1.1 What’s the purpose?
You will need to have a clear purpose for the Creative Workshop in order to achieve your objectives and persuade people to attend. Being able to explain your purpose succinctly to colleagues is an important first step. Get some informal feedback as to whether the Creative Workshop is a good idea before committing to it. You could do this by asking the following questions.
- What is the exact challenge you wish to solve, encapsulated in one sentence?
- Would your target participants be excited to attend?
- Are you focusing on the most important issue, or are there other ideas to discuss?
Emphasise the Creative Workshop’s focus on solutions, as people are more likely to attend if they know there will be a clear output.
Case Study 1: A Creative Workshop in health education
Feven is a project manager delivering two masters programmes for health strengthening in a sub-Saharan country. The programmes are delivered through blended learning. Students, who are health managers in the health system, study independently, but attend a university for one week in four for teaching. The rest of the time they continue in their health management roles. However, there are problems with the delivery format of the masters’ programmes.
Students complained that they didn’t have enough time to study the modules effectively because of the demands of their jobs, and their line managers complained that their commitment and effectiveness in their jobs was compromised. The universities and academics were also struggling to timetable the teaching every four weeks.
Feven organised a Creative Workshop and invited representatives from the Ministry of Health, students’ line managers, the universities, teachers and students. Over the course of one day the Creative Workshop process was followed and some new ideas emerged. These included giving students study time and enabling students to delegate more work to colleagues, but the most popular suggestion was to shift the programme from a two-year delivery to three years.
This was quite a radical departure, but was welcomed by all stakeholders. The Ministry was reassured that its investment in producing the programmes would lead to improvements in health service delivery because students now had sufficient time to study without compromising their responsibilities at work. This also pleased their line managers, and the universities had more time to deliver the programmes in a robust way, placing less strain on their academics.
On reflection, Feven said that the greatest benefit of the Creative Workshop was that stakeholders heard the perspectives of others, and also appreciated that unless each stakeholder’s concerns were addressed, the project aim and many of its objectives would be undermined. The Creative Workshop provided an opportunity for reflection, and to reorientate the project so that it could deliver the intended benefits and increase the commitment of all stakeholders.
Activity 1
In the text box below, reflect on a situation in your work when this tool would potentially have worked for you. Why do you think it might have worked?
Discussion
A Creative Workshop can be particularly useful when there is a growing awareness among stakeholders that existing approaches are not working and the solutions, if not directly failing, are not delivering the desired outcomes. You might have thought about generating ideas for a new project, or a project extension, or any number of other challenges.
1 When you might use a Creative Workshop