Guest Post From Wal:

Wal is a colleague of mine that offered this criticism of the workshops that he assisted facillitating:

(NB: Comments in this instance were the SMI's [frustrations and improvements] captured over a number of weeks)

My main concern with the model creation was that the end result didn't leave me with an action plan that would solve the participants problems. The information used came from anyone within the organisation, which is what you are after. However, the problem I had with it was that each comment was placed straight onto the model and then allotted a position within one of the four sectors. These comments were not agreed upon by consensus or catalogued as the same point with other comments. They were looked at individually, allocated a sector then the group moved onto the next comment. Furthermore, if you have more than one group working on the same comments, each comment can be placed under any sector dependant on the groups thoughts. So it is possible you could end up with same comment under all four sectors, what does that prove??? If this did occur I would almost guarantee during the action planning phase all the groups would still come out with the near / same solution even though they were in different sectors. I say this because most participants in these form of workshops are not keen to be there, thus they will take the easy path out to get to the final result. Hence, even though the comments have been sorted into their respective sector the participants will not truly acknowledge that sector's title in problem solving, rather than they will concentrate on the comment itself and ignore that it is a complicated or simple problem.

Because the comments can emerge in any domain, I feel that the process doesn't allow for looking at the problems holistically. Each comment is looked at individually then allocated a sector, move on to the next problem. Because the comments are in no particular order, commonality between points or the holistic problem can be missed, especially if the group is not excited about being there. During the action planning they may be able to fix up a symptom but miss the real problem.

Duplication is also a problem. Because each group is working within their own table, they do not know what is happening on other tables. A situation could transpire where four groups are working on the same problem, yet come out with either four different solutions or all the same, either result doesn't seem to be an efficient method or use of participants time.

My last concern is again knowing your customer. As I have mentioned before many of these workshops have people who don't won't to be there but are volunteered. There attitude is not there so when the process is told to them and it is slightly confusing they shut down even more. When I saw this process done the facilitator explained it very well due to his thorough understanding of the process and theory behind it, but the group did not have the same comprehension of the facilitator. So even though it was well explained he still had to go through each separate table to explain again the process. Still further he was explaining the process whilst the table were doing it as they were still getting it wrong. From an observers point of view it was confusing for the group because they are not use to these types of processes and were not putting too much mind space into the tasks. Of course this is a problem with many workshops.