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How To Give A Killer Presentation or Workshop!
Chris Do and Rob Fitzpatrick reveal the system for designing and delivering workshops that captivate audiences and create real learning outcomes.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · October 22, 2023
Your Presentation Is Failing. Here’s Why.
Most presentations are a waste of time. So are most workshops. You sit in a cold, dark room for hours, get spoken at by a parade of speakers, and walk away with a handful of blurry photos of slides and a vague sense of unease. You know you were supposed to learn something. You just aren't sure what.
This is the default experience. It’s what audiences have come to expect and what most event organizers continue to sell.
Chris Do, an educator for over 15 years, frames the problem with a quote from social neuroscientist Dr. Christine Looser: “Lectures are the most efficient way to teach but the most ineffective way to learn.”
This single paradox explains the failure of the entire conference industry. The format is optimized for the speaker, not the student. It prioritizes the transmission of information over the transformation of the audience.
Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Workshop Survival Guide, offers a different path. It's a path forged in the wreckage of a failed startup and refined through years of running an education agency. His philosophy is simple but revolutionary. Stop performing. Start facilitating. Stop lecturing. Start designing experiences.
“A workshop facilitator takes responsibility for the energy level and the attention of the attendees,” Fitzpatrick explains. “In a lecture scenario, the speaker sort of expects the audience to be paying attention. It is the audience’s job.”This is a fundamental shift in responsibility. Your job is not to be an expensive, in-person YouTube video they can’t fast-forward. Your job is to architect an environment where learning is not just possible, but inevitable.
The Survivor's Advantage
Fitzpatrick’s expertise isn't academic. It was earned. His journey began not in a classroom, but in the hyper-growth world of Silicon Valley as part of Y Combinator’s legendary 2007 batch, which included future giants like Dropbox and Songkick.
After four years, his venture-backed startup failed. Despite having top-tier investors and customers like Sony and MTV, the business imploded. The experience left him burnt out and broke, living in a warehouse with no heating or running water.
“The business failed but I learned some useful stuff along the way,” he recalls. “You know, I fell down the mountain but I learned how ropes work. I can't teach people how to climb the mountain but I can teach them about the ropes.”
This mindset is crucial. Failure immunizes you against the simplistic narratives of success. It provides a texture and depth that unblemished victory never can. Teaching became a way for Fitzpatrick to process the trauma of his startup's “plane crash” and extract value from the lessons learned. What started as informal chats with other entrepreneurs about getting unbiased customer feedback soon became a calling.
He began speaking at unconferences, low-stakes events where anyone could grab a slot. As an introvert, he found the stage to be a safe space. “I've never been good at working a crowd and networking,” he admits. “But I found that the safe space of the stage… I've got attention for some amount of time and I can communicate.”
What began as a therapeutic hobby turned into a freelance gig after someone offered him $700 for a day of teaching. Soon, he had a thriving business, which he formalized into an education agency with a partner. Their work spanned the globe, from teaching disadvantaged youth in Costa Rica to running executive education programs charging $3,000 per seat. This is where he developed and battle-tested the principles that would become his book. As he explains in a discussion about building an agency, scaling demands process.
“We were at a scale where we had to be able to quickly train up other facilitators and maintain a high standard of quality,” Fitzpatrick says. “Because a live workshop, you only get one shot. You can't screw that up… the stakes are really high.” This is where the systems in The Workshop Survival Guide were born; not in theory, but under the intense pressure of client expectations and repeatable results.
Your Day Rate Is a Measure of Your Craft
One of the biggest misconceptions in the world of public speaking and corporate training is that your fee is tied to your fame. People believe you get paid more if you have a massive Instagram following or if you’re a household name.
Fitzpatrick argues this is only true for a very specific type of speaking: infotainment. “If you are doing like corporate dinner parties and you're trying to be the motivational speaker… there it's really helpful if you happen to be Barack Obama,” he says. There, fame is the product.
But for educational workshops, the economics are different. For skill-building sessions, you are not paid for your fame. You are paid for your craft.
You are paid for your ability to deliver a specific, measurable transformation in the room.
“You only need to be credible enough to get in the door,” Fitzpatrick insists. “After that, you're actually paid based on the skill of your craft, not based on your level of fame.”
He saw this pattern play out without fail. As he and his team coached other facilitators, their day rates increased in direct proportion to their skill improvement. It had nothing to do with their social media presence and everything to do with their ability to design and execute an effective learning experience. It’s a lesson that applies to any service business, as mastering the craft is essential before you can truly price the client, not the job.
“Their day rate increased as they got better,” he states. “It wasn't about charisma, it wasn't about fame, it wasn't about Instagram. It was about getting better at the craft.”
This is a liberating idea. It means you don’t need to be an influencer to be a highly-paid, in-demand educator. You need to be good. You need to understand the design principles that create real learning.
The Architecture of Attention
If a facilitator’s primary job is to manage audience energy, how is that actually done? It’s not about telling jokes or doing jumping jacks. It’s about structural variety.
“Switching teaching formats… is the easiest way to maintain energy levels,” Fitzpatrick reveals. “Every time you switch formats, people get a little boost. Their brain's like, ‘This is new, this is different.’”
You aren’t triggering novelty with cheap tricks. You’re triggering it with the structure of the teaching itself. This is the core of effective workshop design.
Most people only know one format: the lecture. It's the transmission of what Fitzpatrick calls “book knowledge.” While it has its place, relying on it exclusively is a recipe for a disengaged audience. A great workshop is a blend of different formats, each chosen specifically for the type of learning required.
Fitzpatrick outlines five essential teaching formats that form the facilitator’s toolkit:
- Lecture: Best used to provide context before an exercise or to summarize lessons learned afterward. Think of it as the frame, not the painting.
- Small Group & Pair Discussions: Ideal for wrestling with ambiguous options or exploring personal applications. This format allows participants to make the knowledge their own.
- Try It Now Practice: The format for building hands-on skills. You can’t learn to skateboard from a lecture, and you can’t learn to negotiate by reading about it. This is where theory becomes action.
- Scenario Challenge: Perfect for building wisdom and decision-making abilities. By working through case studies, participants practice judgment in a safe environment.
- Q&A: Useful for clarifying major confusion and identifying objections. Crucially, it also serves as “flex time” that can be expanded or cut to keep the workshop on schedule.
The goal is to switch between these formats frequently, often every 20 minutes or less. An effective workshop is not a monologue; it is a carefully orchestrated symphony of different learning experiences. This approach is fundamental to building a strong personal brand as an expert: you don't just know things, you know how to teach them effectively.
The Facilitator’s Playbook
Knowing the formats is one thing. Executing them well is another. Fitzpatrick shares a wealth of practical advice for designing and running a workshop that feels seamless and impactful.
Start with the Outcome
Before you design any activity, define your learning outcomes. What do you want people to know, believe, or be able to do when they leave? This is your North Star.
“Decide what you want to be different between when they show up and when they leave,” he says. This “delta” is the value you are creating. Every single element of your workshop, from the first sentence to the last coffee break, should be in service of that outcome.
Design Your Prompts Carefully
When running small group discussions, the quality of your prompt is everything. A good prompt has two key features:
- A clear question. There should be no ambiguity about what you are asking them to do.
- An ambiguous answer. The question should invite discussion, not a factual search. “How you're gonna handle surprise expenses throughout the year” is a great prompt. “What is the current tax law on expenses” is a terrible one.
Chris Do’s own experience highlights a common mistake: asking a compound question. When he asked a group to “Identify two or three things that you think make this a charismatic brand,” he got wildly off-topic answers. The solution? Chunk it down. Ask for one thing at a time. This keeps the task focused and the energy high.
Engineer the Environment
The physical setup of the room has a massive impact on your ability to facilitate. Fixed stadium seating is a facilitator’s nightmare, as it prevents natural group interaction. The ideal setup is what Fitzpatrick calls **Cabaret seating**: small, round tables with groups of six.
“Six is the perfect number because you can split six into pairs, triplets, or a full six,” he explains. This allows for instant transitions between different group sizes without the friction of physically moving people around.
If you can’t control the main seating, try to create clusters of chairs before your talk begins. This creates implicit groups that you can activate with a discussion prompt. When your presentation is designed around audience interaction, you create content that people actually react to.
Watch for Destructive Dynamics
In any group exercise, certain archetypes emerge. One of the most destructive is the “secretary.” This is the one person who volunteers to write down all the ideas for the group. It seems helpful, but it creates a bottleneck.
“The secretary becomes the CEO because they become a bottleneck to whether something gets written down or not,” Fitzpatrick warns. “It slows down the whole group.”
The solution is simple: everyone writes. A core rule for his workshops is that every participant must have a pen and Post-it notes at all times. Another powerful rule is to have people write down their ideas *before* they talk about them. This ensures introverts have a chance to contribute and prevents extroverts from dominating the conversation.
From Goodwill to “Aha!” Moments
Even in a traditional lecture format, you can apply workshop principles to make your talk more engaging. The key is to think in terms of audience goodwill. Your audience starts with a finite amount of it. Every second you talk about yourself or things they already know, that goodwill depletes.
“How many seconds before the first aha moment or wow moment where they're like, ‘Oh my gosh I can use this?’” Fitzpatrick asks. “We're not talking minutes, seconds.”
Your speaker bio should be one sentence. Your intro should be ruthlessly efficient. Get to the value as quickly as humanly possible.
He suggests sprinkling the “good stuff” throughout your talk. Don’t build to a big reveal at the end. By the time you get there, you may have already lost half the room. Every few minutes, you need to deliver a piece of value that directly addresses the promise you made in your talk’s title.
A powerful technique is to replace the standard Q&A with a more structured interaction. After a discussion prompt, instead of asking “Who has something to share?” which often invites self-promoters and sociopaths, you pick someone. Walk around the room during the discussion to eavesdrop. This allows you to identify a group with a lively conversation.
Then, you select one person and ask, “Would you mind like standing up and telling us something interesting that you heard?” Phrasing it this way, about what they *heard* rather than their own idea, removes ego and fear. This creates a more natural and engaging way to bring audience voices into the presentation, fostering a sense of shared discovery that is central to real mastering communication.
The difference between a lecture and a workshop is the difference between a monologue and a conversation. It’s the difference between being a sage on the stage and a guide on the side.
By taking responsibility for the audience’s energy, designing for interaction, and focusing relentlessly on delivering learning outcomes, you can transform a forgettable talk into an unforgettable experience.
It's not about being a charismatic performer. It is about applying a system. It is a craft you can learn.
TRANSCRIPT
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 well the business failed but I learned some useful stuff along the way right so you know I fell down the mountain but I learned how ropes work because a live Workshop you only get one shot right you can't screw that up and it's incredibly Bridge
burning if you do because you ruined someone's conference so you ruined their event so it's like the stakes are really high trust is a huge factor and so we're like okay we can not only do it reliably but we can teach other people to do it reliably what's one thing that we can
do borrowing from the principals to 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 one fact about yourself that's relevant enough for people to let you start talking it's like hey I'm
Rob uh I've done a million dollars in royalties from self-published books and I'm going to share my experiences uh Rob first of all welcome to the show for those who don't know who you are can you tell us can you introduce yourself and tell us a few relevant facts as to why we
should listen to you yeah uh 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 uh and I went through Y combinator in 2007 as part of their fifth batch lost has some great companies
Dropbox songkick a lot of killer companies were in that batch um and we ran that business for four years uh and I was like man this just isn't for me you know we'd raised the fun day we had some big customers like Sony MTV we'd like we were in the press and I
was like my personality just does not work with the hyper growth lifestyle you know and it's like fine call it anti-ambition call it whatever you want uh and when I was kind of picking myself out of the the burnout I was like well the business failed but I learned some useful stuff along
the way right so you know I fell down the mountain but I learned how ropes work you know and I'm like okay I can't I can't teach people how to climb the mountain but I can teach them about the ropes because I like learned that um and one of them was getting unbiased
customer feedback so I started like teaching that to other entrepreneurs or pre-product sales um 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 they kept working and before too long as I taught it more like
it started to fill a place and accelerate like startup accelerators curriculum they're like oh we'll get robbed to teach that thing and I was like oh I'm kind of doing this regularly and would it become like 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 you know these little like day rate stuff uh not a super fun business or fun for a couple years but then it stopped being fun because it was
all travel and we couldn't really find a way to productize um but through that we trained a lot of other teachers we worked for a ton of different clients uh we taught for like disadvantaged youths in Costa Rica we taught exec ad for 3000 to seat we we did stuff in the Middle
East we did government projects in the UK so we we did cohort based courses over three months we did like little short form so through that I I just saw like 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 and a lot of people come in with all these these these incorrect assumptions about what it means to teach and to teach well or to to design a curriculum and so that was the real Gauntlet right it's like we can do
it but can we teach it and out of that that's where like the lessons and the process were like okay now we cannot just do it reliably on on like a predictable time scale and like hit it every time for clients when we're teaching because a live Workshop you only get one shot
right you can't screw that up and it's incredibly Bridge burning if you do because you ruin someone's conference so you ruin their event so it's like the stakes are really high trust is a huge factor I mean like design work right like people are going to be showing this stuff off and it's
live and so we're like okay we can not only do it reliably but we can teach other people to do it reliably and that seems 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 it is but like not that I
just want to sit around and write books uh but it's like I wanted to capture our process and that became the workshop Survival Guide 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 I was probably teaching as an enthusiastic amateur for two or three years where I was you know I was like going to a university and talking to students you know no one was paying me or I was like going to a local conference or unconference I
actually started the unconferences where anyone could show up and you just you talk about something and I was like cool that's getting me on stage I'm talking to 20 people who like don't like nothing matters right but I 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 it actually I was like okay now I've got attention for some amount of time and I
can communicate and I actually found that that was like it felt like a safer space for me as an introvert so I just enjoyed it and did it as a hobby probably two or three years then someone's 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 like frying eggs on the heating pad of my coffee maker you know like living the artist's lifestyle and I was like that was like I was like yes absolutely
you know I try not to sound too desperate as I desperately say yes and then once I started getting the pain gigs I was like huh and 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 know you start playing with time and and and Pipeline and and then really quickly the day race just went up and up and up and I'm like uh you know I wanted a cash flow 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 like what we envisioned as our customer we're like we think each startup accelerator cohort needs three days of our time at two grand a day can we go around and get 10 of them to pre-order a three-day package for five grand um 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 Grand at work they haven't paid us we still have to do the work but it's like all right and that's when we transitioned into treating like an
agency and that was the point when we're like we need quality control like we need this to be the same and getting better every time and that's when we started introducing the processes and that did Celine paradi and I uh we like after every session we did the post boredom you know what
what worked what didn't and we we just really tried to improve and as we brought in other partners we're like okay how do we train these people like the quality is all over the map right they have good days they have bad days there are a couple 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 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 uh no uh Sal was technical I believe he was a coder and uh he had been the organizer of an unconference called lean Camp 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 uh Alex osterwalder talked to a 37 signal like business model generation talked to 37 signals talked to Eric Reese and his whole thing was like let's run these on conferences and bring together different creative communities and try to
like we're all working on the same stuff from different directions and early on it was it was amazing so I went to the first one in London and I was just like 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 and 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 like putting away the venue moving chairs mopping the floor like talking you know chatting with other
volunteers and 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 and I was like yeah and he ended up being my co-teacher and business partner uh
for quite a few years 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 I mean there's a lesson here 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 and I think you would have been all right if we're like see you later buddy don't let the door hit you on the way out because it was just an expression and then they're like
you know what have dinner with us and then one thing leads 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 like helping to clean up a venue and meeting your your future business partner 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 you know I was like uh homeless is a bit of a stretch because I had a warehouse but the warehouse had like 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 pour it into the jug and I had like 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 like pay the rent and afford food and the reason I did that I could have gotten a load of jobs at like startups I knew but I really wanted the open space because I wanted to learn you know like I just spent the last four years sprinting
I need some empty time in my calendar to learn from it and that's when I like started teaching and started working with other entrepreneurs so anyway uh so then that was probably like 28 29 and that's when I was starting that like year of like Warehouse living you know was I was going
to every event and and talking to entrepreneurs and if they're like hey like we need someone to talk I'd like I'll talk and I was just trying to like learn the craft right and share what I was like figuring out and it was helpful for me to process the traumas maybe too strong
a word but to like 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 like we had the world's best investors we had some of the world's best customers how do we still
fail ah um and teaching was like 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 the plane crash of our first business uh and yeah so probably I was right around
30. I'd say a little earlier probably 28 29 uh when I I was you know mopping floors and making friends and and trying to find places to share what I was thinking I thought for a minute you're going to break out into Kanye West song and Fries watching because next thing he's gonna
turn uh actually make a bends out of that Datsun you know there you are okay beautiful I love this I love the humility and and kind of your focus on trying to figure things out I think especially in young culture today it's all about like achieving certain things and and just taking as
many shortcuts as you can so it's refreshing to hear that sometimes you know you got to work through the process I 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 you know and getting paid for it
um people think that your day rate is connected to your fame or your charisma and that's a little bit true if you are doing like corporate dinner parties and you're trying to be the motivational speaker at a corporate dinner party and there it's really helpful if you happen to be Barack Obama right
or like 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 and after that you're actually paid based on the skill of your craft not based on your level of Fame and
I saw without fail in myself and everyone we coached to do this their day rate increased as they got better and it like they'd be famous and they'd be like my time's worth this and it's like no but your your skills are down here like you know but I can teach you to
get better and then they'd see their day rate increase super predictably and it wasn't about Charisma it wasn't about Fame it wasn't about Instagram it was about like getting better at the craft and the people who embraced that did really really well okay so earlier before we started recording I mentioned this person's
name her name is Christine looser and she shared a an idea with me I'm probably on a butcher 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 in person uh for 14 weeks at private art schools and I love that aspect of it and I'm always interested in the craft of teaching and how you do it how much uh 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 and and 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 in case you're in a place where you can't do in-person events on uh cohort based learningonline
communities that kind of stuff okay so we're new 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 um how to design and teach workshops at work every time the workshop Survival Guide that the teaching format should
should be like designed for what you're currently teaching it needs to be matched up perfectly and so many of us just know the lecture format that's the one that's most popular if you're going to events at conferences there's going to be a parade of speakers up on stage to speak anywhere between 18
minutes to an hour or so and then you realize like 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 and you also talk about there's like five essential teaching formats and let's get into
it 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 like let me just say that the reason you want to switch and the difference between like 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 speaker sort of 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 uh it is your job as the facilitator to maintain the audience's attention because without energy they can't pay attention or without attention they can't learn right and you don't want them to finish the day shattered and exhausted like you want them to finish the day fresh and excited and ready to
go apply what you were talking about so so that the and the reason I mention that now is because switching teaching formats are just like the style of your teaching the way you teach is 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 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 and and you you're using that novelty of not because like haha I'm being a funny clown look
at me being a hilarious dancer on stage you you're not doing that you're you're triggering novelty by like the the structure of the teaching right and then their brain goes this is different I'm engaging with different people like that you know and and that's enough that and good coffee breaks and and you
hold their energy level all day um you you actually include in the first part of the book like a timeline like I think it's nine minutes break 90 minutes break and you have to break quite often have longer lunches and things like that and you you get into all the Nitty Gritty stuff
I even wrote in my notes Here why 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 lecture format this is like what I think you refer to as book knowledge the transmission of information I know
something I've read something I've seen something I'm just gonna transmit it to you 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 right as a facilitator your Edge your
like unique value is not in being an in-person expensive stuttery YouTube right that they can only watch on single speed and can't skip around on like that's terrible that's the worst value proposition ever like so like yeah you're gonna need some lecture but it's got to be a situationally and it like like
a great way to use sure is to bookend and exercise so let's say you're doing a like if I'm teaching you to do a customer feedback conversation or pre-product like you're trying to evaluate how much the customer cares 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 can 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 right you need to practice it it's like skateboarding I can't give you a lecture about going down avert ramp like we gotta like build up to that with Hands-On practice try it now in like increment incrementally difficult uh situations right 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 right uh 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 uh right but lecture usually shouldn't stand on its own it's just not it's not what you're doing as a facilitator and I find it then ironic too that most events that I'm booked for I I want to do a workshop where I wanted to do something more interactive and
they're like no just tell us what your deck is going to be about to finish your slides so why is that if we understand I think instinctively that that's not a great way to learn and you don't want to a poor replacement for Google Wikipedia or YouTube why is it that's like so
many event organizers seem to prefer and insist this is the format 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
like and these are cynical value propositions it's a long chain of people doing things for appearances and like where's the value right there are gigs like that fine right you show up like if you are going to do that like yeah if you can give people like one idea that they reflect on
fun like you did the best you can um something I learned doing a lot of 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 like strained a situation and like
you can't beat yourself up over that stuff you you do the best you can you give the client what they want right and you try not to book them again but there's other places where yeah they'll work with you they're like this is what our people need they're they're entering the room in
this place and we need them to leave the room in this other place like able to understand something able to do something and that Delta like what they know what they can do what they believe between when they entered and leave that's like your value right and 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 you know uh 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
to be practicing even the wisdom the decision-making muscle by working through an ambiguous case study or like let's say that I I tell you that uh the most effective way to build whatever like some sort of Indie career it's like 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 gonna 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 like sending newsletters makes me want to
cry and die and so I don't and like I've built a pretty successful creative career without ever having a newsletter because that's not an activity I enjoy so like I could teach a group of people like the theory of an author platform or create a 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 like let's talk through that together right and then what they're doing is they're hap they've got the intellectual understanding I understand what not like what these platforms are and why they're valuable but then there's an
emotional understanding an emotional decision I'm 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 right um so and that's so valuable and like you can only do that in the workshop
format you cannot do that in a 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 like work through an interesting prompt question so
workshop's very powerful but yeah it's possible for the client to screw you like a bad room setup uh like fix 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're just
like you know you you try to deal with that in advance but it's like yeah sometimes it happens 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 are there is
some infotainment there's some inspiration or the famous face value and it seems like it's easier to sell it's like if if attendees stop buying those tickets then event organizers would do differently but promoting just from my own experience and running workshops that's a much harder proposition and 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 and 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 does it sit in a conference and like look at how many people
are taking real notes you know and no one's taking notes like they might snap a picture at the slide with suggested reading or links but it's like you know they're not there to learn it's fine though right like and that's fine like I did conference talks also if you're going to do this
as your career like they're great because one of the ways you get Workshop gigs is by giving conference talks like the the speaking world is very uh it's small and people who organize events go to events so it's like yeah you don't you like I don't know maybe at a certain Fame level
you can be too good for this stuff but but there's like an argument they're 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 like good catering you've got like 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 and yeah people 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 like over and over and over every time we hire a new group of of employees or every time we get a new investment cohort or whatever it is um so yeah it's like I don't know maybe a little hard to get started but once you do
you know you get hired over and over and over because most people are just terrible I go to enough conferences where most speakers on stage are terrible so the the ratio of work Shoppers are probably even worse because it's a much higher degree of difficulty to do that if you know the design
principles it suddenly becomes easy like the design principles are not complicated like if you like fewer learning outcomes you know 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 skill or is this decision-making wisdom or is this
like a personal how do I feel about it you know then 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 uh 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 uh and for me a good prompt is a clear question with an ambiguous answer there's no good to do like a small group discussion around
tax law because there's a factual answer but doing a small group discussion about I I don't know like how you're gonna handle like surprise expenses throughout the year it's like you're still talking about a boring Monday an accounting topic but suddenly you've given it an ambiguous answer so that's a meaty topic for
them to to anyway like these are are simple rules and 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 like you build custom decks of cards but you don't need to do that stuff just like bit of lecture try it now a bit of lecture small group discussion bit a lecture scenario Challenge and make that appropriate to what you're trying to
teach and then you know like it's suddenly amazing like like it's easy so I don't know why people don't do this is everybody doing it and I wanna there there are more questions I need to follow up with you on the workshop so but before I do that you said okay look you're
speaking in an auditorium it's a theater style seating uh 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 principals 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 your your speaker bio should be one sentence is the first thing I would say um it's like hey I'm Rob uh I've done a million dollars in royalties from self-published books and I'm going to share my experiences boom like one 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 uh one fact about yourself that's relevant enough for people to let you start talking like you already have credibility so another way to think about uh energy
and this is the same with writing books or you know designing any sort of Education experience um there's a level of Goodwill and your audience tends to start with fairly High Goodwill like they believe in you they're excited to be there uh 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 they like the suspension of disbelief snaps and they switch back to email or whatever um 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 like how many seconds we're not talking minutes seconds um and your speaker bio your intro you're like hey thank you all for being here what a wonderful event you're like decimating the audience Goodwill how few seconds can you
get it down to before that first aha moment or wow moment otherwise you do this is 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 the value per minute or the the takeaway is like what's
the audience's energy level throughout that's something and then like put the fun stuff at regular points like 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 have lost everyone they don't like you anymore like and you can't have
too long between good stuff you can't do like good stuff at the start then a boring 20 minutes then good stuff you need to like sprinkle the good stuff throughout and by good stuff I mean like what the audience was promised by the title of your talk uh so like the 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 like anything that you do that is like 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 by the the thing that was on the whatever the marketing material or the agenda like that's that's value you know and each time you do that it like it brings them closer and that's the same concept you do with workshops with 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 like a few minutes before they get the next learning outcome that moves them closer toward their ultimate goal uh so I would say that and then if
you've got a slightly flexible room setup 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 uh 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 like the end of the discussion but it's like
the the like emotional implications of raising funding is a very interesting one so it's like if you have like and you can occasionally get away with this in in um Stadium like a theater seating I don't like it because in Theater seating what happens is you go turn to your neighbor and people
like which neighbor you know 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 gonna sit here quietly for three minutes uh and 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 um 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 uh 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 uh you know 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 like 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 like standing up and telling us like 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 know 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 um like and then that gives you something to riff off of for a couple minutes and doing this like stand and share like
have them stand up have them face the attendees not you uh when they share this why you choose someone who you think looks like confident uh for the first volunteer um have them face the other attendees have them share then give them a round of applause everyone collapse you know then your next
attending 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 it leaves shy people behind
and people are always trying to find ways to sneakily self-promote themselves during q a but if you do it around small group discussion it's like just as engaging you've varied the teaching format right so you've totally fixed the energy level and and that that'll fit anywhere that you've got flexibility with your chairs
and that's a lot of the workshop set 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 you know way more money and then you can start talking about the the room setup you really want if you can tell uh my
guess he's he's very enthusiastic he's speaking really fast he knows his stuff he's very passionate and if 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 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 like 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 okay so we know that if you want to give 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 in pair discussions where they get to wrestle with ambiguous 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 try it out we make mistakes the next thing is this 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 for evaluation judgment decision making and lastly what some of us love and maybe hate our q a this
is where you're able to identify and catch major objections and maybe clear up some confusion but also because you talk about in the workshop Workshop Survival Guide that use q a as Flex time if you run out of time you kill the Q a if you end early you could use q a
and just open it up and that keeps you on schedule okay of those things I want to ask you this question when when we try the small group and pair discussions how do we try to work through in our mind now 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 teach uh talk about branding I show them a package I read to them the package and why I think it's I don't tell them why it's good just read it and they're like smiling with the
light this is really interesting and then I asked 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 is super clear of course it is there's like there's 10 things you could talk about and then inevitably when we
when we come out from the small group exercise they raise their hand they start saying crazy things I'm like oh my God are you guys where are you in this universe so how do you plan for that so that you can structure the question such that you minimize those random crazy answers that
then take you off path anytime you're asking people to do multiple things you're going to get bad answers because they they just can't uh so if I was asking them for two or three like you know design qualities um I would are there types of design qualities like is something aesthetic is something
tone is something typography um I would turn that into three different prompts that I ran one at a time and I would the first one would be like pick the top aesthetic I'm just making this up I know nothing about design like pick the top like picking up describing aesthetic quality that you
think like creates this or like look at the Aesthetics and like like describe it in an adjective that like does this and that and I would like 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 like combined with another group and we're going to do a DOT vote to like 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 are
now going to stand up and do a post up and put these sticky notes on the wall or on the Whiteboard and and like you're basically gonna Champion what your like combined group thinks is the most important quality or the most impactful quality so what you've done is you've now shifted formats like
three or four times so the energy level is Sky High you've brought in new voices because you've like you've shifted the group dynamic halfway through and you 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 side
and they go do this first then do this then they 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 like 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 got 60 seconds they're like you know their materials are in front of them they've already been introduced to their group um that's like cool that's time now I want you to do this boom five second
setup into another 30 seconds or 60 seconds um the energy level can be very very high it's very fun uh and you don't need to be like everyone stand up and do a jumping jack in these like dumb tricks that that beginner facilitators do when they're trying to show off their NLP skills
or whatever um like just just like tight facilitation with like clear prompts and then shift through like formats right and you build up so I used to do a business uh like an idea generation exercise in some of my workshops for bootstrappers you know who didn't want funding and like you started and
it's like write down 10 hobbies that you have and it's like cool like now combined with another person rank the hobbies in terms of business potential cool like not now like go and we're gonna like what are the three skills that you have that are most valuable cool combined with someone else take
the top hobby take one of the skills like what could you offer in this space and like at the end people end up with like 50 business ideas with five different collaborators but they got to it with a series of like 60 second actions right and the whole thing lasts 20 30 minutes
they have a blast they're meeting like and that's also functioning as an icebreaker because they're meeting a bunch of people but like icebreakers are garbage never do an icebreaker because an icebreaker carries no educational payload so that decimates your Goodwill right that hurts the energy levels uh you you want to like 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 right and then you you've killed two birds with one stone there like you've broken the ice but they've also learned something or or move
forward let me just slow down for the audience who are listening who 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
down breakdown 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 solve 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 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 like a kitchen nightmare or one of these celebrity chef cooking competitions right where you're like 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 to stack of Post-it notes probably a couple of markers and some scissors and tape maybe those are the essential Workshop supplies right yeah so my dream workshop set up just for the
record is Cabaret seed Inc 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 unnecessary sometimes but if you have groups of six then you
can do pairs triplet six like instantly with no transition time so the shorter your exercise timing is the more important it is to have smooth transitions in the facilitation right 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
the better the room setup the 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 like then then you're gonna need like slower Pace just as you know practically speaking and yeah like supplies you want on the
tables and and simple Workshop rules uh like you want everyone to be holding a pen and a pack of posters at all time because there's like group dynamics you 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 like
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 um a secretary seems like it's a role where someone's being generous but it's actually really really destructive to the to the group dynamics we
want everyone holding a pen everyone holding Post-its everyone writing it down I like posters I don't always use them but the nice thing is you can move them around so you can do these like combo chains you know like if you've already got the idea on the Post-it you like 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 like three different purposes I 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 it's optimal then you can transition much quicker and you can be more ambitious if not you got to slow it down you got to think about the Transitions and think about the exercises that you're doing
because 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 to think a lot of people in Silicon Valley are used to which is every person gets like 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 only have to count you can just look at it visually 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 yeah okay uh
exactly okay the 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 for my world this sounds alien because
we're thinking about like giving business advice you're like what's the try it now there 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 like give a little
Theory or give a little knowledge or a little framing or whatever or to give you a rest like from from practicing and talk about how it went so try it now is actually very familiar it's just it it tends not to be used with like business topics or like so for example if
I was doing um like I was watching some of your your um courses from from future about you know like negotiating pricing with a client and you're doing like awesome kind of role play right you're like you know ask me questions and I'm gonna and this is so cool as a format it's
a very different teaching format right like everyone's interested because they're a bit like is there going to be a train wreck like like is he gonna get stumped yeah so it's nice even though it's still like mostly you talking it's a different change in energy right so that's a new teaching format that's
going to hold attention um but like it's still you delivering the the right answers and you may do this I know that the videos are just sampled but like giving them a chance where it's like um 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 um open the envelope that's on the table in front of you okay it's gonna give you a simple uh like a simple pitch proposal like a one-page mini proposal um the client is going to argue you down right like I want you
to tell them how much this costs and the price can be there and it's going to be like a a scary High number that makes them emotionally uncomfortable I want you to say the price and then the other person's gonna say it's too much and just respond like that's it they've just watched
you do it uh but their heart rate is going to go up if that's something that's emotionally scary to them they're gonna stumble over saying twenty thousand dollars like or two hundred thousand dollars or whatever like is is high for the their industry um and getting over that emotional Hiccup and then forcing
themselves through the words that come afterwards that is the try it now practice right uh just like like with uh skateboarding like these silly examples work right because they're so absurd but it makes sense like you're not going to give someone a lecture about doing an ollie like a skateboard jump right and
then be like cool you're done that's all that's the theory have fun practice on your own like people would be pissed they'd be demanding refunds and stuff um but you're also not going to be like cool so this is me doing an ollie now everyone try because you're gonna have broken elbows everywhere
like there's like a a series there's a progression of uh things like the first one is you stand on the board and you just pop the front up you 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 like there's 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 what are the ingredients like the little exercise that I just mentioned uh is
getting people over the emotional fear of saying a big number and not feeling apologetic right and so that's not going to be necessary for every crowd if you're teaching people who are coming from like an MBA background for example or they're like switching out of Finance careers because they want to be a
creative they're they're not going to have that emotional blocker around saying big numbers so you would probably focus on something else if you're a 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 like this is why it matters who's in the room like 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 uh clear about what is this person at this moment need what's holding them back what are they scared of what are like and so when I'm doing ones for uh talking to customers
getting like 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 this person
like your partner is playing a customer you're 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 um and I'm like you have to learn about this topic without pitching your business like and we've just done
a whole like lecture bit about it they understand the concept not like trying like they cannot do it um 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 like giving like analysis right after the fact of their conversation
um and then as they they rotate right and they play each role and so they're like oh wow I see what this is like in the customer's perspective um and if you want you can keep running that with increasing complexity like you can take down the scaffolding so that it becomes more and
more uh real world right but I like start with lots of training wheels on usually now if you did that for experienced sales people they are going to hate you because they're gonna see that as really patronizing so again it's like you know your audience but for like first time entrees they're like
ah they're so excited to talk about their idea it's like that's what they need to get over um and that's how I designed the exercises is like you know what what what's holding the back What's blocking them where do they fall I like how you said that you're designing the workshop for people
who want to learn something about they want to solve a specific problem not yeah it's a certain type of person at a certain moment in their Journey right and so like they have a goal they have a problem and they're out of place um because one like dumb metric you can't like actually
get this number but you can guess it pretty well for your your workshops is like for any given attendee what percentage of the material is like blowing their mind and so your goal would obviously to be 100 now imagine an audience that is half experts and half beginners you are screwed because you
cannot get above 50 percent so your 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 like 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 got a mixed crowd is so so hard and there's just it puts a ceiling on 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 like entrepreneurs plus investors plus
press like I know I'm screwed before that session even starts right because I cannot possibly meet all their demands 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 yeah decide who's screwed uh honestly like okay because if you try to hit both groups you screw everybody like yeah like no one gets what they want so like 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 you know decision makers plus doers um at the beginning I'd say like hey this is on the Practical side for you know 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 like if you want to zone out and do email like I totally get it if you want to participate thinking through one of your portfolio companies or like channeling the energy of one of your employees like awesome um like but like really this
is for the makers and and hopefully like if you go back to your own work like maybe you'll learn some some like some ways to talk to your own team or like 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 like 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 right and then after that I'm gonna unapologetically focus on the group that I'm there to serve um 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 like giving two talks in parallel and half of it's always boring for one person or another um if you really really have to and I I've only done this once but it was super dire uh
you revert to lecture and you give like a four hour lecture and No One's Gonna Love it but it's like won't be a disaster uh and in some cases if that's the best play you've got that's like 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 it's like and if it's like someone you're gonna work with like if it was organized by a partner or yourself your own team you're like this we need to fix this at marketing level right because like we brought the wrong people in the room um
if you know about it in advance and you have flexible and offend you you split the group so you get a second facilitator and you split the group and you do two threads so you do the lectures all together but you split for exercises um but that requires usually like pretty complex setup
which often isn't available yeah well for a lot of us there isn't another facilitator teacher and we don't have that flexibility so I I can see okay to ignore in the group to serve and then try to frame it and and like don't force people to pay attention to stuff that's not for
them like yeah I like that so if the group is split like one third one third one third you're kind of hosed at that point 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 you're just dealing with
the wreckage and you try to get through it and do the best you can yeah now you said that uh oddly enough the the Saving Grace here is to switch into lecture mode now as you say that anybody who's listening to this they're gonna like wait a minute I prepared for a workshop
where am I pulling this four hour lecture out from out of thin air like you just happen to have a lecture ready to go uh 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 like 20-minute conference talk your
hour-long conference talk you're like uh your sales material where you like do a high level overview of the learning outcomes and the framework and the journey and that whatever for like the buyer like 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 gotta give something and I would prefer what I said first which is like 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 you know but like try to frame it I used to do uh these like train the trainer executive things and people would show up who were like business coaches it was for like a government um thing in Ireland where they were like training
a support 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 like the CEO you'd have the CFO you'd have all the like the executives the board of directors then you'd have the coaches who are actually working with
the scientist entrepreneurs right 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 uh 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 like that's a really important concept like how do we work that into our operational protocol so they were completely diverting from the workshop I had built but like their
discussion was 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 right and you got a bunch of Junior people who might have never sat down with this person before like there is
no conversation happening uh sometimes though mixing the groups can be really good like if 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 uh 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 you know and 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 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 like there's your Workshop skeleton uh so it's like but like managers and and juniors it's like wow what's the overlapping thread one group is terrified of the other group like how do we do this at
that point you like separate and damage control so a lot of this would be done beforehand because you know who's showing up yeah and 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 Engineers together yeah
and then is that one you you do an exercise and you pull a time out for yourself they're like okay I need to reconfigure this in real time it would hopefully not get quite that bad uh 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 know you're gonna check in with the organizer uh maybe when like there's usually some time at the beginning when people are grabbing coffee they're mingling they're chit chatting 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 like scanning for potential Workshop killers and like you now have some amount of time uh 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 organizer
you go hey this is a really different group than we talked about I need to make some quick changes like can we start 10 minutes late and I'm going to be over there and like can you like let everyone know that we're we're like kicking off in 10 minutes um this feels embarrassing
and scary because you're like letting the client know that there's a problem and they're like but actually like sometimes that's your only play but I kind of want to change tax here because we've we've gotten into like the disasters but I've taught hundreds and hundreds of these workshops and all sorts of price
points it's like one percent of the time that something like this happens it's very rare and if you do your prep like before you go into a client contract like you understand what you're getting into right because part of the sales process part of the prep process is to talk through this stuff
like I heard you describe it it's already a good fit for each other and I do this the same way with with workshops I'm like I am good with early staged entrepreneurs who are at this place like I'm I'm way better with techies and product people than I am with business people I
can I can work with business people but they don't respect me because they know I'm not one of them so like I have a harder time building The credibility and getting started it can be done but throw me at a room at techies and We're Off to the Races right and then I
have to spend less of my energy like getting them to take me seriously and we can spend more time delivering impact so like the vast majority of times if it screws up is because you haven't done your prep and if you do your prep right it's not going to screw up in the
this way and you can spend your time working with people you really care about helping and being at your best right and that's like that's the client management or the event management side of this like it's not 99 of Workshop stuff is done in advance but it's like way more than 50. it's
probably like 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 comps it's like less than half is on the day of in terms of the the impact is it's a design challenge it's a client management challenge it's like a
project management challenge like the facilitation yeah it comes at the end like it's the fun flourish but it's not the most important thing so it's a lot of work up front than the day of it's it's pretty fun and chill and you get to hover and listen and see that spark when when
somebody connects ideas I'm like oh my God Rob I totally know how to solve a problem I've been sitting here uh kind of stuck on for a while the one last area I would love just to get your your ideas on and expand on which is the scenario challenge we've talked a lot
about the other two formats uh 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 we're going to be doing things better so I think this is going to be another area for for improvement just
speaking for myself so the a scenario challenge is intended to build decision making or wisdom like think of it as like a 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 like 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 um 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 right with ambiguous or incomplete information um they will give a pre-reading packet to the students and they 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 like 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 I put them in the groups and they work through it as a group and you know it's like oh we think this and the professor says why did it didn't work super cool because people actually get to try not a Hands-On scale but they get to try a decision-making approach or
an evaluation approach um 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 um that's like the business school version um what I would often do in workshops is I wanted something that scaled more in terms of
small groups so I wanted to things to work in clusters of like three people or six people where it was less Reliance on me being a genius in front of the Whiteboard because I I found like I'm a genius like occasionally and I can deliver a really compelling like talk and occasionally I'm
just like firing on all cylinders but also a lot of the time I'm not like I'm ADHD there's good days and there's bad days like some days my energy just slips out from under me or I lose the the the thread completely so I can't rely on a workshop design that requires me
to be a genius or to like deliver like you know 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 uh which is either the slides or like the little handouts they
get so if I'm doing a scenario challenge if it's simple I'll put it on the slides um like well I mean gosh what's what's a good one uh let's say that you're you're trying to pitch your first project you know and you know what you're worth you know you've watched the Futures videos
about value-based pricing you know yeah um you know what you're worth and you can tell it's going to be a nightmare client you know they're giving all the warning signs but you it's your first client and they say yes but just like in a way that's like they way undercut your pricing you
can tell they're gonna hassle you through the whole project that's ambiguous right it's like wow like do we say yes for the case study or do we say no because we can tell they're a nightmare client um so that would work that scenario it's like 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 right uh 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 the piece of paper you don't want it to be too long because they're gonna read it live so it can't be long right because that like kills your your energy flow but it describes the situation uh
sometimes I introduce the like whole scenario like in lecture mode and then I'm like okay open your first envelope that's going to give you your task um they open it they read and they're like oh my gosh uh it's like what do we do like the task could be like we need to
decide like what to email back to them what's our like five word response for example like do we say yes do we say yes but do we say no but do we say no like do we say something else like so suddenly you're putting them in this decision-making scenario right um let them
think about that they're going to entertain themselves for 10 minutes for 15 minutes just on that right like and you're gonna 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 like you call it and then you're like hey you guys I heard you talking about like the dangers you know stand up tell us why you guys you're saying it's worth it you know because you overheard this when you
were walking around you can ask um that gives you the opportunity to give commentary you know and you can after you run a workshop a couple times I think this is important like 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 like designing a one-day Workshop might take you the better part of a month if you're really like high stakes trying to do it
seriously um 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 um so and that's what what I'm we're thinking about 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 um so you know 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 uh artists have this type of misconception and like like digital designers have this type and like you get it and you're not like that surprised after you run a workshop a bunch of times by like the questions and and so then you can
start to like 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 could be like well often what people fall for and then you can tee yourself up for it um and so people discuss you commentate or you know 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 know you got this back what now what does this mean um and you can build out these scenarios and it's it's cool like this would be a nice way like entrepreneurs never get why raising
funding on tranche trunches 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 like a great way to help them work through the decision making and
gotchas at each stage of that right so they're cool they're powerful um okay like another scenario challenge you might do is like 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
the timeline's changed maybe like the boss just got fired and their budget disappeared you can make this whatever you're trying to teach right then people like oh what do we do about this 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 like 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 like 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 right but like 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 it right so it's like uh either run test sessions I did one once where it was um we'd sold half a million dollars worth of workshops I got screwed the client sold half
a million 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 it they got half a million I got 20 grand for Designing this like one day that they'd sold um and it was very high
stakes right because this day needed to be perfect it was like pre-sold they'd hyped the hell out of it I was like I have to live up to such a high expectation um and we did but the way we got there is I I must have run that Workshop like 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 like refine and oh and then the kicker was I didn't get to teach the live session it was taught by teenagers so I had to design a million dollar Workshop that
would be taught by teenagers so it had to be like so bulletproof right like the material had to do so much heavy lifting and to me that was like the Pinnacle of like Workshop design so I was like like this has to stand on its own uh and we like we got there
we got there but it took like so much iteration so many live sessions so many hours that's normally not the way I do it because like 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 you know more refined and I iterate them each time to make them a little tighter well I would say this Rob just from here another story I'm like breaking out a cold sweat here 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 grand we know that but do you still do that or you're like I'm not doing that again uh I mean that client did end up being a nightmare that actually hired me uh to do another day like another Workshop
because like part like 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'm not you know I like I I didn't want to leave them hanging on part one but there was no way I was
going to continue working with them uh I you know what I don't think I'm a good fit for freelancing and Consulting it doesn't make me happy and I catch a lot of stress like I I don't seem to be able to put up a wall between these like the Project's outcome and like
it takes up my life I'm such an anxious like tightly strong creature so I like teaching you know I don't like Consulting I don't like doing it for someone yeah I don't know is there is I I'm you know you can never say never right because someone can throw like an absurd enough
offer where I'm like huh I really ought to do this for my my family's well-being but I will say it's not a it's not a product I am in the the habit of doing you know I kind of closed the book on the workshop side of my life you know we did it
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 like the the drama but I love stuff like this and it's one of the reasons I got so into writing books because I'm like I approach
my books in the same way as workshops I think about value per page which is value per minute I think about like the pacing of aha moments and Goodwill I think about like living up to the promise of the cover so I found that the workshop and the book design challenges are like
surprisingly similar um I guess that's there's a long way to say probably not but you know it depends how many zeros are on the end so for that one percent of the one percent 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 gives you the personal freedom I'm curious have you written the book as
a workshop itself 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 uh 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 gonna
do beta runs of the workshop with test audiences with a book I do a lot of beta reading and I I like I look at both qualitative and quantitative insights so we built a thing this is all through usefulbooks.com is our like thing around books and writing if that's relevant to anyone but
like 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 right we're not like spying on them or anything and so I like debug it I'm like wow everyone's abandoning like 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 like when I went in I'm like okay that is a bug in my book in like the reader experience of my book is broken so I need
to debug it and make it better um 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 are like very interesting not gonna keep reading you know not for me and so I was like huh
so deleted all that and now the book starts with like value pretty quickly I think um 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 right because like 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 like fix it live and then improve it after the fact with a book you don't get that chance so if you're
writing like 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 like 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 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 give people the workshop sheets and the task um 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 like my first book is about business and it had it's built around a really dumb metaphor called the mom test of basically the unconditional support and enthusiasm that you get from your brother like every Project's great at least my mom was supportive I'm told this is a bit cultural um but like
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 like the workshop had become my test environment and then you know and that book
has now taught at a bunch of universities it's I was looking right now it's lifetime royalties are at 997 000 so like within the week it should cross a million in 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 I don't know whatever you're doing like if you're Consulting is built around a design process teach that design process a bunch of times like like you're gonna make some money immediately while you're waiting for the big client uh and then you're also going to get better
because you're going to find like where your process is unpolished like teaching is is a great way to figure out what's not working right because people call BS on everything and yeah I I'm sure you know this one so and and that you just get better you get better you get smarter you
find the right stories you find the right anecdotes and then it makes it that much easier to productize um I actually tell people if you're writing a book and you don't already teach like you need to go teach before you write something because if you're not teaching you're gonna 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 like you talk but you don't learn like you need to be in the room to see where people are confused 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 just hearing you talk about your process about iterating and testing all your ideas I feel like we're kindered Spirits because I love to do workshops because of the feedback because I
need to learn and I'm not growing if I'm not learning and and before I go make a course I need to run that Workshop seven times before I feel like now is a good time worked out the Kings one thing 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 quote unquote 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 um 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 gonna have like a fixed amount of time this is a little different if you're organizing it yourself but they're still like how into the weeds can you go right like they're they're 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 yeah it's there is like you're choosing a starting point right you're saying like this this specific area so I'm gonna like frame the challenge so you're wrestling with a specific uh specific thing uh totally fine it's nice people learn better if they get to make
the mistake and try to do it uh because but you don't have infinite time so it's all trade-offs it's such an interesting design challenge right because you're how do you most effectively design it like spend a block of time or design an education experience that's used this block of time to deliver Maximum
Impact and you know I don't know it's I I don't know it's ambiguous yeah they're going to be different workshops though they're going to feel different right sometimes I like to see them fail because I want them just to have the Baseline so that at the end of the workshop like whoa the
difference might not be perceivable if they didn't start there like oh I always knew how to do this yeah I'm sure he 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 if it's huge enough
like you could take them down a whole scenario that's like why that backfires so like you could set it up so that their first move is always to drop the price or like you can even set up the first stage of the scenario challenges 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 like you know it's not like what you're supposed to do like 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 like you can just keep stacking like that is happening to them and like all the trouble you get into and they start to experience like why this seems like a good idea but isn't and why it's worth leaving money on the table sometimes
and saying like actually like we can't take this cake if this is how you want to do it um and how sometimes that's actually like the more profitable choice so like and and then this the the question to me is like a workshop designer comes back to like is that one of your
core learning outcomes or is that like knowledge that you assume they're already passed they right like is that what they need to learn or is that what they already know and like that's gonna change which point you you start at 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 get uh spend most of our time on a plane or train spend with their family or spend in workshops so it would seem like hey let's do this virtually everything's gonna 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 the little screen somewhere where not everybody's plugged in I would love for you to share your journey through that and and creating cohorts and how you've been able to transition
from Workshop to doing it online 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 the answers so I refuse to do online education for a lot of time um and it was really tempting when cohort or
sorry when covid first started people were trying to pay me my previous day rate for online teaching which I'm like this is great right like I don't even have to like leave home and I'm like my hourly rate is absurd like this is awesome this is the dream and I stopped doing it
because I I felt too constrained and I I do have like a slightly Rosier view now but I'll tell you what my challenges were where I got to and then you know it would 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 like switch people around physically right into different
seeds different places um think of like 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 uh like weddings have to move you into different types of spaces
for different types of activities to to hold your energy through the whole day right they have to give you food um the same as you have a full day workshop so like clients were like we want to give you this much money to teach like a four-hour thing or a three-hour thing and
I'm sitting there and I'm like how do I do this like first off which teaching formats do you have access to online you can do breakout rooms with small group discussion but then it's like 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 like dominated the conversation it's hard to even keep a uh prompt slide visible when they're doing a small group discussion so they forget what they're supposed to be talking about um stand and share afterwards is really tough because you're like when someone volunteer you're back to all the QA problems where
like you keep hearing from a weird sample selection bias group that you don't always want to be always hearing from um so I'm like okay energy levels are tough I'm really Limited in terms of my teaching formats uh like what do you do here uh and then so then I'm defaulting back to
lecture and Q a but I'm like if I'm just doing lecture in Q a why aren't I just doing this as a YouTube video and then people can like 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 yeah
but actually what's best and most impactful for the Learners would be if I just made a YouTube video so like 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
was like so I kind of stopped doing it but now we're in the process for the uh for useful books which is our thing for non-fiction authors like we're in the process of creating a cohort based course um and what changed it for me is community so we started an authors Community when
the book came out so three years ago and there's not been like hundreds of authors who have gone through and the community does accountability like there's writing groups there writing sessions the community does goal setting the community does feedback um the community like has like the road map of what you need to
get through and the resources in the checklist so 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 uh you know like 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 pre-record that as a YouTube video and be like watch this first um so then what is the live session valuable for well
people like live sessions because they get to have their individual problem solved um or because they get to talk to other attendees and like actually like wrestle with real issues and you know make it personal but that's not the way most Cooper base 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 and it's like oh sorry there's too many people so we don't have time for Q a it's like why are we doing this live if you're not taking advantage of live as a medium so uh I'm gonna be
like hey read these chapters of the book or watch these videos so like partial flip clap shroom then when we get together it's going to be uh it's like dissecting case studies because that's something that's good live I'm gonna be like okay we're gonna talk about what fuels the recommendation Loop for non-fiction
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 like break them down like why does this work let's work through it okay like discussion here's the challenge like 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 like 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 uh which aren't already provided by the community if the community does accountability feedback a bunch of other stuff the book itself and the YouTube archive does like pure book knowledge and book knowledge uh and it's like well but there's still a gap right so I'm almost seeing it as like
I don't think I would do a cohort based course if that's all I had but I feel like I could add a couple important teaching formats on top of the rest you know and that overall we can provide a way better experience for uh for for aspiring authors you know who want their
books to do better that's all 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 like over complicating it like how do you guys keep your your courses Punchy and impactful it is a 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 is built to be taught online so the best way I can describe this is and this is a trick I 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 uh event organizer host 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 because that would make the job of the teacher or the facilitator much easier right because 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 minor p's and q's 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 ten 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 the rooms like
hey yeah are you all stuck without being like big brothery and it's like is there something going on and then you realize uh 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 like you could
do this with keynote I've done this with Keynotes pretty fascinating to see people design in real time with very simple tools it's manageable the idea is there is to like uh 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 with Post-it notes on like a fig Jam or something you could do it with oh that's that's a really really cool concept yeah and then that in addition to giving you a view onto what they're doing um people love like seeing a
big pile of activity they love seeing like visual proof of stuff they did during a workshop this is one of the reasons why a lot of facilitators are so obsessed with like 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 you know look at all these ideas um and even if it's not super actionable like the artifact is powerful and it like leaves people with a little bit of a high and so I I that's actually an amazing guiding principle and constraint for the exercises like there has to
be an artifact for everything you do unlike online and it solves two problems fairness yeah 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 touch screen 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 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 like this is I'm never sitting down while I'm teaching so my energy is different right and so we don't have dedicated teams to run cameras for me at home or my home studio so there's 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 whether if there's a whiteboard it will ghost you out it's using technology to compare what what your 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 it 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 to 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 that'd be super nice um I've been using yeah I mean there's so many places where you just want to do
a quick whiteboard sketch and yes it's just not easy and the friction like oh small thing but also a big thing is like 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 like all these little like formations start stopping 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 um online stuff like uh let me just share this screen
hold on this video is buffering stuff like that just decimates your attention levels and online like the the suspension of disbelief is so much more fragile and once people decide to open Twitter in another tab like you're done for right like yeah and so the the attention challenge is is higher Stakes uh
online so yeah I 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 the the the artifact that they've been building together you you want people to be distracted by like continuing to work on
their Post-It note pile or continuing to work on their mock-up design like they're just distracted by the workshop right as opposed to to completely clocking out um there's something that uh because I got access to this that YouTube trying to address the use of YouTube in 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 prep load 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 that's your envelope everybody go 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 right so there's some some challenges and I think a tech company that once it dresses 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 the one that seems like I'm keeping an eye on is butter uh I think it's butter
butter dot us butter dot us and they're specifically designed around Workshop facilitation um a disclaimer like I really like what they're doing but I still don't use them uh and it's like it's for very small issues like the um very small issues of like 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 product like building in agendas and timings and um different like facilitation formats can be like pre-created with certain like this many seats with this prompt slide on this
timer so you can do a lot of The Upfront setup to your facilitation uh 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 it I think there's a way that this solves a lot
of problems so gather town is one that I looked into which is like a 2d Super Nintendo thing where everyone makes a little Avatar um and you can ahead of time you can like build a physical space and then you you can set triggers in the 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 like the videos pop up so that they're only seeing the people at their table um and like over here it's like whatever again it's like a little bit frictiony and a little bit like
I was like oh like I've got authors who are you know 80 years old and aren't that comfortable with with tech and certainly don't know like the video game metaphors so like for them that's going to be a tough thing to get 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 it's like like we do need better tools if you're willing to combine Community email like upfront video flip classroom like but it's hard right because then you're
building like this full Tech business that's like quite operationally complex and teachers have enough to worry about already that's better tools would help they're getting closer there's people working on it I'm excited I think so um I think Zoom is an excellent video conferencing application that's been hijacked and became the default standard
in which everybody communicated like overnight because of covet and they won that battle it seems like but now we're having to force it to do things it wasn't meant to do and they're not necessarily serving the education Market specifically something I recommend for uh anyone watching this you know Freelancers everything is to
get comfortable with um get comfortable with OBS and because this is important for client pitches and proposals also I'm sure you've been on like 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 uh you can set up a virtual camera so right now um I don't know if it's gonna work but like I like I don't have screen sharing permissions but I can like do stuff to the screen right 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 and it's like that's happening through OBS and you can do really nice stuff with like instead of doing a picture
in picture where you've got a tiny face and huge slides you could be like side by side which is what I use if I'm presenting so it's like uh phone like phone portrait slides and beside it phone portrait face and it's nice um and if you're with a client you can just be
like boom and like your stuff pops up and you didn't need to ask for permissions and you can put like the visual effects and it's a nice way for both teaching and selling to be a little bit polished and just you know 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 yeah I I chatted with a gentleman who had a very sophisticated stream Deck with I think ecamm or OBS with multiple presets and the way he was able to run a zoom call was ridiculous it's on 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 of buttons and it does like picture in picture but it's like
a round cutout he has this thing that was really cool uh 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 super sophisticated stuff I mean you can basically set
browsers as your your video Source you can do all sorts of stuff is this going to work now so yeah sit here if like I need it to show a visual I'm just like here I am showing a visual I mean you'd want it full screen I like it's like you didn't give
me screen sharing permissions and it's there me in a little circle right and I'm like showing stuff uh it's like that's it and it helps like all this stuff is is it adds to your polish so if you got to do stuff online you're kind of working against attention and friction so you
know I'm not a huge fan of tricks and tactics what I 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 you're in a tougher situation in my
opinion okay well not that you need my endorsement you don't need it but I think you're a super cool guy a 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 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 doing 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 it's kind of like a a sister to making a workshop but uh if you want to
make a book you know turn your Workshop into a book or vice versa that's really my focus I'm trying to like the publishing industry is like 100 years behind and authors are still writing non-fiction as if it was like fiction or Memoir and stuff it's like there's a different approach to structuring the
education and designing the product you know it's very similar to what we talked about with workshops so that's all at usefulbooks.com where we've got the authors Community we're about to kick off the course so you know if you got a book in you you want it alongside your Workshop that's the that's the
place to find me we can hang out and write together it'd be great wonderful usefulbooks.com will include the links in the show notes so make sure you check out there along with all of Rob's social feeds uh Rob thank you very much for coming on the show as it's been an absolute blast
Chris thanks for having me thank you [Music]
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