I have recently started facilitating "Project Charter" sessions for our project teams. This group consists of internal and external members of the team. We provide that team with a finished "document" about a week after the session to show them what we have captured and agreed on. Is anyone else doing this? Also, would anyone be interested in a peer review of this document and offer feedback?

Hi everybody, it is a great pleasure to be part of this community. I have no much practical experience in workshopping. Yesterday, I had a chat with customer of mine that shared he has a lot of ideas in his head but lack of structure and needs help with that issue. How would you recommend me to start and what kind of workshop to propose to him, what exercises would be best to include?

Sometimes when people hear the word 'icebreaker' they cringe or might feel super anxious about taking part in one. Yes, icebreakers can make you feel a bit awkward initially, but they are proven to help enhance relationships and encourage creativity. 'Icebreakers can help increase team bonds, boost performance and creativity'—Harvard Business School study Integrating icebreakers into your workshops or meetings is a great way to get everyone relaxed and ready to participate. But how do you choose the right ones so that you avoid those dreaded awkward silences? Here are my Top 2 Icebreakers that are easy to implement (in-person or online): 1. My First Job Ask everyone in the group to write down their name, their first job, and what they learned from that job. Then go round the group and have everybody read theirs out. 2. Pointless Questions Prepare a few fun questions ahead of the workshop, then go round the room and have everybody take turns answering the questions. It’s as simple as that—you don’t even need to write anything down! Here are some question suggestions to get you started: - If you could invite a celebrity over for dinner, who would it be and why? - What is your most prized possession and why? - You can have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life. What do you choose? Here are some more icebreakers for you to explore! What's another great icebreaker that I can add to my list?

Hi everyone, I saw that a lot of you are not only Facilitators but also Trainers and was looking for an exercise recommendation. I am looking for workshop exercises for a hands-on practice session for a (sales) team to practice asking a set of pre-defined questions. For context: - We ran a workshop on "what are the right questions to ask" during a qualification (similar to BANT in case someone is familiar) - We compiled a list of questions (not a word-by-word script) based on that workshop (with dot voting) - We would now like to practice asking these suggested questions (no strict order, no fixed script) , so the team feels more comfortable with them - We are looking for exercises that go beyond the usual roleplay or analyzing a call recording. It can be experimental and out of the box -  4-8 participants per group around 45 mins I understand this is not a pure facilitation question. But I feel a creative facilitator mindset could help with coming up with something fun and engaging. What would you suggest to do?

Hi Everyone! So much experience and expertise in this community ... thrilled to be a member. I have a four-hour (same day) virtual session coming up and after the hour lunch break, I begin with energizer that gets the participants out of their seats and have a laugh. I have done ... find objects, eye yoga and the “after lunch shuffle”. Please what are your ideas? Thank you for sharing! Take care.

Hi everybody. I wonder if anybody has had any experience (good or bad) with squeezing a design sprint into one day (or two). Im curious to know what worked and what didn't.

During our virtual meet-up last week, we were reflecting on and sharing our learnings from running our first workshops. The conversations were fascinating and each person shared something completely different. My first workshop experience was amazingly terrifyingly wonderful! 😂 I was asked to run a workshop for 60 people at a retreat that we as a company had organised in Italy. My biggest fear was public speaking. I had always believed that I could NEVER stand up in front of a crowd of adults and speak, yet there I was... Beforehand I was super nervous, pacing around the place and looking over my agenda a number of times. But then the weirdest thing happened. The minute I started talking to my audience, this sense of calm came over me. I started to feel comfortable, excited and I was getting energy from the crowd. Maybe this is for me, I thought to myself. Of course I made MANY mistakes but I didn't care. The audience understood I was new to this and they made me feel soooooooo comfortable and supported (shout-out to my amazing audience at the Workshopper Master Retreat, I love you all 💛). Looking back on it, I loved it. It was so much fun and most importantly, my participants had fun! Check out the video I recorded reflecting on my 3 key learnings from running this workshop which I've added to this post. I would LOVE to hear your stories/experiences and key learnings from running your first workshop in the comments. Feel free to record a quick video if you'd like 😊

One of my favorite books of all time is 'The Power of Moments' by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. In this book, Chip and Dan talk about improving experiences for others, and they explore what makes occasions unique and memorable. Psychologists have found that, when we reflect on our experiences, we tend to remember two moments in particular: The "peak"—the best moment of a positive experience—and the ending. Peak Moments are things that happen that are out of the ordinary; they're unexpected and a bit of a surprise. These moments disproportionally impact how we remember an event. These moments make us feel excited, motivated, and surprised! So here's the question for all of us: Are we paying attention to these moments as facilitators? Are we consciously creating peaks for our customers or participants, or employees? You could run an average workshop, sticking to the agenda, and everything would run smoothly. BUT, if you've designed your plan to include a few peak moments throughout, people will remember this workshop to be incredibly special and memorable. They're more likely going to want to have you facilitate another workshop for them in the future so that you create this unique experience for them again. ❓So how can you create these peak moments in your workshops❓ 💪 Start your workshops strong: Make sure you make the group feel welcome when they arrive at the workshop. What we did in a recent workshop to create a peak moment at the beginning was we made a welcome poster with every participants name on it in fun colourful writing. We also had a little goodie bag on each persons chair for them to take home. This was filled with simple things like a notebook, sharpie, post-its and our own AJ&Smart stickers. Another workshop we had everyone wait outside the room, we blasted some high energy music and let the participants in. We high-fived each person as they came in and everyone was super pumped before the workshop even started. 🎉 Celebrate wins/milestones: Throughout your workshops, make sure to celebrate when a group finishes an exercise with a simple high five. Get everyone up and out of their seats and praise their efforts by taking a nice break outside of the office space. Take them to get ice-cream or go for a nice walk together. In a recent workshop, we rented an ice-cream van and let the group know that on their 15 minute break they could go grab an ice-cream and sit in the sun. This is a peak moment that they won't forget!

"Turning thoughts into words sharpens reasoning. What's fuzzy in your head is clear on the page"-Adam Grant Reading this made me think of one of the core principles of workshopping which is explained in detail in our Workshopper Master Program at AJ&Smart ⭐️Core Principle 2: Discussions are Visualised⭐️ ⚡️It can be very difficult for a group of people to keep more than a few pieces of information/data in their heads at once. ⚡️The Facilitators job is to remove this burden by helping a group visualise conversations in a standardised way. ⚡️This means helping individuals to capture and visualise relevant information (writing/drawing ideas on post-its and placing them on the wall/whiteboard in a structured way) that can be recalled later on in the workshop. ⚡️Visualising conversations also allows the more shyer members of a group share their thoughts and ideas. I love this illustration by PJ Milani (@milanicreative on instagram). I feel it highlights the importance of using writing as a tool for thinking and how necessary it is to visualise conversations during workshops. I would love to hear what you think about this in the comments 🙂 What other benefits can visualising conversations during workshops/meetings have?

This post is inspired by one of the previous questions in the group (can't remember the person's name atm, will edit later). It's a common Design Sprint myth that design sprint isn't very useful for new products but works only for the products that need refinement. While it's understandable for this to be a common standpoint, there are very solid arguments why that's not the case and I'll lay out just a few of them. It's ok not to have a specific product and it's ok to assume things in the Design Sprint. The Design Sprint is here to help us "solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days" (or four days in the case of DS 2.0). So, DS is here to make assumptions, and to test if the idea works in the real world. You can deal with specifics in the later stages of product development. There will probably be the whole UX process for defining specifics, where you can use user interviews, user journey mapping, discovery workshops, etc. Also, remember the hotel robot from the Sprint book. That being said, if you're doing Design Sprint for a new thing, a thorough expert interview should help. Having a UX designer or researcher on the team helps because they usually know general research, the basics of psychology, and behavioral patterns. Together with the team, you'll be able to define and assume what a good customer journey will be and test it out on the testing day or later as a follow-up to the Sprint. Test ideas freely, and don't be afraid to fail! Feel free to add to this and describe your experiences!

We love conducting Design Sprints remotely! There's lots of benefits in doing so, but there are some drawbacks. One of those is the Storyboarding exercise. This has always been a struggle for us, but we've been successful incorporating an iPad/Apple Pencil into the process to sketch or wire framing in Figma and sharing that progress in real-time with the client/DS team. I'm curious though how others have handled this difficult step in the process....

Hi Everyone. I am doing a design thinking workshop with a bunch of 20 individuals next week. It is with a group that have various disabilities. Some are blind, deaf, use wheelchairs and have various mental and physical disabilities. I am looking for ideas for a warm up exercise I can do with them. Would anyone have any ideas?

During one of my team building programs, a very exciting participant wasn't satisfied about the result and she argued loudly and aggressively demanding extra points for her team, and this is the moment for us as facilitators to show our strength and wisdom, it was very tough moments for me, how to handle it, because if I let it go it ll ruin the whole program, I changed the debriefing around that point and linked it with the objectives of the game and involved her at the discussion along the way several times, later I had a conversation with the manager who were attending, she told me that I was watching and waiting for you to handle it :) - Have you eve faced a vert tough participant or similar situation ? - How you handled the situation, or what tools you used?

It seems there’s a lot of teams that are getting pretty good at idea generation. ✅ They’re leaning into creative processes. ✅ They’re banning ‘yeah but’ and embracing ‘yes and’. ✅ They’ve discovered the power of going wide, before going narrow. 💡 And they’re cracking out some awesome thinking and brand-new ideas. The problem is, once all their thinking is on the table, they resort to sticky dot voting and settle on a safe bet. All those innovative ideas get left on the table!🤦 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗴𝗼 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲: 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: Give each team member two sets of dots, in two different colours, and ask them to vote on their favourite ideas. One set of dots is for ideas that make sense and seem do-able. The other set is for ideas that sound amazing, but feel unrealistic or infeasible. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: Invite team members to form small groups of 2-3 and ask each group to choose an amazing (but seemingly unrealistic) idea that they would like to explore some more. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: Give groups 30 minutes to run the idea through a Constructive Evaluation process. (If you’re not familiar with this process, let me know and I can email you a template.) 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: Invite each group to share back their findings to the whole team, including their recommendation for ‘the one decision we can make right now’. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟱: Celebrate how do-able those seemingly unrealistic ideas actually are! 🥳 💥 🚀 Wrap up the session using whatever process you usually use to decide on next steps. I’m willing to bet that “more exploration of those ‘unrealistic’ ideas” makes the list.

Hi guys! How are you? I have a question about the map exercise in the Design Sprint: The map works good for a customer journey that already exists, but what about we are dealing with a need that customers don't know they have yet, or if there isn't an existing solution that customers already use to meet their needs, in other words, what should we do if there isn't a journey that users go through? For example: before Facebook launch for the first time, how would be their map?

1. How you will ensure transfer of learning back to the workplace? 2. Do you conduct any sort of follow up after the workshop/program finished?

Hey folks, After 3 years, finally leading the 2 days Design Thinking - Train the Trainer Workshop with 20 participants from my organization. This is planned at external venue where they will be away from their work (hardly any distraction 😜) and fully able to focus on this exclusive workshop. As this is happening after a long time physically, so was looking out for some ideas/tips 💡 on How to surprise the participants or provide something unique experience which will be memorable for them 😊 Has anyone tried anything differently apart from doing icebreakers exercises ?

Hello 👋 I'm looking for some guidance on running problem framing exercise for senior leaders in my organization who are key stakeholders to deliver projects to one of our esteemed client. The ask: - To decide exciting challenge themes for joint hackathon / innovation challenge - To gather respective pain areas from their everyday project deliverables (Telco Domain), - To align everyone and prioritize top problem areas - Simple template/framework needed as most of these leaders are unaware of innovation tools/practices Let me know how you might have run this in 60 mins along with process/tool PS: I'm aware of Design Thinking approach but in this scenario considering tech challenge looking for some other approaches. Thanks in advance 😊

For about three years now, I have run most of my 2+ hour workshops with the assistance of SessionLab. I am not affiliated, just a happy user sharing a tool. Before SessionLab I would set up the agenda for the day in a table in Word, with notes and responsibilities, and more notes, but timing was always a pain, because I might change something and all my planning was off. I designed 18 day coach training like this. Then my colleague pointed me to SessionLab that does all this in the most natural way. It helps with timing, you can move stuff around easily, park items for later, assign facilitators, differentiate between break-out rooms, and dozens of other things that are really wonderful. Here's a video walk-through - also shown below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI6m2P2mZPY And when I was ready to do my first Design Sprint, I found an AJ&Smart 4 day Design Sprint 2.0 template that I could just work from - see image below for actual screenshot from the app. https://www.sessionlab.com/templates/design-sprint-2-0/ And the Lightning Decision Jam workshop is also in there along with dozens of other templates to inspire better workshops. https://www.sessionlab.com/methods/lightning-decision-jam-ldj My tendency is always to personalize wokshops to my preferences and style, but having the template and the fabulous design of SessionLab has really saved me time before workshops and allowed me to focus more on the people than the tools during the workshop. What tools are you using?

The first time I ever facilitated a workshop, I was terrified. I had never been in charge of keeping a conversation on track before, and I certainly didn't know how to handle silence.Silence is a fundamental tool for facilitation. In fact, it can help teams to better collaborate and come up with creative solutions for highly complex problems. At first, silence may be seen as a challenge to participants, but over time, they realize that silence allows them to listen more carefully and think more deeply about their proposals.They also understand that silence gives others the opportunity to do the same, and as a result, everyone becomes more thoughtful in their interactions and produces better results. Working together-alone is a way to use silence. Walking meditation is another. How are you using silence in facilitation?

Mastering the art of eliciting information is very crucial in order to understand client needs clearly, sometimes the clients may not give you the root causes for their issues, you may end up treating symptoms and that's will impact the delivery and outcomes. Asking the same question from different angles and different people will give you better clues. mini-meeting with several members from the client's team; will give you the chance to observe how they are interacting and guide each other to the root causes. anymore ideas :)

I am really interested and curious as to how experienced "sprinters" establish user needs or empathy mapping in 'non-tech' environments such as higher education, NGOs, and so on. I have used a 'placemat' activity that has worked well once participants understand the structure. What other ways are there that folks here have used that are successful? (tech examples welcome) 😉

what workshops on virtual model we can work on together. Please type your core areas below?

Hello, as you know to bring in any kind of change in organisation with new ideas/innovation Stakeholder Management is one of the key thing. So, I'm curious & interested to know some of the practical tips/ techniques which has been used to train on Stakeholder mapping. As a facilitator, 🤔 how have you trained participants on this topic ? 🤔 What were the challenges faced ? 🤔 How did you convince people on adoption of your technique ? 🤔 What was the time duration of the session ? Also, were you able to assess before & after scenario? Do share your thoughts !

When I first started facilitating, I was lucky to get a lot of experience early on, but I always struggled with the unpredictable nature of the workshops. I wanted the workshops to come out as I had planned them, not how they went. When I later trained as a coach, we had an improv trainer in for half a day, and I went to do more training with him. Just another half day with him, but enough to allow me to switch my perspective on what works - and to trust that I could improvize. That was the single best thing I ever did for both my coaching and my facilitation skills. Improv allowed me to be in the moment much more - and to trust that what ever I would come up with would be the right thing for the group - and if it wasn't I could figure it out with the group. It helps me assess the group, the actual needs and to allow workshops to go in entirely different directions than planned. Mind you, I probably would do this (too much) in a Design Sprint, but a strategy session can become a team building session and an ideation session can become a concept building workshop if need be. I does take a tool box that allows you to improvize, but when you've done a few of each, - and you take a 15 minute break to re-evalute and align with the workshop owner, then you can figure out next steps. I found that it's always better to end up doing the right thing and not make it through all the exercises than to continue with the wrong thing and finish up on time. During my last Design Sprint, I realized that despite several meeting about the focus of the workshop, it turned out that participants had very different understandings of this focus and the project. Some knew exactly what the focus was, but a few were off topic. So we broke out of the room, and into a different physical room - we disassociated from the Design Sprint. Did a small workshop in there to align on the content and the focus, - and then we went back into the Design Sprint room and continued. We were 90 minutes behind schedule by lunch time, but the alignment helped us tremendously, and we caught up with the schedule by Tuesday afternoon.

Perhaps one of the biggest perks of a community like this is to openly share failures and have a laugh about it 😀 What were some of your most memorable fails to date throughout your facilitation journey? Either yours or that you witnessed first hand! Let’s hear it! I’ll start in the comments!

I came across this group in the usual random way, when you start out looking for one thing and find something even more valuable. Am hoping to improve my skills, currently aiming to deliver more workshops as there are instant benefits, with delivering workshops and I work with an organisation that needs to speed up a bit! Thank you, thank you to whoever shared the lightening decision jam, as I now have the weekend to myself as I don't need to create something from scratch. Many thanks am looking forward to being involved in this community.

Hey folks, I have a cool opportunity on Tuesday to present to the CEO of a Fortune 100 and his exec circle. How would you go about getting them to reflect and share openly? *Background* We're giving them an overview of a workshop that is being taught to organization-wide and touches on topics like psych safety, efficient meetings, daily focus time etc. In a nutshell, they are trying to reduce excessive workload and change a little their ways of working. *Context* I've been briefed that they are quite a closed group, and it's very "business-y" in these meetings. They are used to presentations from division leaders, but it's very much information-sharing and not usually interactive. So we need to be light and easy when it comes to the interaction. We have two ideas: 1) Use Mentimeter to allow them to submit some reflections anonymously, then we can speak as facilitators to those reflections and see if it opens up a group discussion 2) Go tech-free and do a quiet 1-minute journal then open up for 2-3 people to share with the group...hoping for the best that it's not crickets :) WHAT DO Y'ALL THINK?!

I'm curious what y'all use to bring silence back to a room (e.g. after a breakout discussion)? With the first program I was trained to facilitate (Search Inside Yourself) we used a singing bowl like the pic attached. Works like a charm, but definitely has a mindfulness vibe and isn't perfect for every setting. Are there are tools, techniques, etc. that you've found work well?

Hello All, I facilitated a 21 off-site person workshop (internal to my company) last Monday, 27th Feb. For the first time I produced a Survey Monkey survey to gauge impressions of the workshop. So far & after a reminder 12hrs after the initial survey email went out, I have had 9 respondents. Having tried surveying before, I know that the number of respondents to a survey will be very low (43% i.e. 9 out of 21 in this case - which might be as good as it gets). The results are in the attached screen grab. My questions are: 1. What's a good percentage for 'satisfied participants' after a workshop? 2. Feedback appreciated on the types of questions that I asked in the survey! 3. The weakest area was my 'explanation of the exercises'. I used the AJ&S format for explaining an exercises, if you are familiar with this. I really struggle with explaining. I think that I need to iterate several versions of the exercise explanation. And may drop the exercise if the explanation doesn't make sense, as this might be indicative of the exercise not actually making any sense?