Why Workshops Should be the Heart of Change Programs

Change Management work has evolved. In most ways, this is a good thing. We’ve realized that how we define change work and talk about it has implications. We’ve lived through years of executives saying things like, “We don’t need that soft stuff” and maybe even come up with some good ways to respond. Honestly, I’m still working on that one. We’ve realized that methodologies like Prosci are helpful for tracking and for simple implementation changes, but that they have major limitations for the types of changes most organizations are trying to enact.

The most exciting evolution of change work for me is the understanding that, at its core, managing change is about understanding and shifting how people interact. Now, this is a vast oversimplification, of course, but if you do an exercise to get to the root cause of why change is hard, it often comes down to individual reactions, interactions between people or groups, and habits (individual tendencies) or norms (group tendencies). The logical conclusion of this discovery is that change work is most powerful when it brings the impacted people together to create a meaningful experience for them. This catapults their understanding and engagement in change to a new level.

So, for the sake of demonstration, I’m going to do a little storytelling. The following scenarios are genericized versions of things I’ve seen a dozen times in my work as an organization development and change consultant. Keep in mind these are not formulas - they’re just examples of how something might be tackled. I can’t stress how common this first scenario is, and how powerful I have found (something like) the second scenario.

The Background

This is the story of an organization with leaders who believe in change management, and want to accelerate and smooth their change programs through planned methodologies and dedicated resources. Let’s say that this change is about a company-wide directive toward efficiency. Maybe this means using AI, maybe it means improving processes, etc. What this looks like can vary by team, but the leadership has done a lot of work to decide on this priority and communicate it to the teams.

The CEO (we’ll call him Ted) has brought in an external consultant to be the “change manager” (we’ll call her Wendy) and has held a session with his direct reports asking them to prioritize taking some time to work with Wendy to get her what she needs to shepherd this project.

Wendy is gung-ho and ready, and does a robust discovery to uncover the key tenets of the change, identify the key players, craft some messaging strategies for ongoing communication, and create a plan for interventions that could help people understand what’s expected of them. Let’s assume this plan is AMAZING, and that if followed to a T, it would mean the change would be in people’s bones within months (work with me, this is imaginary after all).

Story #1: Change is Planned, but not Prioritized

After the initial blessing of the plan, the consultant starts to hit some barriers. The communications are going out as planned, but activities beyond this are stalled, and she hasn’t been pushing Ted to advocate for them. None of the key leaders want to take time away from their teams.

“Everyone is too busy! They can’t possibly take two hours for a workshop. Put together a micro-training for them that they can do on their own time.”

“Are people ready for a workshop? I think they need more time. Please create a playbook for how this change should work, with examples and templates. You can work with marketing for the design. Maybe we can even make printed copies!”

“This is just one of four changes my team is figuring out right now. Please do what you can for now and come back to me in August.”

A theme starts to emerge: The organization believes that the consultant is responsible for the outcomes of this change, not just the plan to achieve them. This is a fatal flaw of any change program (and should have been addressed before the work started, but that’s not what this article is about!).

Soon, old behaviors arise. An outdated, inflated process maintains its stranglehold on an engineering team, and the team has endless reasons why. “The data is a mess.” “The XYZ team has to feed us the right information and they never do it on time.” And on and on.

A marketing team implements tons of efficiency measures, and their first three deliverables are shipped with incorrect information, blank pages, and even outdated photos. The CEO is furious and the change program is blamed.

A group of junior employees has banded together to create a working group focused on this change, and has done more than most other teams. They’ve figured out a way to responsibly integrate AI into their work, documented ten processes that could be streamlined simply, and even made a proposal to the CEO for where a small resource investment could save millions down the line. But they can’t get that work to go anywhere because no leader trusts that their work is solid.

So what’s going on here?

This is what happens when a change program is entirely reliant on communications. Everyone interprets it differently, there are no guardrails or incentives to guide people, and old behaviors, habits, and norms run riot. In this scenario, how much time is being wasted? It’s hard to quantify, but in my experience it’s MASSIVE - hundreds of hours between dozens of people, many of whom are highly paid and valuable. In the end, they will likely declare the change a failure, fire Wendy, and never discuss it again.

This is incredibly common, and in my experience how most organizations manage change.

Story #2: Change is Workshopped

In this imaginary future, Wendy contracts with the leaders for an initial two-hour session with them and then four, two-hour workshops with the entire company over the course of the next four months. One business unit will do it all together, and others might break them up. But the content will be similar for all groups. She schedules these well in advance, so everyone knows to save the time, and the key leader reinforces the importance of these with the team via a priority communication and a town hall meeting.

First, the leaders.

She works with the leaders first, taking them through a 2-hour exercise to get really deep into what this change actually is. They define it carefully, check each others’ understanding of the change, and discuss what good and bad outcomes could result from the direction they are giving their teams. What might be some unintended consequences? Are we okay with these? What are we absolutely firm about? What can be open to interpretation?

This workshop becomes the input for the sessions with the remaining teams.

Session One

In the first session, the whole organization goes through a similar exercise that the leaders do, except they have a solid, well-defined definition of the change as an input. They hear what the leaders discussed, add color to the potential outcomes and consequences, and they discuss what this could mean for their own team and their everyday work. They also speak openly about their concerns. Are they properly incentivized to do this? Do they know HOW to do this? What are the barriers?

They then leave with a commitment - to try one thing between now and the next workshop that will make this change real, and bring back a two-sentence summary of how it went.

Session Two

After a month, the organization is able to report back on their commitments and discuss their barriers and challenges. Perhaps they’re able to dig a level deeper to understand the root-cause of their own behavioral challenges. Or perhaps the team can jointly triage the challenges, and problem-solve together.

Session Three

Another month on, there is likely still problem solving to do, but it feels a tad repetitive. Wendy even begins getting some push-back from leaders about continuing the sessions. “People have engaged so well, isn’t the change done?” “Should we give people time back and let them focus on their business as usual work?” These questions are common, but because she has such a great reputation and a solid plan, she pushes them to keep to the four-session commitment.

Perhaps in this session they dig deeper into personal barriers. This is really where they start to see that through this process, every individual is learning to be a better employee (or even a better person) if the conversations are safe, free, and open.

Discussing challenges and failures is powerful at this stage.

A Check-in With Leadership

On the note of challenges and failures, Wendy decides to gather the leaders again as she continues to get questions about whether the sessions are worthwhile. She asks them: is there anything they want to adjust based on these sessions? The beauty of these sessions is that they don’t just serve as ways for the team to understand and learn the change, but they also provide invaluable feedback to the leadership about what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be adjusted. The leadership makes some tweaks to the change plan and vision as a result, even though it is uncomfortable to do so.

Session Four

In the final session, the consultant keeps it simple: introduce the leadership’s reflections, ask for thoughts, and then maybe do one more scenario-based practice exercise. The beauty of leadership adjustments after the first three sessions is that they truly make the team feel that they have been heard and that this work they have been putting in has been worth it. This feedback loop is essential for building trust and maintaining change.

At the end of this session, the consultant integrates 30 minutes for each person in the room to reflect - “What have I learned about myself?” “What am I committing to?” “What fundamental things about how I work need to change, and what do I need in order to do that?”

After this, her plan involves having another sharing session in 2-3 months. Keeping it in peoples’ minds is key, and rewarding them when they make progress, whether that’s through something succeeding or through something failing and them sharing the learnings.

So what’s going on here?

I’d bet my hat this change is going quite well by the fourth month. Even if there are challenges to it, which there will be, they are being shared openly and the teams know how to address that. They know how to pivot and how to learn. The hardest thing about the change might be the continuing questions for leadership about whether the sessions are worthwhile, even though they each have gone very well.

The craziest thing? These activities are creating a healthier, stronger organizational culture. And they are likely making each person in the room BETTER, by teaching them how to learn and reflect, and forming stronger bonds with the people in the room. It’s a kind of magic, and it’s what happens when change is done well.

As for the time commitment, it’s equivalent to a SINGLE. DAY. of these employees’ time - eight hours, spread across four months. Plus three hours of each of the leaders’ time. The consultant will do more work in-between, having one-on-ones as needed or refreshing resources or whatever is needed — but it will time spent creating things that are actually valuable to these employees!

No matter how you look at it, this is the better approach. So next time you balk at spending two hours in a workshop for something that’s a priority, think of this. And make sure you have a damn good facilitator.