In short: Yes, and it can be surprisingly productive for inspiration gathering but I wouldn't recommend it for decision making or prototyping. Here a few tips to make it work:

• Use existing recurring meetings: Insert your 5-10 minute mini workshop within an existing recurring meeting.

• Use a Canvas: it breaks the workshop in smaller pieces and makes it easy to leave the results in the room between the mini-workshops

• Don't make people do it right away: Give people the time through the whole existing meeting to do the task.

• Summarize what's done: Each time summarize the key learnings from the last time

The Challenge

Necessity often drives innovation. In a pro-bono project I was helping a local community envision future impacts on their region. We organized a large workshop with external officials, neighbors, and community members. To maintain a balanced mix of participants, we couldn't invite all community members to the big workshop. So, we needed another way to involve all the internal community members.

We decided to run several short 5-minute workshops spread out over weeks. Surprisingly, this method turned out to be very effective.

Key Elements

Here a few things that I've learned running those mini workshops that I might replicate the next time I run such a series of mini workshops:

Use existing recurring meetings

We noticed that the community gathered weekly, providing an opportunity to run parts of the workshop in 5 to 10-minute blocks. This allowed us to involve more people and give them a preview of the process while capturing their thoughts.

Use a workshop Canvas

We used a workshop canvas to show progress each week. Displaying this canvas in the community center allowed people to see our advancements and focus each mini-workshop on specific sections. It also made it possible throughout the week for all community members to see the workshop results.

Don't make people do it right away

Instead of making people write during the short 5-minute workshop, I gave them a task and collected their responses at the end of the recurring community event. This kept the event's length manageable and people just had a sticky note ready during the whole event for whenever an idea poped in their mind.

Summarize what's done

After the first mini-workshop, in each mini workshop I started by summarizing the previous learnings to show to people how valuable their participation is.

When to Reuse Mini Workshops

Mini workshops can work well in organizations with routine events. I feel they are pretty useful for gathering inspiration or context information. But I wouldn't recommend it for decision making or prototyping. Asking for decisions based on information that was shared over weeks would be too much pressure.

Written with AI help
This article is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.