I’m running a series of service design workshops, but the people I need only have short windows of time available together.
The timeline and outcome expectations for the first two workshops were aggressive. Going into them, I knew they were downright unrealistic. Both should have been, at minimum, half-day workshops, if not full-day sessions, but I was only given 90 minutes for each one.
In my two most recent articles, I talked about how I dealt with that:
Being clear in the introduction that these were usually longer sessions and that I would do my best to get us as far along as I could in the time we had.
Requesting additional time and follow-on sessions if we could not get through everything.
Using brainwriting to maximize participant input and generate as many ideas as possible.
Behind the scenes, I also did extra work to help move things along more quickly than usual:
I did a ton of pre-work to help jumpstart discussions instead of relying on in-room work to generate the foundational ideas to get us started.
Since we did not have time to do all the work in the room, I used the participants' input as direction and performed a lot of the analysis myself.
I invited participants to continue inputting asynchronously after the fact and set deadlines for contribution.
That has changed how I am planning the rest of the series.
Now that I am settling into a rhythm and understanding more clearly how this organization works, and now that I have their trust that these sessions are valuable, I am designing sessions with the following in mind:
Setting realistic expectations about how much we can do when they only have short windows of time available together.
Expecting that one of my normal workshop processes will take several days, likely spread over one to two weeks.
Building activities to fit the window we have and only planning what is realistically going to fit.
Providing a clear recap to start each session and including outputs from previous ones to keep building on ideas.
Planning my own schedule knowing that I will need to do more hands-on work between the sessions to compensate for the lack of time.
Making all materials available asynchronously between sessions for ongoing input.
Documenting all progress in a single document to keep the history visible as the ideas evolve.
Building collaboration into organizational culture requires experimentation and observation to understand team dynamics, availability, work patterns, and styles. All of this information can help you create sessions that will both respond to the existing culture and nudge it toward making collaboration a normal, recurring part of work.
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