Rob Fitzpatrick:

A workshop takes so much time to create that you do not want to run it once. It is a product, and when you get a good workshop, it is productized and you're going to run it over and over and over, and that's where you get the profit from these things. Designing a one-day workshop might take you the better part of a month if you're really like high stakes, trying to do a seriously, but then once you've done it, you can charge a high rate and you can sell the same workshop over and over and over to the right type of people.

Chris Do:

Nearly 30 years into my business, over 15 years teaching at private art schools, nine years making content online, I'm on a quest to becoming the best teacher I can be, especially this year. Something's gotten into me, and all of this will make a lot more sense in about two seconds because my next guest wrote this book, The Workshop Survival Guide, along with this co-author Devin Hunt. Rob, first of all, welcome to the show. For those who don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself and tell us a few relevant facts as to why we should listen to you?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. Hey, I'm Rob. I'm a programmer. My background's in game design. I really wanted to make board games, video games, stuff like that, but I caught the startup bug and I went through Y Combinator in 2007 as part of their fifth batch, launched us some great companies, Dropbox, Songkick, a lot of killer companies were in that batch and we ran that business for four years. I was like, man, this just isn't for me. We'd raised the funding. We had some big customers like Sony, MTV. We were in the press and I was like, my personality just does not work with the hyper growth lifestyle. It's like, fine, call it anti ambition, call it whatever you want. When I was kind of picking myself out of the burnout, I was like, well, the business failed, but I learned some useful stuff along the way.

So I fell down the mountain, but I learned how ropes work and I'm like, okay, I can't teach people how to climb the mountain, but I can teach them about the ropes because I learned that, and one of them was getting unbiased customer feedback. So I started teaching that to other entrepreneurs or pre-product sales and it seemed to resonate. So I was like, at first it was just like, oh, I'm helping out other entrepreneurs, and that was the thing that kept working. Before too long, as I taught it more, it started to fill a place in startup accelerator's curriculum. They're like, "Oh, we'll get Rob to teach that thing," and I was like, oh, I'm kind of doing this regularly. What had become a fun hobby project, started to turn into a freelance gig and then I turned it into a book. I built a little education agency.

There were four of us. We got up to billing about a million a year in kind of these little day rate stuff, not a super fun business or fun for a couple of years, but then it stopped being fun because it was all travel and we couldn't really find a way to productize, but through that we trained a lot of other teachers. We worked for a ton of different clients. We taught for disadvantaged youths in Costa Rica. We taught exec ed for $3,000 a seat. We did stuff in the Middle East. We did government projects in the UK. We did cohort-based courses over three months. We did little short form. So through that, I just saw a wide range of stuff and we were at a scale where we had to be able to quickly train up other facilitators and maintain a high standard of quality, which is not so easy.

A lot of people come in with all these incorrect assumptions about what it means to teach and to teach well or to design a curriculum, and so that was the real gauntlet. It's like, we can do it, but can we teach it? Out of that, that's where the lessons and the process we're like, okay, now we can not just do it reliably on a predictable timescale and hit it every time for clients when we're teaching? Because a live workshop, you only get one shot. You can't screw that up, and it's incredibly bridge burning if you do because you ruin someone's conference or you ruin their event.

So it's like the stakes are really high. Trust is a huge factor. I mean, like design work, people are going to be showing this stuff off and it's live. So we're like, okay, we can not only do it reliably, but we can teach other people to do it reliably, and that seemed special. So as I decided, all right, I'm done with the agency lifestyle, that's not for me either, I don't know what is, but not that I just want to sit around and write books, but it's like I wanted to capture our process and that became The Workshop Survival Guide.

Chris Do:

Oh, beautiful. Okay. So how long were you running workshops before it occurred to you that, hey, there's systems, processes and things that we can do to codify and put into the book? I'm just curious about the timeline there.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

I was probably teaching as an enthusiastic amateur for two or three years where I was going to a university and talking to students. No one was paying me, or I was going to a local conference or unconference. I actually started at the unconferences where anyone could show up and you just talk about something. I was like, cool, that's getting me on stage. I'm talking to 20 people who nothing matters. I'm starting to get the reflexes, get the muscles going, and it was fun. It was fun for me. I'm super introverted and so I've never been good at working a crowd and networking and getting to know people, but I found that the safe space of the stage taking on that role, I was like, okay, now I've got attention for some amount of time and I can communicate, and I actually found that it felt like a safer space for me as an introvert.

So I just enjoyed it and did it as a hobby for I'd say two or three years. Then someone was like, "Oh, can you do this?", and I was like, "I can't. I'm too busy, sorry," and they're like, "We'll give you $700 for the day," and I was like, "$700 for the day?" I think at the time I was frying eggs on the heating pad of my coffee maker living the artist's lifestyle. I was like, "Yes, absolutely," trying not to sound too desperate, as I desperately say yes. Then once I started getting the paying gigs, I was like, huh. I really quickly booked out all of my time and I'm like, whoa, I'm exhausted now. I can only do this a few days a week. So you start playing with time and pipeline, and then really quickly, the day rates just went up and up and up and I'm like, oh. I wanted a cashflow positive business.

So me and a buddy were like, let's see, we've got a thing that we think works for startup accelerators that was what we envisioned as our customer. We're like, we think each startup accelerator cohort needs three days of our time at $2,000 a day. Can we go around and get 10 of them to pre-order a three-day package for $5,000? By the end of a week, we'd basically been walking around London ringing doorbells. By the end of a week we had 10 people say yes, and we're like, okay, that's $50,000 at work. They haven't paid us. We still have to do the work, but it's like, all right.

That's when we transitioned into treating it like an agency, and that was the point when we're like, we need quality control. We need this to be the same and getting better every time, and that's when we started introducing the processes. That did [inaudible] and I. After every session we'd do the post-mortem, what worked, what didn't, and we've just really tried to improve. As we brought in other partners, we're like, okay, how do we train these people? The quality is all over the map. They have good days, they have bad days. You can't be relying on that if it's your business, someone waking up on the right side of the bed.

Chris Do:

There are a couple of wonderful things I heard here. So you decided I need to eat and there's something I'm doing here that people seem to be interested in, and it led you down a very organic path. Now you, and was it just one other person at the beginning just jamming?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

Trying to figure this out, doing the sales, doing the post-mortems. Are both your backgrounds in the game design space and the accelerator community?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

No. Sal was technical. I believe he was a coder, and he had been the organizer of an unconference called Leancamp, which started in the UK, and it was a really fascinating conference. It was the first time that the design thinking community talked to the lean startup community. It was the first time that Alex Osterwalder talked to 37 Signal, like business model generations, talked to 37 Signals, talked to Eric Reese and his whole thing was like, let's run these unconferences and bring together different creative communities. We're all working on the same stuff from different directions.

Early on it was amazing. So I went to the first one in London and I was just like, I don't know who that organizer is, but if he's able to put together something like this, that's someone I want to know. So when the conference ended, I just didn't leave, and the volunteers started cleaning up chairs and I just joined them and I helped out and I spent an hour or two with them just putting away the venue, moving chairs, mopping the floor, talking, chatting with other volunteers. Afterwards he's like, all right, "Thanks everyone. You volunteers have been amazing. We're all going to dinner," and he's like, "I don't know who you are, but thanks for helping. Do you want to come with us?" I was like, "Yeah." He ended up being my co-teacher and business partner for quite a few years.

Chris Do:

What an excellent strategy. Okay, so all my introverted friends who don't have a lot of opportunity, maybe you're broke, maybe your CV isn't what it needs to be, I think what you do is just look for a way to be useful and helpful to other people, and you don't need permission. You just kind of do and see what happens. I think you would've been all right if we're like, "See you later. Buddy. Don't let the door hit you on the way out." This is just an expression, and then they're like, "You know what? Have dinner with us," and then one thing leads to another. Now from a timeline point of view, just so I can map it in my head, how old are you at this point in which you're helping to clean up a venue and meeting your future business partner?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So my first business, the YC business was I think from when I was 24 to 28, something like that, and then after that I was just super bankrupt. I was like, homeless is a bit of a stretch because I had a warehouse, but the warehouse had no heating, no running water. I was showering from a jug that I drilled holes into the bottom of, and I would heat water in the kettle poured into the jug, and I had one jug to soap up and one jug to rinse off, and then I was renting out desks in that warehouse space because that was the only way I could pay the rent and afford food. The reason I did that, I could have gotten a load of jobs at startups I knew, but I really wanted the open space because I wanted to learn. I just spent the last four years sprinting. I need some empty time in my calendar to learn from it. That's when I started teaching and started working with other entrepreneurs.

So anyway, so then that was probably 28, 29, and that's when I was starting, that year of warehouse living was I was going to every event and talking to entrepreneurs and if they're like, "Hey, we need someone to talk," I'd be like, I'll talk. And I was just trying to learn the craft and share what I was figuring out. It was helpful for me to process the, trauma is maybe too strong a word, but to process all the things that had happened in the previous four years of the business and why it went so wrong, even though it seemed like everything was going so well. We had the world's best investors, we had some of the world's best customers, how do we still fail?

Teaching was the forcing function to get me to spend the time to properly process those lessons learned. So it was very therapeutic for me and it allowed me to extract value from the plane crash of our first business. So probably I was right around 30, I'd say a little earlier, probably 28, 29 when I was mopping floors and making friends and trying to find places to share what I was thinking.

Chris Do:

I thought for a minute you're going to break out into a Kanye West song, mopping floors, doing fries, watching. Next thing is going to make a Benz out of that Dotson. There you are. Okay, beautiful. I love this. I love the humility and kind of your focus on trying to figure things out. I think especially in young culture today, it's all about achieving certain things and just taking as many shortcuts as you can. So it's refreshing to hear that sometimes you got to work through the process.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

I will say also people think there's a bunch of misconceptions about teaching. This is more like if you're teaching as gigs as a freelance gig and getting paid for it, people think that your day rate is connected to your fame or your charisma. That's a little bit true if you are doing corporate dinner parties and you're trying to be the motivational speaker at a corporate dinner party. There, it's really helpful if you happen to be Barack Obama or you get paid more based on your fame, but if you're teaching an educational workshop or a skill building workshop, you only need to be credible enough to get in the door.

After that, you're actually paid based on the skill of your craft, not based on your level of fame. I saw without fail in myself and everyone we coached to do this, their day rate increased as they got better. They'd be famous and they'd be like, "My time's worth this," and it's like, no, but your skills are down here, but I can teach you to get better, and then they'd see their day rate increase super predictably. It wasn't about charisma, it wasn't about fame, it wasn't about Instagram. It was about getting better at the craft, and the people who embraced that did really, really well.

Chris Do:

Yeah. Okay, so earlier before we started recording, I mentioned this person's name, her name's Christine Lucer, and she shared an idea with me. I'm probably going to butcher it, but it's something like this, that lectures are the most efficient way to teach, but the most ineffective way to learn, and this is where we're going to get to because I love to do workshops. I used to teach in person for 14 weeks at private art schools, and I love that aspect of it. I'm always interested in the craft of teaching and how you do it. How much hands-on experience do you give to the students, how much the critique should be, how much of it should be self-reflection. So I'd love to do a really deep dive with you today on workshops and stick around everybody because later on we're going to talk about the transition in case you're in a place where you can't do in-person events, on cohort-based learning, online communities, that kind of stuff.

So we're going to do traditional and then we're going to talk about digital, and we're just going to talk shop here a little bit. So you write in the book how to design and teach workshops that work every time, The Workshop Survival Guide, that the teaching format should be designed for what you're currently teaching, it needs to be matched up perfectly. So many of us just know the lecture format. That's the one that's most popular, if you're going to events, conferences. There's going to be a parade of speakers up on stage that speak anywhere between 18 minutes to an hour or so. Then you realize, what did I learn? I spent the last 48 hours in a dark cold room and I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be able to do. You also talk about there's five essential teaching formats and let's get into that, okay, and why you should switch quite often every 20 minutes or so. So let's go through, I'll mention them and then I'll pause, and then I would love for you to expand.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Before we get there, let me just say that the reason you want to switch and the difference between a workshop and a non-workshop is a workshop facilitator takes responsibility for the energy level and the attention of the attendees. So in a school or in a lecture scenario or a conference, the speakers expect the audience to be paying attention. It is the audience's job to pay attention. Whereas in a workshop, which are often longer form, it is your job as the facilitator to maintain the audience's attention because without energy they can't pay attention, and without attention they can't learn. You don't want them to finish the day shattered and exhausted. You want them to finish the day fresh and excited and ready to go apply what you were talking about.

The reason I mention that now is because switching teaching formats, which is the style of your teaching, the way you teach, is it a small group discussion or is it lecture or is it Q&A or is it a case study challenge, switching that is the easiest way to maintain the energy levels because every time you switch formats, people get a little boost. Their brain's like, this is new, this is different. This feels like a new thing. You're using that novelty of not because like, ha-ha, I'm being a funny clown. Look at me being a hilarious dancer on stage. You're not doing that. You're triggering novelty by the structure of the teaching, and then their brain goes, this is different. I'm engaging with different people, and that's enough, that and good coffee breaks and you hold their energy level all day.

Chris Do:

You actually include in the first part of the book a timeline. I think it's 90 minutes, break, 90 minutes, break, and you have to break quite often and have longer lunches and things like that. You get into all the nitty-gritty stuff. Thanks for doing that. I even wrote my notes here, why I mix it up, and then you must have read my notes because here you are, like, "Let me tell you why." All right, so everybody's familiar with the lecture format. This is what I think you refer to as book knowledge. It's a transmission of information. I know something, I've read something, I've seen something, I'm just going to transmit it to you.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, it's like being the in-person version of the Wikipedia page. There's certainly a time and place for it, but if that's all you're doing, they could just go watch YouTube or read Wikipedia. As a facilitator, your edge, your unique value is not in being an in-person expensive stuttery, YouTube that they can only watch on single speed and can't skip around on. That's terrible. That's the worst value proposition ever. So yeah, you're going to need some lecture, but it's got to be used situationally. A great way to use lecture is to bookend and exercise. So let's say if I'm teaching you to do a customer feedback conversation or pre-product, you're trying to evaluate how much the customer caress before you actually have a money changing hands relationship, that's a very delicate style of conversation, as you know, you do this all the time with clients, and there's a lot of ways that that conversation could go off track.

So for me to teach that with lecture is not going to be very effective because you can understand the principles, but then in the hot moment of an actual client conversation, all that lecture goes out of your head. You need to practice it. It's like skateboarding. I can't give you a lecture about going down a vert ramp. We got to build up to that with hands-on practice, try it now, in incrementally difficult situations, but you need a little bit of lecture at the beginning and the end to frame why you are doing the practice you're doing and put it into context. So that's the way I would encourage most facilitators to use lectures. Think of it as a way to extract the value and the lessons learned from a different teaching format, but lecture usually shouldn't stand on its own. It's not what you're doing as a facilitator.

Chris Do:

I find it then ironic too, that most events that I'm booked for, I want to do a workshop or I want us to do something more interactive and they're like, "No, just tell us what your deck is going to be about. Send us your slides." So why is that? I think instinctively that that's not a great way to learn and you don't want to be a poor replacement for Google, Wikipedia or YouTube. Why is it that so many event organizers seem to prefer and insist this is the format?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So events are a weird product category and it is correct to view them a little bit cynically because a lot of the time you are being hired for infotainment or for motivation or to tick the somebody famous is on the curriculum box. These are cynical value propositions. It's a long chain of people doing things for appearances and where's the value? There are gigs like that, fine. You show up. If you are going to do that, if you can give people one idea that they reflect on, fine, you did the best you can. Something I learned doing a lot of live sessions is that sometimes the situation is impossible and the deck has been stacked against you and you cannot actually have an impact because you've just been put in a very constrained situation and you can't beat yourself up over that stuff. You do the best you can, you give the client what they want and you try not to book them again.

There's other places where, yeah, they'll work with you. They're like, "This is what our people need. They're entering the room in this place and we need them to leave the room in this other place, able to understand something, able to do something," and that delta, what they know, what they can do, what they believe between when they entered and leave, that's your value. Then multiply that by the number of people in the room, and that's what in theory, you're able to charge, which is why you can charge so much per seat for exec ed because it's like a high impact delta, but to do that, you usually need them to be practicing stuff, to be trying stuff, to be practicing even the wisdom, the decision-making muscle by working through an ambiguous case study. Let's say that I tell you that the most effective way to build whatever, some sort of indie career is to start building the mailing list now.

You go, "Yep, that makes sense. I can see mailing list, compounding asset, do it every day, do it every week, going to be great in five years," but then there's another question where it's like for the people in the room, not everyone wants to do that. I do not want to do that. Sending newsletters makes me want to cry and die, and so I don't, and I've built a pretty successful creative career without ever having a newsletter because that's not an activity I enjoy. So I could teach a group of people the theory of an author platform or creative platform or whatever, but then there's another important part where it's like, well, let's decide if you actually want to do it, and if you do, let's talk through that together. Then what they're doing is they've got the intellectual understanding, I understand what these platforms are and why they're valuable, but then there's an emotional understanding, an emotional decision like, okay, of that theoretically optimal thing, what am I actually going to do myself and be happy with long-term because if you only do it for years, there's no value.

That's so valuable, and you can only do that in the workshop format. You cannot do that in the lecture format because the lecture has to be filled. You can't stop talking in a lecture. You cannot cause people to introspect in a lecture, but you can do it by breaking them into groups of three and having them work through an interesting prompt question. So workshop's very powerful, but yeah, it's possible for the client to screw you. A bad room setup, fixed stadium seating, how in the world do you get people to talk to each other? It's impossible. There's so many ways that they can prevent you from doing a good job and you try to deal with that in advance, but it's like, yeah, sometimes it happens.

Chris Do:

I think the challenge is, and I have many friends who run different events and they follow a very tried and true format, and I think you nailed it really succinctly, that there is some infotainment, there are some inspiration or the famous face value, and it seems like it's easier to sell. It's like if attendees stopped buying those tickets, then event organizers would do it differently, but promoting, just from my own experience and running workshops, that's a much harder proposition. As you said, there's a greater responsibility for you as the facilitator teacher to manage the energy and the attention within a workshop and to have them walk away with clear, actionable things that they're able to apply in their business the very next day. Whereas if you attend a conference, it's like, yeah, I met some people. We had a good time. I laughed a couple times, and you're not going to ask for a refund. So it's a much harder proposition. So I think they just go with what's easy. I mean, unless you have a different thought on that.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

No, I mean, sit in a conference and look at how many people are taking real notes. No one's taking notes. They might snap a picture of the slide with suggested reading or links, but it's like they're not there to learn. It is fine though, right? That's fine. I did conference talks also. If you're going to do this as your career, they're great because one of the ways you get workshop gigs is by giving conference talks. The speaking world, it's small, and people who organize events go to events. So it's like, yeah, I don't know, maybe at a certain fame level, you can be too good for this stuff, but there's an argument that like, yeah, that's your marketing for what you really want to do, which is where you get to have a real impact, which is when you get a big room with a small group and you can put people spread out around tables, you can get them talking to each other.

There's good catering. You've got the ideal setup where you're going to be able to maintain their energy and attention for a long enough period of time, and you've got a flexible enough setup that you're able to really deliver a meaningful learning outcome. Yeah, people don't like to book that, but also, most workshop facilitators suck, and most workshops are bad, and so clients are very nervous about booking these things because the last 50 times they did it, it blew up in their face, but once they see you do a good job, they're like, "Whoa, can you come back over and over and over, every time we hire a new group of employees or every time we get a new investment cohort or whatever it is?" So yeah, it's like, I don't know, maybe a little hard to get started, but once you do, you get hired over and over and over because most people are just terrible.

Chris Do:

I agree. I go to enough conferences where most speakers on stage are terrible, so the ratio of workshoppers are probably even worse because it's a much higher degree of difficulty to do that.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

If you know the design principles, it suddenly becomes easy. The design principles are not complicated. Fewer learning outcomes, decide what you want to be different between when they show up and when they leave, that's your big learning outcome. Below that, there's a few, like a cluster, three or four things they need to know or understand in order to get the big result. Those will probably need some supporting skills or concepts or whatever. Cool. You've built a little concept tree. Then for each of those concepts, you decide, is this book knowledge, is this a hands-on scale or is this decision-making wisdom or is this a personal, how do I feel about it? Then you pick the right teaching format for the job. If it's a hands-on skill, let them try it now. If it's wisdom or decision-making, give them some kind of case study challenge.

If it's a personal, what does this knowledge mean to me and how does it apply to my life or business or work, put them in small groups and let them discuss with an interesting prompt question. For me, a good prompt is a clear question with an ambiguous answer. There's no good to do a small group discussion around tax law because there's a factual answer, but doing a small group discussion about how you're going to handle surprise expenses throughout the year, it's like you're still talking about a boring, mundane accounting topic, but suddenly you've given it an ambiguous answer. So that's a meaty topic for them. These are simple rules, and if you do it, suddenly you've got an amazing workshop and you don't need fancy equipment. You don't need to be throwing post-it notes everywhere, but you definitely can. You can use the props. You can use the fancy formats if you want to. I have a soft spot for card games, during workshops. You build custom decks of cards, but you don't need to do that stuff. Just like bit of lecture.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

But you don't need to do that stuff. Just like a bit of lecture, try it now. Bit a lecture, a small group discussion, bit a lecture, scenario challenge, and make that appropriate to what you're trying to teach and then like suddenly amazing, it's easy.

Chris Do:

[inaudible] why people don't do this. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. And there are more questions I need to follow up with you on the workshop stuff, but before I do that, you said, okay, look, you're speaking in an auditorium. It's a theater style seating and it's difficult to run a workshop in a format like that because everybody's oriented towards the stage and it's hard to do groups and get around and do stuff. But okay, let's just before we go into the workshop part, if the majority of people are booked to speak and speaking could be a gateway to running workshops if you do really well, what's one thing that we can do borrowing from the principles of the workshop, that as a person who's on stage that you can do to activate and manage the energy and attention of the people in the audience besides talk at them? Throw us a bone here.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Your speaker bio should be one sentence is the first thing I would say. It's like, "Hey, I'm Rob. I've done a million dollars in royalties from self-published books and I'm going to share my experiences." Boom. Or it could be like, "Hey, I'm Rob. I'm writing my first book. It's been a mess and I want to share what I'm learning along the way." Both of those is fine. One fact about yourself that's relevant enough for people to let you start talking. You already have credibility. So another way to think about energy, and this is the same with writing books or designing any sort of education experience, there's a level of goodwill and your audience tends to start with fairly high goodwill. They believe in you, they're excited to be there. The more you talk about yourself or about stuff they already know, the goodwill drops. And if the goodwill drops too much you lose them.

The suspension of disbelief snaps and they switch back to email or whatever. If you give them what they want, which to me I structured in terms of learning outcomes, it's like how many seconds before the first aha moment or wow moment where they're like, "Oh my gosh, I can use this."? How many seconds? We're not talking minutes, seconds. And your speaker bio, your intro, you're like, "Hey, thank you all for being here. What a wonderful event," you're decimating the audience goodwill. So how few seconds can you get it down to before that first aha moment or wow moment? Otherwise, you do this, it's like theoretical introduction, "So before we get into the takeaways, let me just tell you the history of," blah blah, blah. It's like what are you doing? So the value per minute or the takeaways. What's the audience's energy level throughout? That's something. And then put the fun stuff at regular points.

You don't want to build up to a big reveal at the end, because then what happens by the time you get there you'll have lost everyone. They don't like you anymore. And you can't have too long between good stuff. You can't do good stuff at the start then a boring 20 minutes, then good stuff. You need to sprinkle the good stuff throughout. And by good stuff, I mean what the audience was promised by the title of your talk. So the title of your talk is making a promise about what problem you're going to solve for them for their investment of time. And anything that you do that is chipping away at that promise, that's making progress where they're like, "Aha, that is getting me close to the goal I had that was promised by the thing that was on the whatever, the marketing material, or the agenda," that's value.

And each time you do that, it brings them closer. And that's the same concept you do with workshops starting with the skeleton of learning outcomes, because the reason they're there is for the learning outcome. So by starting with the skeleton and then choosing teaching formats around it, you make sure that there's never more than a few minutes before they get the next learning outcome that moves them closer toward their ultimate goal. So I would say that. And then if you've got slightly flexible room set up, experiment with clusters of chairs. So basically before your talk move the chairs into clusters of three or four or six, because once you've got people in a cluster it is an implicit group and you can say, "Hey, in your group I want you to discuss this," and give them one discussion prompt, which you put on a slide.

So remember, clear question, ambiguous answer. Like valuation math for an equity investment deal is not a good small group discussion because someone's going to know it and everyone else isn't, and that's the end of the discussion. But it's the emotional implications of raising funding is a very interesting one. And you can occasionally get away with this in theater seating, I don't like it because in theater seating what happens is you go, "Turn to your neighbor," and people are like, "Which neighbor?" And then there's someone in the middle and both of their neighbors turned away and the person in the middle is like, "I guess I'm just going to sit here quietly for three minutes." People don't like it. And then once they've switched into phone mode, they're not coming back out. But if you can create the clusters of chairs, then you've solved the group formation issue and you can very naturally start adding in these small group discussion prompts.

And then what I would do if you want to progress further, so you've done a small group discussion, you've done natural seating clusters, you've done small group discussion, and this is something I do in my slide decks where I will have these slides in then when I get to the venue and I see the room set up, I will either remove them or leave them in. And if I can cluster the chairs before my talk, like if my talk is after a coffee break, then I'm going to be able to cluster chairs during the coffee break. Then when people show up, it's like, cool. And then I can include my small group discussion slides after the discussion. You pick a volunteer who looks assertive and charismatic. I mean I know that's a weird thing to say, but you can do it. Don't say, "Who has something to share?"

Pick someone. Go like, "Hey you, over there, it looked like your group was having a lively discussion. Would you mind standing up and telling us something interesting that you heard?" Make it about someone else, don't say, "What was your interesting idea?" Say, "That you overheard in your group." You're removing the ego fear. And they go, "Oh, at our group, this and this and this." It's helpful during the exercise if you get off the stage and you walk around with your arms behind your back, don't say anything, listen to people talk. That makes it easier to choose someone who you know is going to have something to say. And then that gives you something to riff off of for a couple minutes and doing this stand and share. Have them stand up, have them face the attendees, not you, when they share this. That's why you choose someone who you think looks like confident for the first volunteer. Have them face the other attendees, have them share, then give them a round of applause, everyone claps.

Then your next volunteer can be someone shy. And what this lets you do is you can then riff off of what they said. And this is a much more natural and engaging alternative to question and answer, because question and answer selects for sociopaths, and it selects for confident people and at leaves shy people behind. And people are always trying to find ways to sneakily self-promote themselves during Q and A. But if you do it around a small group discussion it's just as engaging, you've varied the teaching format so you've totally fixed the energy level, and that'll fit anywhere that you've got flexibility with your chairs. And that's a lot of the workshop setting. And someone sees you do that and they're like, "Whoa, can you do way more of that?" And you're like, "Yeah, it's way more money." And then you can start talking about the room setup you really want.

Chris Do:

Okay, if you can tell, my guest, he's very enthusiastic. He's speaking really fast. He knows this stuff. He's very passionate. And if this is tickling your brain, I just want to remind you, I'm talking to Rob Fitzpatrick. He wrote the book, The Workshop Survival Guide, which I'm holding in my hand, which I've read many times. And it says how to design and teach workshops that work every time. Now, Rob's already done this. He's gone through and broken down many of the different things that make a workshop successful, but I'm just going to go quickly over a couple of things that he wrote about in terms of the five essential teaching formats. I'm just going to then turn it back over to him to riff as the way he does so brilliantly. So we know that if you want to give them a lecture, you should probably do it to set up context for exercises and to wrap up learning lessons and it's kind of book knowledge stuff.

Then number two is a small group and pair discussions where they get to wrestle with ambiguous options. You said ask a clear question but have open-ended answers. And this is really good for engaging people to kind of work through the problem. You've sort of mentioned the try it now practice where you build hands-on skill. So if you're a teacher of design, of course this is the primary way in which we learn how to design. We don't read about it, we do it and we try it out. We make mistakes. The next thing is the scenario challenge, which I think the Harvard Business School is very well known for. They gave you case studies to work through and allow you to figure out what you would do in a situation. So they're great for building wisdom, for evaluation, judgment, decision making. And lastly, what some of us love and maybe hate, our Q and A. This is where you are able to identify and catch major objections and maybe clear up some confusion.

But also, because you talk about it in The Workshop Survival Guide, that you use Q and A as flex time, if you run out of time, you kill the Q and A. If you end early, you could use Q and A and just open it up and that keeps you on schedule. Of those things, I want to ask you this question. When we try the small group and pair discussions, how do we try to work through in our mind from a design exercise that it's the right question and the answer is going to be okay? I'll give you an example. Here's what I've been doing recently when I talk about branding, I show them a package. I read to them the package and I don't tell them why it's good, I just read it, and they're smiling with delight. This is really interesting.

And then I ask them identify two or three things that you think make this a charismatic brand, why they're worth talking about? Now I think in my mind it's super clear. Of course it is. There's 10 things you could talk about. And then inevitably when we come out from this small group exercise, they raise their hand, they start saying crazy things. I'm like, "Oh my God, where are you in this universe?" So how do you plan for that so that you can structure the questions such that you minimize those random crazy answers that then take you off path?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So anytime you're asking people to do multiple things, you're going to get bad answers because they just can't. So if I was asking them for two or three design qualities, are there types of design qualities? Is something aesthetic? Is something tone? Is something typography? I would turn that into three different prompts that I ran one at a time. And the first one would be pick the top aesthetic. I'm just making this up, I know nothing about design. Describe an aesthetic quality that you think creates this or look at the aesthetics and describe it in an adjective that does this and that. And I would work them through different buckets. And then at the end they'd have a couple ideas from their group in each of those buckets. And then you could build on that by saying like, "Okay, now we're going to shortlist it. Combine with another group and we're going to do a dot vote to pick what we think is the most powerful out of all the options gathered."

And then after that I might say, "Okay, in your big groups we're now going to stand up and do a post up and put these sticky notes on the wall or on the whiteboard and you're basically going to champion what your combined group thinks is the most important quality or the most impactful quality." So what you've done is you've now shifted formats three or four times. So the energy level is sky-high. You've brought in new voices because you've shifted the group dynamic halfway through and you've turned it into three small concrete tasks that are each individually facilitated. When people screw this up is they put all three things on one slide and they go do this first, then do this, then do this. Anytime there's a then do this, it should be a separate exercise with its own timer, and you can use very short timers.

Once you get people responsive, you can use a 30 or a 60 second timer, because it's a simple prompt and they've been set up for it and it's like do this one thing. Go. You've got 60 seconds. Their materials are in front of them, they've already been introduced to their group. Then it's like, cool, that's time. Now I want you to do this. Boom, five seconds setup into another 30 seconds or 60 seconds. The energy level can be very, very high. It's very fun. And you don't need to be like everyone stand up and do a jumping jack and these dumb tricks that beginner facilitators do when they're trying to show off their NLP skills or whatever. Just tight facilitation with clear prompts and then shift through formats right when you build up. So I used to do a business, like an idea generation exercise, in some of my workshops for bootstrappers who didn't want funding.

And you started and it's like write down 10 hobbies that you have. And it's like, cool. Now combine with another person, rank the hobbies in terms of business potential. Cool. Now what are the three skills that you have that are most valuable? Cool. Combine with someone else, take the top hobby, take one of the skills, what could you offer in this space? And at the end, people end up with 50 business ideas with five different collaborators. But they got to it with a series of 60 second actions and the whole thing lasts 20/30 minutes. They have a blast. They're meeting and that's also functioning as an icebreaker because they're meeting a bunch of people, but icebreakers are garbage. Never do an icebreaker because an icebreaker carries no educational payload. So that decimates your goodwill, that hurts the energy levels. You create these experiences so that if you want people to meet each other and talk about emotions, find a way to attach that to an educational outcome through an exercise. And then you've killed two birds with one stone there. You've broken the ice but they've also learned something or moved forward.

Chris Do:

Let me just slow down for the audience who are listening who have maybe not ever done a workshop or even considered speaking and teaching before, but they're excited about these ideas because maybe you don't need to run a workshop but you can use these ideas in your meeting. So let me just slow it down and break it down for some folks. The mistake that I made was I asked a compound question. I need to chunk it down, one idea per slide. And you solved the other problem for me which is it doesn't have to be long, and every time you switch there's new energy. So here's question number one and you have one minute, just go. And they're scrambling.

It's kind of like a scene out of a Kitchen Nightmares or one of these celebrity chef cooking competitions where you're running to the pantry and getting stuff. So the supplies are in front of them. So some things that you mentioned that people may not be aware of, you mentioned dot voting and you said a post-up, which is you need a stack of post-it notes, probably a couple of markers and some scissors and tape maybe. Those are the essential workshop supplies, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. So my dream workshop setup, just for the record, is cabaret seating. So chairs around tables in groups of six. Six is the perfect number because you can split six into pairs, triplets, or a full six. Getting people to physically move around introduces a ton of friction. It's worth it and necessary sometimes but if you have groups of six, then you can do pairs, triplets, six, instantly with no transition time. So the shorter your exercise timing is, the more important it is to have smooth transitions in the facilitation because you don't want to spend five minutes getting people into pairs for a 30-second exercise. It makes you look ridiculous. So the better the room's set up, the more ambitious you can be with your workshop design and the faster you can make it.

Whereas if you have a less ideal room setup, then you're going to need a slower pace practically speaking. And supplies you want on the tables. And simple workshop rules, you want everyone to be holding a pen and a pack of post-its at all times because there's group dynamics you've got to look out for and one of them is the secretary, where one person tries to write the ideas for the whole group. But what happens is the secretary, because the CEO, because they become a bottleneck to whether something gets written down or not, and it slows down the whole group. So you can have rules. This works in meetings as well. It's like you have to write it down before you talk about it. So now they write it down, then they talk about it, suddenly you've removed the bottleneck and you've removed this person who is able to implicitly judge the worth of every idea.

A secretary seems like it's a role where someone's being generous, but it's actually really, really destructive to the group dynamics. We want everyone holding a pen, everyone holding post-its, everyone writing it down. I like post-its. I don't always use them, but the nice thing is you can move them around. So you can do these combo chains. If you've already got the idea on the post-it, you mark it with a pen to dot vote it, then you pick it up and you put it on the wall, and you've just used it for three different purposes.

Chris Do:

Very good. I also like the idea that you must write it down before you can talk because some extroverted people will just start to dominate the conversation. This gives the introverts a moment to also gather their thoughts, write something down and contribute. And oftentimes we'll find that the introverts have a lot to offer, but they just get crushed by the higher energy folks in their group. Okay, wonderful. All right, so I have some things to work on clearly, and I love this kind of fluid thing. And you said if the room is designed so that it's optimal, then you can transition much quicker and you can be more ambitious. If not, you've got to slow it down. You've got to think about the transitions and think about the exercise that you're doing. Obviously you don't want to spend five minutes getting the team oriented and it's like 30 seconds to do something.

It's lopsided. Okay, beautiful. You've helped me solve that problem. You've also said something which you heard a little reaction from me. So for people who want to do bigger workshops, you can have two groups come together to then dot vote something, which is an exercise I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley are used to, which is every person gets three little dots and they can put one on each or all three on one. There's no rules. They can put nothing, whatever. So whatever has the most visible dots, you don't even have to count, you could just look at it visually and you're like, "That's really dense. That is our group's idea of what the best answers are," and I love that. So you can expand and contract these exercises to work with different size groups, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

Okay. The exercise that I think oftentimes is quite difficult to do, depending on the subject, is the try it now practice. How do you do these hands-on? Can you give us an example from your world? And then maybe I'll have a question for you from my world.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So I'll give a couple examples, I guess, it's going to be different. So this sounds alien because we're thinking about giving business advice and you're like what's the try it now? But if you think of a yoga workshop or a pottery workshop or a computer programming workshop, it's like 90% try it now. You are doing things and the trying it now is occasionally interrupted to give a little theory or give a little knowledge or a little framing or whatever, or to give you a rest from practicing and talk about how it went. So try it now is actually very familiar. It tends not to be used with business topics. So for example, I was watching some of your courses from Futur about negotiating pricing with a client, and you're doing awesome kind of role play, right? You're like ask me questions, and this is so cool as a format, it's a very different teaching format. Everyone's interested because they're a bit like is there going to be a train wreck? Is he going to be stumped?

Chris Do:

Including me by the way.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. So it's nice, even though it's still mostly you talking, it's a different change in energy so that's a new teaching format that's going to hold attention, but it's still you delivering the right answers. And you may do this, I know that the videos are just sampled, but giving them a chance where it's like, okay, I've shown you how to respond when someone says it costs too much money. Or when someone tries to push you from value-based pricing to hourly pricing, open the envelope that's on the table in front of you. It's going to give you a simple pitch proposal, like a one-page mini proposal. The client is going to argue you down. I want you to tell them how much this costs and the price can be there and it's going to be a scary high number that makes them emotionally uncomfortable.

I want you to say the price and then the other person's going to say it's too much and just respond. That's it. They just want you to do it. But their heart rate is going to go up if that's something that's emotionally scary to them. They're going to stumble over saying $20,000 or $200,000 or whatever is high for their industry, and getting over that emotional hiccup and then forcing themselves through the words that come afterwards, that is the try it now practice. Just like with skateboarding. These silly examples work because they're so absurd, but it makes sense. You're not going to give someone a lecture about doing an ollie, like a skateboard jump, and then be like, "Cool, you're done. That's the theory. Have fun, practice on your own." People would be pissed. They'd be demanding refunds and stuff. But you're also not going to be like, "Cool, so this is me doing an ollie. Now everyone try."

You're going to have broken elbows everywhere. There's a series, there's a progression of things. The first one is you stand on the board and you just pop the front up. You don't try to get off the ground, you don't do any jump. And you do that over and over. Then you pop the front up and you slide your front foot. There's a known series of things to practice which will eventually get you to the result. And so when you're designing a try it now you go like, "Okay, what are the ingredients?" The little exercise that I just mentioned is getting people over the emotional fear of saying a big number and not feeling apologetic. And so, that's not going to be necessary for every crowd. If you're teaching people who are coming from an MBA background, for example, or they're switching out of finance careers because they want to be a creative, they're not going to have that emotional blocker around saying big numbers.

So you would probably focus on something else if you're teaching a group like that. But if you're focusing on people who have come out of art school, the emotional blocker to asking for money is going to be a major thing standing in their way. So this is why it matters who's in the room. I don't think you can design a workshop that's good about a topic. You can only design a workshop that's good for a certain type of person who is trying to learn a certain thing and they're at a certain moment in their journey. And once you understand the audience profile like that, you're able to be very clear about what does this person at this moment need? What's holding them back? What are they scared of? And so when I'm doing ones for talking to customers, getting customer insight before you have a product, the thing everyone gets wrong is they want to pitch their business. But as soon as you start pitching, you stop learning.

So I give them an exercise where I'm like, This is your business. You need to learn about the problem behind it." Your partner is playing a customer, you are playing the business person, the third person's taking notes, it's groups of three and they rotate roles so they all get to see other people trying it. I'm like, "You have to learn about this topic without pitching your business." And we've just done a whole lecture bit about it. They understand the concept and I'm like, "Try." They cannot do it. And then I have the note taker basically describe where the conversation went off the rails so they're able to hear someone else talking, giving analysis right after the fact of their conversation. And then they rotate and they play each role and so they're like, "Oh, wow, I see what this is like from the customer's perspective."

And if you want, you can keep running that with increasing complexity. You can take down the scaffolding so that it becomes more and more real world. But I start with lots of training wheels on usually. Now if you did that for experienced salespeople, they are going to hate you because they're going to see that as really patronizing. So again, it's know your audience. But for first time entrepreneurs, they're so excited to talk about their idea. That's what they need to get over. And that's how I designed the exercises, is what's holding them back, what's blocking them, where do they fall?

Chris Do:

I like how you said that you are designing the workshop for people who want to learn something about... they want to solve a specific problem, not to-

Rob Fitzpatrick:

It's a certain type of person at a certain moment in their journey. So they have a goal, they have a problem and they're out of place. Because one dumb metric, you can't actually get this number, but you can guess it pretty well for your workshops, is for any given attendee what percentage of the material is blowing their mind? And so your goal would obviously to be a hundred percent. Now imagine an audience that is half experts and half beginners. You are screwed because you cannot get above 50%. So your ability to deliver a good value per minute experience is hugely constrained by getting the right people in the room. And this is where facilitation and workshop design dovetails with marketing. Because if you market your workshop as for everyone, you cannot deliver a good workshop because you're going to have too many different types of people in the room.

You can start at either place. You can start with sharp marketing and then design a workshop around what you've promised. Or you can start with a high impact workshop and then figure out how to market it so that only the right people show up. If you've got a mixed crowd it's so, so hard, and it puts a ceiling on how well you can do your job. And all of my worst workshops were because I was surprised by a mixed audience of too many different entrepreneurs, plus investors, plus press. I know I'm screwed before that session even starts because I cannot possibly meet all their demands.

Chris Do:

Right, okay. Let's just say that's where you're at in your career for whatever reason, and you don't know who's in the room and it's a mixed bag. Is there anything you can do to try to make the most of a less than ideal situation?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, decide who's screwed. Honestly, because if you try to hit both groups-

Chris Do:

You screw everybody?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, no one gets what they want. So what I would do is I would frame it at the start. So let's say it's entrepreneurs and investors, or let's say it's managers plus frontline makers, decision makers plus doers. At the beginning I'd say like, "Hey, this is on the practical side for the entrepreneurs, for the makers. I know there's a bunch of investors or managers in the room. You guys probably aren't going to get much out of this. If you want to zone out and do email, I totally get it. If you want to participate thinking through one of your portfolio companies or channeling the energy of one of your employees-"

Rob Fitzpatrick:

... Portfolio companies or channeling the energy of one of your employees. Awesome. But really, this is for the makers and hopefully if you go back to your own work, maybe you'll learn some ways to talk to your own team or some ideas that you can bring back when you're coaching people.

So I might try to spend a minute framing it, so I'm basically saying, "It's not going to be for you. It's okay if you zone out, but there still might be some benefit if you want to participate." And then after that, I'm going to unapologetically focus on the group that I'm there to serve. I've done this wrong before where I tried to do everyone and it's just like my most embarrassing workshop experiences are from that because you're always giving two talks in parallel and half of it's always boring for one person or another.

If you really, really have to, and I've only done this once, but it was super dire, you revert to lecture and you give a four-hour lecture and no one's going to love it, but it won't be a disaster. And in some cases, if that's the best play you've got, that's the way you save face for yourself and the event organizer and the client, and then afterwards you're like, "This is what went wrong." And if it's someone you're going to work with, if it was organized by a partner or yourself, your own team, you're like, "We need to fix this at marketing level because we brought the wrong people in the room."

If you know about it in advance and you have a flexible enough venue, you split the group. You get a second facilitator and you split the group and you do two threads. So you do the lectures altogether, but you split for exercises, but that requires usually a pretty complex setup, which often isn't available.

Chris Do:

Whew, yeah. Well, for a lot of us, there isn't another facilitator teacher.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Choose the group to ignore and the group to serve and then try to frame it and don't force people to pay attention to stuff that's not for them.

Chris Do:

Yeah, I like that. So if the group is split one-third, one-third, one-third, you're kind of host at that point?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, it's a mess. And it's a case where the failure was upstream; it was a failure of marketing and event promotion, and now you're just dealing with the wreckage and you try to get through it and do the best you can.

Chris Do:

Yeah. Now, you said that oddly enough, the saving grace here is to switch into lecture mode. Now, as you say that, anybody who's listening to this, they're going to like, "Wait a minute, I prepared for a workshop. Where am I pulling this four-hour lecture out from? Out of thin air?" You just happen to have a lecture ready to go?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

You probably will if you're teaching workshops because you're going to do a mix of event formats and you're often going to have your 20-minute conference talk, your hour-long conference talk, your sales material where you do a high-level overview of the learning outcomes and the framework and the journey and the whatever for the buyer. You are probably going to naturally have these assets on hand.

I am not saying this is ideal. This sucks, but this is like you got to give something. And I would prefer what I said first, which is you choose the people to focus on and choose the people. Depending on who's got the leverage, either choose the people who you care about having an impact on or choose the people who are paying you and do what they want and screw the rest, but try to frame it.

If you have to run exercises with a mixed group, and there's so... I used to do these train-the-trainer, exec ed things, and people would show up who were business coaches. It was for a government thing in Ireland where they were training and supporting scientists, entrepreneurs. A really, really cool project. But when we had the workshops, and they were expensive workshops, everyone from their team would show up. So you'd have the CEO, you'd have the CFO, you'd have all the executives, the board of directors, then you'd have the coaches who are actually working with the scientist entrepreneurs. The workshop was for the coaches to get better at supporting the entrepreneurs, but 50% of the people in the room were their bosses. This does not create an open and safe workshop environment.

So what I did is I put all of the bosses in groups with only bosses and they were free to spend their discussion time doing whatever they wanted, and sometimes it would be on topic because they'd be like, "Huh, that's a really important concept. How do we work that into our operational protocol?" So they were completely diverting from the workshop I had built, but their discussion was following the topics. Now, what would happen if they were mixed is no one else would talk because this was like the CFO or the CEO of a big organization and you got a bunch of junior people who might've never sat down with this person before. There is no conversation happening.

Sometimes though, mixing the groups can be really good. If I was doing something for entrepreneurs, it's awesome if you can get a business person, a designer, and a programmer in each group, but then you go, "Is that three different types of people?" No, that's one type of person. It's type of people who are starting a business and you find the unifying thread and then you go like, "Okay, what are these groups? If you do them as a Venn diagram, what's at the center? What do they have in common?" And you design your workshop to speak only to that overlap. You're like, "What do they all have to deal with?" And you go, "Cool," and there's your workshop skeleton. But managers and juniors, it's like, "Wow, what's the overlapping thread? One group is terrified of the other group. How do we do this?" At that point, you separate and damage control.

Chris Do:

Okay. So a lot of this would be done beforehand because you know who's showing up. I'm imagining if you had to do this in real time because you're going in A, and then all of a sudden surprise, surprise, it's managers and juniors together, and then is that when you do an exercise and you pull a time-out for yourself to like, "Okay, I need to reconfigure this in real time"?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

It would hopefully not get quite that bad, but it would be... So almost always you're going to show up to your venue, your room, like 20 minutes ahead of time. You're going to check in with the organizer. Maybe when there's usually some time at the beginning when people are grabbing coffee, they're mingling, they're chitchatting. It's very, very tempting, especially if you're introverted like me, to use that time to zone out and hide. But actually, this is where you're scanning for potential workshop killers and you now have some amount of time.

It's okay to call a late start, but you have to announce it and then honor it so you can be like... And you talk to the client. If there's a client who organized it, you go, "Hey, this is a really different group than we talked about. I need to make some quick changes. Can we start 10 minutes late? And I'm going to be over there and can you let everyone know that we're kicking off in 10 minutes?" This feels embarrassing and scary because you're letting the client know that there's a problem and they're like... But actually, sometimes that's your only play.

But I kind of want to change tacks here because we've gotten into the disasters, but I've taught hundreds and hundreds of these workshops at all sorts of price points. It's like 1% of the time that something like this happens. It's very rare. And if you do your prep before you go into a client contract, you understand what you're getting into because part of the sales process, part of the prep process is to talk through this stuff.

I heard you describe it as are we a good fit for each other? And I do this the same way with workshops. I'm like, "I am good with early-stage entrepreneurs who are at this place." I'm way better with techies and product people than I am with business people. I can work with business people, but they don't respect me because they know I'm not one of them. So I have a harder time building the credibility and getting started. It can be done, but throw me in a room with techies and we're off to the races, and then I have to spend less of my energy getting them to take me seriously and we can spend more time delivering impact.

So the vast majority of times, if it screws up, it's because you haven't done your prep, and if you do your prep right, it's not going to screw up in this way and you can spend your time working with people you really care about helping and being at your best, and that's the client management or the event management side of this. It's not 99% of workshop stuff is done in advance, but it's way more than 50%. It's probably a third of it is in your workshop design or 40% of it's in your workshop design, 10% of it's in your client comms. It is less than half is on the day of in terms of the impact. It's a design challenge. It's a client management challenge. It's a project management challenge.

The facilitation, yeah, it comes at the end. It's the fun flourish, but it's not the most important thing.

Chris Do:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

Want to experience the shift that happens when you get yourself around the right community, resources, and support to scale? We're ready to show you inside The Futur Pro Membership. The Futur Pro Membership was created for established creative service providers, coaches and consultants that want to take their business to the next level. Go to thefutur.com/pro to learn more and join us inside.

Welcome back to our conversation.

The one last area I would love just to get your ideas on and expand on, which is the scenario challenge, and we've talked a lot about the other two formats, small group and then try it now. Scenario challenge, take me through something there. I'm already learning a lot, unpacking and just thinking in my own brain how I could be doing things better, so I think this is going to be another area for improvement. Just speaking for myself.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

A scenario challenge is intended to build decision-making or wisdom. Think of it as Dungeons and Dragons, where, as the facilitator, you're acting as the dungeon master and the attendees are the players. So they're telling you what they think or what they want to do or what they want to try, and then you are continuing to tell them the reality and you are unfolding the consequences or why that doesn't work or why it does work, and then you're gradually delivering more information. Aha, that happened? Okay, you're now in this scenario.

In MBA classes, the way they do it, case studies are a huge part of MBA, for good reason because a lot of business is decision-making with ambiguous or incomplete information. They will give a pre-reading packet to the students and sometimes it's quite long. It could be 10 or 20 pages of detail about some business or some scenario, but it's incomplete. It doesn't tell you what happened. It sets up the scenario. Then in the class, the professor will say, "Okay, based on what you read, this is the prompt. This is what I want you to think about. This is what I want you to decide." And then they put them into groups and they work through it as a group and it's like, "Oh, we think this," and the professor says why it did or didn't work.

It's super cool because people actually get to try not a hands-on skill, but they get to try a decision-making approach or an evaluation approach and then see, in real time, feedback. Did it work or did it not? This is a great way to learn. Quick feedback, doing it themselves. That's the business school version.

What I would often do in workshops is I wanted something that scaled more in terms of small groups. So I wanted things to work in clusters of three people or six people where it was less reliance on me being a genius in front of the whiteboard because I found I'm a genius occasionally and I can deliver a really compelling hock and occasionally I'm just firing on all cylinders, but also, a lot of the time I'm not. I'm ADHD, there's good days and there's bad days. Some days my energy just slips out from under me or I lose the thread completely. So I can't rely on a workshop design that requires me to be a genius or to deliver, and then I also can't hire people and train people if it requires them to be a genius.

So I look for ways to put the complicated stuff into the workshop materials, which is either the slides or the little handouts they get. So if I'm doing a scenario challenge, if it's simple, I'll put it on the slides. Let's say that you're trying to pitch your first project and you know what you're worth. You've watched The Futur's videos about value-based pricing. You know what you're worth and you can tell it's going to be a nightmare client. They're giving all the warning signs, but it's your first client and they say yes, but just in a way that it's like they way undercut your pricing. You can tell they're going to hassle you through the whole project. That's ambiguous, right? It's like, "Wow, do we say yes for the case study or do we say no because we can tell they're a nightmare client?"

So that would work, that scenario. It's very ambiguous and personal answers. It would work as a small group discussion, but if you wanted to structure it more, you could print out some of that on paper, on handouts, even multiple handouts.

So what you often do is you'll use a series of envelopes with a printout inside of them, and the envelopes are on people's desks and they're numbered one, two, three. When you tell them, they open envelope one, they take out the piece of paper. You don't want it to be too long, they're going to read it live so it can't be long because that kills your energy flow, but it describes the situation.

Sometimes I introduce the whole scenario in lecture mode and then I'm like, "Okay, open your first envelope. That's going to give you your task." They open it, they read it and they're like, "Oh my gosh." It's like, "What do we do?" The task could be like we need to decide what to email back to them. "What's our five-word response, for example? Do we say yes? Do we say yes, but? Do we say no, but? Do we say no? Do we say something else?" So suddenly, you're putting them in this decision-making scenario. Let them think about that. They're going to entertain themselves for 10 minutes, for 15 minutes just on that.

And you're going to read the temperature of the room. You watch how lively and energetic it is, and you walk around and you listen to groups talk. As long as it is lively, energetic, and on topic, you can allow them to continue wrestling with this. At a certain point you call it, and then you're like, "Hey, you guys, I heard you talking about the dangers. Stand up. Tell us why. You guys, you were saying it's worth it," because you overheard this when you were walking around. You can ask. That gives you the opportunity to give commentary.

And after you run a workshop a couple of times, I think this is important, a workshop takes so much time to create that you do not want to run it once. It is a product. And when you get a good workshop, it is productized and you're going to run it over and over and over, and that's where you get the profit from these things. Designing a one-day workshop might take you the better part of a month if you're really high stakes, trying to do it seriously, but then once you've done it, you can charge a high rate and you can sell the same workshop over and over and over to the right type of people.

And that's when we're thinking like, "Man, creating all this material. What a nightmare." The reason is you're creating a product. It's a product that is delivered by hand, but it is a product, it's repeatable. And what happens is as you run it repeatedly, you know what people are going to say. There is a predictable set of answers and mistakes and misconceptions that your sort of people have. I'm sure you've seen this with designers and you're like, "Oh, artists have this type of misconception and digital designers have this type," and you get it and you're not that surprised after you run a workshop a bunch of times by the questions.

And so then you can start to bake that into your workshop plan where it's like you're actually delivering a five-minute lecture segment that carries a learning outcome, but it is in response to what someone said after a case study challenge. And this is where it feels like you're never lecturing, even though you are, but you're still very polished and prepared because you knew it was coming sometime, and if no one says it, you can be like, "Well, often what people fall for," and then you can tee yourself up for it.

And so people discuss, you commentate or give commentary, you give analysis, maybe you introduce the next piece of framework, they open the next envelope. Oh, things have changed. You sent this email, you got this back. What now? What does this mean? And you can build out these scenarios and it's cool.

This would be a nice way... Entrepreneurs never get why raising funding on tranches where it's like, "We'll give you this much money, but in three payments, if you hit these milestones," that is almost always a bad deal for the entrepreneur, but they never understand why. And a scenario challenge is a great way to help them work through the decision-making and gotchas at each stage of that. So they're cool, they're powerful.

Okay. Another scenario challenge you might do is you've got this big client, this is what's going on. You get this panicked email and the first envelope is the panicked email from the client. What happened? I don't know, maybe their timeline changed, maybe the boss just got fired and their budget disappeared. You can make this whatever you're trying to teach so that people are like, "Oh, what do we do about this?"

Anyway, that's the scenario challenges. You can use them all over the place. They're the most prep-heavy and they are very fragile to the quality of the materials that you hand out. So if you're going to use scenario challenges in this way with materials, you need to run test sessions of your workshop in advance in order to debug your materials. Look for where people get confused and then improve your materials so that piece of confusion stops.

Often, you'll start with smaller workshops, like 12 people, 20 people where you're able to manually fix something, but as you scale up, I've done some of my polished workshops for 300, 500 people where I'm the only facilitator and it works brilliantly if the materials are good, but you're not going in there with untested materials because then you've got 300 people asking the same question and you're done for. And so it's like, "I have to run test sessions."

I did one once where it was we'd sold $500,000 dollars worth of workshops. I got screwed. The client sold $500,000 dollars worth of workshops, then hired me to design them because they're like, "Oh, we sold these but we don't know how to make it." So they got $500,000, I got $20,000 for designing this one-day that they'd sold. And it was very high stakes because this day needed to be perfect. It was pre-sold, hyped the hell out of it. I was like, "I have to live up to such a high expectation."

And we did, but the way we got there is I must have run that workshop 10 times for test audiences, completely unpaid, just to debug the material, to figure out where people got confused, to figure out the predictable objections, to refine. And oh, then the kicker was I didn't get to teach the live session. It was taught by teenagers.

Chris Do:

Oh my God!

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So I had to design $500,000 dollar workshop that would be taught by teenagers, so it had to be so bulletproof. The material had to do so much heavy lifting. And to me, that was the pinnacle of workshop design because I was like, "This has to stand on its own."

And we got there, we got there, but it took so much iteration, so many live sessions, so many hours. That's normally not the way I do it because the energy is overkill, but I start with smaller or less demanding audiences and then work up to larger and higher price point audiences as the materials get more refined and I iterate them each time to make them a little tighter.

Chris Do:

Well, I'll say this, Rob, just from hearing that story, I'm breaking out a cold sweat here. I'll say this. You are good. You are good. I mean, the fact that you did 10 iterations of it and you can hand it off to randoms basically with little life experience and for them to be able to pull this off at such high stakes, that's a feather in your cap.

I'm just curious. Side note, quick question is do you still do that service for people? If somebody's hearing this right now, they go, "Oh my God, I need Rob right now," it's not going to be $20,000, we know that, but do you still do that or you're like, "I'm not doing that again"?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

I mean, that client did end up being a nightmare. They actually hired me to do another day, another workshop because that one went well. They're like, "Part one went well." They're like, "Yes, now let's do part two." And I was like, "Nope, take your money back." I didn't want to leave them hanging on part one, but there was no way I was going to continue working with them.

You know what? I don't think I am a good fit for freelancing and consulting. It doesn't make me happy and I catch a lot of stress. I don't seem to be able to put up a wall between the project's outcome and it takes up my life. I'm such an anxious, tightly strong creature. I like teaching. I don't like consulting. I don't like doing it for someone.

I don't know. You can never say never, right? Because someone can throw an absurd enough offer where I'm like, "Huh, I really ought to do this for my family's wellbeing." But I will say it's not a product I'm in the habit of doing.

I kind of closed the book on the workshop side of my life. We did it for a lot of years. I was like, "I get this." I had fun. It was nice, but I don't want to travel. I don't want the drama, but I love stuff like this. And it's one of the reasons I got so into writing books because I approach my books in the same way as workshops. I think about value per page, which is value per minute. I think about the pacing of aha moments and goodwill. I think about living up to the promise of the cover. So I found that the workshop and the book design challenges are surprisingly similar.

I guess that's a long way to say probably not, but it depends how many zeroes are on the end.

Chris Do:

So for that 1% of the 1% of our audience who is well-funded enough, you know who you are and you're listening to this, there's a way possibly to get Rob to do it, but it's not likely.

Okay. Random question, just to follow up, you love to write books. Maybe that's your jam now, to distill your knowledge and experience into bite-sized pieces and teach at scale, it gives you the personal freedom. I'm curious, have you written the book as a workshop itself?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Have I written the book-

Chris Do:

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Do:

Have you designed the book to be a workshop where there's very few words on a page, and there are chunked-down exercises, and then people literally fill it in the book or on a piece of paper so that they learn what you're trying to teach?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

I don't do that, but there's a lot of great authors who do, and I think that's an excellent style of book. I think it needs to be... So part of my writing process, just like for a workshop if it's high stakes and I've only got one shot, I'm going to do beta runs of the workshop with test audiences. With a book, I do a lot of beta reading and I look at both qualitative and quantitative insights.

So we built a thing. This is all through usefulbooks.com is our thing around books and writing, if that's relevant to anyone. But we built software for beta reading so that we can see where readers abandon, where they start to skim, where they become confused. They give this data with permission. We're not spying on them or anything. And so I debug it. I'm like, "Wow, everyone's abandoning." With The Workshop Survival Guide, for example, in the early version, the first version I beta-read, not a single beta reader made it through chapter two. And I realized that when I went in, I'm like, "Okay, that is a bug in my book, and the reader experience of my book is broken, so I need to debug it and make it better."

And it was because I was starting with a bunch of teaching theory, like zone of proximal development and scaffolding and energy curves and blah, blah, blah. People were like, "Very interesting, not going to keep reading, not for me." And so I was like, "Huh." So I deleted all that, and now the book starts with value pretty quickly, I think.

And I got into that rant to say that if you're doing a book that is meant to be used as a workshop, like an interactive book, that is 10-times more important because when you're teaching a live workshop, if you miss the mark on an exercise prompt, you can see that people are confused and you can hear them getting off track and you can kind of fix it live and then improve it after the fact. With a book, you don't get that chance. So if you're writing a book that's meant to be used as a workshop, an interactive book, you're going to want to do a lot more testing.

And if possible, I would love to have readers send in their completed pages or send in recordings of them doing the thing. This would be hard to set up. You would need very friendly, engaged readers. I think setting up a practitioner's community alongside the book where it's like you get early access and these are the exercises for the community, or structuring the book alongside a cohort-based course so that you can use the course to teach the exercises in the book, and you get people the workshop sheets and the task... And this is kind of how I get to my books is I usually start by teaching the topic, and once I found a really effective way to teach it, I then lock it down in the canonical version in the book.

So my first book is about business and it's built around a really dumb metaphor called the Mom Test of basically the unconditional support and enthusiasm that you get from your mother. Every project's great. At least my mom was supportive. I'm told this is a bit cultural. But that's a weird metaphor, but I was very confident putting it in the book because I taught that enough times and I tried enough different ways of delivering the learning outcome that I was like, "I know this works." So the workshop had become my test environment, and that book is now taught at a bunch of universities.

I was looking, right now its lifetime royalties are at $997,000. So within the week, it should cross $1 million in royalties, which will be very exciting. And it's like, why does that book work for people? Because I had taught it so many times that I knew it worked.

If your consulting is built around a design process, teach that design process a bunch of times. You're going to make some money immediately while you're waiting for the big client. And then you're also going to get better because you're going to find where your process is unpolished. Teaching is a great way to figure out what's not working because people call BS on everything. I am sure you know this. And then you just get better. You get better, you get smarter, you find the right stories, find the right anecdotes, and then it makes it that much easier to productize.

I actually tell people, if you're writing a book and you don't already teach, you need to go teach before you write the thing because if you're not teaching, you're going to do it wrong. And workshops are the best way to teach because workshops are two-way. If you're standing and doing a keynote presentation to a huge audience, you don't learn. You talk, but you don't learn. You need to be in the room to see where people are confused.

So that's one of the challenges with online is you don't learn back from an online audience as easily as you do with a live audience so it's harder to improve online.

Chris Do:

I agree. I knew we were going to get along, and the short backstory to this is pre-pandemic, I reached out to Rob and said, "Would you be interested in coming on the podcast?" Which he said, "Yes," but then life happens. And I was looking at his book again. I'm like, "Let me just try another time and see if it would happen."

But just hearing you talk about your process, about iterating and testing all your ideas, I feel like we're kindred spirits because I love to do workshops because of the feedback I need to learn, and I'm not growing if I'm not learning. And before I go make a course, I need to run that workshop seven times before I feel like now is a good time, I've worked out the kinks.

One thing that I want to circle back to...

Chris Do:

Like now is a good time, we worked out the kinks. One thing that I want to circle back to, and you said this, if you create a scenario challenge and you have some kinks, then you have the stories to resolve that. I'm just curious if you feel like, from an educator point of view, if it's important and necessary for people to have the ""wrong answers, or do you then bake that into the scenario challenge where they cannot use the wrong answer?

So the example would be, here's the constraint. You cannot lower your price. Let's say the outcome is I don't want you to lower your price at a pricing negotiation. And sometimes the answer is like, we'll cut our prices in half and if that keeps coming up, I'm like, Nope, that's not what I want you to learn. Do I just say the constraint is, you can't do that or let them do that and have a story being prepared to talk about it?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

It's probably going to depend on your timing because each branch you go down is using up more of your time, and usually when you're running a workshop, you're going to have a fixed amount of time. This is a little different if you're organizing it yourself, but there's still, how into the weeds can you go? There are just practical limits and often workshops are like you get the three-hour workshop or the four-hour workshop or the full day workshop or the 90-minute workshop and you go, how do I best use that time?

And in some cases going down those branches is the best use of time and in other cases it's not. And you need to force people down a branch, totally fine. But what I would do there is you're choosing a starting point, right? You're saying this is this specific area, so I'm going to frame the challenge so that you're wrestling with a specific thing. It's nice people learn better if they get to make the mistake and try to do it, but you don't have infinite time. So it's all trade-offs. It's such an interesting design challenge. How do you most effectively design it? Spend a block of time or design an education experience that's uses this block of time to deliver maximum impact.

Chris Do:

Sometimes I like to see them fail because I want them to have the baseline, so that at the end of the workshop they're like, whoa, the difference might not be perceivable if they didn't start there like, oh, I always knew how to do this. Yeah, sure you did. So you start with a failure and then they bridge or scaffold towards this new state, they're like, wow, that was a big learning outcome for me.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

If it's huge enough, you could take them down a whole scenario that's like why that backfires. So you could set it up so that their first move is always to drop the price. Or you could even set up the first stage of the scenario challenge is like, hey, in a tough negotiation with a big client where you really wanted the case study, you made the choice to drop your price even though it's not what you're supposed to do. Now here's what's happening now.

And then it's like, gosh, when you're already in a position where you don't have enough leverage, you don't have enough wiggle room in the budget, you're already over hours. You can just keep stacking. That it's happening to them and all the trouble you get into and they start to experience why this seems like a good idea but isn't, and why it's worth leaving money on the table sometimes and saying, actually we can't take this gig if this is how you want to do it. And how sometimes that's actually the more profitable choice. And then the question to me as a workshop designer comes back to is that one of your core learning outcomes or is that knowledge that you assume they're already past? Is that what they need to learn or is that what they already know? And that's going to change which point you start at.

Chris Do:

Makes sense. Okay. Now before we end, we need to talk about how this is happening in online communities and the challenges of doing this virtually. Ideally, we'd like to be able to not spend most of our time on a plane or train, spend with our family or spend it in workshops. So it would seem like, Hey, let's do this virtually. Everything's going to be great. You cut out all the stuff that you don't have to spend time. But then there's a lot of challenges with doing it on a little screen somewhere where not everybody's plugged in. I would love for you to share your journey through that and creating cohorts and how you've been able to transition from workshop to doing it online.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Well, I'm hoping you'll tell me. I'll tell you where we're up to and why I think it's difficult and then you can tell me the answers. So I refused to do online education for a lot of time and it was really tempting when COVID first started, people were trying to pay me my previous day rate for online teaching, which I'm like, this is great. I don't even have to leave home. And I'm like, my hourly rate is absurd. This is awesome. This is the dream. And I stopped doing it because I felt too constrained. And I do have a slightly rosier view now, but I'll tell you what my challenges were, where I got to, and then it'd be awesome to hear how you guys are approaching it. So for longer sessions, so when people want to pay lots of money for a workshop, they want a longer session, this is the way it works in the real world.

But in the real world, you can do coffee breaks, you can do lunch, you can make sure the venue has good natural light. You can switch people around physically into different seeds, different places. Think of on a full day workshop, you want to think about it like organizing a wedding where a wedding that stayed in the same room in the same chair for the whole day would be a nightmare. Weddings have to move you into different types of spaces for different types of activities to hold your energy through the whole day. They have to give you food. The same is true of a full day workshop. So clients were like, we want to give you this much money to teach a four-hour thing or a three-hour thing. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, how do I do this? First off, which teaching formats do you have access to online?

You can do breakout rooms with small group discussion, but then it's hard to... You can't listen in, so you don't know if people are going off track. You don't know if someone's dominated the conversation. It's hard to even keep a prompt slide visible when they're doing a small group discussion so they forget what they're supposed to be talking about. Stand and share afterwards is really tough. Would someone volunteer? Because you're back to all the QA problems where you keep hearing from a weird sample selection bias group that you don't always want to be always hearing from. So I'm like, okay, energy levels are tough. I'm really limited in terms of my teaching formats. What do you do here? So then I'm defaulting back to lecture and Q&A, but then I'm like, if I'm just doing lecturing Q&A, why aren't I just doing this as a YouTube video?

And then people can skip to the best they want and the only reason I'm doing it live is because that lets me charge a workshop day rate. But actually what's best and most impactful for the learners would be if I just made a YouTube video. So at a certain point I'm like, the money isn't worth the cynicism and if I'm not doing the best job I can for the learners, I don't want to take the money. So I kind of stopped doing it, but now we're in the process for Useful Books, which is our thing for nonfiction authors. We're in the process of creating a cohort-based course and what changed it for me is community. So we started an author's community when the book came out. So three years ago. And there's now been hundreds of authors who have gone through and the community does accountability.

There's writing groups, there's writing sessions, the community does goal setting, the community does feedback, the community has the roadmap of what you need to get through and the resources and the checklist. I'm like, cool. That actually simplifies what I would need to teach in the course to something manageable. And we have the book. So the way I'm thinking about it now is like, well, what is a live class good at? What is the medium best at? I'm not just going to go and lecture the book because they've already got the book. And if something's just factual knowledge, book knowledge, I'm going to prerecord that as a YouTube video and be like, watch this first. So then what is the live session valuable for? Well, people like live sessions because they get to have their individual problem solved or because they get to talk to other attendees and actually wrestle with real issues and make it personal.

But that's not the way most cohort-based courses I've been to use them. They're like, Hey, I'm now going to lecture you all the material that you could have watched on YouTube as like, oh, sorry, there's too many people, so we don't have time for Q&A. And it's like, why are we doing this live if you're not taking advantage of live as a medium? So I'm going to be like, Hey, read these chapters of the book or watch these videos. So partial flip claps room. Then when we get together going to be, it's like dissecting case studies. That's something that's good live. I'm going to be like, okay, we're going to talk about what fuels the recommendation loop for nonfiction and why some books get recommended for years and others only sell if the author is promoting them. Okay, cool. So there's like, let's start looking at books and break them down.

Why does this work? Let's work through it. Okay, discussion. Here's the challenge. Groups of three. Here's a different book that we haven't talked about yet. In your groups of three, go through the same process, come back. Why do you think it's recommendable? And I'm hoping that that will create a level of practice and mastery. So we'll get to do basically the decision-making, the wisdom and the try it now, like the practice which aren't already provided by the community. The community does accountability, feedback, a bunch of other stuff. The book itself and the YouTube archive does pure book knowledge, and it's like, but there's still a gap.

So I'm almost seeing it as, I don't think I would do a cohort based course if that's all I had. But I feel like it can add a couple important teaching formats on top of the rest, and that overall we can provide a way better experience for aspiring authors who want their books to do better. That's how I'm thinking about it. What do you think, I mean, you've done way more than this. Am I missing a trick? Am I over-complicating it? How do you guys keep your courses punchy and impactful?

Chris Do:

It is a big challenge and something that I'm trying to figure out as well. But I've had the opportunity to learn from people who have specialized software to be able to teach online because their entire program is built to be taught online. So the best way I can describe this is, and this is a trick I learned by watching some of these people, which is if you put people on breakout rooms, you don't know what they're talking about. You can't eavesdrop. So Zoom, if you're eavesdropping on this conversation, I suggest you give the event organizer hosts of Zoom, the ability to hover into rooms and listen without being identified and just to be able to turn up and down the volume as they move through different rooms. That would make the job of the teacher, the facilitator much easier. As soon as they see you in the room, it's like, oh, Rob's in the room.

Everybody tighten up real quick. We got to mind our Pa and Qs. So here's one trick that we're able to monitor what's happening in the room. We have a Google Doc or a paper doc that is shared with each room number. So let's say there are 10 breakout rooms. We have document one through 10. They can't see what each other are doing, but everybody in that room is sharing one document. So as you flip through it, there are your envelope questions, so to speak, and you can see how they're writing. So if a room has no answers, nothing's going on, minutes in, you have to send somebody into that room. It's like, Hey, are you all stuck? Without being big brother-y. And it's like, is there something going on? And then you realize they're all just reading and nobody's talking or something, whatever the thing is. So I find that having, and there are more apps today that allow collaborative working. You could do this with Keynote. I've done this with Keynote. It's pretty fascinating to see people design in real time with very simple tools. It's manageable.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

The idea is there is, you're not listening to the conversation, but you're watching the artifact and you make sure that the activity is focused around something visual, something you could say... That's really cool. Yeah, you could do it with Post-it notes on FigJam or something you could do it with. Oh, that's a really, really cool concept. And then that in addition to giving you a view on what they're doing, people love seeing a big pile of activity. They love seeing visual proof of stuff they did during a workshop. This is one of the reasons why a lot of facilitators are so obsessed with covering the wall with Post-it notes, is because at the end of the day, people see that wall and they're like, wow, we did a lot. Look at all these ideas. And even if it's not super actionable, the artifact is powerful and it leaves people with a little bit of a high. And so that's actually an amazing guiding principle and constraint for the exercises. There has to be an artifact for everything you do, unlike online. And it solves two problems. Very nice.

Chris Do:

And if you have access to some technology, we have a Google Jamboard, which they don't have to have one, but they can literally create Post-its, move them around, and you have the Jamboard that you actually literally grab a touchscreen and you move things around. And so it's technology that's designed to do that. And we're also seeing now, I guess a couple of years late, but companies like Canon and others have created technologies with cameras that allow you to move around in a space. So one of the biggest constraints I find that in teaching on a Zoom call, this is I'm never sitting down while I'm teaching. So my energy is different. And so we don't have dedicated teams to run cameras for me at home or my home studio. So there are these cameras that allow you to crop in to different parts so you can be free to move and talk.

And it does this really cool thing where if there's a whiteboard, it will ghost you out. It's using technology to compare what you're writing versus you standing in the frame. So what it'll do is it'll put you at 10% opacity so people can actually see through your body. It's pretty cool. And what's really cool is also it'll take that thing that's in perspective and it will flatten it out. So there's some cool technologies that exist that they've been demoing for a couple of years now to help teachers in classrooms. So you can have a 10-foot by 15-foot room and teach on three different surfaces and talk to people and move around. And this is the cool part, Rob, if you don't already know about this, because you're a tech guy. It takes hand gestures. So if you gesture certain things, it'll zoom in on you or it'll redirect it to the board or something else. And I think, okay, we're almost there now because we have to respond to this online learning, because there's a big market for it.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

That'd be super nice. I've been using... Yeah, there's so many places where you just want to do a quick whiteboard sketch and it's just not easy. A small thing, but also a big thing is the friction of transition. So in real world workshops, you mainly see this around group formation and getting people back from a coffee break and getting people to start talking to each other and then stop talking to each other, all these little formations, start, stop. It's like friction.

And that's one of the main places where your facilitation skills will improve as you get more practice and get better with room setup online stuff, like let me just share this screen. Hold on. This video is buffering. Stuff like that just decimates your attention levels and online, the suspension of disbelief is so much more fragile. And once people decide to open Twitter in another tab, you're done for. And so the attention challenge is higher stakes online. So yeah, I love what you're saying. It's like anything that can, I don't know, hold the focus. And if people are distracted, if you can get them looking at the artifact that they've been building together, you want people to be distracted by continuing to work on their Post-it note pile or continuing to work on their mockup design. They're distracted by the workshop as opposed to completely clocking out.

Chris Do:

There's something that, because I got access to this, that YouTube... Trying to address the use of YouTube in classrooms, they have a special portal for educators so that you can only watch the video, no ads come up, no referral or recommended videos come up. So your ability to preload those videos onto a more robust server versus broadcasting via Zoom, which has all kinds of problems. So at the appropriate time, you drop the link in the chat, now that's your envelope. Everybody go ahead and click on that thing. They can watch that and then not hopefully get pulled into watching whatever Pop Star is doing at that moment. So there's some challenges, and I think a tech company that once it addresses multi-billion dollar market will eventually solve this because the trend towards online education isn't going in the opposite direction. It's only increasing over time. And people like you and me, we need better tools and hopefully we don't have to invent them ourselves.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

The one that seems like I am keeping an eye on is Butter. I think it's Butter.Us and they're specifically designed around workshop facilitation. A disclaimer, I really like what they're doing, but I still don't use them. It's for very small issues of reliability on certain browsers and stuff. And there's things that I'm just like, I need it to work for every attendee no matter what all the time. But they're doing really cool stuff with the products, like building in agendas and timings and different facilitation formats can be pre-created with certain this many seats, with this prompt slide, on this timer. So you can do a lot of the upfront setup to your facilitation so that your actual delivery is smoother, but still flexible. So that one's really cool. And then I also looked into virtual spaces, which sounds ridiculous, but I think there's a way that this solves a lot of problems.

So Gather.town is one that I looked into, which is a 2D Super Nintendo thing where everyone makes a little avatar and ahead of time you can build a physical space and then you can set triggers into space. So you can be like, this is the podium, and if someone's standing here, it gets broadcast to everybody. And if someone's sitting at these tables, the videos pop up so that they're only seeing the people at their table. And over here it's like whatever.

Again, it's a little bit friction-y and a little bit... I was like, I've got authors who are 80 years old and aren't that comfortable with tech and certainly don't know the video game metaphors. So for them, that's going to be a tough thing to get started with. So it's like I'm not using these things yet, but I feel like they're important. I agree with you. It's like there's only so much you can do as a facilitator through Zoom right now. We do need better tools. If you're willing to combine community email upfront video, flip classroom, but it's hard, then you're building this full tech business that's quite operationally complex and teachers have enough to worry about already. So better tools would help. They're getting close enough. There's people working on it. I'm excited.

Chris Do:

I think so. I think Zoom is an excellent video conferencing application that's been hijacked and became the default standard in which everybody communicated overnight because of COVID, and they won that battle it seems like. But now we're having to force it to do things that wasn't meant to do, and they're not necessarily serving the education market specifically.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

Something I recommend for anyone watching this, freelancers, everything, is to get comfortable with OBS. This is important for client pitches and proposals also. I'm sure you've been on a Zoom pitch with clients and it's like, oh wait, I don't have screen sharing permissions. Can you let me share my screen? I need to show you something. And it really breaks the flow. And with OBS, it's what streamers use, video game streamers. You can set up a virtual camera. So right now, I don't know if this is going to work, but I don't have screen sharing permissions, but I can do stuff to the screen that's coming through. That looked like garbage because I don't have it set up for anything right now, but it's like you didn't let me share my screen, but I could share my screen. And that's happening through OBS.

And you can do really nice stuff, instead of doing a picture and picture where you've got a tiny face and huge slides, you could be side by side, which is what I use if I'm presenting. So it's like phone, portrait, slides and beside it, phone, portrait, face, and it's nice. And if you're with a client, you can just be like, boom, and your stuff pops up and you didn't need to ask for permissions. And you can put the visual effects, and it's a nice way for both teaching and selling to be a little bit polished and just remove that little bit of friction. So you set up a virtual camera and then Zoom shows the virtual camera instead of the real one.

Chris Do:

Yeah. I chatted with a gentleman who had a very sophisticated stream deck with I think ECAM or OBS with multiple presets, and the way he was able to run a Zoom call was ridiculous. It's next level. This is what he does professionally. So he has a ton of equipment to make it work, but I think hopefully as there are more elegant solutions that pop up on the market that you and I, mere mortals, can just hit a couple buttons and it does picture-in-picture, but it's like a round cutout. He has this thing that was really cool. He has this thing where it's a wheel of fortune wheel that comes in and shows all of the attendees and can just pick a person at random based on that, and it flies in. It's super sophisticated stuff.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

I mean, you can basically set browsers as your video source. You can do all sorts of stuff. Is this going to work now? So yeah. So here, if I needed to show a visual, I'm just like, here I am showing a visual. You'd want it full screen. It's like you didn't give me screen sharing permissions and it's there me in a little circle and I'm like showing stuff. It helps, all this stuff. It adds to your polish. So if you got to do stuff online, you're kind of working against attention and friction. So I'm not a huge fan of tricks and tactics when I'm doing in person workshops. I'm like, focus on the fundamentals, build a great skeleton, deliver learning outcomes. Online right now, you got to be a little bit trickier and a little bit more tactical because you're in a tougher situation, in my opinion.

Chris Do:

Okay, well, not that you need my endorsement, you don't need it, but I think you're a super cool guy, really bright, brilliant, but the fact that you know Dungeons and Dragons, skateboarding, and you're into games, you're a winner. My guest today has been Rob Fitzpatrick. He wrote the book, the Workshop Survival Guide, and I just want to read the top How to design and teach workshops that work every time. And for anybody who's going to talk, teach, lecture, or do anything, I've been recommending this book for as long as I've been aware of it. It's an excellent book. Value to words, as you said, is very, very high. The blow your mind moments are all in there, and I just feel like there's not many opportunities for educators to watch or listen or to learn from other educators. So we're just going through and just going and repeating the painful steps and making the same mistakes. But I don't like that.

And I found today's conversation to be pretty brilliant. So I'm going to recommend everybody go buy the book and Rob, you've written other books, but go buy the book and then listen to this podcast again, and it's going to make a lot more sense for you. So this is the audio companion to the analog version, everybody. Now, Rob, for people who want to find out more about you and the things that you're doing, where do we send them? What are you working on next?

Rob Fitzpatrick:

So it's kind of like a sister to making a workshop, but if you want to make a book, turn your workshop into a book or vice versa. That's really my focus. The publishing industry is a hundred years behind and authors are still writing nonfiction as if it was fiction or memoir and stuff. There's a different approach to structuring the education and designing the product. It's very similar to what we talked about with workshops. That's all usefulbooks.com where we've got the author's community, we're about to kick off the course. If you've got a book in you, you want it alongside your workshop, that's the place to find me. We can hang out and write together. It'd be great.

Chris Do:

Wonderful, usefulbooks.com. We'll include the links in the show notes, so make sure you check out there along with all of Rob's social feeds. Rob, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Rob Fitzpatrick:

It's been an absolute blast. Chris, thanks for having me. I'm Rob Fitzpatrick, and you are listening to the future.

Stewart Schuster:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Krista and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborne for our intro music.

If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. That will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

‍