You’ve spent an afternoon in a strategy workshop. The executives talked about the big picture. The subject matter experts debated technical details. There was plenty of discussion, but when it came time to make decisions, the group couldn’t make any.

Then the facilitator closed with: “Well, this was valuable alignment!”

Nobody was aligned. Nobody could act. And now there’s another workshop in your calendar.

That’s workshop theatre. People look productive while they’re in the room, but leave wondering what they actually achieved.

Let’s call the facilitator Jen.

Jen skipped the full planning process. She didn’t define clear goals or do discovery interviews. She didn’t map out the participants; she guessed who to invite.

She ended up with executives who were interested in the strategy but weren’t specifically responsible for executing it, and subject matter experts who had no decision-making power.

The executives talked strategy at 30,000 feet. The experts debated technical details nobody could resolve. By the end of the session, it was painfully clear that this group couldn’t make the decisions the work required.

Jen’s “valuable alignment” comment was sincere. But calling the discussion alignment didn’t give anyone the authority or direction to act.

So she scheduled a second workshop.

More cost. More time. No more outcomes.

Frankly, she owed everyone a redo. But without preparing differently, she was asking them to repeat the same frustrating experience.

Now picture Jen preparing for that same strategy workshop.

She interviews the project leads and reviews the existing project documentation. She maps the stakeholders to understand their roles, including who is responsible for the work and who has the authority to make decisions.

She defines the goal before she starts designing the session. That goal drives participant selection, rather than leaving her to work with whoever she guessed should attend.

Then she designs the activities around the discussions and decisions the group needs to have.

By the time Jen arrives, she has clear goals, a structure for the work and her materials ready. The executives and experts have specific contributions to make, and the people needed to make decisions are in the room.

This time, the group leaves with clear solutions and next steps.

The difference isn’t that Jen got better at managing the conversation. She did the work beforehand to make that conversation useful.

When I build a workshop from scratch, I spend about three hours preparing for every hour of workshop time. After two decades of workshop design, that’s the ratio I find works consistently for me.

That preparation includes:

That’s not three hours spent formatting slides or filling an agenda with activities. It includes finding out whether I’m bringing together the right people to do the right work in the first place.

In Jen’s first workshop, the problems were there before anyone joined the session. She hadn’t established what the group needed to accomplish, who needed to contribute or who could authorize a decision. Facilitating the discussion couldn’t fix those omissions.

Skipping preparation might save the workshop lead a few hours. In Jen’s case, it cost an entire group an afternoon, then required them to make time for another session.

For a 90-minute workshop, my 3:1 ratio means four and a half hours of preparation. That is one person’s time invested before asking a room full of people to contribute theirs.

It doesn’t guarantee that every discussion will be easy or every decision will go as expected. It means I’ve done the work to understand what the group needs to accomplish and designed a session that gives them a way to do it.

When everyone is being asked to do more with less, preparation is not the obvious place to cut. An under-prepared workshop can leave you with the original work still unresolved, plus the follow-up meetings and repeat sessions needed to finish it.

Your participants are already committing their time. As the workshop lead, you need to commit yours before they arrive.

This is the preparation we’ll work on in the Workshop Workshop: defining clear goals, choosing the right participants and designing activities that help them produce results you can use.

Join me live online on November 24, 8:30am–12:30pm Eastern. Early bird pricing ends October 31: 199 CAD / 149 USD / 124 EUR.