Workshopify Your Meetings — Rebecca Courtney on Delivered

Facilitation coach and collaboration designer Rebecca Courtney appears in our event series Delivered to discuss how to improve business meetings using workshop principles.

Meetings are a cornerstone of corporate life and simultaneously one of its most despised rituals. Hating on aimless, soul-sucking gatherings has practically become a cultural touchpoint, fuel for memes, jokes, and office banter. People often complain about having too many meetings, which takes away their time and focus for individual work, and this meetingophobia is particularly common in the tech world.

As it happens, the collective frustration with meetings is backed by cold, hard data. A Harvard Business Review survey of 150+ senior managers across a range of industries revealed that 71% of them feel meetings are unproductive and inefficient. We got similar results in our recent LinkedIn survey, with 45% of people claiming that meetings feel like a waste of time.

Appearing as a guest on our show Delivered, Rebecca Courtney talks about why meetings fail, how workshops are different, and practical ways to “workshopify” meetings to make them more engaging and productive. Rebecca is a facilitator and collaboration designer at the product strategy studio AJ&Smart, and for the past 10+ years, she’s been leading workshops for some of the most well-known companies, such as Lego, Slack, and Netflix.

Workshops are meetings in the sense that you get people together, either in a room with coffee and donuts or on Zoom, but that’s where the similarity ends. For those unsure about the difference, a workshop is a highly structured session where a facilitator guides a group through exercises to ensure they’re aligned on a clear solution. As Rebecca puts it:

“In a meeting, you talk about what you should do, and in a workshop, you do the actual work. Workshops gather everybody in a room, all the people that need to be part of the decision-making process.”

Meetings often feel unproductive and like a waste of time because they lack structure, guidance, and clearly defined next steps. Most of the time, they just end up with another meeting being scheduled. Without a guide to moderate the conversation, they can spiral into chaotic, circular discussions that result in little more than a collective sigh of despair.

But here’s the thing: not every meeting can and should be turned into a workshop. Routine meetings like daily check-ins or status updates don’t require full workshop treatment, though even these could benefit from facilitation skills to keep discussions focused and efficient. For more strategic meetings and complex decisions, workshops are definitely the way to go.

Before we get into why workshops really work, what their benefits are, and how to workshop-ify meetings, it’s worth examining the root cause of why meetings fail — poor communication.

Sophisticated communication is one of humanity’s defining traits, yet we’re universally bad at it. Imagine the disappointment of our Homo sapiens ancestors – those who gifted us the power of modern speech – if they saw us turning it into a game of broken telephone in today’s meeting rooms.

Rebecca Courtney points out two key reasons for this struggle. First of all, poor communication stems from the complexity of communication itself. In a group of just eight people, there are 28 potential lines of communication, increasing the risk of misunderstandings and confusion.

The second issue is a lack of facilitation skills, especially among leaders. This includes active listening, asking powerful questions, giving clear instructions, managing the energy of the room, and understanding group dynamics. However, these skills aren’t part of formal education or workplace training. Instead, people are often expected to lead meetings simply because they hold managerial roles, regardless of whether they’re equipped for the task.

This is where a skilled workshop facilitator can make all the difference. Facilitators take on the burden of managing communication issues and group dynamics, allowing team members to focus on the work they were hired to do. By laying the groundwork for clear and effective collaboration, facilitators help teams move forward with purpose and alignment.

“People often spend their time jumping from meeting to meeting, talking about what they should be doing rather than doing what they were hired to do. What I love seeing in workshops is the joy on people’s faces when they actually get to do what they’re good at, says Rebecca.”

Far from the sticky notes cliché, workshops bring people together to align on ideas, solve real problems, and leave the room with solutions — not just more questions. As Rebecca explains, workshops offer three major benefits that can revolutionize team collaboration and decision-making.

Misalignment can happen even in the smallest teams. As people focus on their own tasks or projects, they can easily become siloed, and before long, communication breakdowns lead to confusion about goals and responsibilities. Workshops help eliminate this by bringing the right people into the same room and aligning everyone around shared goals and priorities.

Research shows that people are more likely to support ideas when they feel a sense of ownership over them. In traditional meetings, decisions are often imposed from above, leaving team members without the enthusiasm required to successfully implement them. Rebecca summarizes this simply: “People support what they help create.” 

This idea is backed by a cognitive bias known as the IKEA effect, where consumers place a disproportionately high value on things they create. In workshops, however, the collaborative environment allows ideas to be shaped collectively, helping people feel more invested in the outcomes.

As Rebecca puts it, you can achieve more in a three-hour workshop than in six months of meetings about the same challenge. By dedicating focused time and energy and bringing the right people together, teams get the momentum needed to solve problems quickly and move projects forward.

A great example of how workshops can help save money is product validation. Take the Design Sprint workshop, for instance. Rather than investing resources into developing a product without knowing its chances for market acceptance, Design Sprint offers a structured approach to rapidly prototype and test ideas with real users in just a few days.

If you’re a leader or someone who’s working at a company and just want to try some workshopping techniques to make the group discussion more productive, why not volunteer to be a facilitator at the next meeting? Here are four proven workshop principles that you can apply:

For more insights on effective collaboration, watch or listen to the full conversation with Rebecca. And if you’re looking to build a digital product, validate a prototype, or refine a product idea, our product strategists can facilitate a digital strategy workshop for you.