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The Workshop Book
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The Workshop Book

How to Design and Lead Successful Workshops

Pamela Hamilton
Pearson Business, 2025
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9

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  • Applicable
  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Teamwork expert Pamela Hamilton argues that a well-designed workshop is the most effective way to address an organization’s problems and shape creative responses to business challenges. A workshop helps participants see issues from new perspectives and create innovative solutions. Hamilton’s nuts-and-bolts handbook explains how to design and run a successful workshop, cultivate creativity, maintain energy, and deal with disruptive behavior.

Summary

A workshop is an environment for creative collaboration.

A workshop is not a conventional business meeting. It has a specific, defined goal; adheres to a specialized code of conduct; and focuses on activities that stimulate creativity. A successful workshop combines the participants’ individual talents, perspectives, and knowledge into a collective intelligence that is more powerful than even the smartest team member.

As a workshop leader, you are responsible for choosing the participants, setting the ground rules, and designing a roster of idea-generating exercises. Each of your choices fosters the group’s creativity and enhances the quality of its ideas.

Use reframing to clarify your workshop’s goals, which shape its design, audience, and agenda.

Begin by clarifying your workshop’s objective. That will inform the design of your event, the data you use, and the people you decide to invite. Identify the stakeholders who requested the workshop, the ones who own a problem and want to solve it. Clarify the goal they want to achieve and explore their understanding of the issue. This will help you distinguish between the facts of the case and stakeholder...

About the Author

Pamela Hamilton founded Paraffin, an agency that designs and runs workshops and helps build organizational capabilities. She also wrote Supercharged Teams: 30 Tools of Great Teamwork.

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