In this presentation, the speaker surveys the current state of the workshop industry, noting a clear decline in attendance for both open‑enrollment and private‑label workshops. He attributes the drop primarily to soft costs—expenses such as lunch, travel, and venue overhead—that make large‑group sessions financially unattractive for companies. As a cost‑effective alternative, he highlights video‑based delivery, which reduces these soft costs while preserving content value. The talk then shifts to assessment tools, contrasting superficial, marketing‑style quizzes (e.g., “I’m a peach or a plum”) with rigorously validated, competency‑linked instruments. He stresses that credible assessments must be grounded in industrial‑organizational psychology and involve PhDs or other experts. To illustrate the depth of validation required, he references the Buckingham StrengthsFinder, explaining its extensive scientific validation process—half‑a‑million‑dollar investment, multiple rounds of item testing, and strict psychometric standards—showing why simple, low‑cost quizzes cannot meet enterprise expectations.
Chapters
How many of you are doing workshops? OK. How many of you are doing sort of open enrollment workshops? Really? OK. And how many of you are doing more closed private label workshops? Great. OK. That business, just the trend on that business is it's going down, right? It's just getting harder and harder to put the butts in seats. It's getting harder and harder to get the companies to commit. It's primarily a soft cost problem, not a hard cost problem. It's once they start to do the math of how much it costs to have 48 people in a room times X dollars an hour in lunch and travel, it becomes really, really expensive. So video, there's an economic element to video as well. Assessments. How many of you have assessment tools? How many of you are making money from your assessment tools versus free assessment tools? OK, cool. So let me just sort of give you my 3-minute spiel. spiel on assessment tools. There are assessment tools that are just marketing tactics, if you will. So I'm a peach, a flower, or this or that, whatever. That's not really an assessment tool. So I'm a plum. Great. What do I do with that? Actual assessment tools. So that's not to say that there's not a reason to put out some sort of baseline assessment tool that gets people to lean into your content and want something. But be thoughtful with it. I mean, people are smarter than we think. And a lot of stuff that I see out there is just— wow. Just put a little bit more something in there. The baseline is higher, folks. You're competing with so many different people. If you're going to do a proper assessment tool, you have to tie this to competencies. And you have to get some IO people and PhDs. You've got to get some really smart folks. How many of you are familiar with Buckingham StrengthsFinder piece? Right. So I've worked with clients and I said, well, oh, it's got 12 questions and it gives you the— You know, your initial piece, I could write 12 questions. They spent half a million dollars validating that scientifically, and each question was tested something like 48 times. Every word in those, and you look at that. So if you look at that and go, well, I could write 12 questions, yeah, but it's wrong. It's not going to work. And you can fool some of the people some of the time. We call them consumers, right? Right. But when you get into the big leagues and the large companies, it's not going to work.
