The Workshop Ended on Friday

For about ten years, I taught the Accountability Dial™ in rooms.

Hotel ballrooms with bad coffee. Conference rooms with the blinds half down. Offsites where someone had gone to real trouble with the snacks.

I loved those rooms. I still do.

Which is why I want to tell you what I learned in them, because I think most of us have been arguing about the wrong thing.

Friday at 3pm

You know the feeling. Day two of the offsite. Everyone's a little punchy. The roleplay that felt silly on Thursday morning finally clicked for someone, and you could see it land on their face. People are writing things down. Somebody says, out loud, "I wish I'd learned this five years ago."

There's a binder. There's always a binder.

Friday at 3pm, the room believes. I stood at the front of that room a lot of Fridays, and I believed too.

Then everyone goes home.

Monday at 10:14

Monday at 10:14, a Slack message lands.

The client update that was supposed to go out Friday didn't. Or the teammate who went quiet in standup just answered a question in the project channel with "k." Or someone you genuinely like just shipped the same mistake for the third time.

This is the moment. The exact moment the whole offsite was for.

And you don't think, "Ah, third time, this has moved past a Mention." You don't think about the binder at all. You think "ugh." You have a 10:30. So you type something vague and warm and a little passive-aggressive. Or you type nothing, and tell yourself you'll bring it up in your 1:1 on Thursday.

I've done exactly that.

I have stood in front of a room on a Friday explaining why a Mention should be one sentence, said early, and then gone home and sat on a Mention with someone on my own team for three weeks. I didn't forget the framework. I wrote the framework. I was tired and busy and a little scared, and when the moment showed up, the framework was in a different room.

Those of us who run workshops don't love admitting that part.

The content is fine

The usual critique of leadership training goes after the content. Too abstract. Too many models. Too much theory, not enough practice. Fix the curriculum and the behavior will follow.

I don't buy it.

Some workshop content is bad, sure. But I've watched good content, content I'd defend all day, fade just as fast as the bad stuff. Same people, same energy on Friday, same silence by the following month.

The problem is distance. The moment of learning and the moment of need are days, weeks, sometimes months apart, and nothing carries what you learned across that gap.

On Friday you had the idea and no situation.

On Monday you have the situation and no idea.

We keep trying to fix this by making Friday better. More engaging. More practical. More roleplays, better facilitators, nicer binders. I spent years doing exactly that. It helps a little. It doesn't close the gap, because the gap was never in the room.

What the room is good for

I don't want to throw it all out, because some of the best moments of my working life happened in those rooms.

A good workshop gives a team shared words. When two people have both heard "that's a Mention" and know what it means, the next hard conversation between them gets shorter. That's real.

A good workshop gives people permission. Sometimes the most useful thing that happens all day is a manager realizing that the conversation they've been dodging isn't a character flaw. Everybody dodges it. They just never said so out loud.

And once in a while, a good workshop cracks something open in a person. I've watched it happen. It's why I kept doing it.

What a workshop can't do is be there on Monday at 10:14. That was never its job. We pretended it was, because for a long time it was the only tool we had.

Mind the gap

So if you're planning the next offsite, I'd change the question. Stop asking "how do we make this stick?" and start asking "what's going to be there when someone actually needs it?"

Sometimes that's a person. A peer who was in the room with you, who you can ping on Monday and who'll write back, "sounds like a Mention to me, just say it." That's underrated, and it costs nothing.

Sometimes it's a habit. Pick one thing from the workshop. One. Put it somewhere you'll see it on a Monday morning. Not in the binder. At the top of your 1:1 doc, or on a sticky note on the edge of your monitor.

And sometimes it's a tool that lives where the Monday message shows up. That's a big part of why we built Ren into Slack and Teams, so the first sentence of the hard conversation isn't something you have to dig out of a Friday three weeks ago.

I spent a decade trying to make Fridays better. I wish I'd spent more of it thinking about Mondays.

What showed up at 10:14 this week? And what did you have with you when it did?

Jonathan