Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #449853 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Synopsis
Business psychologist Rob Yeung shows how to facilitate excellent workshops and focus groups using various techniques, tips and motivators.

About the Author
Rob works with international organisations, devising and facilitating workshops. He is a regular contributor to national media such as 'Financial Times', 'Sunday Business' and CNN.

Customer Reviews

Practical guide to workshop process
I'd been asked to run a workshop to design a competency framework for our business so I frantically bought three books on designing workshops. This one proved the most useful because it provided a good structure to the workshop - setting out how to design the agenda, and develop a beginning, middle and end to the workshop. Also I used some of the techniques to populate different sections of the workshop to keep it from being samey. Life saving book!

Detailed guide to running MUCH more interesting meetings
Excellent ideas for how to design a meeting to engage and interest participants as opposed to having them sit there and watch the clock, waiting for the meeting to end.

Good ideas on Roving Brainstorms and Six Thinking Hats - tools that get participants during meetings up on their feet, talking to each other, contributing ideas, and coming up with action plans. The early chapters of the book lay out the principles of workshop design fairly gently - but then the final chapter throws in a whole bucket of ideas that really add to the ideas quotient of the book.

The book could have had more detail on how to deal with difficult people. I didn't find that the categories it puts people into were comprehensive enough - and they tended to assume that people had similar motivations to each other.

But still a good book - and much easier to read than most books on workshops that tend to be either patronisingly simple (and aimed at Americans) or completely obscure.

Good introduction to running focus groups and workshops
Well laid out book going through everything I needed to run a workshop. I used to work for a communications agency but then moved into change management consultancy and had to design and run focus groups with a client for the first time. This book saved my bacon!

It gives you lots of tools to run workshops. And it is written in very straightforward English with almost no management jargon - which is great as I hate books that try to dress up fairly straightforward concepts in overly elaborate prose.

Just one minor negative is that it could have given a few more examples of workshop formats. It gives you the tools to design your own, but I would have liked templates of generic workshops or focus groups that other people have used successfully.