Hi all, I thought i'd share an interesting workshop I ran recently - hopefully it's helpful for someone else who has a similar challenge or brief! The client is a large charity and this was their brief: Produce a short vision statement for our future digital fundraising and engagement and the required transformation over our strategy period (they obviously shared context of their org strategy etc). I split this up into two stages: 1) Vision & 2) Required Transformation. Here are the exercises I ran: 1️⃣ Vision ➡️ Lightning Demos (this helped us focus on the market and the team created some really great How Might Wes). We clustered these to use as stimulus for the next exercise. ➡️ Vision Statement Drawing. People drew their vision statement and presented back to the group. I was mindful that if we asked people to write them they would get caught up in the language rather than the overall concepts. We asked them to share their vision and gathered the main themes. 2️⃣ Required Transformation ➡️ We then essentially did a Lightning Decision Jam which I don't need to explain! This was a fun one to run but I was very worried about timings, we did get everything done on time though which was a relief! I was constantly talking about pace and how it's going to feel like everything is going WAY too fast before and during the workshop and I think that helped a lot! They just could not get people together for longer but all worked out ok! I've had some really positive feedback from the client and recently ran a training session for them too so hoping to run more sessions with them next year 😁 Shout if you have any questions! 😀

***PRESALE OFFER HAS ENDED - NEW OFFER NOW AVAILABLE (SEE PINNED POST)** Hey Workshoppers! Even though our official Black Friday sale starts this Wednesday, we're launching our "VIP Pre Sale" for everyone here in Facilitator Club and in our Newsletter. It starts RIGHT NOW with an extra 10% off the Black Friday price! To put it simply, on Wednesday, it'll be 10% more expensive for everyone else. If you've ever wanted to jump in on our Facilitation Course at its lowest price ever, here's the link. I made a little video down below explaining the deal.... that's all! Cheers, Jonathan P.S. I said it's only an extra 2% off in the Loom video... because I'm an idiot :)

Hey Workshoppers, I usually don't cross-post anything from our Workshopper Inner Circle community but this video I made for the group today kinda exploded and created a lot of really interesting conversations. So I said fuck it, let's pop it in here too :) P.S. Applications are still closed right now for joining our Inner Circle community, if they open again any time soon we'll post about it here 👍🏻 **************************************************here's the post*********************************** Hey all! I spend a lot of time coaching or being coached. I spend a lot of time around hyper-successful entrepreneurs and consultants, but also people who are stuck (and stay like that forever). I have some thoughts about what keeps people stuck and what makes people successful. I decided to make a little video about something I think is going to hold a LOT of you back from achieving success. It's a bit of an experiment so lemme know if it's interesting! https://www.loom.com/share/b03e24ebdf8449d3bb700abd7fa35cdc?sid=cc23381e-4203-4a6c-8057-631e886c3670 Cheers, Jonathan

It can be tricky to maintain high levels of engagement but there are steps you can take to get great results. Here’s 4️⃣ tops tips for facilitating impactful virtual workshop: ✅Plan and write up your explanations for your exercises. Use the what, why, how formula to make sure everyone ‘gets’ your exercise ✅Build in more prep time - you’ll need to create a virtual board and think through your tech platforms. So make sure you’ve got enough time! ✅Ask more questions: it’s much more likely you’ll get crickets 🦗in virtual sessions so be prepared with some great questions to trigger discussions ✅Give your participants work e.g. get them clustering post its so there’s no chance of them getting distracted my Teams: Slack / Emails Let me know your tips below! What's worked for you? 😀

One of the great things about what we do is you can do it as an employee or go out and become your own company. Whilst the later comes with amazing benefits there are a lot of areas that need to be considers… Like - What does it take to set myself up as a business or do I just contract in. - If I am setting myself up as a business am I a sole trader.. registering by business - Defining your purpose and setting clear goals yearly, quarterly - Defining your target customers, products, services and financials. Whilst this is a passion space for a lot of us, you still need to understand your revenue needs. - Branding and marketing - What do you need to set yourself up… physically, technology - Contracts for engagements - How to build a pipeline, managing you customer base Making sure you get work life balance! Would be interested in hearing and learning from each other on what made sense for you and what you would like to share with the rest of the community…

Hi all! I'm pulling together some tips for facilitation for beginners - here's my first video with my top 3 tips. What others would you add?

I am trying to create a free short workshop that can help me sell a bigger workshop or more workshops to many clients. Have anyone used such an approach. If yes would you do the first one for free and use as a lead generation tool for future ones?

Hi team 😃 I wanted to say a quick hello! I'm really enjoying being part of this awesome likeminded group - so great to see loads of questions being asked that i've also wondered about! I also wanted to share a challenge i'm currently experiencing to see if it's something you talented people could share any experience on! So, hello! I'm Louis - i'm a London based Innovation Lead in the charity sector - i'm also a freelance innovation consultant and facilitator which i'm going full time with from May...which i'm very excited about! I am currently doing the Design Sprint and Facilitation Fundamentals course which i'm loving... Turning into something of an AJ & Smart super fan! 😁 Anyway, my interesting challenge..... I'm talking to a charity at the moment who want to run three workshops with businesses and government bodies on one big challenge which they've narrowed down to three separate territories/areas. The overall challenge is around getting businesses upskilling low paid low skill workers. One of the challenges sitting under this is how do we ensure businesses have the data they need to convince them upskilling their low paid, low skill staff is worth their time and investment. They have done a lot of research and insight work on this upfront to show why this is an important challenge to focus on. The approach they want to take is: - Run 3 separate 'co-creation' workshops on 3 separate (but linked) challenges to generate solutions. They want these to be c3 hours long with 25 people. This is with businesses and government bodies. - As they work in the policy world which are very accustomed to 'roundtables' - as far as I can tell this entails lots of chat, not much action and plenty of unstructured conversations.. 😑 - In my view as they are very complex challenges it would be more beneficial to engage a smaller amount of people for a longer amount of time and am thinking best approach would be more like a Day One of the Design Sprint with Expert interviews, Lightning Demos and Concept Sketching and if time permits prototyping and testing.

Hi team! From experience, the parts of the workshop participants tend to remember most is the beginning and end. . There are lots of great warm up exercises and energisers, but I was wondering, beyond of course achieving the objective of the workshop (be that a a new strategy, tested prototype, decision made etc) what tips do you have for ending a workshop in a way which leaves participants feeling super positive about it? Thank you in advance!! Louis

Hey Facilitators, Firstly apologies for those of you that have seen this on the other AJS channels, but for those of you that haven't seen it, here you go... You may have also seen that Jonathan also did a react video on latest Unscheduled CEO podcast ----------- The Business Model Canvas is a great workshopping tool (when used well) to retrospectively analyse a business but also plan transformations. I recently used it to deconstruct AJ&Smarts business model and show how Jonathan and team transformed their business twice (into what we see now). I really hope you enjoy this video, it was made for people like you :) Hope you enjoy it - https://youtu.be/PiIBSDnJPew Thanks, Spence

On Saturday after we brainstormed about different ideas, I tried to use the Impact Vs Efforts quadrants to prioritize the issues, but I people tend to take too much time figuring out where to put the post-it note and things weren't clear, how did you tacked this stage? thnx

I realized that I never did a formal introduction, so here we go! I'm Sam and recently started my own solo consultancy focusing on facilitation for product, service, and strategy development. Previously I have worked in production development and industrial design engineering, I am based in Luleå (in the sub-artic part of Sweden🏂). I discovered Aj&Smart due to their youtube channel being written as a reference along with sprint stories on a whiteboard at university that the instructor had not erased after some lecture in the distant past (2018) and I have been devouring their content and guidance ever since.

When trying to understand the goals of a client and if/how a workshop would help, I usually use these two questions: 1. “I want you to imagine that the workshop is over! It’s done! How would you finish the sentence ‘this workshop was very useful and impactful to me and the group because….’?” 2. “Again, imagine that the workshop is over! How would you finish the sentence ‘this workshop was a waste of everyone’s time because…’?” These questions will give you a lot of information to build from! You may learn in question 1 about the overall goals of the client and how the workshop fits with that! You may learn with question 2 what the client has tried out before and did not work, etc. Also, very importantly, these questions may make you and the client realise that a workshop is not the right approach! This is totally fine and preserves a healthy relationship with your client. The last thing you want to do is to force a workshop when it is not neded (especially in large organisations). How about? What do you ask a customer to dig deeper into their needs?