Leverage points in professional education (Or: do workshops need to cost $3.000?)

Leverage is what makes learning scale.

Take a book. A book holds years of a writer’s experience. Writing synthesises this experience and lays it out in a clear manner. Instead of taking years to get in on the experience, a reader taps into a book for a couple of hours. Leverage.

Leverage works the same with workshops. The facilitator puts effort and wisdom into process and content. The participant learns in one sitting what otherwise might have taken days or weeks to understand independently. Leverage.

Ratio’s and cost

Leverage determines how fast and useful you learn. But there is a snag. It costs time to create leverage.

Take an example of you creating a small workshop for an in-company training.

In a Do It Yourself (DIY) setting, lets assume you need about 3 units of preparation to achieve 1 unit of delivery. A ratio of 3:1.

So a full workshop day will need 3 days of preparation and 1 day delivery resulting in 4 days of work. Lets say a good developer costs $1,000 per day. This makes the workshop cost $4.000.

The alternative is to hire in an expert for the day. An expert is way more efficient at preparing the workshop because they have their content covered. Lets say half your effort. So 1.5:1.

An expert’s cost will then be 2.5 days x $1,000/day = $2,500. But they’ll sell you the workshop for $3.000 (because you save $1,000, and they gain $500).

Switching the ratio

There is a 3rd way: you take on process, and the expert delivers content.

Lets do the math.

If you know what your learners need, then you’ll organise a process more efficiently than the outside expert can. Do some preparation calls with participants, line up a series of facilitation formats that prepare case presentations and questions for the expert to discuss in a clinic setting. Facilitate the expert into a fitting context to close it off. Your ratio will drop, to 1:1 or even less if you know your formats. $2,000

As for the expert: hire her in for 2 hours ( 0:0.25 as no prep is needed) and let her keep the expected profit of $500.

You now have a workshop that hits the same learning goals, and at great value for money.

Focus on process, not content. Leverage.