Workshops are a popular means of aggregating the efforts of different groups (often who have not previously worked together) within a time-boxed meeting. Such meetings can be effective in obtaining ownership for ideas, exploring options, and organizing efforts for an endeavor. While collaboration can be a powerful tool, workshops can also have many limitations - especially a willingness of participants to make a/b comparisons. In Knowledge and Decisions, Thomas Sowell describes the differences which arise between group and individual decision-making: 

To mitigate some of these effects, McKinsey research suggests working together with a workshop sponsor to implement the following steps in order to enhance the outcomes from such workshops:

1. Establish the decision-making criteria

Determine what an acceptable idea looks like.Develop highly specific definitions of boundaries and evaluation criteria that are tailored to meet the intended purpose of the collaboration.  Read more »

Let's consider the implications of distributing attention across too many competing demands. Inefficiencies exist as people or teams switch from performing one task to another. Let's call the monitoring and control function which performs such context switches our 'Work Operating System'. This Work Operating System is offered to provide a metaphor for what occurs during context switches, and relate that to the actions which an operating system must perform as it manages the resources on a computer. In each case, whether the computer or person switches contexts, there is overhead (in both time and energy) that is involved in making such transitions. Read more »