one of my favorite simple tools for dealing with people who try to derail your workshop is having a parking lot and this is the most basic thing you can possibly imagine so you basically just have a you know a board or a flip chart somewhere in the room with parking lot written on it and when people ask you questions that are not relevant to the workshop or somehow are challenging but not worth addressing in the moment this is what you use the parking lot for so let me give you an example if i'm running a
design sprint workshop or if i'm running a strategy workshop and someone says to me hey jonathan uh we have this problem in our organization that our software is really crappy and really old so you know it's going to be really hard to implement some of these things and i'll say okay by the way there's two ways of dealing with this okay one way makes the person angrier one way is me saying okay so we're not really going to talk about that in this workshop that doesn't really this is about the and then they'll say yeah
well if we don't do this if we don't talk about this then there's no point in doing this workshop right i've had that so many times what i do now is i say oh okay so you're saying that software okay so this is not something i'm going to deal with now but we're going to have a section at the end where i'm going to be able to go through answer some rapid-fire questions so what i'm going to do is add this to the parking lot so i'll write it down i'm going to post it or
just write it here and i'll say software issues then someone might say hey look i don't think this type of workshop's going to work in our company uh you know we don't have time because our schedule is all over the place we'll never be able to block two days um this doesn't really make sense for us i i don't even know why we're in and i'll be like all right i really understand where you're coming from i have a lot of things to say about this if you don't mind trusting the process for now i'm
going to come back to that so what you said to me is that you don't believe this is going to work because the schedules of your company will never fit with that okay so i'm going to put that down okay i'm going to come back to these questions i'm going to come back to these topics later in the day or tomorrow at a designated time or if it's a shorter workshop i'll say so these questions i'm putting them up on the board at lunch time let's have a one-on-one about these talks about these topics because
you don't want to have these things exploding in the room and derailing the entire workshop really honestly having a parking lot is one of the simplest ways to mitigate long open conversations that might break out in your workshop i know a lot of you people who've done facilitation before are like yeah jonathan obviously a parking lot we all do this but it was something it actually took me quite a few years to start implementing so if you want to save yourself if you want a way out of a conversation that you're not ready to have
right now create a parking lot make it clear to people from the very start of the workshop that this is what it's for and capture conversations and questions that you don't want to deal with right now that you think could disrupt the workshop stick them on the board and make it clear when you will address these questions and the crazy thing is you might never address them honestly i do it even if i even though i know they won't have these questions by the end of the workshop i still write it down and tell them
i'm going to address them just so that they can get it out of their head really the goal of having something like a parking lot is like for me that's two things help people feel heard that's often like often the reason people call trouble cause trouble in a workshop is that they don't feel like they've been heard they don't feel like they are getting what they want in a parking lot if you write their thing up here sometimes i even go further and i write their name next to it so that they really feel heard
the other thing is you need to help them let go of it right you need to help them let go of this thing that's in their head if you can help them do that then this person will be more relaxed in the workshop as well so put get yourself a parking lot in every workshop so that you don't have to disrupt the entire workshop when someone tries to challenge you a parking lot is really the perfect way to do that [Music]
