Six workshops

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On the first morning, everyone clocked in at Brammel and Tosk, Ordinary Supply for the Outer Reaches. I read them two mornings from the company’s own records: two customers, one record, every field the same, and two completely different days. Near the end of the hour I gave them some news. A customer nobody had ever heard from, the Whist, had ordered one of every item in the catalog, then an hour later sent everything back except six. Everyone wrote one line guessing what it meant. I sealed the guesses, and nobody saw them for six weeks.

Workshop Season was six one-hour workshops for coworkers, held on a video call and set inside an invented supply company that ships ordinary goods to forty-one alien species. Everyone played an employee for the hour, so the room could pick apart screens, forms and habits that nobody in it had built. Each week quietly trained one skill, and I never said which: watching, then listening, feeling, judging, making, and in the last week, delight. Nobody fixed anything. The point was to leave curious about what a customer’s day is actually like, and to work out, unprompted, that customers know far more about their own work than we do.

Each hour ran in six parts: arrival, a warm-up, the core activity, a story beat, a postcard (one line written to a customer) and a cliffhanger. Answers came to me and waited on a blind board until I revealed them all at once, so nobody anchored on whoever spoke first. In week three everyone drew a customer card and tried to place an order in the company’s old ordering software under that customer’s limits, from a quantity field that stops at 999 to a signature step you can’t finish without hands. In week four the room got twenty seconds per pair of screens, and voted. In week six the envelope opened, and each person read their own week-one guess aloud. Everyone heard how wrong they’d been, and it was funny rather than embarrassing.

I ran it from a facilitation page that lays out each hour part by part: the minutes, the lines to read aloud, the board and the activity, with the same data printing the paper run-sheets. A season board laid all six weeks side by side. The rounds ran on everyone’s phones through the Workshop Facilitation AppWorkshop facilitation appA shared stage, a facilitator’s screen and a phone page for workshops on a video call; answers stay sealed until the facilitator reveals them.Application, the company and its customers are The Outer ReachesThe Outer ReachesA fictional wholesale company with alien customers, written as the setting for six workshops, with a world reference and a mock-up of its ordering software.Application, and The RippleThe RippleTwenty-six short films made as the in-house news channel of a fictional space wholesaler, to invite coworkers into a six-week workshop season.Application was the company’s broadcast channel, which invited everyone in: “Six weeks. One hour each. Join up.”