I very much enjoyed the (energy training) course yesterday. I found it very interesting, and we do hope to put some fresh ideas into practice here at school... My thanks to the course leaders for their time.
School caretaker, Manchester
Meetings with no purpose
We're all busy people. There's emails to respond to, calls to make, people to meet, blogs to write - and then of course work to actually deliver. Time is precious. Which is why I was slightly bemused by a seminar I went to a couple of months ago that seemed to have no real purpose.
As a workshop facilitator, I know I can be a pretty harsh critic (though I like to think that I pick up ideas and new ways of doing things too). But although this meeting was well constructed and had a LOT of speakers, I couldn't understand what it was FOR. It wasn't launching anything, it wasn't telling the (senior and knowledgable) audience anything new, there were no actions, outputs, decisions or aspirations at the end. I wondered if the whole meeting had been set up just because the organisers had got a slot in the Minister's diary - but when he didn't show, even that purpose slipped from their fingers.
Don't get me wrong, I value networking and think seeing people face to face has incredible merit. But this workshop just did nothing for me.
It puts the pressure on of course. Do my workshops deliver value? Do they make the most of people's time? Do they give people something they want? I think on the whole the answer is yes, but it never hurts to view your work with a critical eye! The way I plan and facilitate workshops has matured with experience - I now seldom ask delegates to start with a blank piece of paper (what's the point if someone's already started the thinking for you?) and spend as little time as possible getting people to write lists of barriers (it's been some thing we've been doing for at least 20 years - what we need now is solutions).
The key to a good workshop is, I think, the quality of the questions you ask the delegates and this often falls to the client: spending time on these, honing them and being very clear on what you want to get out of it (as well as what your delegates will take away) is time well invested. Because no-one has time to attend meetings that are for meetings sake.