Manage This - The Project Management Podcast · Velociteach

Bringing Workshop Culture to Everyday Project Teams

·45 min·4 clips

Alison outlines the three C's—capacity, capability, and behavior change—to help teams implement workshop ideas.

This episode of Manage This features an interview with Alison Coward, founder of the consultancy Bracket and author of "Workshop Culture." Hosts Wendy and Bill explore Coward's concept of translating the energy and effectiveness of workshops into a team's daily operations. Coward defines workshop culture as applying workshop principles to build team cultures focused on creativity, collaboration, and productivity. She explains the concept originated from observing a disconnect between highly collaborative workshop environments and teams' struggles to maintain that dynamic daily. Coward emphasizes that embedding this culture starts with redesigning team meetings using a facilitator's intentional design process. Her framework is built on five pillars: align, cohesion, communication, design, and change. For the "align" pillar, she advises teams to co-create specific values that directly serve their goals, distinct from generic company values. Coward suggests using personality assessments like Myers-Briggs or Belbin to increase awareness of diverse working styles within a team. To transform meetings, she recommends first questioning if a meeting is necessary, then clearly defining its purpose and desired outcomes. She identifies four key facilitation skills: asking open-ended questions, deep listening, tolerating productive chaos, and synthesizing diverse viewpoints. Coward shares examples from a professional services firm that redesigned its board meetings to encourage cross-team conversation and a museum team that used meeting breakouts to improve collaboration. A surprising insight is her advice to treat team change like individual habit formation, referencing concepts from James Clear's "Atomic Habits." She notes that teams often instinctively know their needed values, and facilitation helps articulate them. Coward argues that the gap between a workshop's big ideas and implementation is often due to capacity, capability, or required behavior change. She stresses that workshop culture is not about constant workshops but adopting a mindset of ongoing experimentation and conversation. The tone is conversational, educational, and heavily advice-oriented, with the hosts sharing their own project management experiences. This episode is ideal for project leaders, team managers, and anyone frustrated with unproductive meetings seeking practical strategies for improving collaboration. Listeners looking for highly technical project management methodologies or quick fixes might find the focus on cultural change and facilitation too broad.

As heard by us

A practical argument for treating workshop habits as team cohesion, not just better meetings.

Alison Coward treats workshop culture as a mindset rather than a meeting format, and that framing gives the piece its clearest edge. It stays focused on how project teams actually operate: aligning team values with company values, shaping a team subculture, and naming the…

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Why you'd press play

You want workshop thinking that helps a project team get aligned before the work gets messy.

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