#2 – Five Essential Elements of Successful Workshop Facilitation
Make sure you plan for a successful workshop by considering these five key elements before you walk into your facilitation room.
Welcome to the second issue of the Facilitation Studio. Today I will run you through five top tips for successful workshops. These should be super actionable, and I hope you can immediately put them into play!
Define Your Intent
Before you begin planning your workshop, defining your intent is essential. What do you hope to achieve through the workshop? By specifying your intent, you can stay focused and on track. Your intent shapes the critical questions you’ll address and the outcomes you’ll create. We’ll touch on both of these things in future issues.
A good intent provides flexibility and suggests multiple ways to achieve it. It focuses on what you’ll do next, not what you will have done.
For example, a poor intent might be “Create a customer journey map showing pain points and opportunity spaces.”. This states a deliverable and doesn’t articulate what will be done with it. On the other hand, a good intent might be “By the end of this session, we will share key pain points in our customer’s experience and prioritised areas for investment with the executive team”. Despite having the same potential outcome, it articulates the actual value you’ll be creating. It also gives you more room to flex if your planned approach isn’t bringing you to the conclusion you need.
Top tip
Complete the following sentence and write it at the top of your agenda, as in the introduction to your invite and on the wall of your room during your workshop:
By the end of this session, we will be able to…<what you’ll be able to do!>
Choose Your Collaborators
The next step is to choose your collaborators. Who are the people that can help you achieve your intent? You can have the best prepared, best-designed workshop in the world, but if you have the wrong people, you’ll never be able to achieve your intent.
So we live in the real world, and you’re sometimes not going to be able to get those people. But this is a two-way street. In those instances, you’ll need to rewrite your intent based on the people attending your session. If you don’t change your intent to something achievable with the people in the room, you’re setting yourself up to fail. But even worse, you’re setting a room full of collaborators up to fail.
Top tip
Something that can help you net the right people is articulating the skills, experience or knowledge you want at the session and highlighting why it’s important rather than focusing on individuals’ names. Then ask people to take responsibility for that area. This shows them the value they can bring and allows them to buy in, deputise or opt-out.
We need someone with <skill/knowledge/experience> to <value they will add>. <Name> we’d love you to be this person or to suggest someone else.
Tune Your Tools
Once you have your team in place, it’s time to tune your tools. I’ll talk another time about the difference between tools, methods and processes, but for now, let’s assume a tool is a single activity you’re doing with your collaborators to move the workshop forward towards your intent; maybe it’s drawing a journey map together or a silent brainstorm.
Different people, teams and organisations react differently to the same stimulus or tool, so finding activities that engage your specific group of collaborators is essential.
Using metaphors and terminology relevant to your organisation is the quickest level of tuning you can do. If you’re using a classic tool like the sailboat metaphor, but working with an aviation company, making that sailboat into a plane might engage people more.
Top tip
If you’re using tools like those in the Hyper Island Toolbox or a Miro template, align the language with how your collaborators will think by (carefully) using find & replace. Things like the word “Customers” refers to different stakeholders in a B2B or B2C business. Aligning your language beforehand will save you questions and confusion during the session.
Practice makes perfect
First up, it’s super, super important to do a dry run of your workshop in a low-stakes environment. Like any prototyping, this doesn’t have to be a full-blown session; it can be anything from a walkthrough with a key sponsor to practising your patter with a colleague. Make sure you can explain what you want collaborators to do clearly, that you’re using their language and that your words relate directly to any materials they’ll be using. This will help you articulate your ideas more clearly and ensure that your tools and activities are effective.
Secondly, you sometimes need to practice a technique with your collaborators in the workshop to help them understand what you will be achieving. Not all good things are easy, and allowing everyone to practice can massively increase confidence within your team, especially if they’re going to be using the process to make a high-stakes decision.
Top tip
When practising in a live workshop or before meeting collaborators, it’s important to simulate an environment that reflects the audience’s knowledge of the end subject. For example, when conducting a prioritisation workshop, I often have participants prioritise criteria for a specific piece of stationery. This approach provides a relatable experience for everyone, often elicits surprisingly polarised opinions, and is just a little bit silly, which encourages team bonding. The more guesswork you introduce into a practice run, the further it is from reality, the less insight you gain.
Tie Up Loose Ends
Finally, make sure to tie up loose ends within your session. Your workshop is a story; if someone puts energy and time into that story but doesn’t understand how it contributed to the conclusion, they’ll feel like they wasted their time. Sometimes your plan will change, and outputs created early in a workshop won’t directly contribute to the overall success, but these evolutions should be celebrated, not hidden. Calling them out validates the individuals involved and shows how you, as a facilitator, evolved the session to meet the context and achieved your intent by doing so.
Top tip
Dedicate the last 15 minutes of the session to a walkthrough where you acknowledge everyone’s input and ensure you haven’t misunderstood anything. I like to record this walkthrough as a video; it has become my go-to outcome reference. Hearing it all spoken aloud gives people space to reflect, correct any misunderstandings and see how the story you’ve woven comes together, even sections they may not have been a direct part of.
And we’re done!
I hope you found these tips helpful and super actionable! Stay tuned for the next issue of the Facilitation Studio, where we’ll cover five common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
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Until next time, happy facilitating!