177. The BEST Workshop Design Framework in the World? (Storytelling)
HATE clunky workshops? They’re super annoying and they make it harder to learn.
Here’s why:
❌ No direction means information is less intuitive.
❌ No clear purpose means you’ve got no….purpose…
❌ Poor pacing rushes crucial insights or drags simple stuff
What the solution?
Design your workshop like a story arc.
Result?
A workshop that feels whole and creates genuine “aha” moments.
Want to see how this can work for your next workshop?
Then listen to this week’s guest, Rob D. Willis who’s taking us on a deep dive into how you can design workshops that flow as smoothly as stories.
Rob is a storytelling consultant and workshop facilitator who’s on a mission to unlock your potential with clear storytelling techniques.
Resources
Register for the Coaching-as-Marketing Blueprint training.
(It’s FREE)
Listen to Rob’s Podcast
Transcript
Rob Willis:
imagine if you watched a film of just one camera angle, one person speaking the whole time. It would get terribly boring. The way to maintain engagement is contrast. So you have people changing, different characters speaking different scenes, different things going on. The same needs to be true in your workshop and you need to think about how the different experiences go against one another. So you’ll start with speaking, then there might be a pair exercise, then there might be a video, then a discussion, then a small group exercise. It needs to keep changing. If you have too much of one thing for too long, you will inevitably drop an engagement.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your Standout Business Coach, and today we’re talking about what could be the best workshop design framework in the world. So if you’re one of those people who absolutely hates those clunky, boring workshops or maybe you’re someone who’s been leading a clunky, boring workshop my guest today storytelling coach and workshop facilitator, rob Willis he’s coming on to break down how you can avoid the pitfalls of running a workshop that just kind of drags. Designing a workshop that is truly engaging is actually one of the best ways for you to stand out with the work that you’re doing, because from time to time, we always have to make some sort of presentation, and we all know what it’s like to die by, know, die by PowerPoint presentations that go on and on. If you’ve ever been in the corporate sector, those things are rampant and they’re to be avoided like the plague. It’s really timely for me because later this month I’m going to lead a one day virtual workshop and I do not want it to suck. Today, rob is here to help us uncover the secret and spoiler alert the secret lies in storytelling and turning the whole design of your workshop into a kind of narrative arc. So stay tuned, because we’re going to take a deep dive into how you can design workshops that flow as smoothly as stories, and if that sounds good, let’s start the show.
Brad Powell:
Before we get started, I’ve created a masterclass that I’m presenting in January. It’s called the Coaching as Marketing Blueprint. I’m going to present the full-on model on how you can create your experiential offer so that when people come in contact with you, what they actually get is this experience of working with you, which actually takes them one or two or three steps closer to the destination that they want to go. They see you in your zone of genius and they see you as possibly the only and best solution for them, and they believe in the solution because they go. Wow, I’ve just had the experience of doing this. Now I know it’s possible for me and I want more, and this makes you super attractive. So if you’re interested in that, the link to the Blueprint Masterclass is in the show notes or you can go to awesomevideomakerscom slash Blueprint. It’s free and you can thank me later. And now back to the show. All right, rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Willis:
Hello Brad, Good to be here.
Brad Powell:
You know, this whole conversation was inspired by a LinkedIn post you did recently that I saw, where you really broke down in detail how this can work and basically you’re telling the story of a workshop you led recently with about 200 people and how you had created this arc, so that the whole thing was like this long, engaging journey that you were taking people on, and to me that’s super intriguing and I really thought, ok, well, this post is cool, but can we go deeper? Can we actually take a couple of the details so that not only myself but everybody listening can figure out? Okay, for my next workshop, I want to be able to apply some of these strategies to the design of how I put my next presentation together. So when you look at workshop design, let’s just talk about, like, the big mistakes or the things that people have been doing that you really want to avoid.
Rob Willis:
So I think the mistakes for workshop design are kind of similar to the mistakes that people make in all kinds of communication which is rushing in too quickly with the answer and throwing it at people as a kind of shopping list or list of facts. I like to call it checklist type communication, which is I have all of these things which I’m going to tell you, I’ve done all the research, I’ve got the data. Here it is, and you go through this one after the other and you think, well, I said everything.
Rob Willis:
that means I’m right and it’s going to work. It comes from, I think, how we’re educated. We are at least where I was educated in the UK. It feels like in exams we were pretty much judged on quantity of information and accuracy of information. But when you get into the working world you realize that quantity and accuracy is not the way you build impact, and definitely when it comes to delivering a workshop and you’re trying to get people to change behaviors in some way, you’re going to have to find more of an arc. So, yeah, happy to take you through this. Where do you think we should start for people?
Brad Powell:
The first thing that you mentioned was just mapping out the journey, and I really like the idea of looking at this as a kind of a journey, that it’s a path that you’re outlining and saying here, we’re starting here and we want to go over there yeah and so what were the elements that you include in? Just the features of of any kind of map like that?
Rob Willis:
okay. So start super simple, as I would say, because we’re trying to move away from the checklist lots of of information and really break it down to the simplest story structure there is, which is beginning, middle, end. Just like your mom used to tell you at night, a story just has a beginning, a middle and an end, and any piece of communication does as well, and I think that’s how we need to think about it. Now a good question would be okay, what’s the beginning, what’s the middle and the end? So the beginning would be where are your audience right now, the people in your workshop? Where are they? What is their problem? I believe it was.
Rob Willis:
Aaron Sorkin said that all the story is is a character who wants something and there’s an obstacle. So identify what is that obstacle. What’s keeping people up at night? What are they worried about? The frustrating thing here is they may not be totally aware of the problem that you’re going to solve for them. You need to start where they are and show them what the problem is. Yeah, but anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. At the beginning, understand what is the problem that you’re going to solve and at the end, what is success going to be? What are they going to be after this workshop with you and the middle you fill this in afterwards. It’s very intuitive from this point If you understand where people are and where you want to get them to work out the top three things they need to know the high-level topics, the high-level takeaways that they would need in order to achieve that goal.
Brad Powell:
So just give an example In the workshop that you were leading, what did that look like? What was the beginning? And what example like in the workshop that you were leading, what did that look like? What was the beginning and what was the end to the?
Rob Willis:
stuff that you were talking about. Yeah, so the reason I needed to spend quite some time on this was that workshop was actually a series of three workshops, for a lot of people and it wasn’t compulsory to go to all of them.
Rob Willis:
So not only did I have an overarching flow for three workshops, each individual one had to have its own particular arc as well, so I needed to work on it on two different levels. I guess it’s similar if you’re creating a TV show Each episode needs to have a story arc and then that feeds into an episode, and the episode feeds into the series and the series into the world of the story. So you know, that’s nothing unusual about that, I guess. So what I did was I sat down with the clients and I discussed what are the kinds of challenges they see in the company. To make it easier for me, I’d worked with the company a lot, so I knew a lot about them, I knew about the challenges they had, I knew about what they had to do.
Rob Willis:
So I had to think about okay, what are the three professional environments in which these people are challenging to communicate? And I broke it down into three topics. In the end, the three workshops were nail your next update. That was the first one. Two was about driving action, about persuasion, which I feel was like the next stage. And step three was more about collaboration. How do you actually work with people? All under this arc of storytelling and more effective communication at work all right now that we have this, let’s just call it destination.
Brad Powell:
We know where we’re going, we know where we started and now this is the there’s the messy middle part, like somewhere in there. There there’s obstacles, but there’s also solutions, and there’s probably more than one along the way, especially if you’re doing what you just did, which was like a three separate stages of your workshop. So talk a little about encountering the obstacles along the way and then picking up, like I know that in your post you were talking about like insights and aha moments.
Brad Powell:
That you want to slot in, and I think that this is something to really be thinking about for a workshop thing. I think most people make the mistake of thinking that the big aha is going to be at the end, like at the end I’m going to reveal the final thing and be able to go oh my god, that’s amazing, you blew my mind. But actually you want to be shifting and changing perspective along the way so that you’re pulling people along with you.
Rob Willis:
I think so talk about that process so, firstly, I would say the mistake, or rather it is a mistake to feel that you are the one who has to reveal the aha moment. In fact, I would say that it ceases to be an aha moment if you are the one who reveals it. The idea is you want to build up a kind of tension and create an environment in which people kind of come to the answer on their own. Now, this totally depends, of course, on the size of group. If you’re dealing with 200 people, then you do need to explicitly say what the harm mode is. If it’s a smaller group, then you want to create exercises and discussions and give them questions that lead them to coming up to the solution themselves. When they have some agency, it’s more relevant to them and they’re more likely to follow through on it. I mean, you coach, don’t you Brad? So I imagine you’ve got some experience of sharing questions with people and they come to the answer themselves.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, absolutely that’s the. I mean that’s the main job of a coach is not to really say stuff, it’s to ask stuff, and it carries over into the podcast realm. I mean, one of the one of the ways that I hone my skill as a coach is by doing interviews like this, where I’m constantly asking and I’m doing my best to listen. In fact, it’s one of the biggest reasons why I do the style of podcasting that I do, which is more conversational, Like I don’t have a bunch of questions that I came up with earlier. It’s more of we’re starting a conversation and I’m listening to what you have to say and then that’s. That’s keying something in me that I can add to our discussion.
Rob Willis:
Yeah, I think that’s it’s a relevant way to think about building a workshop as well. Again, it totally depends on where you’re doing the workshop, how many people are there, etc. But it is a conversation and you are building something with others and they will appreciate more the stuff that they were able to have some agency in creating, the stuff that they were able to have some agency in creating. Very often you’ll get requests for workshops which are like oh, can you just give us some tips? People feel that that checklist-style approach of just deliver bits of information, that’s going to be enough. But think about any of the big breakthroughs or the achievements that you’ve had in your life. It’s knowing more didn’t make them happen. Taking continuous action did. And when you’re planning a workshop, you need to be able to visualize what that will look like.
Rob Willis:
To give it an analogy, one of my previous jobs I guess when I really learned about storytelling was I was working as a tour guide in Berlin and I would have to find routes for people starting in one place, finishing somewhere else, and that route would have to have some sort of narrative arc to it and on the way you’d need to build up a whole story for them. You’d also tell the stories of the individual points You’d need to think about, okay, what are they doing before and what are they doing after? And it would need to make sense in the idea of their day. You’d have to think about where are they going to get a little bit tired? Where are they going to have questions? It’s the same principles for building a workshop, actually for any, you know, building a meeting, a keynote. You need to think about what’s the context of what you’re doing.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, that’s so interesting that you’re doing working as a tour guide. It reminds me of my past life. I was an outdoor educator, working for Outward Bound and taking young people out into the outdoors. And the cycle of our facilitation. First of all, we’re really facilitating how to confront some kind of challenge in the outdoor world and be okay with being there and be okay as a group working together so you don’t just all melt down, and also individually, how you can meet the challenge and be comfortable and confident in that kind of environment. And but. But the truth was that from day to day there were all these little cycles of activity that you know things would.
Brad Powell:
Things would happen spontaneously and some things we would plan. But the facilitation was where’s the group now? Where do we think they want to be, and how can we facilitate the growth that will allow them to get there?
Rob Willis:
Yeah, and you also have to, of course, think about all the stuff around it, like okay, what’s, what’s their limit? What, how far can they go in all of this? Right, if you’re dealing with a group of teenagers who have never climbed a mountain before and you send them up K2 or something, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Brad Powell:
It’s not going to work very well.
Rob Willis:
Yeah, you need to find a challenge that they’re going to be able to engage with in that. Well, we’re talking about workshop, but in that instance, the experience- yeah, instance the experience.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, yeah, I used to uh talk to the staff about having virtual tachometers so you can gauge and have a tachometer. That was for the students and you’re always watching and make sure that you know there’s. Sometimes you would have it like do things so that you know that they’re going to go into the red zone and they’re going to be challenged there yeah but make sure that they’re not so far that they’ll never come back like they’re going to just be destroyed there, but sort of like.
Brad Powell:
There’s this thing of bringing them up and then helping them come back out, kind of thing, but at the same time watching your own tachometer so that, no matter what’s happening, your own tachometer is never going into the red yeah, so because you need to be the one helping them.
Rob Willis:
If they can’t, it can’t go any further right, yeah you need to find the, the limit, the, the bounds and and I think, visualizing all of that, then you you will kind of know what’s required for the rest of the workshop. You will have such a clear idea of okay, we start the workshop at this time in this location. It’s online or in person. What are they doing before? This is how we’re going to get people into the right frame of mind. This is the exercise that’s going to help them engage with the problem and see where they are right now. Then these are the three main topics and for these topics we’re going to watch that video or have that discussion and discuss this question. They’re going to do this particular exercise and at the end of all of this there’s a exercise where they can bring everything together and try it out, and at the end we’re going to discuss how we’re going to move on beyond the workshop.
Rob Willis:
You can really see everything without having made a single slide by this point. You know exactly what’s going to happen, you know what you need, and then you can just sit down and methodically go through putting it all together and you feel ready for the workshop at this point, and the weirdest thing I found from working like this is. For some reason I always seem to finish pretty much exactly on time. Having said that, now I’m tempting fate and I’m not going to go terribly over time in the next workshop. But when you have this clear idea of how long is it going to take, this is going to take them a bit longer than there’ll be a bit of a fumble to get them back to their seats for this bit. Once you have all of that taken into account, you can kind of judge how long it’s going to be quite accurately actually.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, that’s great. I can really appreciate that. I mean because there’s a lot of elements, especially when you’re facilitating group exercise. You really don’t. I mean you can put a time limit and say, okay, put your pencils down or whatever, but still people are always wanting to ask questions. Some people, when they ask a question, they tend to tell their own story while they’re doing that, and so it can take a lot longer, and so it’s a real trick to pay attention during those moments.
Brad Powell:
So when you’re looking at, like, this whole picture of designing a workshop with this narrative arc as a thing like I see it as, especially when you’re talking about doing a series, which is great, like we’re, we’re constantly, as business people now compelled to put out various kinds of content, and a workshop or a masterclass delivery is just another form of that content and we are doing things not necessarily repetitive in that you know, if you’re working for a particular client and they want to hire, you do something with a group of people that they’re going to want to come back.
Brad Powell:
Like you leave an appetite, so that you’re building something that the experience that they’ve had is so compelling that they’re going, oh, this is fantastic. We could certainly use a lot more of this, and so this is what I want you to speak to in terms of design elements that not only are getting them to the destination but are building the appetite and even kind of the challenge of you know, you guys as an organization or as a team, or whatever the group is like as a cohesive whole, or whatever the group is like as a cohesive whole, you guys have now achieved a certain level, but we’re just getting started Like there’s a lot more that you could do, and be putting them in that mindset of oh yeah, we’re on a pattern of growth here.
Rob Willis:
One thing I’d say is give a good enough workshop and they probably will hire you to give exactly the same thing again to other people in their organization, because most of the organizations I work with are at least 1,000, 2,000 people, and there’s usually more people who need the same training, and people in your group tell their friends about it and they want to come along to it. So have to acknowledge that some people won’t have seen your training already, and, though it may feel frustrating at times, repetition is kind of part of your job whatever you do. So that’s one thing I say. Sometimes you do need to repeat when it comes to developing. I think I want to make it clear that you shouldn’t ever hold anything back when you’re presenting. Give people a complete experience and they’ll want more, and there’s always more that you can talk about. There’s either taking the same principles and applying it to something else, or there’s discovering new principles. Very often it’s simply taking the same principles and applying them in different situations, but you can grow the topic as well.
Rob Willis:
Actually, at the end of last year, I gave a workshop to a team who I’d worked with already a workshop to a team who I’d worked with already and the client said okay, like most, almost everyone has done your workshop two years ago or something.
Rob Willis:
And I was a bit worried about this because I thought, okay, well, everyone’s done it, but there’s a few people who haven’t. So how do I include people who haven’t done it but also provide something new and exciting for those who have? And I guess the answer was just looking at what was going on right now, because there’d been a year to year gap in between the two workshops. They had slightly different needs, they had a new executive team who wanted them to communicate in a different way, and all I had to do was discover what is the new context. The principles of storytelling are the same I didn’t invent them, aristotle did, and it’s not really changed a whole great deal since then. But the context, of course, the reality of people using these principles, that changes all the time, and the demands of their job that also changes. So you’re always going to find new avenues and ways to apply this stuff.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, and one thing else I’d like to talk about is during the process of going through a workshop like this you mentioned this in your post, called it, calling it reality checks. I would call it in sort of a check in or a debrief, something like that. But there’s this element of you do want to check in with people to see if, like, where they’re at like, have they moved? Are they actually moving along the path or are they stuck somewhere, and so talk about the techniques that you use to do that kind of check in.
Rob Willis:
So this will very much depend in what kind of business you are in, if you’re B2C or B2B. B2c, in a way, is easier but harder in other ways. So B2C is easier to get people to make a change because they put their own money on the line. They want to do this, they are interested in it and if they’re interested in it they’re probably already okay at it. So it’s a bit easier to get them to implement things. B2b, which is where I work. So I am very rarely employed by the person who does the training or the facilitation of the workshop. I’m employed by their boss or the people team in their company. So they might be there thinking, oh what’s this for? Or I didn’t realize I had to do this thing, so that’s going to be a little bit harder thing. So that’s going to be a little bit harder.
Rob Willis:
The three pillars of learning are relevant content, a personal motivation and a supportive environment. Now in the workshop you only really have control over relevant content. You can make sure that it’s relevant and that it’s good. That should be a given, I think. Personal motivation you don’t have so much control over. The only control that you have is your relationship with the manager. So getting the management team involved, that will both make people more motivated but also create the better learning environment. There have been some jobs I’ve done where that wasn’t possible to have that kind of coordination and the challenge you find is people never have time for the training, they never have time to implement it because there’s something else going on and then boss told them they needed to do something. So they forgot to do what you asked. So getting their boss, their whole environment with you, that’s going to lead to a more significant change. It’s much easier to work with a team than to work with a disparate group of people in an organization. In some ways, I’d say yeah, absolutely Well.
Brad Powell:
I can recall being with groups that you know in the Outward Bound work. We also had professional development programs with employees from a company that would be kind of dumped on us. It was kind of like, you know, the teenagers would come and the parents had dumped them on us and the corporate people would come and the company had dumped them on us and them. You’re all going to go out and do team building in the outdoors and be whatever and made better. And a lot of these folks are like why am I here? Why did my boss make me do this? I’m just going to be miserable the whole time.
Brad Powell:
And so it was a really interesting magic act to work with groups like that and bring them to a place, like really help them come to a place where they’re really okay with what’s going on and not only that, but feeling like they really got value and benefit from the whole experience. And creating that kind of transformation was super rewarding when it was possible. But it’s super challenging as well because you’re just right, I mean, often the workshop environment is this it’s kind of like having to go to church on Sunday. It’s just like you might not want to be there, but the whole everybody is telling you that is something you just have to do.
Rob Willis:
It can be. But if I might just jump in, I think that if people are going into your workshop expecting a passive engagement like entertain me, impress me, it’s not going to work very well. It doesn’t matter how good you are, People need to be involved in the process, and I think that goes for when you’re presenting as well, or when you’re in a sales conversation. If people are not engaging with you, then it’s going to be very, very hard. It doesn’t matter how good your content is. So time needs to be spent at the beginning of a workshop, bringing people into your world, showing them what the problem is, showing them how it relates to them. That has to be part of the workshop. If you just go in and start saying this is how you do this, this is how you do that, people won’t necessarily see the application, they don’t necessarily see the need to do it.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, that’s probably the best piece of advice I can imagine. It’s just at the start. I mean sort of we used to call it framing. We’re creating a frame that we’re going to operate in and, of course, as you continue, you can keep on reframing, like you can bring in new frames and sort of set the pace and the scene you know before you actually start telling the story and are bringing them along the journey Super critical, so that people know what to expect. But they also understand that, oh, if I’m going to get anything out of this at all, I need to just do something more than just sit and have you be like the entertainer yeah, and some, some people you won’t successfully achieve that with, but it and it’s less to do with you than with them.
Rob Willis:
To be quite honest, there may be lack of interest. It might be that all you’re really good, or they think they are. At least it may be they have something else on their mind, some things you can’t control, but you can do your very best to control what you can.
Brad Powell:
All right. Well, I think that might be a really good note for us to close on. We’re getting right close to the end of the time, but if there’s one other thing that we haven’t touched on that you would like to impart around workshop design. I got a whole page of notes here. Really good stuff, but what would you like to add?
Rob Willis:
This is a tip I got from a book called Two Hour Workshop, which I think I understood intuitively but hadn’t quite grasped theoretically was that the way to maintain engagement is contrast. Imagine if you watched a film of just one camera angle, one person speaking the whole time. It would get terribly boring. You have contrast. You have people changing, different characters speaking different scenes, different things going on. The same needs to be true in your workshop and you need to think about how the different experiences go against one another. So you’ll start with speaking, then there might be a pair exercise, then there might be a video, then a discussion, then a small group exercise. It needs to keep changing. If you have too much of one thing for too long, you will inevitably drop an engagement.
Brad Powell:
Well, all good storytelling has that in it. If there’s nothing to push against, it’s not an interesting story.
Rob Willis:
And if the end is not different to the beginning, then it’s not a story.
Brad Powell:
Yeah right, that’s right. If there’s no transformation, then nothing happened. All right, Rob, this has been terrific. I really appreciate you breaking some of this down for us. If people are interested in connecting with you, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Rob Willis:
They can visit my LinkedIn. Rob D Willis, based in Berlin, should be easy to find. I also have a podcast called the Superpowered Podcast, where I talk about the unique stories of modern leaders. So I’m really interested in people’s X factors, how they got those and what I think is really unique about it is in every episode we give people an actionable ritual or exercise that they can try out for the next week.
Brad Powell:
Well, that’s cool, all right. Well, I’ll check that out. Well, I’ll make sure that links to both your LinkedIn and to your podcast are in the show notes.
Rob Willis:
I appreciate that.
Brad Powell:
Thanks so much for coming on today. This has really been great.
Rob Willis:
Thank you for having me, Brad.
