Well, I’ve banged on long enough and often enough on this site about my loathing for the horrifying cliché of lazy thinking that is “the workshop” – but I’m afraid that I just can’t help myself. I’ve just returned from Jakarta (oh – and by the way, it’s a shit-hole. Just to be clear, the hotel that we went to was promoted as “the only hotel of its class in Jakarta that has only been bombed once”) where the dread workshop was the centre piece of the visit.
I had actually only gone because Enthusiastic Account Guy had planned to go from there onto his holiday in South Africa, and when the original moderator backed out, it looked like he was going to have to cancel (and lose all his money…) so I stepped in. Anyway, once there, I had to just go with the flow – well: with some of the flow, anyway. I still can’t bring myself to say “No such thing as a bad idea” – when that’s so obviously not true; and I still can’t do any of that “Imagine if this bathroom cleaner was a contestant in the Big Brother house – what would they be like?” type rubbish – I much prefer to stick to the difficult stuff, such as “You want 20% market share in one year and you have fuck all money – how the holy HELL are you going to do that?” and then review ideas. So, I suppose it’s fair enough that the over-riding emotion in the room was “fun” – but do you know what? We were there to work – nevertheless there was a palpable sense of alarm in the room when I started the afternoon session.
I had started to brief the groups on what I wanted them to do, how to approach the task, and how long they had to do it – and when I looked up at them, it was as if I’d suggested that we could murder our children and then sit down for a good session of shit-munching. Needless to say, this was just what I felt like, having flown for about twenty hours, to be confronted by a bunch of people who chose to update their Facebook profiles as other people presented information to them on how to grow THEIR business. And, so, while I didn’t say “Or we could eat our own shit.” I did say “Or we could all just give up, go up to our rooms, have a sleep and watch the brand fail.” – and after that, they were good as gold (well, they compared me to Simon Cowell – but other than that, they were good as gold). Maybe I have found the magic solution to running workshops: arsiness.
