Three Questions for Workshops

In-person workshops are important investments that can pay huge dividends—or not—depending on how they’re designed and run. They’re always costly in precious time that people could be spending elsewhere—and sometimes also in travel and other expenses. 

As a workshop host, manager, or facilitator, you want your next workshop to pay off but are anxious that it might not. You’ve been a part of so many events that wasted your time—and don’t want to inflict that pain on your guests. 

There are myriad factors that go into making a workshop a positive and productive experience (many of which are addressed in Moments of Impact). In this brief piece, I address just one: How to ask the right questions in the right way to get the most out of your group’s time together? 

As you approach designing a workshop, a good piece of prep work is to draw up a list of questions that you’d like for the group to answer. It’s okay for this to be a rough brainstorm at first—you can sharpen and prioritize the questions later.

Once you have your list of questions, sort them into these three buckets: 

• Type 1: Very specific queries that maybe one or just a few people know the answer to; 
• Type 2: Complex issues that require combining insights and perspective from more than one person to answer fully; and 
• Type 3: Important judgment calls that will benefit from the wisdom of the entire group. 

Now, let’s look at each type of question and how to get the best answers, using a hypothetical situation. 

Imagine that you’re the host of a workshop for a cross-functional group of 25 leaders of a national chain of fitness facilities. Your purpose is to explore ideas for future business growth, and all options are on the table—adding locations in the U.S., expanding internationally, offering new retail and/or food and beverage services to existing sites, entering the market of products for home use, etc. 

Type 1 Questions: Very specific queries 
Solution: Google the room 

These are specific questions that maybe one or a few people in the room know the answer to and are important inputs to the group conversation. In our hypothetical situation, examples might include: 

• Which customer segments are growing the fastest today for our current offerings? 
• Do we know of a low-cost manufacturing partner who could produce home equipment? 
• Have any of our major competitors explored into international markets? 

If the number of specific questions is small enough, it can be enough to just ask them in plenary and get the answers live from the person(s) who know the answers. That’s the simplest way to “Google the room.” However, in some situations the number of specific questions is too large to handle in this way. In those cases, other options for getting the answers include: 

• Send out a pre-work survey with the list of questions for people to submit answers in advance; 
• Post a wall of questions where people can write the answers by hand (with their names for follow-up), in a place where all participants can reference as needed; or  
• Use a digital collaboration tool such as X to do the same thing in a virtual space that participants can access on their digital devices as needed.   

Type 2 Questions: Complex issues
Solution: Work it together  

Some questions are multifaceted and require different disciplines and perspectives to address well. In our hypothetical situation, examples of such questions might be: 

• What would be the major obstacles to launching a line of branded home fitness products across all dimensions of branding/marketing, pricing, production, sales, and delivery?  
• Which international markets offer the most promising prospects, across  all critical success factors (e.g., market demand, availability of labor, positive regulatory environment, etc.)? 
• What is the profile of our current locations that offer the most promising conditions for testing overall market interest in on-site retail and food and beverage offerings? 

These kinds of questions are best tackled by small groups of participants working together to combine their knowledge—usually during breakout work in Act Two of a strategic conversation. (We’ll talk about the three-act format in another post.) 

There’s an art to crafting prompting questions that call for deeper responses—mainly by being explicit about the holistic nature of the challenge. The example questions above are well framed to encourage this kind of response. 

In many situations, you’ll want to provide a breakout group with not just the question but also a physical template with specific areas to consider. For example, in the first question above, you could have dedicated spaces for the group to fill in specific insights related to the areas of branding/marketing, pricing, production, sales, and delivery.

Type 3 Questions: Important judgment calls
Solution: Debate, then take a straw poll 

Finally, sometimes you want a group to weigh in on an important judgment call, tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd,” such as: 

• Which of our four major growth options have the highest potential for success: expand US locations; international expansion; on-site retail / food and beverage; or branded home fitness gear? 
• Is food and beverage service an option worth testing in some markets: yes or no? 
• Should we consider reducing our top-line growth aspirations to focus more on bottom-line profitability of locations instead? 

There are three important success conditions for addressing questions of this kind. First, it’s critical to have the group engage in respectful debate before voting, so that their opinions are well thought through. Second, the vote should be anonymous to avoid two common “groupthink” results: the pile-on effect or the follow-the-boss effect. Third, decision rights on the vote should be crystal clear: Is this a decision we are making, or just giving our opinion? If the latter (as is often the case), then who exactly will be making the decision? 

This last point is critical. Too many leaders conduct votes like this without declaring decision rights, which can create cynicism among participants. Most people understand that workplaces are not a democracy and just need to be heard and treated like adults. Being vague about decision rights fools nobody and undermines faith in leadership. 

Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers 

You’ve got questions; the group has answers. How many answers you get by the end of your session—and how useful they are—will depend on your skill in posing the right questions at the right time in the right ways. Getting this right may not be a trick shot from half court, but it’s no slam dunk, either. 

The important thing is to be intentional about identifying in advance the types of questions you want answered in any given session and lining them up against the right approaches, as above. If you take this simple step, it’s guaranteed you’ll get better results at your next session.