Yoolaa IT Update Seminar & Workshop, January 2009

Yoolaa IT Update Seminar & Workshop, January 2009


We’re having fun organising this workshop as it’s stretching our minds. Really stretching our minds because we realise people are giving up their precious time and we therefore have an absolute responsibility to deliver substantive value to them.

Our objective after the seminar is for the participants to achieve a change of behaviour, to do something differently.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that “the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting change to happen.”

Why have we chosen a workshop as the format for the morning? What do we mean by a workshop?

For us a workshop is a seminar where the participants do most of the work, rather than the speakers. We chose this format as people learn best by being active participants, so for three hours they are going to be working. Our objective seems very low as we just want three changes of behaviour per person, from three hours work.

We compare this with three hours of us spouting new facts (no matter how technically brilliant our presentation may be) with no one thinking about the implications of the information or the opportunities it may create, therefore with probably no changes of behaviour. We’ve all come away from seminars and thought “Well, all very interesting but it doesn’t apply to me.”

Our workshop style will be to briefly provide a few new facts and insights about our favourite interest, using IT to its fullest extent to solve business problems, to achieve new profit levels, to achieve better service levels. We want people to really think about the implications of this new information for their business.

What we want to do is to give people time:
To work out – how can I use this most effectively, how can I make money or solve a problem?
To ask additional questions, can it do …., how can I ……, what about….,
To discuss in small groups what elements attract them and what they’ll leave aside

Then to agree for each group the three most important changes they are going to implement and report these to the whole room.

After all they know their businesses far better than we know them.


Click on this link: http://www.yoolaa.co.uk/seminar.htm