Enemies of successful Brand Action Workshops 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Brand Action Workshops and what makes some more or less successful. I’ve done a lot of these, so much of what in this post has been learned via error and perfect hindsight. I’ll post these issues one by one and hopefully get your comments. 

1.Hubris: 

   The least successful workshops are those in where the manager and his or her dept has little or no self awareness about what makes them ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Very often this is a result of hubris. A few years ago I ran some workshops in an organization in which every department complained about another particular department (let’s call them dept X). Just about everything was blamed on Dept X from poor sales results to global warming. Yet when I did the Brand Activation Workshop with Dept X, not only the top managers of the dept thought that they were doing a great job. It was as if they were living in a bubble. Too often we do workshop where we rely on self-reported strengths and weaknesses. While this may work, I’ve found workshops are infinitely more helpful if we present some form of ‘objective’ data for the managers to respond to, even if it’s anecdotal. The point is to provide some sort of challenge and provoke a reaction. For example “It’s interesting that you think that everyone in the company is happy with process ABC when in actual fact I’ve heard a great deal of complaints about it”  More next week.