Protect your method from "slopification"
Once expressed, our ideas go out into the world and are changed in the process. Workshops help others retain a sharp understanding of our frameworks.
If you're in the business of expertise and/or perspective it's inevitable that you'll create your own concepts, analogies or even processes.
There are great advantages to having not just a specific Point of View (really valuable to stand out) but also a method that the market comes to associate to your company.
However, the thing about methods is that other people apply them. You lose control over that and this can be unnerving.
This means that proprietary or novel methods also require a little teaching to make sure your students use them in the right way.
Surely you've seen your share of frameworks being poorly understood and deployed.
You don't want that for you own proprietary methods.
Left to their own devices, the potential users of your methods will each interpret your ideas in a different way.
They will they apply your processes without the nuance that you know is crucial. And in time, whole segments of the market will associate your frameworks to nothing in particular and certainly not the sophisticated perspective you needed to sculpt before creating them.
Luckily there are things you can do about this.
Like Workshops, of course.
Why Workshops Protect your methods
Workshops let you create the ideal conditions to apply your processes.
You can control:
the timeframe
the goals of the meeting
the resources that can be used
and even the profile of the participants.
Workshops let you stage your method in a way that its brilliance shines through.
What about other formats?
Workshops are not the only tool you can use to teach a method, of course.
Written articles, podcast interviews, video explanations. These are all very good too.
But they don't create the visceral experience of your audience applying your ideas, live, with your guidance.
And a bonus aspect of using a workshop to teach your own methods is that you can see, in real time, where participants struggle more or what aspects of your frameworks are already intuitive enough.
This interaction is great to constantly fine tune not just your ideas, but also, how you present them.
What happens after that?
As you get more comfortable with workshops as a method teaching tool, you can even start to offer more self-guided versions of them, which are easier to scale.
You can also create shorter, even more focused versions, that can be targeted to a specific Ideal Costumer Profile or Industry and run them with prospects to convert them into customers.
But that's something for another day.
All the best!