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4 August 2023
User Experience
Although a bit overused as a term, everybody is convinced that ‘workshops’ are the way to go if you want your team to come up with creative and innovative ideas, solve long-pending issues or build a roadmap for the coming period. A good workshop ends with actionable results, but we will discuss this in a separate blogpost. Yet, there is still some doubt and hesitation when it comes to who needs to lead this exercise. Who is the best placed person to make this effort work? Can it be someone from your own team or would it be better to have this done by an external facilitator?
I will try to give my view – knowing that I am an external facilitator myself – as objectively as possible, and – giving away the conclusion upfront – try to convince you what’s the added value of an external facilitator for workshops.
Time & resources
Let’s start with the most important reason: time and resources.
Time is a scarce commodity in every company, and you need someone inside your organization that can work on this in a dedicated manner. A workshop needs to be ‘built’ if you really want it to work and have it achieve your goals and objectives. Such building of a workshop takes time and when it is something that is done on top of all the rest is almost never done right.
If you hire someone external to do this, you have a dedicated person working on this. Of course, you still need to contribute internal resources and time. You need to prepare the workshop together with the facilitator, mostly to define clear goals and validate the workshop structure. But this effort can be limited when you have a good facilitator that you are on the same page with.
Finally, an experienced facilitator has an arsenal of tools at their disposal: workshop formulas and setups, exercises, templates, workshop materials. All used and tested in real life. Coming up with all these by yourself is quite an endeavour.