I woke up this morning with my to-do list on my mind. Before helping the kids get ready for school, I quickly email a colleague who needs to be updated before our first meeting with a client…

When I arrive at my desk to start the day, I quickly browse through my new emails before jumping into my first online call. I try to answer the ones I can and add the others to my to-do list. As I am going through them, I am already planning an hour for focused work today in-between two meetings to handle the emails that require more work. There is not much time available to squeeze in some focused work, but I think I can just manage to cover the most urgent requests.

And then, I suddenly realize I also promised to review some results from an internal survey for a management meeting at the end of the day. It will be a busy day again, juggling tasks and hoping to finish the most important ones in time…

If you’re more into video you should watch this interesting conversation I had with no other than Jeroen van der Weide from DesignThinkers Academy.

And if you’re in for a good read just keep on reading.
(Also: please don’t hesitate to to both!)

As I roll up my sleeves to jump into my first call, I notice a new email about an upcoming workshop. The title says PREPARATION FOR THE WORKSHOP in bold capitals. Clearly, the sender suspected this email would get lost in workshop participants’ inboxes and wanted to be sure the title was as visible as possible.

I click on the email as I still have two minutes. A long text appears, neatly structured in paragraphs with clarifying titles above each. Some of the text is shouting at me in bold capitals again, making sure I notice it. The text is too much to read, but the deadline catches my eye, together with a gigantic file attached. A 7Mb Powerpoint. I dare not open the file, dreading seeing the number of slides.

I pick up my notebook and add to my to-do list, “Figure out when to prepare for the workshop”, concerned about it becoming weekend work.

The little devil on my shoulder whispers that I might conveniently forget to prepare, using the importance and workload of my current projects as my alibi.

It is about prioritizing competing priorities

When you ask anyone to do some pre-work for a workshop, you are competing with many other priorities. Your competition can be pre-work for another meeting; it can be project-related work with better immediate returns; it can be a last-minute request from the boss; it can also be family time. The arguments used to prioritize these tasks differ from participant to participant. They all have their own incentives that become the motivations behind their actions. Some motivations will be extrinsic; others will be intrinsic. In other words, they are chasing a bigger carrot or are more drawn to another type of work and project. You probably won’t pay them to do the pre-work (at least, I wouldn’t recommend going that far). So, we’re looking at incentives that motivate each individual intrinsically to prioritize your call to action above their competing priorities.

The Fogg Behavior Model

You can offer all kinds of incentives, but if people don’t feel able to do the pre-work for some reason, your incentives won’t have a lot of motivational power. Motivation and ability go hand in hand, as explained by B.J. Fogg, Ph D, in his book Tiny Habits. Fogg created the Tiny Habits Academy to help people around the world use his secret formula:

B = MAP
Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt

Your teammates might be highly motivated, and the task might be a bit harder than their ability, meaning they might feel less able to do it, but they will still take it on. On the other hand, they might see it as a super easy, quick fix; thus, they won’t need to be super motivated to complete it. Both motivation and ability compensate one another.

When motivation and ability are in a good place, they will still need a nudge, a little poke, to start working on it. You might even need to prompt them a couple of times in different ways to ensure they act on the nice balance of motivation and ability.

The Fogg Behavior Model can be applied to any type of desired behavior, including getting your workshop participants to do the pre-work for your workshop. Being equipped with such a simple but effective model can be very beneficial for a facilitator – as well as for the success of your workshop.

‘ARE U IN’ for doing homework?

To become a better competitor in the prioritization game when it comes to getting participants to do workshop pre-work, I developed a little model myself, inspired by the Fogg Behavior Model. It is called ‘ARE U IN?’. Every letter stands for an approach to influence workshop participants’ motivation, their perception of their ability and/or to prompt them for action.

A: Accountability

When you feel accountable for completing a task, your reliability is at stake. Being reliable and dependable allows your colleagues to trust you. Reliability is often ranked as one of the top values in a workplace. By making someone accountable, you are addressing their reliability.

First of all, you can make someone accountable by being very clear on the consequences for the workshop if the pre-work is not completed. For example, we will lose time, we won’t be able to go as deep into the topic, the quality of the input determines the quality of the output, etc. It is a matter of creating awareness about the impact of not doing the pre-work and how it will affect collaborative efforts during the workshop.

Secondly, you can make someone accountable by defining their responsibility more clearly. For example, they can get an assigned role. One person is responsible for bringing in the voice of the customer, while someone else might have to bring in the voice of a supplier or partner. Another option is to give them the role of an expert. One person is responsible for preparing the opportunities in the market, while someone else should identify the obstacles and threats. There are multiple ways to specify what someone should try to achieve while preparing for the workshop. By making this more tangible, the tasks and responsibilities will be very clear, and it will make your workshop participants accountable.

R: Relevant

Your participants have to see the value of the pre-work for the workshop. Relevant pre-work is perceived as worthwhile. The most straightforward way to make it relevant is to make sure you have an activity on the workshop agenda for which it is crucial to do the pre-work. The pre-work is done to prepare for an actual collaborative exercise. For example, you can ask each participant to present their most inspiring solution from other companies related to the challenge of the workshop. This can happen at the beginning of the workshop – a “show and tell” that expands the idea of what is possible.

Another way to increase relevance is to connect the output of the pre-work to the quality of conversation in the workshop. For example, assigning roles to the participants that bring in different perspectives, as described in “Accountability”, is a great way to avoid predispositions and improve the quality of the conversation. Anyone would agree that broadening perspectives will significantly enhance collaboration.

E: Engaging

Would you feel like reading a long text while being bombarded with emails and meetings? Could you find the headspace to digest a multi-paged pdf or Powerpoint when racing against the clock to meet your deadlines? If you wouldn’t yourself, it doesn’t make sense to send participants unachievable tasks and expect them to complete them.

So far, “Accountability” and “Relevance” are about the (intrinsic) motivational aspects of the Fogg Behavior Model. Making the pre-work more engaging and appealing will help with participants’ ability to do the work.

By making the pre-work interactive, it will be more fun and, therefore, more appealing. You can break it down into smaller pieces of work, each with a different prompt. For example, it can be a survey to fill in or an interactive video with questions at the end of each section. You can even lay it out into a sequence of simple steps. Once they have completed the first step, they will receive instructions for the next step. This will give them a sense of progress and achievement.

Making it a visual exercise instead of reading and writing will require more “System 1” thinking instead of “System 2” thinking, as explained in Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. It requires less effort and is emotion-driven. For example, the pre-work can be creating a mood board or selecting a couple of pictures.

U: Urgency

Another way to tackle the “ability” part of the Fogg Behavior Model is by bringing in time. When you indicate how long the task will take, you make it easier for the participants to plan it in their agendas, thereby changing their perception of their ability to complete the task. Obviously, this will only work if you make an honest and realistic estimation.

It might sound contradictory but giving a deadline will also increase their ability to deliver. Their ability to deliver can be hampered by their inability to plan it. They might be overwhelmed and unable to see the forest for the trees. If you give them a clear deadline, they will have a beacon to plan around.

I: Incentive

We covered motivation and ability with the previous points. Let’s focus on the prompts. This one is called “incentive” and is about a specific way to incentivize, which also provides a way to prompt. Let me explain.

With this point, I would like to highlight the power of peer pressure. You can use peer pressure in different ways to incentivize and prompt participants to action. One way to do this is by openly congratulating the first-comers – by letting the group know about the completion of tasks by one or two of their team members. You are not only prompting them to action, but you are also turning up the heat.

Another way to apply peer pressure is by assigning duos to complete the tasks together. They can prompt each other to do the work. It increases the sense of ownership of the tasks and reliability towards each other.

A different version of the latter tactic is creating small groups and assigning each group tasks to complete as pre-work. They will prompt each other to do the work. Then, you can turn up the heat again by turning it into a competition.

N: News

News refers to the way you communicate the news of doing pre-work to all participants. It is a marketing effort. You are convincing them to take action. Your call to action is competing against all other priorities in the same way different products and services compete against each other to be consumed.

Think like a marketeer. What exactly do I want to achieve? What is my core message? What is the best channel to use? What is the language and tone of voice that resonates with them? What is in it for them? You might quickly conclude that sending a 50-slide Powerpoint by email won’t be the best way to “convert” them.

Find out how they want to receive the message. Try to understand what is important to them and how they prioritize tasks. That way, you can increase the effectiveness of your communication, and your prompt will be much stronger.

In sum …

If you apply the above to the letter, your pre-work will look something like this:

Small groups of participants are tasked with preparing an important perspective on the workshop topic in a couple of steps. Each step takes about 20 minutes of collaboration. The pre-work will need to be completed a week before the workshop. Each group will have to present their group’s important perspective at the start of the workshop.

That would be some great pre-work. It can also have a thousand different variations, applying ‘ARE U IN?’. Use your imagination as you go over the different points when preparing the pre-work.

Two last tips

Before you go, here are two more tips to make pre-work work.

Tip 1: Organize a kick-off for your workshop. It allows you to explain the pre-work and to have a formal agreement from the participants. It also allows you to check in with them on the kind of communication they prefer (news) and whether they feel comfortable with the deadline (urgency). In general, this conversation and their formal agreement make them more accountable.

Tip 2: Organize one or more “check-in” moments between the kick-off and the workshop. Check in with each individual or group to understand their progress and the obstacles related to the pre-work. You will be better prepared to facilitate their input during the workshop, and you can unlock anything that blocks them from completing their pre-work.

In our “Prepare for success” course, we take a deep dive into all the elements of strategically preparing your workshop, including ‘ARE U IN?’. Sign up if you would like to learn more:

Prepare for Success - Facilitation course — ***Prepare for success***

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How to get your workshop participants to do pre-work