“You have to conduct change management but stakeholders are reluctant to change? You are working on a project with an important change management dimension but changing is not in the enterprise culture? How to engage my team in the change?”
It was the type of questions I was thinking about when I set-up the Innovative Workshop Experience (IWEx) approach.
At that time, I was responsible for implementing change management on a new project management tool. I developed IWEx as the involvement of my team was a key factor for project success. On several identified area, the target was to look back at our current ways of working and imagine new ones for the future. For each identified area of improvement, a series of 3 workshops has been performed.
1. Summary
Do you take pleasure in defying complexity?
A workshop is a collaborative type of meeting, displayed one time or in a short-term period, where a group of people is engaged in discussion and work on a creative subject. Innovative Workshop Experience has several goals like socialize before working, make sense and stimulate innovation while working in a fun context.
Why setting-up Innovative Workshop Experience instead of brainstormings, workshops or meetings?
We are currently facing an acute meeting mania. Indeed, our agendas are full of meetings. Moreover we are sometimes invited to a workshop but no-one knows exactly what it means. Other times, brainstormings are organized to find a solution differently but the scope is often too complex.
However, Innovative Workshop Experience (IWEx) is intended to address these issues by suggesting different type of participatory meetings in a short-time period where people are at the heart of their ambitions.
IWEx are characterized by:
The first priority is to have participants that want to take forward the discussion on the subject, the second one is to have a relevant section of individuals according to the thematic of the workshop. It’s mandatory to validate the mindset of the participants at the beginning of the first session. Indeed, thanks to a check-in activity, if you realize that the majority of the participants are prisoners (“Feel that they’ve been forced to attend and would rather be doing something else”, ESVP check-in) it is better to cancel the meeting. Either these persons are not the right participants or it’s not the good time. Participants make the decision to come at the meeting; therefore they are responsible of its success.
The first sessions of IWEx I developed are composed of several meetings:
As we can see, IWEx respects “the model of the pendulum”: the different sessions alternate between divergence and convergence phases. This approach enables to satisfy the specific needs while being creative.
The model of the pendulum applied to the IWEx follows the following process:
Take a look at the detail of each session:
The last important point to highlight is the “facilitation”. In IWEx, roles are allocated between an animator leader, a facilitator and the participants. On a human perspective, it’s useful that the presenter is synchronized with the participants to create a comfortable collaborative environment. Moreover, the facilitator helps the animator to prepare the meeting and to lead it by facilitating the interactions. On a technical point of view, it’s necessary to use the appropriate tools. As mentioned above with the speedboat, Innovative Workshop Experience uses innovation games to enhance collective intelligence.
2. Objectives
There are several objectives of using the Innovative Workshop Experience (IWEx):
I would like to underline another example on the constructive approach. At the end of each meeting, this is “ROTI time”! ROTI means Return on Time Invested. At the same time, all the members made different feedback: they raised one hand with one, two, three, four or five fingers. If you show one finger, it means you have lost your time however five fingers mean it was great. Thanks to this quick feedbacks, I can adjust the next meeting: sometimes I need to go back on an item, to adjust an exercise, etc. ROTI enhances transparence and confidence. That’s why I suggest you to apply the ROTI at the end of our meetings whatever its type.
In a few words, the mindset of the IWEx is to set up a disruptive approach to reach our goals thanks to human capital and pragmatism.
3. Resulted Obtained
In only 3x2hours, we got great results. On the one hand, according to the thematic of the sessions we managed to:
On the other hand, people were enthusiastic. It was a pleasure for them to share their knowledge/ exchange information on their specificities as they don’t often have this opportunity. IWEx is a place of share where we take time to discover the others participants. Moreover, people were also committed, they are now ready to support project development.
4. Conclusion
Such workshops have wider impacts than the workshop itself by getting people engaged in the evolution of their enterprise.
Here is only one example of high value workshops. If you need to engage our team, enhance cohesion, create a team spirit, implement change management, and so on; I advice you to use the key elements of the recipe: a participatory approach, some divergence and convergence phases, facilitation techniques and fun. As a famous quote said: “We can collect good players, the harder is to make them play together”.
If you like this article, if you are convinced that energetic teamwork and having fun is a relevant way of working, take a look at the “FISH! Philosophy”.
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