Approach
Don't start with the agenda.
A good workshop is the consequence of understanding the problem properly. The agenda comes later — once we're clearer on what must change, who needs to be involved and what the room needs to make possible.
The workshop is an intervention, not an event.Understand → Design → Do
The model is deliberately simple. The questions inside each stage are where the work happens.
Understand
Explore the brief, talk to the people around the problem, challenge assumptions and define what a genuinely useful outcome would look like.
Design
Shape the sequence of thinking: the questions, provocations, activities, artefacts, decisions and moments where the group needs to diverge or converge.
Do
Facilitate the real room. Read what is happening, adapt the plan, make the thinking visible and make sure the work leaves the room with owners and momentum.
Before the workshop
Interrogate the brief.
What are we really trying to change?
What decision is stuck? Where do people disagree? What has already been tried? What is political, emotional or simply unclear? Who needs to leave the room believing or doing something different?
Respectfully challenge the ask.
If the answer appears to be “a workshop”, I want to understand why. Sometimes the best design is a workshop. Sometimes it is a sequence of conversations, a decision forum, a prototype, a working session — or no workshop at all.
During the workshop
Design the conditions for people to think.
Make thinking visible.
Use canvases, walls, prompts and synthesis so participants can see the group's thinking evolving — not just hear a series of opinions.
Design for participation.
Change the mode before energy disappears. Individual thinking, pairs, small groups, whole-room decisions — each has a job.
Adapt to the room.
The design is a hypothesis. If the room tells us something different, the plan moves. The outcome matters more than fidelity to the agenda.
After the workshop
Don't let the energy die in the car park.
Capture what matters
Decisions, tensions, open questions, actions and ownership should survive the workshop in a form people can actually use.
Share back quickly
The longer outputs sit untouched, the more momentum leaks away. A useful shareback should help people re-enter the thinking without re-running the workshop.
Stay interested in what happens next
The value of a workshop is not whether people enjoyed the day. It is whether the work changed what happened after it.