What Can We Learn from Conducting Large Workshops

What would you do if you had to conduct a large Meeting of the Minds experience for more than a hundred participants?

 

It’s no easy feat, yet the team at Emergenetics Japan did a remarkable job when it conducted such a workshop for the employees of Musashino Group, a well-known manufacturing company in Japan, on 17 January.

 

And what a magnificent experience it was! With five certified Emergenetics Associates facilitating the session for 141 participants, the energy in the room was indeed high and the learning massive.

 

How It Began

Koyama Noboru, CEO of Musashino Group, first knew about Emergenetics through the Business Management Research Society – a society he started where representatives from various companies and industries regularly meet and organise courses on business management.

 

It was through the society that he met Masanori Kagawa, CEO of Emergenetics Japan, who had attended one of the courses. Masanori introduced Emergenetics to some members of the society and it left a positive impact to the members. Koyama thus decided to implement Emergenetics throughout his company, and so the journey began!

 

Preparing for the Workshop

Emergenetics Japan started preparing for the workshop six months ahead of the scheduled run. This included interviewing participants for real-life examples in the company so that they can show how Emergenetics can be applied.

 

This helped to make the session real, relatable to the participants, as well as useful for them to apply the learning to their daily work in the office.

 

In the wise words of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

 

Some of the activities that were planned to help the participants realise their thinking and behaviourial preferences include:

• MPA Vacation Activity
• LPA Love Letter Activity
• WEteam – The Tallest Tower
• Behavioural Line-up

 

Challenges Faced

Conducting such a large workshop does come with its challenges. One of which includes grouping the participants – especially when they have to move to different groups for the different activities. To solve this issue, the associates put a box on each table with envelopes that contain the next group which each participant had to proceed to.

 

A simple yet effective way to solve a potential messy problem! This allowed easy movement and facilitation of the participants.

 

Learning Takeaways

To say the least, there were lots to learn from the experience:

 

Large scale workshops: Running a workshop on a large scale required a different approach, which Emergenetics Japan took time to carefully plan and execute, ensuring that the quality of the workshop and learning was not compromised. Indeed, the experience gave the Emergenetics Japan team the confidence to take on and plan bigger workshops!

 

WEteam Effort: Tapping into the strengths of all members of the team also made the workshop possible. The in-house operations helped in much of the “green” processes, which truly helped make the workshop successful. A true WEteam effort and approach!

 

Time estimation: The team also learnt that it was good to allocate more buffer time, especially during breaks, as large groups require more time to settle down. A small consideration yet practical when running large-scale workshops.

 

All in all, it was a successful workshop. Musashino Group is in fact planning to run another Emergenetics workshop for their 200 – 300 contract staff members.

 

A wonderful job by our Emergenetics Japan team and their associates: Kohichi Okamoto, Masanori Kagawa, Shinya Nakao, Yumiko Nishi and Munehiko Tamada!

 

Thank you for sharing your experience and learning with all of us here.

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