Workshops are for making things
Getting people to create something is more engaging and forces them to make decisions.
When you think of a ‘workshop’, you imagine a series of discussions and activities, lots of post-it notes, and an attempt to get alignment. If you’re lucky, some decisions get made.
The problem with most workshops is that from the participants’ point of view, they are primarily there to provide input and perhaps have their viewpoint on something not-so-subtlety changed. They get some time away from their BAU sharing what they think about a topic, but they’re rarely involved in the creation of an output – that’s done by someone else who writes it up after the session.
While that might be fine for the people organising the workshop, it can be an anticlimax for participants. They spent all day discussing a topic, but have nothing to show for it. Staying focused and engaged when you’re giving input but don’t see how it’s used can also be tough.
Yet this is ironic given the more traditional meaning of ‘workshop’: a place where craftspeople make things. Workshops are much more engaging for everyone when they are closer to this definition. Have a workshop where people produce something, not endlessly discuss it.
People love making things (even accountants)
We recently ran a two-day workshop where instead of capturing input from attendees and compiling it into a strategy deck afterwards, we had participants use Lovable to create a website that encapsulated the discussions and decisions from the session. About 80% of the team had never used a tool like this before. They were amazed at what they could produce and their engagement was super high.
At the end, I asked people to guess who had used the most tokens. No-one got it right. Despite it being an IT leadership team, the person who used to most usage was an accountant by trade. Not someone you’d expect to be the most engaged with a vibe coding tool, but that’s the point: everyone loves making stuff. It doesn’t matter what discipline people come from.
Making brings out a side of people that most jobs don’t allow them to express. Often, the only things they get to create are spreadsheets and slide decks. When you give most people permission to be creative, they love it. They feel proud of what they’ve produced and want to show it to their peers. You actually need to allow more time for playback than you’d expect, because everyone wants to share what they’ve done.
Making forces decisions
Asking your workshop participants to make things keeps them more engaged, but there’s an even better reason to do this: it forces decision-making.
Discussion encourages divergent thinking, which is useful but you can talk all day and decide nothing. When you create something, you have to make choices. What goes on the homepage? What’s the name of the product? What do you show first in the video?
Think of the classic cereal box exercise, where participants create a cereal box representing their team or product. You can’t have a cereal box with three names. You have to pick one, and that single decision reveals what the team actually thinks is most important.
What can participants make?
Digital tools like Lovable, ChatGPT, Canva, CapCut and so on make it easy for non-technical people to create a wide range of things: websites, videos and more. Of course if you’re in-person, it’s fun to get away from the screen and create posters, cereal boxes, paper prototypes and so on.
The level of polish doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s better when the outputs aren’t polished because the point is exploration, not production.
When choosing what to ask people to make, think about the purpose that making serves in your workshop:
- Making to decide: As with the cereal box example, the act of creating forces decision-making. The output almost doesn’t matter – it’s the decisions people have to make that are the point.
- Making to surface thinking: This is closer to a projection technique (like you might see in brand/market research). When someone builds a website representing their team, the choices they make (what goes on the homepage, what they leave out, the language they use) reveal what they actually believe, not just what they’d say in a discussion.
- Making to teach a process: Having people make something can be an effective way to link multiple activities together, like when you’re running training. If the point of the workshop is to teach people design thinking, you can have participants gather requirements, brainstorm and prioritise ideas, prototype, get feedback and iterate on a product that they make rather than running it as a series of lectures.
- Making to communicate: Create something that carries the message beyond the workshop: a video, prototype or a one-pager. The purpose is less about what happens during the workshop and more about having something that travels afterwards and influences people who weren’t there.
How this changes your job as a facilitator
If one of the outcomes of the workshop is to make something, then your role shifts from a facilitator to a coach. You’re helping people get the most out of the tools, offering tips and unblocking them when they get stuck. With tools like Lovable, you need to give people a few tips upfront and then guide them through using it without having to deliver a training course upfront.
How you create your agenda is also different, and I think easier than a more standard workshop. When one of the primary goals of a workshop is to produce something, you can work backwards from the output they’re making and base the agenda on what participants need to know or do to create it. This simplifies planning enormously because every activity has a clear purpose: it feeds into the thing they’re making.
Having done a couple of workshops like this recently, I can’t imagine going back to the more traditional style of workshops. People are more engaged and they finish the day having created something they’re proud of. The next time you’re planning a workshop, start by asking: what could participants make? You might find that the agenda practically writes itself.
