Working towards a workshop – renaming the workshop

Clear feedback from recent conversations is that there is ‘workshop weariness’. People feel that the format has been abused beyond recovery. I tend to agree. I wouldn’t, as a broad rule, attend workshops in my last job. A panel discussion? Yes. A breakout session at a conference? Yes. A presentation by a notable figure in the industry? Yes. But I avoided workshops outside the firm.

Internally, we didn’t utilize workshops or facilitated discussions. Probably to our detriment as we struggled, at times, to capture input from the entire company. Rather, we had unstructured conversations where people could volunteer their opinion without guidance. Often, it was the loudest and most opinionated that had their views heard.

So, what should the name of the event that I want to hold and therefore the format of the event and its objectives. A suggestion was ‘conversations’ where the format was a set of four conversations, centered on specific industries or trends, guided by me. I feel that the word ‘conversation’ lacks dynamism. I am believer in the power of words to energize and I want my work to be named in ways that speak to action and change. That dynamism is even in the blog’s name.

Other names include:

• Bootcamps focusing on initial or basic training with multiple sessions
• Q+As where the presenter and panelists take questions to discuss particular topics.
• Retreats involve some form of isolation and group work
• Tutorials ask participants to undertake real work based on lectures or other material
• Hackathons facilitate short and intense solution development for complex problems
• Lab sessions involve the undertaking of a previously explained experiment with discussion about results at the end of the session

These events fall into a set of objective categories – challenge/problem orientated (with solution development as a sub-category), practice orientated where participants learn a process and then undertake examples, information transferal such as lectures and Q+As and group planning sessions such as retreats.

There are also interesting developments in project deliver and management from software companies with Scrum Master certification and project sprints. Project sprints in a workshop context might be similar to breakout sessions. Kanban has the ‘To Do, In Progress, Done’ areas. I spoke to an MBA class where I asked for several hot topics and then went through each one in a Kanban type method.

Maybe something even more outrageous as a name. Delta session? Impact jamboree? Third step thinking? The jump off? Battle royale?