Make your workshops work with framing

In this post, I share a quick tip about one simple addition to your workshops to help boost engagement.

Product Designers often have to get colleagues from different departments together and get them to collaborate. This is a lot easier said than done.

You’ve planned and designed the ultimate workshop. Your Miro board is a brainstorming wonderland, brimming with possibilities. You’re ready to ‘facilitate’, solve problems, and unleash creative geniuses in your colleagues. You jump into an activity and suddenly, the Engineer looks less than enthused, and the Product colleagues seem to be disappearing into ‘an urgent call’. Engagement takes a nosedive, and your carefully planned session starts to derail. Sound familiar?

I’ll tell you about one slide I add to all my workshops and how I make people understand their roles. And more importantly: boost engagement.

Framing

Instead of whacking up an agenda first, I show and talk over:

1. What we’re doing in the session

2. The outcome

3. Why it’s important

4. How it will be done

I show the above at the beginning of my workshops

This all might seem a bit ‘extra’ but it helps massively:

• It brings a shared understanding of what is going on. Remember people have their day jobs to complete before they jump onto your workshop.
• It’s a powerful way to make people’s mindsets shift into being participants and part of the design process.
• It stops people from questioning what you’re doing as you’ve told them why it’s needed.

I have used this at least once a month for reviews with colleagues across the Kingfisher business since I discovered it in mid-2023. And I’ve always been able to switch my colleagues on with this priming. This ‘tool’ is not limited to Product Designers…anyone can use it!

This is not my invention at all, I learned this thanks to a book called Collaborative Product Design by Austin Guvella. So all credit to him.

I hope you use this technique in your workshops! If you’ve used anything similar please let me know in the comments. Give this article a clap 👏 if you found it useful. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.