The first time I introduced my A3 & Kaizen presentation to the international community, I only had 30 minutes available. I was in Berlin, at the Agile-Lean Europe 2011 – easily the best community-driven conference I have attended to date. To my surprise, at the end of my session, a senior manager in a large organization came straight towards me with his business card, shook my hand and said: “when can we start?” (i.e. “when can you come over and help us out?”).
A similar episode happened at a conference that followed. Hey, what are the chances?

These episodes confirmed what I knew all along:
Forget the artwork, the story, the anecdotes, the techniques, the performance. Even forget the feedback, the invitations to other conferences, the interviews, the awards. They are either means to an end or basic (if not vanity) indicators.

The reward for crafting an outstanding presentation is your enhanced ability to inspire change.

But no matter how hard you try, even an outstanding presentation can only accomplish so much. It can create awareness and strong desire, not skills.
What I truly discovered however, is that people you touch will not only begin their journey but they’ll often ask you to join them.

So, consultancy work aside, I faced a new problem as I began asking myself a crucial question:

How would I craft a truly outstanding workshop?

Given the level of sophistication that I’m reaching with my latest speaking performances, you’d be forgiven if you assumed that I’d know exactly how to craft a stellar training experience.
Contrary to common practice, however, a day-long string of lectures (with the occasional exercise) does not lead to anything resembling an outstanding workshop. Not even close.

That’s too bad. How am I going to deliver my next Pragmatic A3 Thinking Workshop this Autumn? Why should anyone deserve anything less than an out of this world experience?

So I started again from scratch. Almost.

My journey began with a book some of you may have been exposed to: Sharon Bowman’s excellent “Training from The Back of the Room!“.
If you deliver any form of training and you haven’t read it (or actively used it), please respect your future learners  (and your craft) and give it a solid try!
Sharon illustrates a very effective instructional design model (4Cs) for very participative workshops:

• Connections
• Concepts
• Concrete Practice
• Conclusions

I won’t go into the details (you haven’t ordered the book yet? I’m waiting.)
To orient myself with all the ideas, I created a series of mindmaps for my own use and I thought I may just as well share them with you. They are unlikely to make any sense without the book, so you are warned.

Today, I’ll begin by publishing the Connections mindmap (PDF).

It’s to be printed on an A3 paper or larger. I quickly created the small drawings with my finger on my ipad as memory aids, so don’t expect a sophisticated work of art.
Enjoy!