Workshops are typically longer than other meetings and serve a different purpose. They’re ideal for solving specific problems or developing strategies that require input from a specific combination of people. Workshops often involve 4-14 people, are frequently held at an offsite location and can last anywhere from a few hours to several days. These deep-dive sessions work well for addressing the types of challenges the business has faced before.
 
Before starting any detailed planning, however, you should ask yourself whether a workshop is the right thing to do. Bringing together a group of experts for hours, or even days, is a major time and cost commitment. So, only decide to run a workshop if you’re convinced the topic is important enough to warrant it, and that the group input and interaction is necessary. If the problem to be solved is complex and hard to define, you may need to adopt a more agile approach.
 
With a skilled facilitator, workshops can be adapted on the fly to explore unexpected themes should they emerge, but as a starting point, they generally follow the outline shown here.

​EQUIP
At the start of the workshop (or beforehand) it’s important to bring all attendees up to a minimum level of knowledge about the topic. This should include an explanation of the business issue, the context, why the challenge must be met and what success would look like. This ensures that everyone understands why the workshop is being conducted and what needs to be achieved by the end of it.       
 
INSPIRE
Workshops typically involve at least one session designed to provide inspiration, to help participants get into the right mindset and to get their creative juices flowing. This might include examples of how other businesses have addressed a similar challenge. Bringing in guest speakers with relevant stories to tell can be particularly effective.
 
GENERATE
Workshops allow the right combination of people to collaborate and generate new ideas. Giving participants time and space to interact leads to imaginative solutions. Workshops should therefore involve activities that inspire creativity and encourage collaboration. The ideas can then be built on and refined collectively.
 
PRIORITIZE
In a workshop setting, every participant’s opinion is important. When it comes to identifying priorities, a democratic vote is the norm. Once the most promising ideas have been agreed upon, the team can decide which should be leveraged immediately and which can be developed later on.
 
PLAN
As with any business meeting, workshops should finish with agreement on an action plan. A key output from a workshop is a record of who is going to do what, and by when, to move the ideas forward.