Tips for effective Service Design workshop facilitation

Here are a few tips for facilitating workshops that focus on co-design, or participatory design, but can also be applicable to other workshops or design sprints as well. If you are new to workshop facilitation, make sure you look into other resources such as the Service Design Thinking and Doing books. These tips assume that you are already familiar with some of the basics of running a workshop, and are reflections from my 5 years of working in service design, workshop facilitation, user and customer experience, and strategy. Hopefully, they are helpful if you find yourself having to put together a workshop.

1. Understand your audience

• Expect the unexpected. You may be walking in and setting up a workshop for a room of people at different levels with different team dynamics, motivations, and goals. Do your due diligence in advance of conducting the workshop and try to understand participant roles, organization structure, some of the existing painpoints, and get a sense of the gamut of those who work closely with each other compared to complete strangers, and relationships that fall somewhere in between. Despite all your preparation, you never know how participants will act at the time of a first workshop, so be prepared for different scenarios and maintain a level of flexibility to handle thinking quickly on your feet.
• Who is invited to attend? Have they worked together before? Is there a good mix of people with different backgrounds and perspectives? Anyone who might be resistant to having a workshop and why?
• Even the playing field by ensuring everyone is included in discussion and their voices are heard. This one might be difficult because you may have those in the room who have stronger voices, are very opinionated, hyperfixate on particular details, or someone that others have respect and reverence for so will defer to them to speak. But if the workshop is about hearing everyone out, it is important to give everyone equal opportunities to share and encourage them to do so. Which leads us to…

People interact in various ways in a workshop setting, so be prepared to handle different situations including people trying to take charge, or even conflict resolution, should that arise. Usually if you consider the second set of tips, setting expectations can mitigate this from happening.

2. Set clear expectations upfront

• Introduce yourselves and the reason the workshop was called for in a way that sets the tone and gives people an idea of how they can interact with you and your team
• Stress that you are the facilitators and will remain as objective and impartial as possible
• Let participants know how you expect them to interact with each other, almost like a code of conduct. This is not just about being civil with each other, it takes a bit of a paradigm shift sometimes to empower people to contribute their tacit knowledge, recollect a previous relevant experience, or talk about their feelings and motivations as it relates to the focus area.
• How long will the workshop(s) take?
• What should participants prepare?
• Send out the agenda ahead of time without giving so much away to allow people to come in armed with their own biases, and review the agenda again at the beginning of the workshop (in case people don’t read their emails)
• During a workshop, go through instructions step by step, using progressive disclosure
• At the conclusion of a workshop, wrap up by summarizing the results of some of the activities, thank the participants, and let them know what the next steps will be with the insights that have been brought up and collected

A set of ground rules helps to set the tone of the workshop and provides a chance for participants to reflect on what is being asked of them as the workshop proceeds.

3. Prepare the space and materials

• It is important to set the mood for co-design and participatory design. Whatever the activities are, if they involve mixing people together and having them collaborate in some way, people should be comfortable doing that in the space. Sometimes snacks and icebreakers are a good way to warm people up to each other.
• Can everyone see the materials comfortably from where they are situated?
• How will people move around if they are going to be asked to get up?
• How should groups be split up to ensure you mix up a diverse range of perspectives and subject matter expertise
• Other things to prepare: Sound, lighting, projector and HDMI, laptops and any peripherals, whiteboards, markers, sticky notes, adhesives (painter’s tape) for sticking up journey maps, etc. camera for documentation
• Print out any large format artifacts and create an environment that encourages people to examine and mark up details
• For remote workshops, organize your collaboration tool of choice (I tend to use Miro a lot). Clear away unnecessary elements and hide any other distracting things from screen when sharing. Scroll slowly so your audience can follow along. Show examples of how you expect people to interact, especially if there is anyone unfamiliar with the tools.

4. Make things engaging

• Tell stories that relate to the subject at hand to break the ice, set up the context, and to demonstrate the importance of the activities the participants are about to participate in
• While it is important to stick to the agenda and your facilitation notes, if discussion deviates into uncharted territory, take a moment to listen and assess where it is going. If it is relevant, and important let it continue. If it doesn’t pertain to the focus areas of the workshop, find a respectful way to steer the conversations back on track
• Practice active listening as a facilitator. Hopefully someone is keeping notes, but sometimes, insights can be found from just the discussions that happen and not anything written down
• Further prompt relevant discussions with questions to dive a little deeper into the details of the topic (without getting too granular) or to elaborate on something that not everyone in the room may be familiar with
• Keep a gauge on energy levels and facial expressions in order to pace out the activities and discussion conversations and adjust your timings as necessary
• Learn participants’ names and roles and call on them or ask for volunteers to share during discussion phases and check that everyone else is listening

Encouraging participants to speak or to designate a spokesperson for a group allows everyone in the workshop to hear some of the things that groups may have discussed and surfaces common threads across teams or organizational departments.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes achieving the explicit workshop goals or objectives aren’t the only measures of success from facilitating workshops. Teams should come away inspired to collaborate more closely with each other, and feel empowered to communicate ideas more freely. Designers should reflect on a workshop as something that helped them to get a deeper look at an organization, its service touchpoints and interactions. Those expected outcomes aren’t the only valuable insights. If things go well, designers may sometimes make discoveries that perhaps they weren’t even aware of when setting out to run a workshop, and lead to whole new paths to explore. The unwritten goal of a Service Designer and workshop facilitator is to act as a catalyst for change and shift in perspectives in working teams and organizations.