184 Leading with NLP
that it focused more on the future desired goal and not so
much on the present problems. This was partly because the
participants were invited to explore the problems first,
rather than the desired outcome. We addressed this by
changing the order of questions in the workshop so the first
question the delegates discussed was: ‘What do you want?’
When this had been fully explored, the next question was
about the barriers to the desired situation. Now the prob-
lems were put in context and only relevant problems were
discussed. The third question was: ‘How will you get what
you want?’ The facilitators would structure the answers into
a series of steps, starting with the present and ending in the
desired state. Then everyone would identify those actions
the group could do on their own and those things that
needed external support and finance from UNIDO.
The second problem was that the workshops often did not
lead to sustainable projects. When the UNIDO facilitators left,
the stakeholders did not have enough energy, commitment
and momentum to carry the project through on their own.
We realized that we were looking at too narrow a part of
the system. The workshop was the focal point, but only one
part of the whole developmental co-operation process. We
needed to put it in the context of the whole system and look
at what preceded and followed it in order to make the whole
process give better results. So we looked at how the work-
shop participants were recruited. Who was selected? How
were they prepared? We discovered we knew far too little
about the participants, their goals, their expectations and
their understanding of the whole process. Suitable partici-
pants were not always identified; some participants were not
the best people to have at the workshop while other key play-
ers were missing.
Participants were selected and interviewed by consultants
in the country many weeks before the workshop. We needed
to give the consultants better guidelines on selecting and in-
terviewing prospective participants. They needed a better
appreciation of the whole system: target beneficiaries, other
stakeholders and external agencies such as UNIDO. They