I am happy how the Singapore Dec workshop turned out.
I had been worried about it quite a lot. It was a pilot program for a group of demanding participants. They work in fast-pace area. People there are intelligent and highly specialised. And given that they are selected to the workshop, the participants are good at what they do. I exchanged some emails and phone calls with them before the event, they were really busy. More challengingly, they seemed to know very little about the workshop, and thus unlikely have much WIIFM for it. In short, I expected the workshop to be a tough one.
Fortunately, the workshop turned out well. We had great conversations. Well, at least the participants wrote good things about their experience.
Among all, I think what I done well was keeping the workshop real for them. On reflection, ‘staying real’ has emerged as a key theme in my workshops including both for training or team effectiveness. Basically, instead of talking about theories or tools, I try to make the participants directly apply them in things real to the participants. For example, instead of explaining a feedback formula, I ask them to give feedback to each other on how they have been behaving in the last 1 day. And I mean even no hypothetical scenario but feedback to real behaviour.
