Tips for Facilitators

How to run engaging, productive workshops

Workshops tend to figure prominently in creative, vision-led work, especially when your organization wants to harness the potential of people putting their heads together to envision new futures ahead. As we see across industry and government, the idea of co-creating, crowdsourcing and consulting publics on our way to better answers feels like a great idea for tackling complex challenges that affect many people.

But when do workshops go from pointless exercises (ie. time away from getting stuff done, or where you’re just there for the buffet spread), to transformative moments with clarity and purpose, informing why and how the organization does things moving forward?

And how do we, as facilitators, increase the chances of productive interactions happening?

The Facilitator: A subtle but important shift in your role

As opposed to sitting at your workstation doing great work on your own, workshops are where we generate divergent ideas and concepts in groups. There is a slight but important shift, in that you’re not so much coming up with the answers, as helping others do so together.

Think of yourself a little more like a DJ or music conductor than rockstar:
as a facilitator you lead more on context and environment than on absolute content and ideas. You’re setting the frameworks, deploying tools to spark responses, and stepping backwards or forwards at the appropriate moments depending on the energy in the room.

Just as it takes a certain amount of savvy to pull off a great party, there are a few planning essentials that can help workshop facilitators elicit the most productive outcomes out of participant time.

Here are some tricks learned over the years, to help you hone your own style and craft of facilitation. Let’s start with what happens during, before we talk about before and after your workshop.

During workshops — facilitating

1. Start by generating empathy for users
   Bring the voice of the customer into the room. Depending how much prior work you can do, open up the opportunity with insights from a fieldwork sprint, or appoint colleagues from the frontline to share a compelling user story or two. Use visual storytelling (for instance show customers using the product in context) as reminders of pain-points in the system that create impetus for doing things differently. This sets the tone firmly on the ‘why’, the value the organization wants to deliver.
2. Help people relate to the challenge
   If stakeholders are unfamiliar with design-driven language, or focussed on implementation, they may feel confused about what’s needed from them or disconnected from the process. Help them see themselves in the challenge and how new solutions benefit their lives and jobs. Engage the whole person, remind participants that we are all ourselves customers and citizens too, not just civil servants, product owners or chief executives, for instance, to level the playing field.
3. Asking the right questions: that’s your X-man skill
   As a problem-solver you’ll naturally have a point of view on solutions. But how do you lead without leading too much and crowding out your participants’ creative process — whilst not letting things spiral out of focus? Enter the art of framing. Break the broad opportunity area or brief down into missions or subthemes as triggers to generate around. Take out any words that presuppose solutions, leave in desired qualities. Also, have someone remind the team to stay grounded in the customer experience. In principle, if it’s hard for others to build upon, it might be too narrow. (If you’ve a confident direction, take it to the field and prototype instead!) Keep your ideas in ‘back-of-pocket’ reserve, to jumpstart the flow when things stall.
4. Keep everyone on topic, on time
   Tone-setting norms such as brainstorming rules help focus the creative energy. Signpost each burst of activity with easy-to-grasp instructions and help them jump right in with readymade templates and tools. Give someone else the job of timekeeper, and license to be strict! When taking airtime from dominant voices to create space for others to contribute, think of this as ‘passing the mic around’. Often it can be as simple as redirecting your gaze and asking someone, ‘what do you think?’

Before and after workshops — planning

1. Work backwards from the end-in-mind
   Facilitation is somewhat curatorial. What’s the desired experience, takeaway, or emotional engagement we want? That should inform your minute-by-minute flow of activity. Feel free to break from past practices to come up with new activities and create assets fit for purpose. This ensures relevance and keeps things new, if you can invest the time.
2. Equip facilitators with the game plan
   A good briefing is essential. Gather the team round for cookies and teatime and hand out your facilitator guide. It’s ideal for facilitators to understand the human stories and evidence of the problem in order to lead participants towards productive ideas. The shorter the workshop and the more the participants, the tighter everyone needs to be!
3. Be clear on the follow-through before you begin
   A workshop is only as useful as what it enables the organization to do next, no matter how insightful or transformative it may feel. So filter your activity set based on what will help specific members of the organization do next. Some questions for the planning team: are we helping participants inform the design for a role, service, process, or comms piece? Are we trying to co-create a pipeline of prototyping experiments and interventions? Or is the workshop meant to re-prioritize the focus, tasks and behaviours of the team? When’s our follow-up presentation to stakeholders; who will synthesize the workshop outcomes for that? Importantly, what is the resource commitment required down the line; who will own it? In other words, integrate workshop outputs with existing or upcoming workflows, to stay on the path towards actionable impact.

Finally, don’t forget to bring good humour, a sense of fun and positive vibes! Ultimately, remember growth is a process. There’s no replacing learning by doing, and over time you’ll develop your own killer workshop instincts as long as you remain thoughtful and intentional about it. The best part is, once you start to impart your craft or help others along their thought process, you’ll know that you’re truly levelling up in effectiveness.

If you’ve more tips for facilitators to share, or specific questions to go deeper in, ping us! We want to hear from you.

The Coop is an open platform to spread knowhow and field-tested learnings amongst the growing community of practice within and beyond Singapore. We’ll feature and serve people in our ecosystem who are invested in accelerating fluency across diverse methodologies and tools for improving policy, service and operational challenges from design, data to transformation. Follow us and stay tuned! — Jason & Shan, The Coop Editors

Shan has led design and innovation programs for complex challenges for 9 years as a design researcher, and 5 as a founding member of IDEO Singapore. She is currently spending time in public service.