On this page you will find information and resources that will help you plan your collaborative workshop. While the topics are somewhat in order, you will find yourself tackling many of the tasks concurrently.
Once you have read through this page, consult "GATHER_Tying it all Together" for examples of how to effectively bring together these planning elements to build a purpose-specific meeting.
Charrettes take a lot of time to plan, prepare for, and execute, so before you get started, it’s a good idea to determine if a charrette is really the best tool for your desired outcome.
Work through the following Kinsley questions then read the GATHER materials posted below.
The attached Kinsley document gives a nice overview of what to expect in the charrette/workshop planning process, identifies the key elements and task suggestions for each, and provides a rough timeline of when to tackle different pieces of the planning process.
A general rule of thumb is one facilitator per breakout group (five to ten participants). Choosing your fellow facilitators should be pretty simple given RMI’s abundance of talent, and if needed, you can always consult the Subject Specialist spreadsheet on the google drive. Aim to include junior staff: we value facilitation as a core competency at RMI, so let’s start the learning process early to build a strong core of facilitation experts. If you’re collaborating with another organization to host the workshop, include their staff on the facilitation team.
Once you’ve selected your team, include them in the planning: background research, developing objectives, selecting participants, creating an agenda, basically anything pre-charrette. This ensures that all facilitators are on the same page, share an invested interest in the charrette, and are familiar with the participants and content matter. As the lead facilitator, you are responsible for your team being properly prepared for the main event.
Kinsley provides further detail for selecting the most effective facilitation team and suggests beta testing to make sure facilitators are well prepared.
Regardless of where you fall on the problem spectrum -- from unclear problem to clear solution -- you’re hosting the charrette because you face barriers in reaching the desired outcome. Attempt to identify those barriers and then research everything in the surrounding space. Through traditional research, interviews, any other means necessary, you’ll eventually find yourself in a position to form hypotheses for solutions to these barriers.
Next, go out and test your hypotheses: run them by experts or potential participants. Once you find yourself on the right track, use this process to shape your charrette objectives and further guide your background research. You may also find that barriers present a ready framework for designing breakout groups later in the planning process.
For the Battery Balance of Systems (BBoS) charrette held in San Francisco in November, 2014, facilitators hosted a webinar that outlined background data and presented their current framing of the issue to individuals in the industry. Facilitators took the opportunity to ask for any insight that may have been overlooked and used feedback to further refine the charrette structure.
Depending on the nature of your meeting, a fair amount of background research may be necessary before the planning begins. This is particularly true for charrettes with an unclear problem or those where the outcomes will guide the direction of an entire industry, such as BBoS.
Interviewing industry experts is a powerful means of gathering pertinent data. Come to each interview aware of the interviewees position and background and prepared with a script to ensure you fully cover the necessary topics. BBoS interviewed over 40 experts in the battery industry, you’ll find the outreach template as well as the interview script below.
Compile the data you’ve gathered into two pre-reads, differentiating information for facilitators with that appropriate for participants. Remember that participants are often very busy professionals who won’t have the time or attention for more than a limited amount of pre-work; aim for concise yet powerful. The facilitation team, however, should be fully versed so provide them with a more comprehensive amount of background information. The BBoS participant pre-read is attached as an example, it includes the charrette agenda and breaks the background data down by breakout group. The Autocomposites pre-read is also attached.
Crafting the right mix of attendees is the most important factor to a successful charrette. The participants are the heart of the charrette; they are responsible for generating ideas and producing outcomes, so put the time and thought into this process that it deserves -- a lot.
A few general tips:
Start with a list of potential attendees, use Kinsley’s categories of stakeholders to help you generate an exhaustive list:
Next, narrow the list:
Now that you've identified barriers and drafted hypotheses for a solution to your problem, it's time to ask: what are you trying to achieve?
It’s important to draft your objectives early and use them as a reference point and driving force fo you and your participants throughout the planning process and the meeting itself. As so, embrace the collaborative nature of the charrette and seek participant input and feedback in crafting the objectives. This will ensure that you’re working toward everyone’s goals.
In drafting objectives, think about the following:
Once drafted, put rapid cycle prototyping into action and continually hone your objectives as you gain a clearer understanding of the group’s shared intentions.
During the event, clearly display the objectives at the front of the room. You can reference the objectives if focus starts to stray and it serves as a sort of written agreement, holding your participants to the established deliverables.
Additionally:
GATHER likens the purpose, or objective in our case, to the north star of a convening’s design. They assert that any conference needs to achieve at least the goals of building networks and sharing learning. Going one step further, the primary purpose should fit into one of four types – influence, innovate, develop foresight, or align and act – and that this type should serve as a lens for making design decisions throughout the process.
Kinsley provides a grid for categorizing desired outcomes to help classify your workshop objectives as one of the following: agenda setting, approach defining, design creating, or concept generating.
Once you’ve conducted sufficient background research, established objectives, and have a clear idea of your participant list, it’s time to create an agenda. As with the pre-read, you should craft two agendas: a basic agenda for participants and a second, more detailed, playbook style agenda for the facilitation team. Starting this process at least two months in advance of the meeting is advised.
The agenda structure will vary depending on the type of workshop you are hosting, the overarching problem you’re addressing, the length of the workshop, the participants, and the desired outcomes. However, the overall structure should roughly follow the diverge, emerge, converge model.
Diverge: The first part of the charrette should be devoted to divergent thinking, which may be difficult for participants who are used to operating on a plan or who have come in with their own idea of the solution to the problem. This time is for opening -- opening the mind to challenge assumptions, opening the heart to be vulnerable and to truly hear one another, and opening the will to let go of pre-set goals and agendas and see what is really needed and possible. In doing so, the information, ideas, and opportunities start flowing. This is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism but the time for participants to populate their minds with as many and as diverse a set of ideas as possible. The more ideas your participants generate, the more you’ll have to work with in the next stage.
Emerge: The emerge stage is for exploring and experimenting with the ideas generated in the diverge stage. Here you’re looking for patterns and analogies, sorting and sifting, shifting perspectives, building and testing -- your participants will be breaking the problems apart and putting solutions together. Create an environment in which the unexpected, the surprising, and the delightful emerges.
Converge: During divergence your participants were creating choices, during convergence they are making choices. This is the stage in which you assess ideas through a critical eye and move toward decisions, actions, and next steps. The most promising solutions are those in which your participants are truly devoted to investing time and energy in developing.
Plenary and Breakout Sessions
The agenda will mostly consist of a mix of plenary and breakout sessions designed to complement the emerge, diverge, converge process. Try to orchestrate the activities to achieve the right harmony between creativity, reflection, thinking, energy, and decision making. You will find ideas for activities on the Plenary Tools and Breakout Tools pages of this site.
Breaks
Breaks are good for everyone:
Principles
Read GATHER’s Principles for an Effective Agenda, the principles are outlined here, but the details in the document are very helpful. They also have suggestions for structuring the flow of activities through six stages that mirror and expand upon the diverge, emerge, converge framework.
Participant Agenda
Provide the attendees a high level agenda in advance of the charrette. This will inform them of the expectations for their attendance and will clearly define the expected results of their participation. Also, clear post this agenda on the day of the event to serve as a reference for participants and as a tool to help you maintain structure and flow. Include the following information:
Facilitator Playbook
Expand upon the general agenda for your facilitation team, include the following:
See the attached eLab 2014 Member Meeting participant agenda and facilitator playbook as well as the BBoS and Autocomposites playbooks as examples. You may find the Kinsley spreadsheet helpful in developing a facilitator agenda.
Start the budget conversations upfront. Put thought into the following categories and use the details to facilitate budget talks:
Venue Ideals:
With a larger charrette, the venue logistics can become extremely time consuming. Start this process early and consider bringing someone onto the team who is dedicated to dealing with these issues.
Food and Drink:
Food is important. Good food = happy, productive participants. Borderline food = angry, annoyed participants. If you have to choose where to spend your limited resources, it pays to skimp a bit on the venue and splurge on the food.
Your venue may take care of food logistics for you, but if not, plan the details at least two weeks in advance.
The lists above provide the basics, a more detailed account can be found in the attached Reos document. Also consult Kinsley's checklists.
Procuring and transporting charrette materials are part of your facilitator responsibilities, they are most definitely not responsibilities that fall under Emily Loose’s or Chelsea Leber’s job descriptions. Not every item on this list is necessary for every charrette, it all depends on your agenda, but this is a good starting point.
If you are flying to the charrette location you’ll need to pack and ship your materials to the venue in advance, pay attention to timing and keep in mind that Fed-Ex does not deliver on Sundays. Also note that it is likely much less expensive to print materials at RMI and ship them to your venue -- printing at a hotel in NYC or a Fed-Ex in Hawaii can get pretty pricey, you’d hate to blow valuable budget dollars on printing.
General:
For note taking/recording:
For ideation/brainstorming:
A more detailed list can also be found on the Reos venue document and you can use Kinsley’s checklists to make sure you remember everything.
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