Workshops & Meetings: How to avoid the pre-read trap

You’re smart. You know that time flies in a live workshop or meeting.

There’s all this stuff that needs to get done, but your spidey-sense tells you people won’t be able to get it completed in the live session. Besides, much of it isn’t the best of use of a whole group’s synchronous time.

And because you’re a bright spark, you know you can unleash the power of async.

So you create some pre-work. They can do it upfront, whenever they want. They just need to do these few things ahead of the live session and we’re be off to a flyer. Magic!

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But here’s the thing.

Show me a workshop where everyone’s done the pre-work. Any workshop. Ever. In the history of work and shops.

It doesn’t exist.

Never happened. Never will.

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Ok, so what if we remove ‘work’ from the equation? You acknowledge people aren’t going to do a load of activities or surveys or whatever that will set up your live session.

How about a pre-read? Couple of pages with all the upfront info. If you work at Amazon, I’m sure this works wonderfully - because the prepping and reading of advance memos are baked deep into the culture. But in most other places - unlikely.

And the pre-read can actually hurt you even more than the pre-work.

I've got into trouble numerous times where I've showed up thinking, oh, I sent everyone the pre-read and that means everyone knows what's going on so we can jump straight into the X, Y, Z of the main live thing.

Right? WRONG.

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Assume nothing.

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This opens up two considerations for your design work.

1. Dependency

The effectiveness of the live thing cannot be dependent on the pre-materials. If someone doesn’t engage with these, they do need to be able to jump into the live session without any catchup required*. 
Without this, and you're going to be flailing.

* The edge case here is if you want to deliberately design so that people who don’t engage with the pre-materials can’t engage with the live thing. In very specific circumstances this can be a baller move, but most of the time it’ll be seen as exclusionary and antagonistic, so best to avoid it.‍

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2. Multiple Angles

You have to design from a bunch of different angles. Because you can't make assumptions and need to avoid dependencies, you have to acknowledge that people are going to be coming in from a range of entry points, levels of understanding, and so on. Aka, meet them where they are.

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Yes, I know. This is more work than you want to have on your plate, but it’ll be better than playing catchup and pushing a group of people through additional activities in a live setting.

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