The Green Room

Good wood from smart guest contributors. This edition…. Ginny Stevens from Active Farmers, talking about a terrific program building fitness and wellbeing in regional Australia.

Don't muddle training & learning

Workshops can cover an array of target outcomes (innovating, developing, collaborating, aligning, planning and training). They can also be powerful mechanisms for learning. They are different things though, learning and training (not being a semantic trainspotter here, more wanting to point out a necessary difference in workshop design & facilitation depending on your focus).

Think of "learning" as acquiring something new, and "training" as developing proficiency / muscles / effectiveness in implementing that something you learned.

It's easy to over-reach in workshop design and facilitation, trying to do too much.

When you introduce a new idea / fact or skill set (learning opportunity), there's an absorption process that has to happen (and unless you want to leave someone behind, it happens at the pace of the slowest learner). Then we create moments to galvanise that learning with some training (exercises to practice applying, test-drives, try-and-fail and try-and-succeeds)... that's a lot for most to process, and we (I) often skim through these bedfriends too quickly.

Train without adequate learning time / sufficient knowledge & skill onboarding, and it's easy to train "wrong" (bad habits, incorrect process) or to lose the enthusiasm because they're not really "getting" the training. Go to footy practice every week without adequate understanding of how perform a drop punt, and you'll end up with a quirky, usually less-than-optimal style.

Learn without putting sufficient training next to the learning moment, and you don't lock the learned material into practical contexts. Like reading dance steps in a book without spending an hour shuffling them out. You forget.

Go too hard on the combo, and THEN try overlaying a second learning topic and subsequent training moment... you burn them out, and they lose their love of the learn.

Both are powerful applications of workshops. They work in synch. But they're different, they require different approaches, and if you want the crew to move toward mastery (and the joy and benefits it brings), then be mindful of the combo deal when you plan your next session.

Workshop observation...

Panel power.

a. Smart solo speakers sharing their secret sauce is tops to expose an audience to, but
b. A cluster of wise folk, each bringing a different vantage point to a topic, can create really interesting intersections and discussions in a way single speakers can't do alone, and
c. The speakers tend to give you much "realer" thoughts and opinions in a panel scenario rather than theory or concepts. Try it.

A bunch of legends presenting at "Healthy Australian Agribusiness 2020+"

Seeds

3 for your daily toolboxes or weekly huddles…

1. "One thing you achieved yesterday (and why did it work?)"
2. "One thing you learned yesterday (and can you apply it today?)"
3. "One thing you're going to focus on delivering / completing today (and what'll you say no to in order to preserve focus?)" 

Swarms aligning are beautiful to watch.

The Swarm Guide

Meet Strategy Road Associate Deb Trebilcock, a graphic designer that tackles the smaller pieces of work big agencies don't want to touch, and turns them into exquisite print materials, pdfs, Powerpoint decks and websites. Business documents, custom-built infographics, signage large and small, Deb's work is exceptional quality, delivered affordably and quickly. Check out Deb's business Coalmine Canary.

Blooming

"If you can be pleasant and nice, you're going to be conned, absolutely for sure, but in the long run, it's a better journey and in the end, you win more."  Bryce Courtenay.

The dichotomy between ambition and generosity is one I imagine a great many wrestle with. People want to achieve more, grow and succeed and enjoy the trappings of that success... but some also want to give more, do more for others, try creating stuff and let others delight in and benefit from it without immediate (or even delayed) return. Balance too far on either side and there are negative consequences.

I don't know if there's a cookbook for getting it right (sure someone will tell you they have one). I think maybe hoofing the road to learn where the mean and standard (acceptable) deviations lay is the reward. I think it starts with the trying stuff and giving stuff without much expectation (hard as that is when you want pay dirt). To that end, remember the joy you get when you watch your kids faces light up on Christmas morning. That feeling? Is there much better? And you can earn more of that, with clients, with colleagues, with strangers. Give something of yourself, see how it feels.

(To some very generous individuals that gave of themselves with no expectations at our "Healthy Australian Agribusiness 2020+" event, y-uge thanks. Alan Hutchinson, Ginny Stevens, Joslyn Fox, Jason Dunstone, Wendy Perry, Tim Standing, Tania Cavaiuolo, Katharine Crane, Peter Alderson, Michelle Bakjac, Ben Lazzaro & Simon Dillon.  Onya.)

Agribusiness. Successful because you need to eat.

7 opportunities to tailor the workshop

Because the success or failure of an interactive workshop is measured by participants leaving the room willing & able to do something different / better (and then actually doing it), it's pretty important to know you're facilitating a session that's bespoke binding with something in their scones. Delivering a curriculum, no, that doesn't cut it. Walking out the door at 5 and everyone has a copy of a workbook, nup, no good either. Folk actually enabled, empowered, motivated and with a clear plan of when and how to put it into play? There's your money ball.

For a full-day workshop, here are 7 moments you can alter the tailoring;

1. Pre-event 1 (Conversation with the boss) - divining intelligence, understanding ambitions and nuances to the group and the needs and wants. First cut tailoring.
2. Pre-event 2 (Conversation with the crew) - getting a reality check on the bosses briefing, feeling out the temperature and tone and topic bag needed. A little (sometimes a lot of) nip & tucking.
3. Pre-event 3 (Sharing the draft framework with the boss) - hitting the right notes, holding in the key areas, communicating in a language & at a level that'll work? A unified team approach...
4. Right off the bat in the session - assessing the body language, the scuttlebutt, asking what they'd most like to get from the session (does the alignment feel right? If fit is slightly off, you can still change chords.)
5. Morning tea - by now you broadly know where willingness lays, where apathy lays, where antipathy and hostility lay. Some on the fly alterations right now.
6. Lunchtime - a day half done, they're either getting a lot from it and are excited about bringing it home with a wet sail, or they're overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, or frustrated. Check in - boss, a couple of the crew, and re-hem your slide deck to make sure that, after lunch, in that valley of death hour when post-prandial sleepies kick in, you're grabbing attention and enthusiasm by the scruff of the neck.
7. Afternoon break - by now, it's worked or it hasn't from an engagement perspective, but there's still time to massage the content, and even more critically, to turn the post-workshop commitments into an action list that'll work for them. Final iron.

Post-workshop follow-ups and debriefs will help you understand how your tailoring attempts went down, but just because you built the deck and printed the booklets and first conversations with the boss focused on a topic set doesn't mean you're locked in to a lane. Facilitation means acting on the shifting breezes to get the clients to a better place (regardless of your slideshow).

Worth a Bo Peep...

Your local library. It's free. It smells like books. It's filled with more wisdom than you'll ever onboard. Just takes a little time and effort. Spoon feed yourself. Google (then visit) yours.

Luft balloons* (imagine...)

The advisory board of your dreams... Imagine you could fill your Boardroom with a talent factory second to none. Custom-built, exclusively for you, that others'd give their eye teeth for. Who'd be there?

• A poster-child of what success looks like in your space?
• The client you most want to be helping, or that is funding your success in 10 years?
• Someone you trust implicitly to tell you the truth, tough as it might feel, knowing it's coming from a good place?
• Subject matter experts pertinent to the strategic priority areas you're going to need to navigate?
• An old sea dog that'll ask the sage questions?
• A wild-eyed pup that challenges your energy levels and pace?
• Someone left-field, right-brained or centrally located with a panoramic view of your supply & value chains?
• The advocates for people, financials, creative, systems & processes, customers and change?
• A passionate believer in, or walking embodiment of, the values you want to shine bright in your culture?
• .... who else?

You can imagine these.

Or you could ask them.

Slide deck specials

The "call to action" at the end. Do this, try that, contact these people, commit to something. Everything's just thought food 'til you ask them to eat.

Workshop time pressure

Recently, I ran a business model review workshop with a client's leadership team (exercise based on a great book by the team at the University of St Gallen, Business Model Navigator, check it out). We had a bunch of senior leaders in the room that we wanted wearing their creative hats to consider a range of alternative business models (55 of them in total), to stretch their thinking on what that might look like / deliver in their industry, for their business or those of their competitors. We asked them to look at the obscure, the likely, and the scarily disruptive, and see what learnings / ideas / dots joined in their minds as they considered the foggy terrain ahead. Whole process. Really cool and valuable.

The point - we took an exercise that could easily be stretched over a full day... and we did it in 2 hours. Why? It's all we had. We'd briefed the team in advance, they'd read about the models in their own time, and we drove interaction and conversation and collaboration hard. It meant they had to work hard, and it meant there were some threads potentially worth teasing out that didn't get full exploration in the session. But what we got was concentrate. We got Boyles Law of Gases on display - that a gas will expand... or compress... to occupy the size of the vessel you put it in. That you can always fit more into a tighter space... just be aware that it builds the pressure.

Our Healthy Australian Agribusiness 2020+ seminar asked 13 speakers to deliver their wisdom in under 10 minutes. They felt the pressure. And they all delivered in spades.

Remarkable what you can achieve when you push yourself. Don't build pressure to exploding point, but don't assume you need 2 days on the strategy workshop either... 

The trees for the woods…

Wonderwall. Just Wonderwall.

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Thank you for reading!

Forrest Workshops custom-builds and facilitates team workshops on topics ranging from strategic planning, leadership and sales practice development, to innovation, customer experience creation and collaborating with your supply chain in an evolving market. Based in Adelaide, serving clients nationally and internationally, from SMEs to Fortune 500s.
Committed to facilitating purposeful teamwork. 

Forrest Workshops For One are tailored Coaching & mentoring programs for leaders, business owners, sales and service professionals. High-touch, deep- and long-term impact support.

Contact Troy Forrest from Forrest Workshops on 0430 308963 or troy@forrestworkshops.com.au for a discussion.