The Merits or Otherwise of Workshops
From GPWiki
Thursday 09 of September, 2010
Does group therapy work?
Albeit written from a Marketing Executives perspective this lends a few interesting insights into the state of the art. We at Group Partners describe the Groundhog Day of meetings and the acres of flip charts that some poor sod has to type up. This is a good read for those on the practice side or those who have to imagine a better way.
Workshops that tap communal wisdom can help to evaluate activity, but their merit in idea generation is less certain. By Helen Edwards
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There can be few in the marketing industry who have not found themselves sitting in an airless room, with flip charts to right and left, among colleagues both liked and mistrusted, wondering which breakout group they will be assigned to, and what time the next coffee break is. Workshops, it seems, are increasingly being relied upon to unlock every brand problem from extension strategy to identity.
These events come in both plain and exotic varieties, as moderated awaydays with sensibly defined objectives to be tackled as a group, or three days spent working out which Greek god most closely mirrors the brand. The popularity of workshops has, in turn, led to a proliferation of specialist facilitators, who are making significant amounts of money out of getting people to solve their own problems.
Workshops can be fun, challenging, illuminating and, of course, social, as they are often the only time in the year, with the exception of the annual company party, when members of cross-disciplinary teams get to see one another’s faces. But do the brand triangles, innovation initiatives and activation ideas that emerge from these sessions stand up to scrutiny once the enthusiasm of the day has dissipated?
There are also questions over whether big groups can ever produce anything original, inspiring and apt, or whether they are merely a means to achieving buy-in to what has already been tacitly agreed by others somewhere up the line.
Phil Chapman, director of marketing at T-Mobile, is in no doubt about the merits of workshops. ‘We use them to generate ideas, challenge our thinking and get a collective view of strategy,’ he says, adding that this collectivism will define the marketing department of the future. ‘Increasingly, good people at all levels want more involvement in the big decisions. If they’re not empowered, they won’t stay.’
David Taylor, founder of The Brand Gym, is one of the new breed of marketing consultants to have accelerated the trend with an ideological insistence on collective methods. ‘In theory, you could use a workshop to tackle any marketing issue, but they are particularly powerful for team alignment, focused energy and shared vision,’ he says.
When pressed on the quality of ideas emerging from a typical workshop, Taylor concedes it can fall short, especially where a contentious or polarizing outcome is justified. ‘A brand such as Innocent could never have come out of a workshop, he admits.
Inevitably, those on the agency side are most skeptical about the ability of big groups to conceive cut-through ideas. Malcolm White, founder of communications agency krow and chairman of the Account Planning Group, believes workshop dynamics lend themselves best to a strictly editing role. ‘They can be very useful for evaluating and developing ideas that are already on the table, but not for their origination,’ he says.
‘Workshops can be very useful for evaluating and developing ideas that are already on the table, but not their origination – Malcolm White krow
A central issue is responsibly, which is a great motivator for small teams, but is weakened the more widely shared it is. White was one of a team of four that created the name and brand identity for low-cost airline bmibaby during one afternoon session. ‘We knew it was down to us to crack it,’ he says. ‘In a workshop with 20 other people, responsibility is more diffuse; there’s always another breakout team that might solve it, so you don’t dig as deeply into your creative and intellectual reserves.’
Workshops can also b e abused, according to Catherine Cluney, worldwide vice-president of oral health at Johnson & Johnson. ‘There is a tendency when things get sticky to do an off-site,’ she says. Nevertheless, she believes that they can be a worthwhile part of innovation process, as long as the inputs are carefully framed. ‘Objectives need to be tight, and you need to be clear about all the commercial and practical boundaries up front,’ she explains. ‘Otherwise you end up with those silly “why-no?” ideas that can’t be implemented in the real world.’
Much can be done during the preparation process to tilt the odds in favor of the event being a success. This might include avoiding approaching a one-day workshop as a single day in the calendar. A more helpful view of its significance and potential upside is to multiply it by the number of people attending. If 20 senior people are scheduled to be there, this represents the condensation of 20 senior working days into one, with all the attendant investment and gain that implies.
The responsibility of running such a session and maximizing the ration of achievement to investment, is one to be taken lightly. Adam Morgan, found of eatbigfish, which runs challenger-brand workshops, says success depends on meticulous up-front attention to the mix of people attending.
Drawing on the Hollywood adage that ‘75% of good direction is casting’, Morgan cites the importance of a genuinely eclectic mix. This goes beyond the usual multi-disciplinary line-up to include people at opposite ends of the knowledge spectrum. This means including ‘brand inside out, and ‘intelligent naives’, who are successful thinkers from an unrelated category or outside the commercial world altogether, and who by their very ignorance about the market, force the wider group out of its mental straightjacket.
Morgan believes that properly conducted workshops are the only way to represent everyone in the organization and achieve the change in behavior that is the driving theme behind inside-out brand thinking. ‘ It is no accident that the surge in workshop activity has coincided with a growing understanding of the importance of internal brand culture,’ he says.
At the internal engagement level, there is no doubt that workshops are an effective marketing tool. Their power to pull people together and break down cross-cultural barriers is undisputed. In addition, they have an undeniable role to play as a means of getting people to rally around the ‘big idea’. Nagging doubts remain, however, about how incisive these unwieldy groups are at creating that big idea in the first place.
Marketing relies on breakthrough thinking, originality and that mix of insight, cunning and courage that gives a brand a chance to stand out in an overcrowded, commercial world. Marketing needs its mavericks, but workshops operate on the basis of consensus, meaning sharpness of thought can be blunted as the number of participants increases.
On the question of quality of output, the jury is out. So here is something to fuel deliberation: everyone interviewed for this piece was asked for an example of a great marketing initiative conceived in a workshop, which went on to play its part in a commercial success. Not a single one was forthcoming.
Workshops Dos and Don’ts
- Do define clear objectives and circulate them before the day
- Do open with a relevant, but low-stakes, session with the aim of getting everyone to speak early on
- Do use two moderators for bigger groups, and give them clearly differentiated roles, such as synthesizer/motivator
- Do choose one internal ‘owner’ of the process, who is responsible for its success
- Don’t be seduced by silly creative techniques; getting the group to make things out of Plasticine will lead to sticky fingers, not open minds
- Don’t make everyone stay inside all day. Instead, insist on a 10-minute stroll around the block
- Don’t think of the workshop as the solution in isolation; it is part of a process that starts well before the event and continues well after
- Don’t leave the workshop without a clear map of who is to do what next, hen they are to do it by, and how
Case study Workshop Techniques
Brand archetype journey
Alexander Dunlop’s unusual workshop approach aims to identify the Greek god or goddess that can act as the organizing principle for the brand. This method was popular with Unilever for a while. Its deodorant brand, Sure, for example was deemed to be Atalanta a rather butch female athlete of ancient Greek mythology.
Picasso session
Part of the 'eatbigfish' workshop process. The group engages in an exercise to jettison everything that is extraneous to the brand’s identity. The analogy refers to the answer the artist Picasso is reputed to have given when asked how he was able to fashion a lion from block of stone – ‘I chip away everything that isn’t lion’.
Red hat, green hat
A challenge to classical brainstorm theory from SRI International, which reverses the dictat that criticism is banned in workshops. Instead, the group is divided into ‘red hats’ and ‘green hats’. The reds have to criticize the output, and greens have to defend it, before their roles are reversed.
