Strategy workshops: Tired, Wired and Inspired
For a long time I held a somewhat heretical opinion about workshops for a strategist. I didn’t like them, and found them mostly to be a waste of time. A waste of my time, at least - because even when they did uncover new perspectives, institutional knowledge or insights, they went about it in a less efficient way. Part of the disconnect with workshops comes when strategists approach them as an artifact, with structure. But groups of people with disparate points of view and goals all coming together will always push more towards entropy than order. If the goal of the workshop is some sort of alignment, it’s at odds with the group’s natural dynamic. Chaos is a liability to workshop bent on structure and a defined outcome.
And that leads to the other disconnect in workshops. The people in client services who usually propose them have different objectives from strategists who deliver them and try to integrate them into their strategic process. For the person looking to build trust and chemistry with a client team, freewheeling chaos and ideation is an asset, not a liability. In the best workshops participants put their roles and hierarchies aside and get to contribute more as people than as titles. That’s humanizing, and disarming, and revealing. And fun - for anyone not trying to turn it into a catalog of load bearing insights anyway.
Ultimately a workshop’s success or failure comes down to the exact same rubric as anything else in strategy: are we clear on what the goals are, and are we structuring the activity in order to meet our goals? When a workshop feels awkward or frustrating or unproductive, it’s probably because not everyone is aligned on the goals for the group, and default to personal agendas.
Conversely, the best workshops recognize the natural entropic tendencies of groups, and are both realistic and aligned on what the workshop’s purpose actually is:
Tired workshop objective: Uncover new insights that will improve the strategy work
I love that you want this to work but I’m afraid you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and frustration. 1-on-1s are usually a better way to get clients to speak freely, and there’s a danger here that people will have heart for ideas that don’t contribute to the strategy, or even torpedo it. This doesn’t often work because only the strategist wants order, and the workshop was probably suggested as a way of “getting everyone on the same page.” That’s a relationship objective, not a strategic one.
Wired workshop objective: Claim that uncovering new insights is the goal, while recognizing it’s a chemistry building exercise
This ends up being a workshop that looks very much the same as above, but the strategist has limited their expectations. It may go better, as the strategist won’t work so hard to rein in the entropy. So that’s good. But it can feel like a waste of time for the strategist, who wants to dig in, learn shit and move forward. Strategists often tell me that they don’t know why they’re the ones who are running workshops and this is the reason - if the workshop isn’t an input into the strategy. Ultimately though, if you’re pretending the workshop is one thing and realizing it’s another, this approach is disingenuous. Don’t gaslight your clients please.
Inspired workshop objective: The workshop’s first objective is to build chemistry, and second to see what we can uncover.
The best workshops are when we’re being honest with ourselves and our clients about what we’re doing here. It’s ok if a workshop is mostly about chemistry. Understanding how people think, organizational culture and personal motivations can pay huge dividends later on - not just for the strategist and the agency, but also for the clients, whose needs and organizational obstacles are better able to be integrated into the work. The downside is that instead of feeling like a waste of time to the strategist, it can feel like a waste of time to the client if they are dedicating time and people to an activity that doesn’t pull through directly into the artifact and output they’re paying for. If you suspect this is how your clients would react, they’re probably not great partners so go ahead and gaslight them.*
*I’m sure I’m just kidding.