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We just got home from a sushi making class. A poorly planned sushi making class. An expensive, poorly planned sushi making class. The kind of expensive, poorly planned sushi making class that compels you to write a blog post about getting your shit together if you’re running any kind of event where people are expected to participate in any capacity.

Sushi class output

Granted, anything involving cooking food has a high difficulty level. Lots of cleanup and prep, varying experience and comfort levels, and a room full of strangers. But that’s why what I’m about to say is really important. Listen up. [This post got long, so I’m inserting animal gifs to break it up a bit. Enjoy!]

Any workshop is going to involve some back and forth between a presenter/facilitator talking and activities. Ideally, you want to use the talking part to set the stage for the activities and then let the actual learning take place while the participants are doing something. You always, always, always want people to construct their own knowledge. Say it again: CONSTRUCT THEIR OWN KNOWLEDGE. That’s really the entire point of the workshop format, right?

Facilitators need to understand that in a workshop setting (i.e. a situation where I have not paid to see you perform), people are not there to listen to you. They’re there to try it.  They’re there because you’re providing the equipment and the environment and the guidance.

I’m gonna break this down for you.

How the construction of knowledge happens should be determined by the goal of the workshop:

Is the point to develop and practice skills? Then a demo followed by ample opportunities to practice would make sense.

If the point is to develop understanding or generate ideas, then you want to use modeling sparingly. One way to approach this is to provide tools and facilitation and then back off.

But wait…there’s more! Let’s say we’re running a “skills” workshop. If the goal is for everyone to practice the same set of skills, every single person needs to get their grubby little hands on the same set of materials so that they can all practice the complete set of skills. You can’t have Chris chop the onion while Sally prepares the sauce.

We should have let Sally make the sauce.

Everyone needs to do their own individual little thing. People prefer to get their own kit of parts, especially when it’s a group of relative strangers. Eliminating any awkward social negotiation over who gets what tool or material will save time and get people focused on the skill itself. If people are there to learn a skill, the workshop should not depend on group dynamics or sharing.

Can it be a logistical nightmare to get enough space, time and materials for each person to work simultaneously? Yeah, that is that hard part and, presumably, why the participants paid you for the workshop. This is where you figure out that you need twice as many cutting boards because there’s not time to wash them all during the class. Spend that time. Because cutting boards are kinda important at a sushi class.

Upping the difficulty level: prep your materials so that you eliminate any steps that are not essential to practicing the skill. It’s like editing a piece of writing: strike anything that doesn’t help you make The Point.

Get the work done AHEAD OF TIME

Now, let’s return to the “ideas” or “understanding” type of workshop. Here’s where group dynamics might be a lot more important. If it’s a group activity by design, not necessity, try to provide as much structure and direction as possible in terms of the administrative work of the group. Assign people to groups, do not let them sort themselves. If there are roles to play, like note-taking or time-keeping, consider designating individuals at the beginning.

The truth is, we humans like being given clear tasks and then fulfilling them. The operative word is “clear.” If you’re leading a cooking class, don’t say “Okay, we need a volunteer to make the filling” with no further instruction or details. Some people will volunteer for everything, but most people will not jump at the opportunity to do something mysterious. Be specific, be clear, and assign tasks when possible.

This is what happens when you don’t assign tasks.

Secondly, in an “ideas” workshop, since you don’t want the group merely copying your example, it’s important to provide the right tools to scaffold learning, creativity, and inspiration. In this kind of session, people need constraints, and it’s up to the facilitator to provide the guardrails. Figuring out how to frame an activity is a different kind of work than physically prepping materials, but it’s just as necessary.

Finally, have Plan A totally mapped out and have a Plan B in mind and ready to go. Anticipate some potential problems that may come up. This is where those of us catastrophizers have an advantage. Don’t go far enough with this thinking to drive yourself crazy, but be ready to be nimble.

Why is this important? People know when the leader doesn’t have their shit together. In a workshop situation, people already feel vulnerable because they’re not sure what they’ll be expected to do (trust falls? being called on at random?). When a workshop is disorganized, the leader is actually passing the burden of logistics onto the participants.

And hey, if you’re doing something free and informal, that’s fine. But if you’re ever, EVER, charging money for a workshop, do not wing it. Have enough materials. Have a plan for every step of the process. Have backup plans. Be professional. Do the 90% beforehand so you don’t have to sweat the 10%.

Doesn’t that feel good?

** I don’t usually position myself as an expert because it seems like something a marketing blogger does. But I really do have years of experience with workshops and event production and a there’s a strong, Type A streak in me that gets incredibly frustrated when something is shoddily organized. Also, this is part of XD, or at least the kind of XD we do. A poorly planned class is bad experience design, full-stop.

For many years I had a half-baked idea that I could be a screenwriter. I don’t phrase it that way to put myself down, but instead to acknowledge that I consistently failed to put forth the effort to actually complete an entire screenplay.

I’d always been praised for dialogue, so it was easy for me to write a scene of banter that went on for pages and pages. Where I fell down was story structure. And anyone who’s ever read a screenwriting book will tell you that story structure is really a much bigger deal than dialogue. I can’t imagine being able to nail story structure on your first outline, but I would never give myself more than one chance to figure it out and I resisted listening to any feedback that wasn’t positive. The result: a bunch of thirty-page first drafts.

I’ve taken two kinds of writing classes in the last few years: screenwriting and romance novel writing. They’re both difficult for the same reason: they both need to follow a structure within a prescribed length. There’s only so many pages to hit the right beats and meet or subvert the expectations of the audience. (Yes, even in something as formulaic as a romance novel you surprise the audience.) Both of these media require plenty of discipline.

When you come up with the seed of a great idea for a screenplay or a romance novel, it’s usually just the setup. It’s rare (for me at least) to have any idea of how the conflict will play out, or the story will resolve until I dig much deeper into the initial germ of an idea. Taking that premise and shaping it into something that fits the story structure established thousands of years ago is a something I’ve never quite been able to crack.

Until now!

Well, no. Not exactly. But I think my perspective as an experience designer has started to bring it into better focus. One of the great and frustrating things about my job is that we’re working in a space that doesn’t have a wealth of best practices. Traditional UX has these resources, but in my studio, we’re typically borrowing from several disciplines at once, UX among them. There’s no Syd Field or Robert McKee guide on how to design an experience for a set of 10 foot high responsive digital columns. So, we dive into an array of work in adjacent fields and media, do a lot of prototyping and testing, and start to compile our own set of best practices.

You can’t break the rules until you understand them.

I’ve come to realize that one of those adjacent fields might be screenwriting. Although the work we do isn’t as specifically prescribed as a formatted screenplay, every experience follows some kind of loose story framework: call to action to the user, user goes of some short journey of discovery by interacting, and then returns to where they came from with some additional knowledge or insight. Putting aside the differences in the experience of “passive viewing” (something I’ve never believed in anyway) versus interacting, what screenwriters, romance novelists, and XDs do is basically the same thing: figure out what’s going on with your audience at every step in the journey and engineer a structure to provide them with the most immersive experience possible.

The tools and raw materials are different, but the task is pretty similar. In fact, much of the overall process of creating the finished product is the same.

Like screenwriters, XDs are usually the first ones into the pool on any given project. Although the makeup of concepting teams varies, there’s always an XD presence as early on as possible. The concept may be totally open and original or spun off from an existing experience. There may already be characters or content to work with, or the team may need to invent everything from scratch. Once the concept is approved by the client (in movie world: the financiers), the XD starts in on the framework of the experience much like the writer would break a story. What needs to happen and how can I structure this in a way that makes sense to the user/viewer but isn’t completely predictable?

It’s that negotiation between working within the conventions but trying to add some new variable to the equation. Sure, you can create a completely out-of-left-field interactive experience, but if the user doesn’t know what to do when they stand in front of it, they’ll eventually walk away. I’m pretty sure that writing for video games straddles these two domains.

As the project goes from the skeleton of an idea to something more fully fleshed out, other specialists and professionals take the “script” and make adjustments. There are constant rewrites for awhile. Creative directors and clients give notes, producers pull together all the moving parts and keep the budget in check, the designers and technologists start to bring everything to life, piece by piece. Often you pivot or make edits when you see how something plays out at scale. Compromises and improvements get implemented. And with each production iteration, the XD’s role becomes more oversight than hands-on.

We’re usually the role that feels like the finished product is quite different (for better or worse) than what we initially envisioned. Sometimes it feels like disappointment. We remember that first draft, before we killed our darlings. I can’t think of a project where I didn’t have to lose the weirdest, coolest element somewhere along the way. It’s hard to admit that that’s often for the best. Even more so than in filmmaking, creating interactive experiences is a team sport and sometimes you can’t have your way (or can’t get someone to pay for it).

There’s some truism about screenplays that goes something like this: a good screenplay turn into a good movie or a terrible movie. A bad screenplay can only be a bad movie. If the structure isn’t there from the start, all the amazing design and technology and acting can’t make it a winner.

And that’s not to say, “hey, XD and screenwriting is so much more important than these other things!” The designers and technologists and producers and CDs on our team have come up with some amazing solves for inherent XD problems. But when you’re the person responsible for that underlying engineering, it helps to have those best practices and rules to follow. It would be a lot easier to be able to pick up a Syd Field book and remind myself of how the whole thing must work.

So I just might do that. Jeremy tipped me off to John August and Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes podcast and as I’ve been listening, much of it resonates with me as an XD. The fundamental importance of structure. The stripping away of anything that doesn’t provide some vital nugget of information or push the story forward.  The careful arrangement of major beats and minor beats to make the audience feel a certain way at a certain time. Avoiding the dreaded exposition fairy. So many of these principles are the same, just viewed through a slightly different lens. I think screenwriters have already figured out a lot of the issues XD folks wrestle with.

I’m kind of excited to pick up those screenwriting books again and figure out exactly how I can apply some story technique to my work. Being an XD has forced me to work within an iterative process with lots of feedback along the way. My first draft is never perfect. I can finally accept that. I don’t know what that means for my screenplays or my romance novels, but I’m pretty sure that if I tried to write one today, I’d work much differently. I wouldn’t start with the first line of dialogue from the first scene. I’d take a stab at engineering the story, and then take like twenty more stabs. It’s still not going to be perfect, but it will probably be a lot better than the thirty-page first draft I wrote 5 years ago.