How to prepare your team for a facilitated workshop session

A facilitated workshop session is only as useful as the preparation that goes into it. Helen Redfern has run half-day and full-day sessions with teams across Ontario and British Columbia, and the sessions that produce real decisions almost always have one thing in common: the team arrived knowing what question they were there to answer.

Name the question before the day ¶

The most common reason a workshop session produces a lot of good conversation but no clear decisions is that the team arrived with a topic rather than a question. 'Our onboarding process' is a topic. 'What is the single biggest barrier to a new hire being productive in their first thirty days?' is a question.

The question does not have to be perfect. It has to be specific enough that the team can tell, at the end of the day, whether they answered it. Helen Redfern spends part of every pre-session call with the client working on this one thing, because it shapes everything else about how the day is structured.

Brief participants honestly ¶

Participants who arrive at a workshop not knowing why they are there, or who have been told it is 'just a brainstorm,' are harder to engage and less likely to say the useful, uncomfortable things. A short briefing note, sent a few days before the session, that explains the question, why it matters, and what the team will do with the output, makes a measurable difference.

The briefing does not need to be long. Two paragraphs is usually enough. The goal is to give people time to think before they arrive, so the session is not the first time they are encountering the question.

Decide what happens after ¶

Before the session, not after, agree on who will own the output and what the next step is once the session ends. This sounds obvious, but it is frequently skipped. The result is a session that produces good decisions and a summary document that sits in a shared drive while everyone waits for someone else to act.

The decision about what happens after does not need to be detailed. It needs to name one person who owns the follow-through and one date by which the first action will be taken. Everything else can be figured out from there.

The day itself is the easy part, once the preparation is in place. If you are planning a workshop session and want to talk through the question you are trying to answer, that is a good use of a short call.