Figuring Out the Purpose of a Workshop
We often get inquiries from organisers of events of all sorts – they have heard from someone somewhere that we have facilitated events, meetings, conferences, workshops, that apparently were successful, exciting, different. They then send us their tentative programmes that they have already put together.
A dear colleague of mine, Allison Hewlitt, who used to work with Bellanet and IDRC, once said: “I never facilitate other people’s events”. What she wanted to say, is, that it is very difficult and thankless to take over the facilitation task of an event at a late stage – when many of the decisions on format, structure and so forth have already been taken. Why? 80% of the success of an event lies in the preparation (because once the event starts, the ball is rolling, just like in a marble run). With regard to outcome and impact of an event, the most crucial part of the preparation work is designing and structuring the overall event. So the main task of the facilitator lies more in the work accomplished before the facilitation task during the actual starts – or to put it differently, the most important part of the job of a facilitator is to facilitate the lead phase to the event.
The main challenge of this design work is to define the expected outcome/ impact of the event – we’re talking not just about output! People who come to us often are very clear about what they want to see at the end of the event: people have heard about this and that topic, they have shared their ideas and knowledge, they have drafted a plan or strategy, … But that’s not our main concern! We then ask them: what do you want to see happening in the six months after the workshop, that will lead you to the conclusion that the workshop was worth all the time and effort? What criteria will you use at that stage to judge the workshop and our contribution to it? Because once we as facilitators know the answer to that question, it is then our task to design an event and outputs that best lead to that impact. However, usually when we ask this question, people on the phone get very silent – telling us that this is a good question – and ask us to give them a few days to figure it out…
