Penny Pullan - Making Workshops Work: Creative collaboration for our time

Magic! Nice clear structure, great stories and supportive guidance.

Professor Eddie Obeng, Speaker, Innovator and Author, Learning Director of Pentacle, The Virtual Business School, and Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Henley Business School, UK

This book encapsulates all the best techniques and approaches to manage and deliver change in our increasingly remote working environment. For the first time, Dr Pullan brings together best practices and practical techniques to help us facilitate successful meetings and workshops. The book reflects Dr Pullans extensive experience in the design and delivery of successful workshops that we can all put to great use in our own working lives. Long overdue, and sorely needed, this is a book for our time.

Chris Alexander, Project Manager, Computacenter, UK

This book is a delightful and fascinating read. Dr Penny Pullan engages the reader with concepts, practical application, tips for success, and stories from the field. This is a timely piece for the pandemic age, critical for any workshop facilitator, leader, or participant. Entirely in-person workshops are almost obsolete, and Dr Pullan helps the reader see the success of an in-person, hybrid, or virtual facilitation approach. To effectively embrace the present and future in conducting workshops, you absolutely need her book.

Joanna Kirchgessner, Information Technology Supervisor at COUNTRY Financial Illinois, USA

Penny has created a book that is not only competently resourceful, but timely too. With remote work on the rise due to COVID-19, the book is a rich source of knowledge, grounded in practice and informed by theory, on how to effectively facilitate virtual and hybrid (in addition to in-person) workshops whilst promoting creativity and collaboration. What I particularly like about the book is its embedded recognition that workshops may take different formats and, as such, workshop facilitators need to demonstrate adaptability and be equipped with skills and ability to enable them to cope with participants diverse requirements.

Professor Niki Panteli, Professor of Digital Business, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Penny Pullan covers the full spectrum of workshops (in-person, hybrid and virtual), and is one of the first to describe with authority how to make virtual workshops successful. She explains the why, and the how, in her usual clear and effective style. When this book was started, none of us had any idea that virtual meetings and workshops would become such a big part of our professional lives, but here we are. The contents of this book are timely, easy to implement, and yield results.

Hugo Minney PhD., Chair and Executive Director, Durham, UK

Workshops are a powerful tool, yet so many of them are run in the workplace by those who have had little or often no training on how to run them effectively. This book will be the go-to resource for anyone who has found themselves in the position of having to run workshops without having been trained to do so, whilst also providing a wealth of information for those who have ever wondered how to deal with some of those sticky workshop situations which can be so typical. Easy to read with real-life stories and a range of tips from how to plan effectively from the outset, to dealing with disengaged participants and managing workshops in a virtual environment as well as face-to-face, this book is recommended for anyone who has ever run or contemplated running a workshop.

Sarah Fitton, HR Professional and former BA Head of Practice, UK

Whether you are running a small group session or facilitating a larger group, there are plenty of ideas in this book to engage your participants and get the outcomes you need. Its the perfect book for our times because it recognises the need for in-person, virtual and hybrid strategies and shares them all. Youll put the book down feeling more confident and more competent running your own sessions.

Elizabeth Harrin, Author of Engaging Stakeholders on Projects, UK

This is an amazing book and very practical. You start learning from the very first few pages. I wish I had had this book 10 years back, as I would have saved many sleepless nights in the run up to preparing for workshops and making them effective.

Ravi Kumar, Vice President Business Embedded Technology, Wells Fargo, India

Whether youre new to planning and facilitating any kind of working session, or want to sharpen your workshop skills by adding new tools and techniques to your repertoire, this book is for you. Chock-full of examples, tips, graphics and real-life stories, the books Quick Start guide makes it easy to find what youre looking for. Covering both in-person and virtual workshop facilitation, Making Workshops Work also delves into important topics that few other facilitation books touch on, such as diversity and inclusion, getting actions done, overcoming typical workshop complications, and understanding what makes people tick. I highly recommend this book to any workshop facilitators looking to take their practice to a new level. Your workshop participants will be glad you did, and so will you.

Nancy Settle-Murphy, President of Guided Insights and author of Leading Effective Virtual Teams: Overcoming Time and Distance to Achieve Exceptional Results, USA

Workshops are important they are where we get things done, where we make decisions, where we figure out what we need to do, where we decide if we are going in the right direction. So, making these important interactions work better, and I mean really better, is one of the more productive things we can do.

The authors six statements for a workshop are wonderfully simple ways to ensure that everybody in the workshop understands what is expected of them. The Magic 6TM collection is worth the price of the book alone. But theres more, much more about getting people to work effectively together.

James Robertson, co-author of Happy to Work Here Understanding and improving the Culture at Work, London, UK

Whether one is new to organizing workshops, or already has extensive experience, this book can certainly provide valuable insights and offer practical strategies for planning and conducting effective workshops. In fact, the principles it covers can be generalized to meetings more broadly as well as to educational settings. This book is also current and relevant as it addresses the challenges and opportunities related to virtual and hybrid meetings, and how to adapt workshops to such alternative formats. A definite must-read for anyone organizing workshops!

Shireen Sindi, PhD., Assistant Professor, Karolinska Institute, Sweden

Theory is one thing and applying in into practice is something else. Penny Pullans book is a superb example of just enough theory to effectively cover the concepts, and a deep dive into practical how-to advice. She weaves in real-life examples that we can all relate to, and invitations to reflect and explore the approach from different angles. This book is for everyone even thinking of running a workshop in any sector, and an excellent resource for training the trainers in facilitation.

Sawsan Khuri, PhD., Director, Collaborative Capacities, and Innovation Specialist, UK

Penny Pullan has done it again! An easy-to-read and useful how-to for people who want to run virtual and face2face workshops that deliver on their objectives.