Workshops serve a variety of purposes, from developing skills to help people do their jobs better, to inspiring new ways of thinking, to building rapport among members of a team. One of the great things about workshops is that they take people out of their everyday environment and create a “safe” space for learning, where the stakes are low for results but high for learning – where risk taking and failure are rewarded.
The problem is, people are busy and have work to do. Four hour workshops can be hard to schedule and harder to fill, regardless of how beneficial everyone agrees they might be. So why not turn the workshop into a working session where people can get work done, but in a more open, collaborative environment that prioritizes learning along with results. Learning concepts before practice is often a luxury reserved for formal classes. In the work environment, the working session workshop is efficient (saves time), effective (we learn by doing), and motivating (no question about “what’s in it for me”).
At Organic, we’re going to be running our Agile workshops like this. Rather than spending hours going over what Agile product development is all about and doing abstract exercises which illustrate the benefits of an Agile approach, participants will bring current work to the workshop and get things done according to certain Agile principles covered along the way. We might not get to all the learning objectives, but we will answer the question “What’s in it for me?” and we will get a lot of work done.
