Scenarios stretch thinking
Using imagined futures to help participants plan for situations that are difficult to picture from today's vantage point.
Read the full field note →Notes from the margins
Things I've been thinking about.
Practical field notes from designing and facilitating workshops: the questions, experiments and lessons that help sponsors, teams and facilitators think better together.
Not “thought leadership”. Just thoughts.Seed the question, not the answer
How a carefully seeded question can help a group get moving without the facilitator pre-solving the problem.
Read the full field note →The value of a canvas
A canvas quietly tells participants what to pay attention to — and therefore shapes how they think about the challenge.
Read the full field note →When Post-its become wallpaper
Paper can still be brilliant. But when a workshop pattern becomes predictable, HTML gives us another material for participation.
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Sometimes the quiet should come last
Individual reflection does not always need to come first. Sometimes the shared picture and other people's perspectives are what make the quiet thinking useful.
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Let the workshop remember.
Most workshop outputs capture where the room landed. In a recent face-to-face session, selective recording and fast AI summaries created a visible memory of how the thinking developed.
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Read less. Hear more.
Workshop prep is knowledge transfer as much as logistics. I built a small AI podcast tool to turn dense source material into a traceable conversation I could listen to on the move.
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All in one room. All on one board.
Everyone was face-to-face, but every meaningful piece of work was captured digitally, live. That gave the room something extra: a shared memory we could interrogate while the workshop was still happening.
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Don't just photograph the wall.
A workshop output pack should do more than prove the workshop happened. Done well, it becomes a readable record of the conversation, the thinking and the decisions — and something people and AI can actually use afterwards.
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If all you're doing is presenting, do you really need a workshop?
If the goal is simply to inform people, there are easier ways. Workshops earn their keep when people need to discuss, challenge, shape and align together.
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Don't close the workshop. Land it.
“Next steps” are useful. But going one level deeper can make the handover clearer and give the work a better chance of surviving after the workshop.
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To chair or not to chair?
Not every useful session needs activities and breakouts. Sometimes the facilitator's value is helping a room understand itself while the conversation is still happening.
Read the full field note →A working principle
Design the thinking, not just the activity.
A beautifully facilitated exercise can still be the wrong exercise. I care less about whether the method is fashionable and more about whether it makes the next piece of thinking easier, sharper or more honest.
Methods are tools. The sequence is the design.More notes soon.