Ep. 15: This Workshop Could Have Been A Meeting
About this episode:
Original Air Date: July 22, 2024Planning a corporate workshop or off-site often feels like making a burrito. So many options—and so many opinions on what should go in it. A presentation rodeo on the next quarter’s objectives? Absolutely. Time for a key initiative to get the spotlight in front of the C-suite? Yes, please. Extra scoops of mandatory team-building to strengthen your culture? Why not. Everyone likes fun, right?
But when it’s time to actually chow down, it quickly becomes clear you’re dealing with an overstuffed, leaky, $20,000 mess. And everything the workshop was supposed to accomplish? Yeah, that didn’t happen—so you’re back at square one come Monday.
In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why our workshop eyes are often bigger than our workshop stomachs; standard off-site practices we need to offload; and how to design new experiences that are actually meaningful and productive.
Mentioned in this episode:
Skittles (the Victorian game, not the candy)
“meetings episode”: AWWTR Ep. 12
“strategy stack”: AWWTR Ep. 2
“even/overs”: BNW Ep. 44
“essential intent”: BNW Ep. 90 with Greg McKeown
“ocean metaphor”: The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
“working agreements”: BNW Ep. 103
“Liberating Structures”
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
The main thing that I get out of our retreats is remembering that the videos that appear up on my screen, or the words that show up in Slack, that piss me off from-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
... time to time-
Rodney Evans:
Uh-huh.
Sam Spurlin:
... is a human being who I enjoy, who I got dinner with, and we laughed about stuff, and we had a good time.
[Intro music]
Rodney Evans:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm Rodney Evans, and that guy with the welty forearms is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
I have some sort of bug bites or growth or skin mishap happening on my arms. It's weird, and it hurts.
Rodney Evans:
That's what happens-
Sam Spurlin:
But, I'm going to power through.
Rodney Evans:
—when inside kids go outside.
Sam Spurlin:
It's true, it's true. I tried to go for a trail run yesterday. And the path was not runnable, it was trekkable at best.
Rodney Evans:
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
Maybe, I got some poison ivy or something. I don't know.
Rodney Evans:
And now, you're being punished for your intrepid nature.
Sam Spurlin:
It's true. I should just stay inside.
Rodney Evans:
You should just stay inside. You're so comfortable here in the air conditioning.
Sam Spurlin:
Mm-hmm.
Rodney Evans:
Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations, as the future of work meets the present moments.
Sam Spurlin:
In each episode, we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into. We pull it apart like fancy fries with cheese on top and propose solutions for what to do instead. Ooh, like poutine.
Rodney Evans:
Mm. I love poutine.
Sam Spurlin:
Poutine's amazing.
Rodney Evans:
Fantastic.
Sam Spurlin:
Thanks, Canada.
Rodney Evans:
Hey, Canada! This week we're going to talk about workshops. We've never talked about workshops before. We've talked about retreats, but in a different way. This is going to be for all of our taters and aspiring taters in the house, how we think about the longer, more important, more intensive gatherings. But before we do that, we're going to check-in.
Sam Spurlin:
Yes. We are. And my check-in question today is, what item or object in your life has given you the best happiness to cost ratio?
Rodney Evans:
Ooh, can you go first?
Sam Spurlin:
I absolutely can.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you.
Sam Spurlin:
So, this is a gift. I'm holding up a pen, a brass pen-
Rodney Evans:
Mm-hmm.
Sam Spurlin:
... that I received from my brother like 10 years ago. And, I have used this pen basically every day for 10 years. And I'm going to do a little bit of ASMR here, just so everybody can experience what's so great about this pen. So, it's-
Rodney Evans:
Ooh.
Sam Spurlin:
... really heavy.
Rodney Evans:
I feel like I'm on a ship.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. You hear that?
Rodney Evans:
Uh-huh.
Sam Spurlin:
And then, putting the lid back on.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
It's real satisfying in the hand, has real good hand feel, easy to put refills in it. I think I've refilled it like four or five times at this point. I have learned that I cannot travel with it because apparently when it goes through an X-ray machine, it looks like a large caliber bullet.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, no.
Sam Spurlin:
So it's stopped literally every single time I have gone through security with it. So, this is a stay at home pen now. It just lives on my desk. And I love it.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it's also an inside pen.
Sam Spurlin:
And, it was free. Yeah. Inside pen, just like his dad.
Rodney Evans:
Inside Sam. Just like his dad. Wow. This is a side of you I haven't seen. I have so many things. So this is going to be funny for the people who were at our lake house last week, which we're going to talk about today.
Sam Spurlin:
Mm-hmm.
Rodney Evans:
Because we had a retreat there, and there's this game there that my mom gave my husband as a gift. And I distinctly remember, I was over at her house. And my mom has this habit, she's been doing this since I lived in a studio apartment in New York City.
She has this habit of buying very large things, large in size, sort of not necessarily tracking spatially where they're going to go.
Sam Spurlin:
Sure.
Rodney Evans:
This is preamble because she bought this game at an antique store for Ed, for his birthday. And she showed it to me in her house, and it is probably three and a half feet tall. It's a three and a half foot tall, two foot wide, wooden box with six inch sides around it. Sort of picture like a maze.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And she was like, "Do you think he'll like this?" And I was like, "First of all, what is this?"
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. You have to say, "What is the game aspect of it at this point?”
Rodney Evans:
What is it? And she's like, "It's a game. It's a game from Victorian times called Skittles." And I was like, "This is stupid. What the hell?"
Sam Spurlin:
Mm-hmm.
Rodney Evans:
Anyway, I took it to the lake house, I forgot all about it, a couple of years ago. We had friends who were there for the weekend. Someone got curious about it on Sunday, basically as people were packing their cars.
Fast-forward three hours and everyone is still in the sunroom screaming over this game that's basically a combination of tabletop bowling, using a top and like dreidel?
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, all right. I’m beginning to see the appeal. Sounds pretty great.
Rodney Evans:
Anyway, I honestly got it for free. But even if it was paid...I'm sure my mom did not spend hundreds of dollars on this thing.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I'm sure it was a two figure gift, probably low two figures. And when I tell you that every person who has ever played Skittles in our lake house has been like, "That's the most fun game I've ever played," I am not exaggerating, at all. And I don't know why it's-
Sam Spurlin:
All right.
Rodney Evans:
... not more popular, and you can't buy it. So Skittles, thanks, momma.
Sam Spurlin:
Skittles.
Rodney Evans:
Skittles. Skittles-
Sam Spurlin:
Great.
Rodney Evans:
... is the best. What else? Reviews? You guys want to leave us-
Sam Spurlin:
Reviews.
Rodney Evans:
... a review? That'd be cool.
Sam Spurlin:
That'd be cool.
Rodney Evans:
We love it so much. They're so nice. Please leave us a review. Also, be on Instagram. You guys, Jack is lighting it up on Instagram. I follow our account, now. And every time I see a story posted, I start laughing before it even starts because I know it's going to be some funny outtake, or-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... Jack mocking us or something else.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. It's consistently good. And, I'm not saying that because roughly half the time it's me related. Even the parts that aren't me related, are really good.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. They're really good. Oh, we're on YouTube, also. I watched part of our podcast on YouTube the other day just because I was curious about how that is going. And, it looks really nice and very professional. You and I are the least professional part of our YouTube presence-
Sam Spurlin:
Absolutely true.
Rodney Evans:
... which tracks. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Topic intro. Are you ready to do this?
Rodney Evans:
I'm so ready. I feel great.
Sam Spurlin:
All right.
Rodney Evans:
I'm so glad we fucked this up on Friday, and we get to do it again.
Sam Spurlin:
I don't know what you're talking about.
Rodney Evans:
I feel like you do.
Sam Spurlin:
You're just making things up, at this point. One of us maybe didn't hit the record button 40 minutes into recording-
Rodney Evans:
... possible.
Sam Spurlin:
And, that one person may be the person who's speaking right now.
Rodney Evans:
Could be.
Sam Spurlin:
It's okay, though.
Rodney Evans:
This is better. Let's do it.
The Pattern: Our hopes for workshops never match reality
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly. Workshops, off-sites, on-sites. We have lots of names for the roughly maybe half a day on the short end to half a week long meeting. And, they come in lots of different flavors. And, we've all experienced what it's like when they go off the rails. Or maybe, we're never really on the rails to begin with.
Rodney Evans:
More likely.
Sam Spurlin:
And we all know the phrase, "This meeting could've been an email." How many times have we said or heard other people say, "This workshop could have been a meeting?"
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
So, how do we do that thing, better? That's what we're going to explore today.
Rodney Evans:
Sam and I have a lot of experience designing and facilitating workshops. And, we have a lot of strong opinions about how to do them well. And, we are very excited to do this today.
Sam Spurlin:
Mm-hmm.
Rodney Evans:
Basically the organizational pattern as I see it, that I think is not helpful and dysfunctional and also self-fulfilling like all of them, is that off-sites become this catchall fantasy for everything we do at work.
Ed and I were just having a conversation over the weekend about vacations. And, I was thinking about how I underestimate myself every time I think about a vacation in terms of how much I'm going to read and what I'm going to want to read. And I'm always like, "I'm going to read this really serious book that's-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... 800 pages on..." Like, "No. I'm not. No. I'm not. I'm going to read an Emily Henry book and drink out of coconut." Like, "Let's just be honest."
Workshops are like this. They are this fantasy of who we're going to be, that is entirely different than who we are. We think that everything we can't get done at work, we're going to magically get done there.
So we overstuff the burrito, and then the workshop doesn't fulfill these unrealistic utopian expectations.
And then as a result, we only add to the friction back home because we have held this container that's going to fix all our problems. It doesn't. And then, the problems persist container free.
So, that's the essential pattern of workshop malfunction in a lot of orgs. I would say at The Ready, we fell into this for years.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
And I'm really excited to talk about what happens and what to do instead. So, you want to sort of-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Okay.
Rodney Evans:
... kick us off with what you see in the wild? The wild can also be our own company, and the ways in which we screw this up.
Why good workshops aren’t for presenting information
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I'm happy to do that. And, I think your summary of the pattern covered a lot of ground. And, I think one of the most common anti-patterns that we see within workshops is that they are primarily used for presenting and sharing information. So, I've been-
Rodney Evans:
Yup.
Sam Spurlin:
... a part of many workshops or seen many workshops where essentially we have this packed agenda of 15-minute presentations-
Rodney Evans:
Ugh.
Sam Spurlin:
... with slides. And, somebody has done the work of collecting it all into the same presentation so we can be kind of smooth in-between it because we're together in person. So, this is what we're getting from that.
Rodney Evans:
I feel-
Sam Spurlin:
We can work-
Rodney Evans:
... the tension in my-
Sam Spurlin:
... smoothly into it-
Rodney Evans:
... shoulders creeping in. Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I'm gonna breathe.
Sam Spurlin:
And then, we have a bunch of presentations. And then maybe, maybe, there's some sort of half asked conversation about it at the end. But more than likely we've gone long in the presentations, and it's cutting into our break or whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing next. That's the version that I have seen the most.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And I think the part of the information sharing that is really bad, and also really persistent, is because organizations generally, people's calendars are overstuffed burritos, then the workshop becomes the place where we're like, "We're finally going to catch up."
I used to do this, too. I would save a bunch of articles and save a bunch of slide decks and be like, "When I go to this off-site, I'm going to read all of this on the plane." Or, "I'm going to hear about all this stuff." Or, the number of times that things would be sent out and it'd be like, "We're sending this now because we're going to talk about it during the workshop," which meant we're going to walk through it slide by slide at the workshop.
So it's like because we assume that we're going to have more space, it feels like the time we're going to "catch up" on all the things that we haven't had time to address. But actually, that's the work that is most well suited to being done asynchronously. And so-
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
... we're using, literally, the most expensive possible time where we've all been taken to a place to do the least valuable work, which just-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... makes me a little bit sick.
Most workshops don’t prioritize what matters
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. There's this element of, maybe it's kind of death by committee, or there's nobody who has the overarching vision for what-
Rodney Evans:
Mm.
Sam Spurlin:
... this experience is going to be-
Rodney Evans:
Right. Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
We just did an episode on meetings. And I think there's a similar thing here with meetings, where we talk about the idea of the host of a meeting. It's not just like you've made the agenda. It's like you have thought through, "What are we here to do? What's the success criteria? What's the structure we're going to use to do that?"
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And I think in a lot of these more corporate bureaucratic off-sites, that role doesn't really exist. There's somebody who is maybe coordinating-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
... like I said, pulling all of the slides together into the thing. I sense there is often a lack of, "What is the most valuable thing we can be doing with this workshop?" And then, how do we design around that, rather than every four months we come together and we always use this structure, we always hear these presentations and we have these snacks. And then, we hear these presentations, and then we go off to whatever is next.
Rodney Evans:
The only good part of that, that I heard, was snacks.
Sam Spurlin:
Snacks.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. There's so much in there that I think is really interesting. One is, when you do the kind of thing that Sam is describing, and even if it's not 15 minutes, if it's an hour presentation with five minutes of Q&A, or with 30 minutes of Q&A, you're signing people up for a lot of context switching and information overload. And so, the likelihood that at the end of the day people have made sense or really thought about anything is quite low when you design that way.
But to me, the more critical point is, "What is the most important body of work to be done?" You have to prioritize that. And then, make really hard choices about what that means in terms of content and experience.
So, the Source team was at our lake house last week for an off-site. I was the primary designer of the overall days of the workshop. And what I did was, I made a notion board that had the days. And, it had the big chunks, like start times and meals, in it. And then, I just made a column and said, "Put in here the agenda or the chunks that you want to see in this time together and how much time you need and who's going to facilitate it." And, I had a bunch of chunks, everybody had chunks.
And the reality is we might have been able to get to all of them, but it would felt really incoherent. And so because the sort of first principle of this particular moment was a strategy refresh, because we had just gotten a bunch of input and done a bunch of retrospection, I made choice as the facilitator-
Sam Spurlin:
From the rest of the organization to be-
Rodney Evans:
From the rest of the organization-
Sam Spurlin:
... clear. It wasn't-
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. You all had-
Rodney Evans:
No. Not from us.
Sam Spurlin:
... designed moments for the rest of the organization to contribute to this thing that was-
Rodney Evans:
To give us-
Sam Spurlin:
... happening at a smaller off-site.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. To give us a-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... boatload of input and data on everything from our purpose to how we're doing resource allocation. I felt like as the facilitator and designer in this case I had to make a choice about what the arc of those days was going to be. And then pretty ruthlessly, put the things to the side that we're not going to fit in it.
And so, what I prioritized was an experience that felt like an unfolding and a very spacious way of working our way through the strategy stack, see another episode about what's in there, even over getting in all of the discreet pieces that people would've liked.
And I know there are people out there right now who are like, "No. We can do it all." And I'm here to tell you, "You can't do it all well." And what I was designing for is, quality and impact, even over quantity and... I don't know. Fullness?
Sam Spurlin:
Sure.
Rodney Evans:
You can't do it all. You can't do it all in two days.
Sam Spurlin:
How did you have those conversations with folks who didn't have their things show up in the actual off-site? You had some conversations as you were actually designing this. How did you do that?
Rodney Evans:
Kind of, but not really? I kind of moved the blocks into spaces over the days, and then I proposed it. And everybody was like, "Yeah. Cool." And we know, because we all do this for a living, that the agenda is absolutely a lie to begin with.
So nobody in our team holds these things too tightly because they know at the end of day one, we're just going to reshuffle the deck anyway, which we did. It should be iterative, like everything else that we talk about, based on what actually happens.
Why offsite agendas waste so much time
Sam Spurlin:
I assumed it was something like that because I have participated in enough off-sites with The Ready to know that. But, I asked it because I have seen in some of our clients, sometimes, that the setting of the agenda and what is in or what is out for the workshop can be this incredible exercise in politics-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
... and turf wrangling. There's so much discord around like, "Who owns what we're doing in the off-site?" And then-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
... once we're in it, there's this adherence to, "This is the plan, and now we're going to do the plan." That is quite different feeling from what you just described.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And, I'm so glad you brought it up. Sometimes, it's really funny to me. I don't know if you have this experience with clients. But sometimes I hear things at clients, and I'm like, "Wow. You guys are still doing that." Like, "That's what was happening when I had a real job like this, 15 years ago."
But, this is still happening, where it'll be like this person who's a director level is going to get the opportunity to present this work at the ELT off-site. And, that's going to be this huge boon for them because it's going to be visibility for them. And, it's going to really shine the light of power on the work that they're doing as being this really important work.
And to me, I'm like, "Cool. I guess?" if that person's work is actually important and relates in some way to what that executive team is doing at this off-site. Particularly, if not, you know that person is going to spend weeks prepping and socializing and fiddling with a PowerPoint deck so that they can put on a show.
The whole thing is so screwily conceived to me, kind of from the drop, that sometimes it can be hard for me to relate to.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Absolutely. Another thing that...this is not even, I think, in our board. But, I just had this thought about how I have seen off-sites kind of go a little bit off the rails in some client organizations.
Basically, we have done some sort of physical moving, even if it's just a different room within our office building where we are going to do this off-site. But if we're lucky, maybe we're actually in a cool location.
Some people have traveled. We're together in a room. And, there's this opportunity to try to be deliberate in shifting how we are with each other.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And, it doesn't really happen.
Rodney Evans:
No.
Sam Spurlin:
We have just transplanted our ways of relating and talking to each other and just all of our patterns around how we work to a new location. And now, we're just somewhere warm and fighting poorly, or not having particularly productive conversations.
Rodney Evans:
Right. And then, I think, the counterweight to that that a lot of our clients try is mandatory fun.
Sam Spurlin:
Mandatory fun!
Rodney Evans:
So, it's like-
Sam Spurlin:
"Everyone gather around, we're going to play-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
... the Skittle box!"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. We act business all day, every day. And we just are exactly the way that we are, except now we're wearing shorts. And then at the end of the day, we're playing dodgeball. And it's like, "Bro."
Sam Spurlin:
Well, wait. Have you ever seen-
Rodney Evans:
"Don't do that!"
Sam Spurlin:
Have you ever been in an off-site where they played dodgeball at the end? That would be incredible.
Rodney Evans:
I had dinner with some people this weekend, and this topic came up. And that had happened, and it-
Sam Spurlin:
Nice.
Rodney Evans:
... did not go well. People were injured and mad.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I'm realizing, I'm sitting here in my almost 40-year-old body thinking about playing dodgeball, and imagining myself in middle school and being like, "Oh, yeah. That was amazing."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. That was really fun.
Sam Spurlin:
And, I would definitely wrench my shoulder.
Example: How to design a workshop for spaciousness
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Exactly. So, how do you third way this thing? Because I do think that there's a third way that's not like, "Business upfront, party in the back." What's the other option?
Sam Spurlin:
Team mullet.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. It's a team building mullet.
Sam Spurlin:
So what I don't think you can do is just flip a switch and be like, "We're going to set aside our entire past as a team, as an organization-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
—and be totally different with each other for these three days.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And, I'm going to forget that every interaction that I've ever had with you in my entire life has had this weird power dynamic that you loom over me. And, we're just going to pretend that doesn't exist." No. That's not a thing.
But I think one very small thing we can do, is under stuff that burrito.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
It's hard when you are feeling under the gun from a time scarcity perspective. I think it's much easier to just default to your ways of interacting and your ways of working that you already have.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
It's the more efficient thing that you already know. If you have some spaciousness, then we have at least the possibility of doing something, or being a little bit different, than we normally are.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
That feels like step zero.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. A hundred percent. I'm going to keep referring to this off-site, last week, because it was about as perfect of a retreat as I think a person can have. And just so people who are listening know, I do understand that sometimes when I talk about things, it feels so far away from where you are and how your team works that it certainly is not going to be copy, paste. But, I tell you the extreme version of these things so that you can build a bridge to where you are right now.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
So to the point that you just made, Sam. Our remit was primarily about strategy. But, we always make working agreements at the beginning of any retreat or off-site. You guys should be doing this.
And the working agreements can be things about how you are going to disagree, what kind of breaks you're going to need, whatever they are.
And one of the working agreements that someone proposed for this Source off-site was, "Basically get things to 60%. Let's not hand wring. Let's get more stuff to 60%, than fewer things to 100%."
Sam Spurlin:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
We were all like, "That energetically feels right for where we are." And, I tell you this because that kind of working agreement really informed the following days. So Tuesday afternoon it was like, "Take a first swing at the EI." And to your point, Sam, about Essential Intent.
Sam Spurlin:
Essential Intent.
Rodney Evans:
To your point about people being humans and bonding, not as a separate thing, what we didn't say was, "We're going to grind out a draft Essential Intent as a group in a room, staring at each other." Or, "I'm going to bring one, and everyone's just going to tell me what they think about it. And then break, break, we're all going to get drunk at dinner and not talk about work."
We did not do that. The end of the first day was very like, "Go get your drink of choice, go find a place, and get to a first draft. And then, we're just going to hear them. We're just going to hear the first drafts, and we're just going to leave them."
And then, we did. We put them up on a sliding glass door, and we left them. And, the next morning we did a different thing. And then, we went back to it, and we did a little bit of refinement. We all did a version two. We did a little up voting. And then, we left it again.
That afternoon during playtime, we ended up talking about purpose while we were on the dock. People were sitting on paddle boards and just hanging out. That night, over dinner, stuff came up about outcomes and the fact that we needed to probably do some structure work.
I'm saying this because I don't see a lot of value in these very expensive moments of trying to separate, so clearly, the business part and the fun part, when it can all be progress making, and it can all be kind of fun?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And it's like-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I don't see a lot of efficacy in really overwrought, perfectionist business theater in a fluorescent lit, airless room, staring at a PowerPoint deck with a hangover. And then, fun time hopefully... at dinner?
Why an offsite shouldn’t feel like a regular meeting
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well, what you just described there, that I really love, is the benefit that you have from doing a multi-day workshop or off-site is that you can leave something, and then come back to it.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
And, leave something and come back to it.
Rodney Evans:
Nobody ever does.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, yeah. In normal day-to-day business, I can wrap my head around the idea that like, "We have to finish things because this group might not get back together for two more weeks."
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And like, "We need to close that loop and close that loop." And if we're just bringing that energy to a longer period of time, where we are all in a room together, we've just made a long meeting.
Rodney Evans:
Right, right.
Sam Spurlin:
That's not helpful. Even if you're using all of the great things that you learned, from literally two or three episodes ago from us, you don't want to treat your workshop just like a single, long meeting.
Rodney Evans:
No. Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
It is a panoply of small meetings-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
—and maybe simultaneous meetings that are happening with subgroups. It's much more an event and experience than it is a "meeting."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Totally. We talk so much on this show about what work really is and what good work is. In my opinion, there's no better place than a protected space like an off-site to try on the things that we're talking about, like actually making stuff.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Working synchronously in a shared space, and then talking while you're chopping vegetables in my kitchen about how that went. There is so much value in that kind of spaciousness. And again, because so much of our working habits are ported from a century ago and very mechanistic in nature, when we talk about these things, it's not just because we're hippies and it's fun, though we are and it is.
It's because if you are trying to do really high quality, innovative, thinking work as a leadership team, you need ways of working that match it. And a way of working that matches it, isn't V 14.7 of a PowerPoint deck and arguing about bullet point 7A. Like, "That ain't it."
And just to put a fine point on this, I just did a workshop that was so fun. Hello, London cohort. You know who you are. I was doing strategy work with them. These were people who don't work together. It was all leaders from different parts of an organization.
It was really funny. This ended up being inspo for the retreat I just designed because I had them for two days. And the first day I intended to get through their Essential Intents and Outcomes and Even/Overs by the end of the day, and I just ran out of time, which was fine. I had more time baked in. But, it just didn't happen.
So they left with a draft EI, and a couple of them had gotten a round of advice on their EI. And then when I saw them again they had, in subgroups, self-organized to go to drinks and work on their drafts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, they came in a totally different place than where I left them.
They were not given homework. They're not asked to do this. But they were just like, "We're in it. And we're excited about it, and we're just doing it." And, you can design for that in a workshop. And you can't design for it by saying, "Everyone has to do this and come with a better draft in the morning."
You can create the conditions where that kind of thing happens, where you create energy and excitement and creativity. And you put people in a state where they're doing that work, and then they're just going to do it. "We are just going to do it."
How The Ready’s approach to offsites has evolved
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And that makes me actually want to talk a little bit about, how has The Ready's practice of off-sites evolved over the past seven years?
Rodney Evans:
Man, you tell me. I feel like I'm too close to this, and also have too much... I don't know. Trauma is too strong of a word, but it's been hard. It's been really hard, the evolution of our retreats, which I think a lot of us hold quite sacred, but have been perpetually dissatisfied with. So, I want to hear from you what you see-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... as the arc, particularly because I've generally experienced you as more of a participant than a facilitator of Ready retreats. Is that right?
Sam Spurlin:
Yes. I mean, except for the early days where the practice that we had is that we rotated responsibility of organizing retreats-
Rodney Evans:
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that.
Sam Spurlin:
—which we used to do, which I think was an interesting proposal, an interesting experiment.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
You get everybody taking a turn to organize this important thing that we do, so it's shared ownership of that. We also would pair a more tenured with a less tenured member in the duo that was planning the workshop. So, you get that kind of onboarding sort of experience as well.
And, it worked okay for a while. I planned a couple. Shout out to Sharan, who was my buddy, the one that we organized. And like I said, good idea. I think what we learned, though, is that for the way we do off-sites, retreats, it's a crap ton of work.
Rodney Evans:
So much work.
Sam Spurlin:
And you build actual skill in designing and facilitating and developing these things over time, which we weren't getting the benefit of people building on that.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
We just had someone brand new every time and having to recreate the wheel every time. So eventually, actually spun this up as a internal role that someone could dedicate real time and attention to.
But what we didn't do was say, "Hey, person holding that role, you have to figure out every little thing and facilitate every aspect of it.
Rodney Evans:
Right. Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
They're just designing the experience. And there is still a expectation that we have shared ownership over the content that is going into it, which I feel like we are continually refining the way that we figure out like, "What is going to be the theme and the content of the retreat?," which I think has been good.
I mean, I think broadly the way our retreats have changed over time is that we have started pulling more stuff out of the burrito.
Rodney Evans:
Yup.
Sam Spurlin:
We had way overstuffed burritos that were really focused on The Work. And probably felt very similar to some of our more bureaucratic clients, where we were-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
... trying to crank through a bunch of stuff. And over time, we have really backed off of that and made it much more spacious. Instead of having four things that we're trying to do every day, it's like, "One thing in the morning, one thing in the afternoon, for two and a half days." And, trusting that we will use that time well, that we will find things that we want to dive into more deeply, that as we've grown, there's actually a lot of benefit from breaking into groups and having groups go-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
... do different things related to the same topic. So, it's become more of a complex system than a complicated system. I think we were trying to really finely tune that engine in early retreats because they're expensive. From money and time perspectives, you want to treat it really seriously.
And somehow, letting that impulse go a little bit has actually made them much more effective and something that we look forward to a little bit more. That's just one angle you could take on that evolution.
The three roles every retreat needs: logistics, design, and facilitation
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that tracks for me. And I think, just to pull out a couple of really practical lessons from that, one is in retreat design, if you're an executive listening to this or you're an org designer who does this, you probably need three roles minimum to host a really good retreat.
You really need someone who's doing logistics. At The Ready, it was a shit show when we were doing that rotation. And everybody basically had to learn how to be an event planner, and it was like, “That’s a skill that people have. Let’s just not try to learn that.”
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Operations or logistics, finding the place, doing the meals, getting the tech, all of that stuff. Design, which should be in a feedback loop with the participants to understand what's up, what's in the water, etc., and start to put that narrative agenda together. And then, facilitation.
And we, in the last few years, have really come to rely on external facilitation for The Ready which I think surprises people sometimes.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, yeah. Right.
Rodney Evans:
When I was one of the designers and now that it's Sharan, we work very closely in the design. But then, it's really helpful and really important, I think, to have a third party who both weighs in on that to be like, "You're doing too much. This isn't going to land. Are these people really the right people to be having this conversation, to have someone to really bounce things off, that's pretty objective.
And then, to be the one that is holding the container and is keeping time and paying attention. And that you have someone to turn to when inevitably things change and say, "Hey, it felt like there was a lot in there that we need to dig deeper into. How should we do that?"
And they're like, "Let's have lunch and talk about it." And then, they figure out the pivot for the afternoon. And obviously we do this for clients, but we have someone do it for us because it's really difficult to be a participant and hold all of those roles.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Yeah. That was going to be the point I was going to make there is that if you have an actual kind of content based role on the team, it's really hard to hold that role and also be the designer and facilitator of a session. So-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
You know? Look into that third party help. "Hey, we do that."
Rodney Evans:
"Hey, you can call us. It’s my sales pitch.
Why in-person time should prioritize relationship building
Sam Spurlin:
It's all right. One, kind of last, maybe hot take, I don't know, lukewarm take.
Rodney Evans:
My friend, Molly, calls it sleepy time tea, when you have something that's not really gossip hotness.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
So, anyway. It's a sleepy time take.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Sleepy time take. If your team is primarily hybrid, which I feel like most teams are nowadays.
Rodney Evans:
Or, should be.
Sam Spurlin:
And you are coming together for an in-person workshop or retreat, I think you would be really well served to use some sort of ratio, like 20% real work, 80% building relationships with people on the team.
Rodney Evans:
Mm.
Sam Spurlin:
I have felt, at The Ready, that the main thing that I get out of our retreats is remembering that the videos that appear up on my screen, or the words that show up in Slack that piss me off from time to time-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
—who I got dinner with, and we laughed about stuff, and we had a good time.
Rodney Evans:
Uh-huh.
Sam Spurlin:
And, I think it's only natural that those good feelings do fray over time-
Rodney Evans:
They do.
Sam Spurlin:
—because we are placed in roles where we counter each other. Or Slack is not the best, necessarily, medium for getting nuanced things across, relationships break down. And if you're going to be working in a hybrid way and you have an opportunity to come together and do things to build those relationships back up, even if we're "not productive" during that time that we had together, you have just amplified your productivity for the rest of the time that you aren't together, which is your default-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
—which I would imagine in the math that I'm doing in my head, comes out to far more productivity than if we had just been hyper productive for two days, in person.
Rodney Evans:
I totally agree. I also think that off-sites sometimes tend to get over logisticized because they're big groups. This can go wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. But it can be very like, "And then the Uber will leave at 8:14, and it will take you four. You're group one. Everybody, what group are you?" "We're group one."
I do think that there is some value in letting people self-organize in these situations. And whether it is how they're going to get to dinner and letting some of them walk or take the subway or stop for drinks on the way or rent city bikes, whether it is saying to them, "Figure out your own breakout groups," which I do at clients' all the time and feels to me like its own kind of team building exercise. When I say like-
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, yes.
Rodney Evans:
... "Okay. I need you guys in groups of five. Find five people who you are the most interdependent with."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Guess what? In their figuring that out, they are learning a bunch of stuff. And, they are creating some of that relational glue by solving problems together, even if they're very basic problems that just need to be solved in the course of a day.
Sam Spurlin:
I'm sitting here laughing because I'm wondering if our mental models of what it looks like for a group of people to be in a workshop or retreat sort of situation, are basically formed when we're in elementary school.
Rodney Evans:
Mm.
Sam Spurlin:
And, you need adults to give you all the logistics because you don't let a bunch of 2nd graders figure out how to get to where we're going.
Rodney Evans:
Like it's recess. Kickball. Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And we've just adopted that as humans, and now we're in a retreat. And we're like, "Well, tell me where I'm supposed to go and what car I'm supposed to be in."
Like, "No. We're all grown ass adults. We can figure that out." Give us a problem to solve. The problem being, "Be at the restaurant by 8:00, and it's five miles away," is a thing that we can handle.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And most of that, I think we have lost some of that muscle, potentially, for-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
... figuring that stuff out. And it can be reawakened, and it's fun along the way.
Rodney Evans:
It can, and it's funny that you say it. So, I was having a little bit of heartburn before I hosted this thing at our house, because we host people at the lake all the time, big groups of people.
But as people who listen to this show know, my husband was a trained chef and worked in restaurants and went to culinary school, so he handles food. And, he is one of those people that you tell him the number of people and the dietary restrictions and he just walks through a grocery store and buys ingredients. And then, there's meals. I can't. I don't know how, and I can't.
And so obviously, Ed was not coming to this retreat and I was super stressed out about how to feed people. And I just was like, "You know what? We're going to self-manage this." I made a spreadsheet. I was like, "Grab a meal that you'll prepare, get a helper if you need to. Here's categories of groceries. Fill in the meal that you're going to prepare and clean up after, and the groceries that you need to make it happen."
And again, what was funny about this is this turned out to be actually one of the nicest parts making food together-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
—eating these meals together, that weren't in fancy restaurants, being on our deck, and eating hot dogs, and drinking Miller Lite. Shout out, Miller Lite, sponsor me. And, having the best time ever.
And what's funny about this is, I remember a time that I was working at an investment bank. And, our team did not have any social glue, and it was very much a snake pit. And, we were taken to a cooking class to bond. And, we were separated into teams in this loft in Tribeca.
Sam Spurlin:
"Here's your knife."
Rodney Evans:
"Here's your knife, and here's your little apron. And, we're going to learn how to bond." And, I was thinking about how funny it is, that we did that as a separate exercise to solve our relational issues.
As opposed to last week, where it was like, "We did this as a team to feed ourselves." And, we probably got better "results" in terms of the actual bonding. It felt to me like such a funny parallel of same activity, different intentions, very different outcomes.
Sam Spurlin:
That's making me think of so many variations on that theme. I had this experience where it was two different organizations that did the same activity for their fun. Whether it's forced fun or not, I think it was opt-in both cases.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
But, it was going to Topgolf.
Rodney Evans:
Uh-huh.
Sam Spurlin:
So, I love a driving range basically. It’s a lot of fun.
Rodney Evans:
I love Topgolf. So fun.
Sam Spurlin:
And in one case, the leader of the team was not a very good golfer and was very self-conscious of that, and maybe took one swing and the rest of the time he just kind of hung out.
Rodney Evans:
No!
Sam Spurlin:
And the other team, also boss, not that great of a golfer, but was in such a different head space around having fun and trying to learn, and having the people on his team who were better at golf give him tips and try to improve his swing as he was going on.
And, those two experiences just really stood out to me in terms of the impact of the "leader" of the team, how they show up to the thing, the experience that everybody else has from that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. That's so interesting. Okay. Anything else you want to hit up before we talk ideas?
How to run a great workshop with no budget
Sam Spurlin:
I do want to hit this question that I threw down here at the bottom which I'm always just very aware of. In some ways I think you and I live a very blessed existence, in the sense that the stuff-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Touched by angels.
Sam Spurlin:
... that we are able to do at The Ready, very few kind of corporate overlords. And by few, I mean zero.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
We can kind do what we want, in most cases.
Rodney Evans:
Ah. It's so nice.
Sam Spurlin:
And I'm always trying to be aware of like, "Are we just being super out of touch?" So-
Rodney Evans:
Mm-hmm.
Sam Spurlin:
What would you say to somebody who's like, "Yeah. This all sounds great, but I don't have budget for my team to go somewhere cool-
Rodney Evans:
Uh-huh.
Sam Spurlin:
—I’m going to maybe be able to get the big conference room. And everyone is going to fly in, and we're going to have two days to do a thing. And, my budget is like $50 bucks for snacks." Can I run a good workshop, a good off-site, with those sorts of very heavy constraints?
Rodney Evans:
Mm. I love this question. I'm very curious, your take. My first swing at it is, "The shittier the conditions, the shorter you should make the chunks." So it's like-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
—"Do two hours or three hours of work. And then, tell people to go play or have lunch or self-organize," or whatever.
If you are in the big conference room and you don't have an external facilitator, a great design, swag, experiential kayaks, experiential stuff to make it fun, don't make it long.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Because you're already in an environment that is going to feel like more of a grind, than if you were to transport yourself to somewhere. So, don't add to the grinding nature of it. And I think, any time in situations like that you can facilitate the things that you would do anyway differently, do. So-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
... maybe my final example from last week. But you know what? No promises. It's my show, and I'll do what I want. So, we... You know? Drafting, unfolding, rounds, voting, unfolding, see what happens.
Wednesday morning, I'm like, "We should probably walk out of here with a draft of our strategy stack of pancakes."
And so I was facilitating, and what I did was I asked for help. And, we wrote the existing draft of each of the pieces, Purpose, Essential Intent, second half of your outcomes, second half of your Even/Overs, on flip charts. We spread them around my house.
And then rodeo style, I set a timer. And I said, "Either alone or in a pair," because uneven numbers, six of us, four components, "you have five minutes to make one of these things better, and then rotate."
So, everybody got their hands on each of the things. And at the end, there were pretty much final drafts of all four, that had been tweaked and wordsmithed and messed with by every member. And then I made a proposal to the group that was basically like, "Okay. Final drafts, any last tweaks?" And then, we consented.
That process of finalizing draft strategy took, I'm going to say, less than 45 minutes. And, I say this as an example of what clients generally don't do in the big conference room, is something like that, where it's like-
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
... "Put up work in progress, have people write over each other's stuff, have them do it pretty quickly, get to good enough, propose it, stamp it, get out of there." If you can't make the conditions ideal, at least take a fresh set of eyes on how you're going to get the work done within the constraints you have.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And with that extra focus of actually getting something over the finish line and then getting out of there, is probably the move when the place that you are in is not a place you necessarily want to linger.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
I can't imagine your nice conference room is the type of place where you just want to hang out all day, as compared to your dock and on paddle boards.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Better than a conference room.
Rodney Evans:
Probably.
Sam Spurlin:
The only other thing I was going to add is just that the novel experience or the thing that people can look forward to in that case should be in the change of pace of how we are doing that work together.
So it's not showing up to the conference room for two days of presentations as we've talked about, but things on walls working together in small groups, drawing things on flip charts. Doing the work in a different way, in a less pressured way can give some of that experience of that more luxurious sort of off-site that we've been talking about.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Even just moving around the room, switching up the groups, alternating between stickies and flip charts and decks. The worst the conditions, the more you could try mixing up the texture of the experience.
Sam Spurlin:
Go fire up the Liberating Structures website, grab a couple that look interesting and you’ll have a good time.
Avoid spinning up new action items in your workshop
Rodney Evans:
I mean, I do. You’ll be good to go. The one other thing that you touched on, and then let's talk ideas that we're starting to get there, is no matter your budget or the amount of time, I would really strongly caution anyone from spinning up a bunch of action items to be finished later.
Sam Spurlin:
Mm-hmm.
Rodney Evans:
I have made this mistake as a facilitator. And while on the one hand I'm saying, "Don't force it and don't overdo it to make everything 100%," what is really bad is a bunch of brainstorming. And then, a bunch of next steps written on a flip chart that then somebody has to figure out how they're going to assign them all and parse them all and track them all, and whatever.
I know that there's always necessarily going to be some of that because we're not going to finish everything in the room. But, don't have it be all that. That feels like you're just perpetuating the pattern that we started with at the top of like, "Someday I'll be a different person, and I'll have a different amount of time and attention." And now we're going from, "That time is the off-site" to "That time is back at my day job." And it's like, "Guess what? You're the common denominator. This is going to keep going this way."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And is the way that you kind of matched that up to the 60% thing you were talking about before, it was that you were getting a handful of things to 60% as opposed to 50 things to 60%. And then being like, "We'll get the remaining 40 later." It was just a couple of things that you were getting to that point.
Rodney Evans:
It was a handful of things. And I would say, we probably got those things to 90% over three days. But, we didn't try in one session to do it all.
Sam Spurlin:
Ah. Yeah, yeah. You're just holding yourself to 60%. You'll get it to 90 because we're more relaxed about it.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
And this is the other hack, is people think that by being super serious and super professional in these contexts that they're going to get more done. And, you're not.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
You’re actually not. When people are in a place of play, mentally, it's so much easier, it's so much less friction. And, there's so much more flow and there's so much more ease when you let people do work, and then marinate in it. And then come back. People think it's not real work, but actually it's just better work.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I love that.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. So, Sam-
Sam Spurlin:
So, Rodney.
Rodney Evans:
—let's wrap it up with some ideas, some easy takeaways. Though, I hope people have some from the last 50 minutes because we have talked about a lot of tactics, but give them some stuff to write down.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. We’ve kind of interwoven these a bit more than usual.
Rodney Evans:
That's true.
Tip 1: Design your workshop with fun in mind
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. Design with fun in mind, but that doesn't mean mandatory fun. So as you were talking there at the end, it made me think about this thing that I often do for the more corporate-y workshops, where I'm in there for a day or two days.
I will put piles of Play-Doh and Legos and sometimes pipe cleaners, just scattered throughout the room. And at no point, over those two days, will I use them in any directive way or even really mention them.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And usually, it only takes one person 20 minutes into the first day to just start idly playing with a fidget spinner or building something out of Play-Doh, where suddenly you've got a room of SVPs having really deep strategy conversations while, literally, I'm not exaggerating, one was wearing a little hat made of pipe cleaners that they had built over a day. And, they're just having that conversation.
And, I love stuff like that. Yeah. So, what? Does it really make a difference to have that stuff?
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
And I think, it does.
Rodney Evans:
It does.
Sam Spurlin:
There's a way to do it in a really cringe like, "Oh, my God. You're going to make me make something with this."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Just having stuff out and available can really shift the energy in a room. And then you can of course always design actual games and Ball Point being one of our favorites.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
If you Google it, you'll find the instructions for it. But, I've literally never had a group not have a good time playing Ball Point. And it's very simple, and it tees up a really useful conversation around emergent leadership and workflow and things like that. So, there's lots of ways to build fun into those moments.
Rodney Evans:
I always bring toys. It's so funny. The same London workshop, I had same thing. I like Brainflakes. Those are one of my favorites.
Sam Spurlin:
I have no idea what that is.
Rodney Evans:
They're like building blocks, but they look like little cogs that fit together. Anyway, I like what people make with them.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool.
Rodney Evans:
And one of the participants was sort of a little bit leaned back in her chair, and she said... We had not even started, yet. The stuff was just on the table. And she was like, "Whatever this is, can I be the note taker?" Or, something like that. And I was like, "Oh, no. It's not anything. This is just for you. I'm not going to make you do anything." And she was like, "Oh, thank God." So bring toys, but no mandatory fun toys.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
But, mandatory Ball Point because that's so fun.
Tip 2: Build in time for reflection
Rodney Evans:
My first idea is, I never think you can go wrong in an off-site context with some amount of time for reflection. And, it can be something as simple as a retro. We just did something at our Ready retreat last time that was about stories and sort of mapping stories from the past. I've done timeline things.
There's lots of ways to get at this. Again, Liberating Structures is a great resource. But, everybody wants to get into these settings and just imagine the future and just talk about what could be when we're all better and different.
And, I think that the shared experience of making sense of what has happened since we were last together, or over a particular period of time, is really, really valuable. And, I do think that it shapes the work that we end up doing together in ways that are difficult to predict.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Rodney Evans:
What else you got?
Tip 3: Design your workshop for the outcomes you need
Sam Spurlin:
One more thought from me, is just taking a more deliberate kind of design thinking approach to actually creating these things.
Rodney Evans:
Mm-hmm.
Sam Spurlin:
So not just figuring out like, "How are we going to fit all of the stuff that we normally do, or who all has a thing that they want 15 minutes to do?" But actually thinking about, "What are the outcomes that we actually need right now from this moment of coming together?"
And then kind connected to that, I don't think you can go wrong thinking about, "What do we want people to feel at the end of this?”
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And when you've got some agreement around what those things are, then you can start to make design decisions that build toward that direction. And I think if you want to go one step better, is that you start to build connections between these workshops over time.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
So, "What is the narrative arc over the last three workshops that we've done?" And yes, of course, some new people have joined who weren't there two times ago.
But, part of that practice is bringing them into the story of what has happened so far and where we are going next, so that each of these workshops don't feel like they're totally discreet, standalone things, but are connected to what we were thinking about and doing in the past.
Tip 4: Find the one thing that will make your workshop feel special
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I love that. My last one, that just occurred to me, is if you're designing this or hosting it, try to think about one thing that would make it feel special to people.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
We've talked in the past about pins. When I did that London workshop, I gave them all pins and told them about our ritual. Last week I wrote everyone on Source a card, and gave them a small token.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
It doesn't have to be a physical thing. But again, in the conversation I was having with friends over the weekend, there was a really funny T-shirt created. It doesn't have to be swag, but I think people having some marker of this as being an experience that isn't the day-to-day is really nice. And, it is probably more powerful than people give it credit for.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Totally.
Rodney Evans:
And so if you're the facilitator, again, it doesn't have to be expensive, but just think like, "What is one thing that would make this special and memorable for the people who are here?" And if you can, do it.
Sam Spurlin:
I love that. And just to kind of connect my last one to that one, something we did at The Ready was, we wrote notes to our future selves at a retreat. And then I think it was like three years later, four years later, I don't remember how long it was. It seemed like it was a long time. Those of us who were still around go those back.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And, we read what we were thinking about and hoping for our future selves from something that we wrote in a retreat. I had completely forgotten that we had done that. So, getting that at that retreat was really meaningful.
Rodney and Sam’s final thoughts
Rodney Evans:
Nice. I love it. Okay, Sam. Two-minute closing round. What'd you notice?
Sam Spurlin:
I noticed this version was better than our failed one from last Friday.
Rodney Evans:
Really? All right.
Sam Spurlin:
I think so. And I noticed that this conversation has made me look forward to the next client, sort of full day off-site that I am in charge of or at least involved in, and kind of push myself and push them a little bit more outside of their default moves, I think.
Rodney Evans:
I love it. I just noticed how you really can't separate the content and the design. Everybody wants to have outcomes for something like a retreat. And, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But, move quickly from that to the experience that's going to get you those outcomes. And, the experience isn't just the information that's going to be conveyed.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
It's how people are going to experience this time together. And, I think it can be very easy to get focused on the content and forget about the rest of it. And the content is not the most important part.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
There we go.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. You all know, we're always looking for new topics for the show. So if you have an organizational pattern you're having trouble changing, shoot us a note at podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin, and produced by chef/producer extraordinaire, Jack Van Amburg.
At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening.