“Let’s get the best minds of our organization in one room and won’t leave it till we have a new [something] strategy”, they say. Here’s why this perspective is naive.
I spent the first half of my career in large international advertising agencies. Many of our clients loved workshops (these usually were about brand strategy, advertising strategy, or marketing strategy). We on the other hand – didn’t, but obediently complied.
After taking part in many such workshops and leading a few, I discovered there were only two types of strategy workshops: Failed Workshops and Fake Workshops.
All workshops that were structured as a set of guided, but open discussions have failed.
Well, it wasn’t a complete failure – they did create fruitful knowledge sharing, but they never ended with a solid strategic direction.
Why? Well, it’s because strategy is a complex creative endeavor that demands a few rounds of failure prior to success. One day is simply not enough for it.
In the beginning, you need some knowledge sharing, alignment on goals, market outlook, audience… you know – the basics. Then comes the first round of ideas. These are never really original, and most of your competitors have already considered such directions and tried them out.
Proper strategic directions stand on the shoulders of this initial set of trivial ideas and a single-day workshop doesn’t allow a deeper ideation process:
Putting the work aside and your mind into a free flow for a few days. Getting some inspiration. Taking your ideas for a walk in the woods. Showering with them. Allowing yourself to go crazy and wild. Asking yourself “What the hell was I thinking” the day after. And only then, one morning, waking up with a perfect direction that is both unique and relevant.
Yes, you might say at this moment, but what about the cool and super-effective workshop I went through in 1999!? It worked out well.
It’s safe to assume that was a Fake Workshop. At some point in my agency life, I became pretty good at crafting and leading such workshops.
The guiding principles were very simple. We wanted our workshops to succeed (there’s no money for agencies in stuck projects), so we would work for weeks in ideating the strategy behind the backs of our clients.
We would go through the full strategic process ourselves and come up with 2-3 strong strategic directions.
Now during the actual workshops, we wouldn’t just share them from the get-go.
We knew that our customers had to walk through the valley of desperation before opening up to new ideas. So we would wait. Meanwhile, we would place our strongest persuaders on tables with the main decision-makers.
After the first round of ideas, the desperation would kick in and we would then casually toss our ideas on the table. Ideally, while making decision-makers feel these were their ideas.
Needless to say, these would work like a charm…
Effective or not, I haven’t been able to push myself to run a single workshop since I left the last agency I worked at.
Fifty or so clients later, I am still here – live and kicking.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against group discussions (these are great in getting the juices flowing), I love one-on-one discussions and do believe that multi-day, well-prepared off-sites can help ideation.
Still, I am not going back to workshops any time soon… unless you have some cool new format you want to pitch to change my mind…