a technique essentially. It's in the book Sprint. It's called Working Together Alone. So basically what that is, is that you give opportunities in the session, in the meeting for your team members to write. Let's say there's a problem to be solved and you need to write down loads of ideas on how to solve it. So basically the work together alone principle is that you get them to first individually write down their ideas, one idea per sticky, and then they place it up on the wall, and when they're placing it up on the wall, they can share it with the group. And this again, kind of democratizes the floor, gets everybody talking. It allows the more introverted people a space to get their ideas out. And again, it's not just like the more senior person is getting their ideas out and everybody else is quiet.
The final thing is that, or one of our principles is that every session always ends in a decision. So you are making sure as a facilitator that you're like, okay, so what did we decide? These are the three solutions we came up with today. How can we actually implement them? What things need to be done? So you can use the what are the who when framework. So you're like, okay, so there's this solution. Who's actually going to be taking charge of it? Okay, Sarah, you're responsible for that. When does that actually need to be done for next Monday? And then you do that for each solution or whatever you come up with in the meeting so that everybody leaves and we're like, oh my God. Okay. So that was really great. We visualized the discussion. There was a bit more order and structure to it. Everybody got a chance to speak, and now we actually all know what we're doing when we leave here. So that was a very long-winded answer, but those are the things, the four things that I would definitely try to implement into a meeting to make it a bit more structured and a bit more productive.

I think that's so important as well, because that's the core fundamentals of just good collaboration dynamics in a room. It's the fundamentals, like you said it, you're not following exercise, you're not trying to recite something, you're just following something that makes the room be more effective. Also, it's like if I buy Sprint, I forgot it's another ad for Sprint, I should get commission on this one. That's true. And that was from Audrey more, so shout out to Audrey more for that one. I

Thanks, Audrey. That was a great question.

So we've got two more questions if you can write through those. Okay. Just want to double check in. An interesting,

Imagine I just exited the call. That happened to me accidentally last night, by the way. I was on one of my higher tiered workshop or master calls, and my colleague was running it, and I accidentally shut down the whole entire call. Yeah, gone.

Okay. The folks at home we're going to try have two more questions. We can't guarantee if Rebecca's going to stay, we'll see how it goes. The next one's from Tom, what resources can you recommend that provide great workshop frameworks that can adapt to our specific needs? Specific needs? That word again. Okay. Am I allowed to plug myself?

I feel like, yeah, of course.

Just to, will you repeat the question? So somebody is looking for some workshop frameworks, right?

Yeah. Resources you can recommend to provide great workshop frameworks.

Okay, so basically, yeah, it does sound like I'm just going to plug myself, but I have to because I do believe in this framework the most. So we have a workshop framework at AJ&Smart. It's called the four Cs, and basically it's how you structure every single workshop. And the four Cs is basically very simple. The first C is, I got it wrong immediately, immediately wrong. So the first pretty sure it was collect.

The first C is corn flakes. No, the first C is collect. So basically collect just meaning that you're going to get all of your workshop participants to collect multiple ideas to a specific challenge or a topic that you're working on. The second C is, I can't remember any of the Cs complex. I'm joking. Choose. Choose is the second C. Basically, you're narrowing all of the ideas that you came up with in the collect phase down to just a few, and you do that by voting and doing some prioritization. And then the next phase is create. In this phase, you're going to be creating multiple solutions to the ideas that you came up with in this choose phase. Maybe you do a really nice exercise, it's called 10 for 10. You're just coming up with 10 possible solutions to tackle the challenge. And then the fourth stage is commit.

Again, it's really based on what I was talking about earlier. You're committing to some actions. You're not leaving the workshop without knowing exactly what you're meant to be doing. So the four Cs is one workshop framework, and then you can plug in loads of different exercises into that. If you want to learn more about that, you can maybe DM me or something, I dunno how you can contact me, but look up AJ&Smart. We explain it on YouTube as well, how to actually do the four Cs. And the second thing I will say, we have a workshop called the Lightning Decision Jam, and that is the most perfect workshop recipe to use if you want to turn your meetings into a more structured sessions. And basically it's just a few exercises that you run together. You can do it in 90 minutes, and the whole idea behind it, and the goal behind that workshop is to get a team to actually solve problems and make decisions together in a very structured, collaborative way. So again, Lightning decision Jam, if you want to Google it or YouTube. That is an amazing framework to start off with if you're looking to get into workshopping.

So good. I'm just trying to find the link to The Workshopper Playbook, which I know is the bulk of all books talking about this framework, and we'll try and share that in the chat somewhere with a link to it.

That's go, that's probably what I should have mentioned first.

No, no, no. Mentioning cornflakes was the best.

Cornflakes is the best one ever.

Of course. Yeah, you get cornflakes. Okay, so last question, anonymous. It's very mysterious, which is what's a tangible way of explaining how you save time and money by utilizing workshops?

What's a tangible way of explaining? Oh, best way, ever
Tangible way of explaining. Well, if I've understood the question correctly, then my answer would be to show people, get whoever is maybe skeptical of the power of what a workshop can do and its ability to save time and money. Then you just need to do a showcase workshop with that group of people, with the person who's maybe doubting it or questioning it and just get them in the room with you and facilitate a short workshop. And basically through that, when you use all of these workshopping techniques or visualizing the discussion, all of these things I mentioned like sequencing the discussion and using different exercises to get people from A to B, they're immediately going to understand why it saves time and money, because you're going to be able to show them an empty room at the very beginning with them having absolutely no idea how they're going to solve a particular challenge, that within 90 minutes they have solutions. A clear idea of what people are meant to be doing on how to actually tackle this challenge. So yeah, my advice would be if you're trying to convince anybody of the value of workshopping, if you want to get started, just showcase it. Get people in the room with you and show them what you can do.
Did I answer that right? As in, did I understand the question correctly?

Yeah, I think you get five stars conflicts for that answer. Thank you. Unfortunately, I can't ask the person because they're anonymous, which is, I love, in some respects it's quite mysterious.

But you're right,

It's Friday the 13th.

It's actually, yeah, it's actually a very good point. And you're right, I get this as well myself. I always, again, just go on the quote side of things. It's like, if you think good design is expensive, you should see what bad design costs, right? And I always say to my clients who are doing products, I'm like, it's going to cost you way more money if you don't do this, because if you get it wrong, you're going to spend loads of time doing it. So there's probably a balance there between making sure you're doing the right thing first time rather than just guessing and hoping for the best. But hey, it is your question. Am I answering the question?

No, no, no. I think, no, absolutely. I love that mission to it. I really do. I'm getting distracted by your Santa Claus in the background as well, by the way, away, I'll take it into my workshops with me. So look, I think we've definitely covered enough today. I'm conscious of your time as well. Thank you so much for being part of Delivered, Rebecca. It's been fun, emotional, educational, and I've got a craving for cornflakes as well at the end of it.

I know. I honestly think it needs to be retitled as just cornflakes because it stole the show. It's so funny when you're trying to come, you're like, you created this, or your team creates this framework and you're trying to tell somebody about it. You forget. The very first thing that it actually, the very first thing I was like, what does that stand for? But no, it was so, so great to be here. Thank you so much, Chris. It was really fun. Thanks to everybody that has listened. Yeah, I could have stayed here for hours, but I have another call after this.

Okay, well look, we'll wrap it there so you can get on your call. Again, thanks you so much, Rebecca, and Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. I'll see you soon. Hopefully.

See you later.

Bye.