In this article, we will look at 9 models of instructional design. First we will go through some of the best-known traditional models: ADDIE, Dick and Carey’s model, and SAM. Next, we will add some insights from dynamic training learning models. 

We will continue with 3 instructional design models focussing on how to make sure learner motivation remains high. Raising and keeping motivation high can be a challenge, especially in elearning. For each of the 9 models presented, I’ve selected a key learning that can be transferred from that specific framework into any kind of instructional design work you might be doing.

In closing, we’ll add some important notes on what you to take into consideration when working in multicultural settings, given that there is very little in the models to support this part of a learning designer’s work. 

Why are instructional design models important? 

Think of models of instructional design as scaffolding for your thinking. They offer a starting point, and can be invaluable to make sure nothing important gets lost while working step-by-step on a learning program. 

Anyone designing training courses and other learning experiences, whether face-to-face in the classroom or in the virtual environments of elearning, ought to be familiar with at least a few instructional design models. You are likely to gravitate towards one or the other, depending on your ways of thinking, as well as on what kind of content you are working with. Having a bunch of different options at your fingertips will give you the knowledge and flexibility to design and adapt courses that best serve your learners’ needs. 

One of my first trainers in facilitation and training design once pointed out that we all have a natural tendency to design courses and experiences that fit our way of learning and thinking. This means that the experiences we craft will work very well for people who share our worldview and style, but might leave other people cold. 

Familiarity with instructional design models can ensure that you:

• Have a range of tools to draw from, in order to create courses that fit your learners’ needs, not just your own;
• Design based on time-tested, scientifically sound frameworks upon which to base the different elements of your courses;
• Include all the important elements, decreasing the risk of leaving something important behind in the rush of day-to-day work;
• Know what different elements to add to your course design to make it motivating, engaging, and effective.

Last but not least, if you are working in education you are probably a curious person who might just like to know more about the thinking that grounds most instructional design work today. 

3 Traditional Instructional Design Models

As long as there have been teachers and students, there have been ideas and models of learning, aka, pedagogy. That said, when we talk about instructional design we are generally referring to a series of models and frameworks codified from the 1950s onwards, mainly in the US context. The origin of instructional design models is closely associated with three psychological currents (cognitive, behavioral and, more recently, constructivist psychology) and with systems engineering, especially as applied to military training. 

Instructional design models arose, in other words, when new scientific research into learning met the need for structured training materials that would be effective regardless of who delivered them. In fact, these frameworks were adopted in military and industrial fields before making their way to education institutions such as schools and universities. 

Inevitably, this implies that biases on what learning is, and what learners need, are baked into these classic models. Later in this article, we’ll get back to what that might mean and what learning designers working in multicultural settings might do to adapt these frameworks to contemporary sensibilities. 

In the next few paragraphs, we will take a closer look at three “traditional” or “classic” instructional design models. They contain time-tested concepts that are still relevant today. Let’s start with the most basic, popular and timeless of instructional design models: it’s time to meet Addie! 

ADDIE model

The ADDIE model is one of the earliest models of Instructional Design or, at least, one of the first frameworks to be explicitly codified as such. 

The acronym in ADDIE stands for five steps in the cycle of designing and implementing a training program: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The process starts with looking at needs, both the needs of the organization creating (and commissioning) the training course and the learners’ needs, and ends with an evaluation of lessons learned. 

ADDIE is such a well-known, reliable and practical framework that we’ve dedicated an entire learning guide to its workings. I’ve seen it stated that all other instructional design models descend from ADDIE, so if you need a quick flexible guideline to start designing, look no further. You can even start with a ready-made template based on this most versatile of frameworks.

A key learning from the ADDIE model

Go through the design process methodically step-by-step. Start from collecting needs, and weave evaluation opportunities throughout. 

Dick and Carey’s Instructional Design Model 

Speaking of models that share a lot of their DNA with ADDIE, let’s now look at Dick and Carey’s Systematic Design of Instruction, aka the Dick and Carey model, aka the Carey model (it’s two Careys, by the way: Lou Carey, who together with Walter Dick proposed the original model in 1978, and James Carey, who has been working on later updates of the model—I assume the two researchers are related, but couldn’t find out, so if you know, drop it in the comments please!). 

Dick and Carey worked on this model to illustrate ADDIE in finer detail and help learning designers, particularly newcomers. They include 10 steps in their model and invite users to think of these as a whole system, rather than a list of isolated components. This corresponds well to what is likely to happen in real life, where different steps might take place in parallel rather than in a neat, orderly progression. 

The 10 steps of Dick and Carey’s Systematic Design of Instruction model are:

• Identify Instructional Goal(s): A goal statement describes a skill, knowledge or attitude that a learner will be expected to acquire

• Conduct instructional analysis: identify what a learner must know and/or be able to do;
• Analyze learners and contexts: collect and analyze information about the target audience, including prior skills, prior experience, and basic demographics; 
• Write performance objectives. Objectives should, of course, be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound);
• Develop assessment instruments: how will you test learners’ knowledge before, during, and after the course? 
• Develop an instructional strategy: what will activities and content be? 
• Develop and select instructional materials, in collaboration with your content providers and subject matter experts.
• Design and conduct a formative evaluation of instruction: what parts of the design and/or content could benefit from some improvements?
• Revise instruction: improve and iterate
• Design and conduct summative evaluation. Close this project and start a new one! 

A key learning from Dick and Carey’s model

Different steps of your design work are likely to take place in parallel rather than in a neat, orderly progression.

Rapid prototyping with the SAM model 

Instructional design model creators have a soft spot for acronyms. Especially acronyms that sound like they could be people. After ADDIE, it’s time to make the acquaintance of SAM, the Successive Approximation Model.  

Perceptive readers might already have noticed a limitation of the two classic models presented so far: it may take a long time to prepare courses following all the prescribed steps. Changing them based on feedback and evaluation could therefore be harder than it sounds, as most important decisions and choices might already be locked in. To include more opportunities for iterative design in your projects, you might want to look at the SAM model. 

SAM is a simplified version of ADDIE developed by Michael Allen to highlight the possibilities that come with making design work recursive. Because of its iterative nature, SAM works best for short courses and interventions or, in any case, situations in which your course will likely run over and over again many times through the years. 

SAM stands for Successive Approximation Model. It is divided into three phases: Preparation, Iterative Design, and Iterative Development. After gathering information in the first phase, the instructional designer using the SAM model will prepare a quick prototype of the course (a part of a module, for example) and submit it for a round of feedback from representatives of all interested parties (students, content providers, and so on).

Team collaboration is emphasized as an important part of the learning design process. For a deeper dive into the SAM model you can check out this YouTube video.

A key learning from the SAM model

Instructional design can benefit from checking in with stakeholders before the final product is ready, to collect feedback and integrate it early, when it’s easy and safe.

3 Learning Models for Dynamic Training Experiences

These classic models of instructional design are invaluable supports to work out the overall flow of learning design work. They clarify all the necessary steps, and will help you be more aware of the workflow involved in creating successful learning courses.

Once you begin storyboarding the details of each individual learning module, working side-by-side with content providers, you might want to turn to some more detailed learning models to help you structure the finer details. 

The idea behind many training models is that different people learn in different ways, and it’s the training designer’s job to accommodate this by mixing and matching activities of various sorts. Sometimes the focus is on the senses (visual learners vs kinesthetic learners, for example) others on the way information is absorbed (by discussing, applying, and so on). 

In this article on Train the Trainers courses, you can find an overview of learning styles and some discussions on whether such categorizations are even valid. I find them a beneficial way to remind myself to provide multiple ways to engage with any topic and offer learners different pathways and choices to take. 

In this section, we will look at three frameworks trainers refer to, that can help you make learning courses engaging for different types of learners. For each, you will also find a ready-made template you can use to see what such dynamic training experiences look like in practice. Using SessionLab’s planner, you can drag and drop sections of these templates to customize them based on your design needs. 

4MAT

4MAT, as codified by author Bernice McCarthy, is a simple 4-step model of how to present and teach new information in a way that caters to different learning styles. Each step features a question, a learning style, and a type of activity. 

The first step is about engagement. The key question is why. Why are we learning this? Why is it useful for me? The key here is to find an interesting situation, something that intrigues the trainees, motivating them to stay in the classroom and pay attention for the rest of the time.

The most common type of activity for this step is storytelling. In learning, this might mean starting the course with a video, in which the course instructors provide inspiration to begin with.

The second part of the model focuses on delivering information. Most of your course materials will be at the level of step two. The key question is what. What is the information provided, what should I learn to develop the new skill required? Instructional content for this stage can take many forms including all traditional forms of transmitting knowledge, such as lectures, reading materials, and so on.

Next comes a section dedicated to practice. The key question is how, and this step is about providing opportunities to move from the cognitive to the practical, through examples, case studies, role play and other safe ways to put the theory to use.

The final part of the model deals with performance. How will your learners bring their knowledge into real-world problems? The key question here is What if. What if we did things differently now? What actions will learners take that would have been different before the course? Learning journals and reflection questions are a great way of applying this step in learning.  

If you are using SessionLab’s planner for your design, you can even color-code sections for what type of question (Why? What? How? What if?) that particular activity or module helps learners answer.

A key learning from the 4MAT model

Using questions (Why? What? How? What it?) to make order among key sections of your project will bring clarity to a design and help content providers stay on track. 

4C

You may have heard of the classic text Training from the Back of the Room, by Sharon Bowman. It’s a great resource, particularly if you are looking to create courses that are centered around the learners themselves, and designed for empowerment. 

The book contains another 4-step process based on learning types. The idea here is to start with Connection (making connections with prior learning, with peers and instructors), then move on to Content, Concrete Practice, and Conclusions. The conclusions are centered around action planning.

Essentially, the ideas are quite similar to the 4MAT model, but I find this model easier to apply to online course design. Connection can be established by asking reflective questions to participants, as well as introducing instructors and, if applicable, groups of peers.

Concrete Practice can be achieved through quizzes, assignments and case studies, while Conclusions is likely to take the form of a learning journal or, if your course is blended, a final workshop focussing on action planning. 

A key learning from the 4C model

People will benefit more, or less, from different parts of the course, depending on their learning style. Try to include something for everyone.

Kolb’s learning cycle

This 4-step model, based on work by American educational theorist David Kolb in the 1980s, is my go-to way to design training and education experiences. It reminds me to make time for conveying concepts and frameworks as well as to start with an attention-grabbing practical activity.

Step 1 in Kolb’s learning cycle is about creating a Concrete Experience to base learning on. Engage learners from the start with a simulation, a roleplay, and exercises that bring your topic to life. 

The second step is about Reflective Observation. This is a moment to ask questions of learners. What did they notice during the previous activities? Did they glean any insights? In this type of training program, new knowledge is drawn out directly from participants’ observations. 

The third part of the cycle is the one that looks most like “conventional” teaching. Called Abstract Conceptualization, it implies teaching and discussing models or frameworks that students can connect their previous insights to. This is a cognitive learning step where new information is acquired. 

Lastly, we come to Active Experimentation, where new knowledge is applied, actually or in a simulation or role play, to real world problems and scenarios. 

If you are preparing a learning course, Kolb’s cycle can help you ideate activities that come before and after the main teaching modules, in an order designed to facilitate learning.

What does this look like in practice? Check out a ready-made template for a training session designed based on this learning model, and adapt it to your needs.

A key learning from Kolb’s learning cycle

Start with a game or role play connected to your content: new concepts are easier to integrate if learners have lived through an experience that leads to insights in that direction. 

What Instructional Designers can learn from Dynamic Training

Dynamic training models emerged from reflections related to face-to-face education and can be hard to translate to online learning. Moreover, they are often applied in nonformal education settings, and might not be exactly the right fit for academic or corporate training.

Nevertheless, it is my firm belief that all instructional designers can benefit from learning about dynamic training models.

Kolb’s learning cycle might, for example, inspire you to sprinkle real-world challenges in a training course. 4MAT is an excellent reminder to always add the Why. If you fear that your course structure might be too repetitive and would love to add some more stimulation and ensure quality instruction, dynamic training is a great place for inspiration. 

3 Instructional Design Models to Raise Motivation in eLearning 

As online courses gain more and more popularity, particularly with adult and life-long learning, the issue of how to sustain motivation is becoming central to the discourse. Because there are so many learning opportunities available, and so many distractions competing for attention in our social-media-infused world, it’s easy for learners to deviate from the carefully designed path you’ve laid out for them.

Blended learning designs, which we’ve discussed in this blog article, are part of the solution to the challenge of keeping learners motivated and engaged. Small group learning can help the learning process by keeping participants accountable. Engaging visuals, the use of multimedia (videos, quizzes, visually compelling handouts) as well as facilitation techniques in online and face-to-face workshops are all excellent practical ways to support motivation.

But what about learning design models? Below are 3 instructional design models you can learn from for design that specifically supports motivation.  

ARCS model

The ARCS model of Motivational Design was developed by John Keller, an American educational psychologist, to systematize research on motivation and turn it into an instructional model. Much of this work is founded on previous research on the principles that support learning, especially Robert Gagné’s 9 principles or conditions of learning. Read through our guide to his work for more information and practical ideas on how to apply these theories to the practicalities of course design. 

The ARCS acronym stands for Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. According to this model, those four are the main areas we should take care of on the path to supporting student motivation. 

The model starts with Attention, arguing that some element of emotional engagement, most notably surprise, is needed to engage participants at the start of a learning experience.

The first thing that came to my mind when I read this was the “wow effect” often felt in a training room if care has been put into arranging it in some way that is different from the usual. Sometimes this is as simple as putting chairs in a circle (To learn more about how room setup can influence learning, you can take a look at this article on room setup.) As for grabbing attention in elearning contexts, which admittedly can be harder, this might mean starting with a video, a story, a “hook” to involve learners from the start. 

[…] people are motivated to engage in an activity if it is perceived to be linked to the satisfaction of personal needs (the value aspect) and if there is a positive expectancy for success (the expectancy aspect).

John Keller, 1987

The second part of the model focuses on Relevance. This is about ensuring that the concepts presented are closely connected to learners’ needs and experiences. Relevance is obtained by anchoring new skills into existing knowledge, and understanding how they will be applied.

One practical way to establish relevance, which I commonly use in my training courses, is to ask students, at the beginning of the first day, to discuss what they already know about the topic, and what they would like to learn. 

The C in ARCS stands for Confidence. This is about providing measurable, achievable goals, a way to measure progress, and growing levels of challenge. An important part of motivation, according to Keller, is the establishment of a positive expectation that success is possible and at hand. 

Last but not least comes Satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from a sense of achievement and is enabled by creating feedback channels where instructors can provide learners with support, encouragement, and pointers for improvement. 

The importance of confidence and satisfaction in keeping motivation high has helped me understand, among other things. why some students of mine rebelled against experiments I’ve attempted with giving no grades nor evaluation at all. While it can be good to avoid putting too much pressure on results, knowledge that hard work will be rewarded by an external authority can be very motivating! 

Reflecting on the ARCS model and looking at how to incorporate it into your designs can help instructional designers craft courses that keep learners engaged and balance internal and external motivation throughout. Discovering the ARCS model has helped me to understand better why some of the methods and tools I applied to raise engagement were working, and a quick framework of reference to check for new ideas or to confirm I’d cover all important aspects of raising and sustaining motivation. 

A key learning from the ARCS model

Design for motivation by including activities and tools to work on Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction throughout the course. 

Backward Design 

I was delighted when I discovered the existence of backward design as an instructional design model. I was also quite intrigued when I learned of the criticism it has inspired. 

Let’s start with what made me happy. Backward Design is a model that stresses designing with the end in mind. The first thing you should do, it argues, is define your learning objectives, then work your way backwards from there. 

Backward design is where we get the invaluable sentence structure “By the end of this course, students will be able to….” 

This resonated with me for two reasons. First of all, as a process facilitator I am constantly urging my clients to define their end goals and objectives. “Until I know the objectives” I have been known to say “I cannot design a session for you”.

The second reason that made me glad Backward Design is out there is how much it resembles a facilitation method I use a lot, called Backcasting. I’ve used backcasting mostly with community groups to define their long-term goals and work back from those to “what are we going to do tomorrow”. It’s a brilliant way to include wide-angle visions and practical next steps in the same flow. 

As I read more about Backward Design, though, I realized that it’s one thing to co-design the future or a session in facilitation, it’s quite another to work backwards as a learning designer or learning design team, without all those other voices in the room.

Backward Design has been criticized for leading to courses that can be quite rigid in their progression (aka “teaching to the test”). There are many learning pathways, and applying backward design rigidly can lead to forgetting about the need for flexibility. Despite the criticism though, there is a lot of value to the Backward Design approach.  

In terms of supporting motivation, having a clear end goal that can be explained in two sentences is a great way to motivate participants. In adult education, it’s essential to specify how the course will help participants in their real-world challenges. Backward Design encourages instructional designers to ensure every piece of the course is fit for purpose. 

A key learning from Backward Design

Instead of starting with the content, start with the learning objectives and figure out, step by step, how learners will get there. 

The Kemp Instructional Design model

My introduction to instructional design came in the context of co-designing summer schools on entrepreneurship, targeting Masters’ students in European Universities. The courses’ pedagogy was 100% centered on the learners and we included a lot of peer education and personal empowerment.

This makes perfect sense for a course that aimed to empower young people on the path of entrepreneurship. That pedagogy was probably also inspired by the work of Morrison, Ross and Kemp in defining what is generally known as the Kemp Instructional Design model. 

You can envision the Kemp design model as a solar system where everything revolves around the learners. While the actual steps of the instructional design process are akin to ADDIE, if a little bit more detailed, the change is in the perspective taken. 

The Kemp model encourages designers to see everything from the learners’ point of view so that their needs, priorities, and constraints are what the course is designed around. This chapter from the Pennsylvania State University’s instructional design handbook gives a good overview of how the Kemp model works. 

A key learning from the Kemp model

Design a learning environment and instructional materials based on what you know about learners’ needs, priorities and constraints. 

Instructional design models and cultural competency

This last note from Kemp’s model is a good introduction to discussing the relevance of all the models we’ve looked into so far to multicultural groups and in a multicultural environment. Every model since the A in ADDIE, stresses the importance of collecting information on your perspective learners and using this to inform how you structure your course.

At the same time, not very much is included in these models with respect to cultural competency. The models hail mostly from US research, and the traditional or classic ones refer mainly to research made in the 1970s, specifically for the education and training needs of the US military. What does this imply in terms of using these models as lenses through which to view all education? 

There are certain biases baked into the models. Learning, for example, is demonstrated by tests and quizzes that imply that the “right” kind of learning has to do with repetition and the acquisition of facts and data. There is also no specific instruction given in traditional models around diversity and inclusion.

Many learning designers have learned to adapt courses to different cultural environments, mainly by developing instructional materials, stories, and images that their learners can see themselves in. This is a great practice, but it is true that it does not require major changes to the structure of the courses themselves. 

What would courses look like if they were designed with multicultural learning at their heart? Authors Charlotte Gunawardena, Casey Frechette and Ludmila Layne have compiled a Culturally Inclusive Instructional Design guide that contains a 10-step list of recommendations for inclusive e-learning design. First of all, the authors invite learning designers to consider their own biases and preferences. What core beliefs drive your design decisions? What do you think is “normal” or “best”? From here, the authors provide more recommendations, such as:

• Acknowledging that bias cannot be eliminated from designs, but that space can be made for alternative experiences, preferences and perspectives;
• Inviting to create space for learners to co-create the course, giving them choices of different learning pathways, and providing options in terms of timelines and milestones;
• Allow for different kinds of learners to shine, without trying to rank them or resolve tensions between apparently disparate or even opposite conclusions. A complex world requires that we learn how to hold different ideas in our heads, all at once.

The authors also recommend learning about, and using, a variety of different instructional design approaches, without getting overly attached to a single or “best” way of teaching, learning and designing. Instructors and designers should know that all of these processes and tools have value, in different contexts and for different materials.

What next? 

Hopefully you now feel better equipped to tackle your next learning design challenge. There are yet many more instructional design approaches and principles to learn. 

If you want to learn more about the principles behind learning theory, you might find this article on Instructional design principles interesting.

If you feel ready to practice and dive into creating a new course structure, you might want to take a look at a design template based on ADDIE, that you can customize based on your needs.   

Let us know in the comments or in our friendly community of facilitators and trainers how your learning design is informed by these, and other, models. 

Even for expert trainers and learning designers, developing a blended learning course can be a daunting experience. Combining such disparate elements in a coherent whole that leverages the best of each, for learning that sticks, requires thoughtful planning and design.

In this article, we’ll look at the key elements for creating excellent blended learning experiences. Read on for practical tips and tricks, ideas and recommendations on avoiding possible pitfalls. We will cover:

What is a Blended Course?

Blended learning courses are training and education experiences that combine different elements, leveraging the power of both synchronous and asynchronous study opportunities. 

Barely existing before the Covid-19 pandemic, blended learning spaces are now a growing trend. The reasons are quite straightforward: the training community is now very well aware of the advantages offered by online, self-paced learning (such as MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses). Content can be hosted online and accessed by learners at their convenience, offering much-needed flexibility. 

At the same time, it’s well known that direct interactions with peers and instructors are irreplaceable elements for learning that sticks. Blended courses designed by learning designers bring together the best of both worlds.

There are four possible components to a blended course.

• Asynchronous, self-paced learning modules. Self-paced study resources, such as videos and articles, give learners the flexibility to study when it works for them, and return to materials at any time.
• Small group work. Working through assignments in a group of peers is a strong motivator, which is likely to increase retention and boost learning. We will see below how this can be organized, depending on the type of course you are designing.
• Synchronous workshops, online. Participatory workshops held on online platforms are a versatile container for learning activities. These can combine plenary work, guided individual reflection, and discussion in breakout rooms (Looking for more information on how to hold engaging workshops for online learning? Here is a dedicated guide).
• Synchronous, face to face sessions. If your course is designed for a specific company, or perhaps for a University, it may allow for participants to gather in person. We’ll see below how to make the most of this opportunity! 

Not all blended courses will include all components, as the mix greatly depends on the specific circumstances. Having at least one synchronous and one asynchronous element is what makes it a blended learning space. You can see an example of how this might fit together in this blended learning course template.

In the next paragraphs we’ll look into each modality in turn. But first, allow me to share a personal story.

A Real-world Example of Blended Learning

My experience with blended learning environments comes from working as a group coach for various cohorts of Masters’ students enrolled in the EIT Climate-KIC’s education programs. 

Traditionally held only in-person, these programs had to undergo a quick, radical restructuring due to the Covid-19 restrictions of 2020 and 2021. In 2020, the program was moved fully online but remained completely synchronous, with participants joining from all over the world to online workshops and lectures, held on Zoom.

Having kept our poor students (as well as ourselves!) hostage too many hours in front of the screen, we quickly learnt that online participation could be leveraged to give more flexibility to learners. 

The 2021 program was therefore re-designed, this time as a blended learning environment. Our main objective was to design online learning activities that would encourage strong connections among participants, adding many opportunities for online interactions.

We achieved this with a combination of

• large, online, in-sync workshops, where 200+ participants joined at the same time, working on vast Miro whiteboards, listening to inspirational speakers, and going through a variety of online learning activities;
• intimate, 8-people cohorts that met on Zoom once every two weeks with a coach to work through specific parts of the program and support one another’s motivation and learning process.

The rest of the program was based on self-study, with modules including online resources such as reading materials, videos, and individual exercises, particularly journaling. 

In 2022, the program moved back to a mainly in-person, live environment. As designers and education specialists, we met o discuss whether we should keep any elements of the previous blended learning environment.

We concluded that online work was extremely supportive of the in-person section, enabling participants to e-meet before meeting in the classroom, explore topics, and start forming a group spirit. 

After the in-person component, we designed modules that allow participants to dig deeper into topics of their choice, and online workshops to keep in touch and keep learning together long after the events were over.

Why Learners Love Blended Training

As I learned when designing blended learning programs for our students, participants get a lot of benefits from blended training. Essentially, it allows to get the best of both worlds: the flexibility and depth afforded by self-paced learning, and the cohesiveness, networking opportunities, and shared space for reflection that comes with live interactions. 

Research shows that the absence of learner interaction causes failure and eventual drop-out in online courses and the lack of learner connectedness was noted as an internal factor leading to learner drop-out in online courses.

Blended learning effectiveness: the relationship between student characteristics, design features and outcomes

As noted in the above quote from this intriguing paper published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, failure in online courses stems most often from the absence of opportunities for interaction among peers and with instructors.

Blended learning, by contrast, includes many different opportunities for online and face-to-face training activities that strengthen connectedness and support the learning process.

How to Combine Synchronous and Async Elements for Blended Learning

Each element of a blended learning course serves different purposes. As designers of such courses, it’s important to have clarity about what works well, using each format to support learning in such a way as to have them strengthen each other.

Let’s go through them one by one and see what purposes they serve, and how they can work together to ensure your learning objectives are met.

Asynchronous, self-paced online learning

Self-paced online learning is individual work learners can do in their own time. From the designer’s point of view, this implies creating, selecting and developing online resources. These can include videos and reading material as well as exercises and worksheets for learners to work through individually.

To design modules for self-paced e-learning, you’ll need first to storyboard the flow of the course, then work with learning content providers to add videos, course content, presentations and activities. If you need some extra ideas on how to set up your workflow with all the right software tools, this article on instructional design software might help. 

Great for: flexibility. Learners can study at their own pace, whenever is convenient. Well-designed self-study modules will also allow for different levels of exploration and depth, with the main content being the same for everyone but plenty of opportunities to dig deeper into specific facets of the subject.

Risk: it can be hard to sustain motivation if relying only on self-paced modules. Lack of feedback channels with other learners and with instructors mean it’s easy to get lost and give up.

How to use it: use self-paced e-learning modules to structure content, especially when it’s technical. Divide topics into easily digestible chunks, and lay it out clearly in your LMS (Learning Management System).

Small group work

Designing small group work into your blended learning course can be a challenge, but it’s certainly worth it. Here are some possible scenarios and ways you can set small groups up:

• In higher education, randomly place students in peer groups and provide them with group projects. Make sure you dedicate a live (online or face-to-face) session to setting up their groups and coaching them on how to work together, and give them precise milestones to achieve, step by step;
• In company trainings, it might be appropriate to have individual teams work through group assignments together, potentially with case studies that apply to them. 
• Even in courses that are joined online by individual learners, it’s possible to get the benefits of small group work. One way of doing this, as is the case in my story below, is to invite participants to join as a small team of co-workers or friends. Another option is to randomly assign participants to a group (this latter option is only feasible if the course has a precise starting date by which all participants will be registered). 

Great for: motivation. A small group setting is an excellent way to keep participants accountable. It doubles as a space for networking and creating connections.

Risk: small groups require a strong set of guidelines, especially at the start of their learning journey to work well. 

How to use it: expect some fluctuating attendance and drop-outs, so make the groups a bit larger than you would in a face-to-face setting (think 5 to 8 people). Include a small group activity after each self-directed module. 

As is wonderfully laid out in this case study from the BMC Medical Education journal, small group practice can degenerate into an unstructured, disorganized mess where a few earnest individuals end up doing all the work for everyone. Or it can be an uplifting, memorable experience of collaboration and learning. 

Early in the Covid-19 lockdowns, I enrolled in a blended learning course hosted by Acumen Academy. I was encouraged to set up a study group, and since everyone was home trying to figure out how to live our lives in our living rooms, I easily persuaded five other facilitators to join.

We were encouraged to meet for a couple of hours online every two weeks, after each completing a course module individually. After our small group session, we each had to upload a finished worksheet with a group project to our LMS accounts, proving the session was complete, before moving on to the next module. 

Although setting the actual time and date was left up to us (and was a scheduling challenge, I will not lie!), the rest of our work was carefully set up fro us with canvases, exercise sheets, and detailed session timelines. As someone who likes to learn in conversation with others, I have clear and crisp memories of our lively discussions and the online canvases we created and filled with virtual sticky notes. 

Synchronous, online workshops

Include online workshops in your design as opportunities for learners to interact with content providers and peers. A virtual workshop can serve many different functions, including going through case studies, running role play activities, giving space in breakout rooms for discussions relative to the course content and Q&A sessions with speakers. In the context of a blended course, online workshops should not feel like lectures or webinars, but be truly interactive. 

Great for: integrating course content into real-life scenarios, digesting and discussing content, exploring the topic with peers.

Risk: the use of technology tools such as whiteboards can pose an obstacle to participation. Make sure you have experienced virtual facilitators and tech hosts on board. Getting participants fully familiar with the technology you are using is key to making the experience useful and memorable. 

How to use it: add online workshops at the start and end of the course. Repeat the same workshop more than once to ensure higher attendance.

How to add Live, In-Person Events to Your Blended Learning Design

Not every learning course can include live, face-to-face events. If you are having participants join from all over the world, for example, it’s extremely unlikely that everyone will gather in the same location at one point in time. That said, there are quite a few situations in which adding in-person events to your blended learning design is possible. 

You might be designing training for a company that has a team retreat later in the year, which can be an opportunity to reflect and discuss the learning content. In higher education settings, it might be possible to launch an online learning course at the start of the school year face-to-face, or meet in the classroom every few months. 

When people meet in face to face sessions, the amount of social interaction is much higher than in remote learning. Informal moments during coffee breaks can lead to unexpected outcomes, synchronicities, collaborations, and new ideas. Cohorts formed exclusively online tend to dissolve after the course is over, while people we’ve met in real life we might keep in touch with for years.

If you do have the luxury of adding face to face events to your design, you should make sure not to waste them! 

Great for: creating momentum and enthusiasm. Networking. Supporting reflections, questions and feedback.

Risk: live events are more expensive and time-consuming to organize. 

How to use it: add a face-to-face event at the beginning of your course to raise enthusiasm. If you have this component as well as small group work, make sure to dedicate some time during the live event for groups to meet and start organising their work together. If it’s possible based on your situation, add periodic face-to-face meetings with instructors and content providers for such activities as Q&A, role plays and simulations. 

Don’t waste them in: lengthy presentations and “death by powerpoint” – you have so many more options of how to provide great content for your learners!

5 Tips (+1) for Designing Great Blended Learning Environments

Having established what the components of blended learning courses are, let’s look at some practical tips to keep in mind when working on the storyboarding and setup of such courses.

1. Keep the sections straight in your head. It’s up to the designer to clearly establish what content will be delivered how, and how the various sections work together to achieve your learning objectives. Diagrams and schematics may help with this, as can a practical design tool such the ADDIE model for instructional design. You can also use the SessionLab app to keep the design clear and visually appealing.
   
2. Use in-sync components to raise motivation, whether it’s big online workshops or small group work assignments. Dropouts are a big concern in online learning, and blended learning approaches can really help with this!
   
3. Leverage the power of small groups. Research findings prove that small groups are the key to achieving learning outcomes. Design activities that groups can go through autonomously, give them team challenges and tools for collaborative learning.
   
4. Provide opportunities for deeper dives. The main content for your self-paced online learning modules will be the same for everyone: keep it accessible, clear, and simple. At the same time, motivated learners will want to dig deeper into topics of their interest, so provide extra resources and specialized learning tracks;
   
5. Give extra-clear instructions in your LMS. Blended learning courses have many moving parts and learners might get confused. What time is the online workshop? Do I need to attend? Create FAQ sheets and video explanations detailing the course structure. Have an email address or chat for participants to contact and make sure someone is answering. Don’t be afraid to repeat information twice (or more).

The last piece of advice I’ve got is rather controversial, so hear me out, and feel free to disagree in the comments:

6. Don’t record live components. The most common questions you will get once the course is set up are probably going to be “Will you record the live sessions?” and “Where can I watch them?” Knowing that sessions will be recorded is bound to lower learners’ motivation to join, and we all know that watching a recording of a participatory workshop is no substitute for participation. Clarify that these are not lectures, and instead of providing recordings, repeat sessions more than once to accommodate different needs and time zones. 

Start your Blended Learning Design from a Customizable Template

Now that you know more about the different elements that compose a blended learning course design, you probably have some ideas of how to put them together in a flow that works for your learners.

Starting and/or ending with synchronous sessions is a common format, as well as including small group work after every self-paced module. 

Using SessionLab, you can easily visualize all the components, color-code them, and drag-and-drop elements to customize your design. To see what a blended learning course might look like, we’ve prepared this ready-to-use template. 

This starter kit begins with an opening session designed to be hosted online, with the support of a facilitator well-versed in virtual workshops. It then contains two blank example modules to be filled with your content.

Each module ends with a small group session, and the entire course concludes with a synchronous reflection workshop where learners can have the opportunity to ask questions, think back on their learning and provide feedback. Find the complete template here!

In closing

Blended learning courses are a growing trend in education and elearning, both for higher education students and for professional training. I hope this article has equipped you with all the terminology and resources you need to design great blended learning courses with confidence! 

Have you tried basing your design on our ready-made template? Have you used SessionLab for your blended course design? Do you agree that live sessions should not be recorded? Have we forgotten any important tips? Share in the comments and in our friendly online community!

This honest guide to hybrid event planning is packed with practical tips, insights and information to get you started setting up, designing and running successful hybrid events. First of all, you’ll find a definition of what hybrid events are, complete with examples of how they may work, hybrid event best practices and more. 

Once that is clear, read on to find out three key insights on how to face the challenge of working with both people who share a space and people who join online.

* Why “honest”? 

• Because hybrid events can be hard and we’re not going to hide it. 
• Because we collected insights based on conversations and experiences from real people, working in the real world. 
• And, last but not least, because this guide will not provide cookie-cutter solutions but rather insights, pointers, tips and inspiration – ultimately, as always, the actual design is up to you! 

The following sections of this in-depth guide include practical tools, roles that you’ll need to cover, an overview of tech needs, and more. The whole article is packed with useful tips, but if you are in a rush to begin planning, start with this section on practical tools to support inclusion in your next, exciting, adventure in hybrid event planning! 

What are hybrid events?

A hybrid event is one in which some participants are sharing a physical space, while others connect online… all at the same time! This is not altogether a novelty. Keynote speakers, for example, were sometimes presenting and answering questions from a screen long before the Covid-19 pandemic came along and hybrid events entered the mainstream.

That said, contemporary hybrid events are going in the direction of more interaction and engagement than a mere Q&A. Effective facilitation is therefore essential to make hybrid participation work.

The word hybrid is borrowed from the natural sciences. In botany and biology, it refers to the offspring of two animals or plants of different subspecies or varieties. A hybrid will preserve some features from each parent and develop others that are completely new. Similarly, hybrid events share some of the characteristics of in-person events and some that come from the online world… and others that are unique. 

In this guide, we will be using hybrid events, meetings and workshops somewhat interchangeably. Distinctions among them can be made (and are, with great accuracy, by Robert Kienzle in his excellent 132-page Hybrid Live Guide). That said, as long as you aim to facilitate active participation while some participants are sharing a location and others are joining from elsewhere, this guide will apply: take what is appropriate and adapt it to the specifics of your situation.

For more long-term setups in hybrid teams that will work together continuously, this guide will still work for you as facilitator, but you are likely to have to add some research on what workflow and communication tools and apps (such as Slack, Asana and so on, as described in this guide to remote collaboration tools) might support your team in the long term.

Hybrid events are not the only possible way of combining remote and in-person: another possibility is to combine modes of participation not at the same time, but in sequence.

In blended events, sessions are run remotely and in-person at different times, with all participants joining in the same way. Think, for example, of training courses in which everyone meets for intensive seminars, then takes some online modules over the space of a month or two. Here is a little slideshow I put together to illustrate the difference. 

Different ways participants may be joining your hybrid event 

While all hybrid events have in common the simultaneous presence of participants sharing a physical space and others connecting online, different configurations are possible. 

Hub-and-spoke: cohorts of participants who are in the same room, with rooms scattered in different locations, all connecting to the same event. You may have, for example, a group of five joining from the Zurich office, a group of seven in Lisbon, and a larger assembly of twenty joining from headquarters in Copenhagen.

Hub and satellite: one main group joining in person, and individual virtual attendees connecting from their personal devices. This is becoming an increasingly common setup for many hybrid events, e.g. for community/networking gatherings and festivals. The main hybrid event takes place in a physical location, and access is given to remote participants to join with a virtual event platform as well, for the entire event or in part.

A combination of the two is also possible, with some participants joining your hybrid event independently and others in small groups. From the facilitator’s point of view, the scenario changes what activities you can run and how to give instructions for them.

Start your session design process by mapping who will be there, with approximate numbers of participants. Combine this with your overall objectives to create a flow appropriate to the specific hybrid event or meeting.

Why you need to know how to handle hybrid events

In 2020 and 2021, with so many people working from home, facilitators moved their work to online settings. We shared knowledge (e.g. in SessionLab’s remote facilitation guide) the tech improved at breakneck speed, and it’s a safe bet to say that online facilitation is here to stay. Having a virtual event enables wider participation of attendees from different locations and personal situations (or over-booked agendas). 

At the same time, in-person events are possible again: those who are able to dedicate the time, and travel, might be keen to attend a physical event. Given all the possible reasons that might keep virtual attendees in front of their screens while others want to be in the same room, it simply makes sense for event organizers to create hybrid event formats. 

It is in looking at facilitation practice in 2022 that the striking emergence of hybrids becomes clear, with over 60% of facilitators having led at least a hybrid session (based on the State of Facilitation report).

It’s therefore important for facilitators to be aware of how hybrid events work, and get familiar with how to facilitate them. Just as it was important to learn how to run virtual events alongside traditional in person events during the global pandemic.

Even if you end up deciding that hybrid event planning is not for you, you’ll need to know why, and how to articulate this to clients. Who knows, you might take to this new environment as a fish to (new) waters and become one of the first world-class experts in hybrid facilitation!

When should you run a hybrid event?

While every facilitator should at least be hybrid-literate, certainly not every event should go hybrid. As hybrid events become increasingly common, it’s important to clearly communicate to clients that they do require more work, (ideally) a larger team, and extra attention to technology. This might mean hiring more people, renting equipment, adding time for preparation and therefore, in essence, more expense. 

Hybrid events should not be thrown around as an afterthought or an “add-on” to events planned in a different format. Having a camera pointed at speakers during a conference and allowing people to tune in is not a hybrid event: it’s a live broadcast and/or a webinar. In a hybrid event, we are looking at actual participation of all attendees, in different ways, aiming for the same level of engagement, with a flow of communication among all those involved.

Clearly articulating the specificity of hybrids to event organizers is essential to ensure decisions are taken realistically. Make sure you take the time to ask for the rationale behind the request for a hybrid event.

Discuss pros and cons with the convenor/client. Is is genuinely better than a strictly virtual event? If for the purposes of the gathering it’s a real advantage to allow virtual attendees and in-person attendees, and the resources to make this happen are available, then go for it! 

What are the challenges of hybrid event planning?

In terms of facilitation, all hybrid events require three complete designs: one for the people who are sharing the room, one for those joining remotely, and one for the connection between the two.

The novelty of this scenario and the complexity of juggling so many moving pieces made handling hybrids one of facilitators’ main challenges in 2022, according to the State of Facilitation report!

It can get even more complicated in cases in which you will have to tweak instructions for different numbers of people joining from different rooms: in the “hub-and-spoke” model, for example, activities might need specific instructions if some groups are even and some odd-numbered!

Besides the challenge of running different programs simultaneously, hybrid events add the hurdle of combining them. If this effort fails, you are likely to end up with disengaged participants or groups. This can create disagreements and conflict between your virtual audience and in-person attendees. People may end up feeling slighted or excluded from certain conversations, dynamics or decision-making taking part in other parts of your hybrid event.

Ideally, participants joining in different ways should still have many opportunities to work together and interact, create bonds and foster the sense of being “in this together” as parts of a whole.

Taking into consideration people with disabilities and neurodivergent people will require additional hybrid event planning. You’ll need to consider how to support access to audiovisual technologies and resources these people may need to participate fully in your hybrid events. Just as accessibility should be considered for any in person event, the same is true for virtual attendees and their hybrid counterparts.

How to plan a successful hybrid event

In early 2022, the Italian chapter of the International Association of Facilitators hosted a one-and-a-half-hour discussion among a group of about 30 professional facilitators on the topic of hybrid events. At the end of the conversation, three approaches emerged as crucial for facing the hybrid challenge successfully and making hybrid event planning more effective:

1. Keep it simple

Keep. It. Simple. These were the three most-oft-repeated words at the workshop! The setting of a hybrid event is so complicated that simple activities work best. Keep the instructions clear and minimal and be a bit more directive than you normally would. This advice was valid when moving towards virtual events and its valid here too!

Don’t worry about being too basic or linear: trust that the nature of hybrid events will provide added complexity, and throw you some curveballs. That is when you will be grateful for all the head-space you will have given yourself by rejecting more elaborate methods or activities. 

2. Craft a spacious design 

Make sure you have defined objectives with the event organizers, and plan activities to ensure those are reached. Because there are so many uncertainties connected to the technology and all the different settings, keep the breaks as actual breaks rather than scheduling leisure activities or games.

Virtual attendees will need that time to get away from the screens. Those people who are physically present will be glad to have informal opportunities to mingle and relax. And you and your team will need all the time you can get to make last-minute adjustments or, if you are lucky, take an actual break! Approach your hybrid event planning with spaciousness and generous time buffers in mind for best results!

3. Gather feedback and correct course

Another piece of advice that is always valid, but worth focussing on for hybrid events: gather feedback, iterate and correct course. Hybrid event planning requires a lot of preparation, but this should not mean you are now bound to a definitive schedule that will never change.

Every group and interaction is different. Learning how to ensure your specific hybrid event is successful will require adaptation to the unique context at hand. What works for a virtual audience is different for those at the in-person event, and so too might it be different during a hybrid event. As such, it pays to listen and create space for feedback.

Involve participants from the beginning in shaping your hybrid strategies (see below for more on how to do this) and schedule regular moments for feedback. For longer events, this could be at the end of each day. For shorter workshops, don’t wait for the last moment: ask for feedback about mid-way, ideally just before a break, so you can start making some changes right afterward.

Time for feedback on the process should not take long: use a poll and get some insight in 5 minutes.

You might want to ask questions such as:

• Which cohort are you in (online, in-person…)? [multiple choice]
  
• How connected do you feel to your cohort (the other people participating in the same mode as you)? [quantitative, e.g. on a scale 1-5]
• How connected/aligned do you feel with respect to the other cohort(s)? 
• How easy/hard is it for you to contribute to discussions?
  
• What are the facilitators doing that is working well to make this hybrid event a success? [open question]
• What could we do to make the experience even better? 

Collecting feedback in this way is serving more functions than one. First of all, you are gathering information that can help you and your facilitation team improve as the event goes on, shaping it based on your specific group’s needs. Secondly, you are modeling flexibility and willingness to adapt and change, two values that are likely needed in any organization or group you might be working with, all the more so if they are experimenting with virtual and hybrid events.

At the same time, you are raising the participants’ awareness of the process, even just by the simple act of reminding them that different cohorts in your hybrid event might have different needs and experiences. This in itself makes it more likely for attendees to collaborate in making it easier for everyone to be included and contribute.

Remember that this feedback is invaluable for future events. Be sure to share this with the hybrid event organizer, the rest of the team and potentially the attendees too!

Hybrid events best practices

In this section we will cover a range of practicalities you’ll need to keep in mind while designing, setting up and running hybrid events. The first part is a deep dive into strategies to support inclusion of different groups. This is arguably the number one challenge of a hybrid event: in this section, we find out why, and list some strategies as well as four practical tools you can use to make sure inclusion is fully supported, wherever your participants may be!

Next, we touch upon the intricacies of tech setups. As virtual event platforms and tech solutions change all the time, so rather than recommend specific solutions, we will be pointing out what you need to watch out for and keep in mind during hybrid event planning and when facilitating a successful hybrid event. 

The third essential matter to consider is your prep work: besides designing carefully and mapping participants, you’ll need to figure out how you will communicate instructions in different ways to both virtual and in-person attendees.

As facilitators, we are already wearing various hats, and hybrid event planning and facilitation will add some new ones to your collection. In this section, we use roles as a way of framing how to best set up a hosting team, and who will do what.

The fifth and final matter to consider is how to run different types of activities: plenaries, small-group, individual, as well as specific activities, to bridge the different cohorts. This section is packed with practical tips to get every part of your program fine-tuned and hybrid-proof! 

Ready to dive in and learn what it takes to run a successful hybrid event? Let’s start by looking at thorny matters of power dynamics and how to bridge those differences.

How will you make sure everyone is included in the hybrid conversation?

In any gathering of human beings, there is bound to be a lot of diversity, and some imbalance of power. This is the case for in-person events and it remains true for hybrid events too.

As facilitator, part of your role is to make the invisible dynamics intelligible to all participants. Offering new vocabulary and words to express what is going on in terms of power dynamics allows the group to reframe them as cultural artifacts: elements that can be interacted with, evaluated and, if needed, changed.

Let’s consider some key points concerning possible power imbalances specific to the hybrid environment, and what we, as facilitators, can do about them.

Power imbalances in hybrid events

Here are three typical cases of how the hybrid setting can exacerbate pre-existing power imbalances or create new ones. The next time you join or lead a hybrid event, see if you can spot these as they happen! 

1. In-person attendees may have a stronger say – Participants who meet in person will have all the benefits of sharing space and are likely to tend to create a niche culture for themselves, based on the simple fact that they will read one another’s body language and subtle cues. As facilitators, we should raise each group’s awareness of cohorts joining from other locations and not fall into the trap of allowing the in-person group to prevail over virtual attendees.
   
2.  The largest group, wherever it is, may dominate – There certainly is power in numbers, and the largest group of attendees, whatever their position, may hold greater sway over the entire hybrid event. Pay extra attention to the minority and make sure those voices are heard, perhaps by inviting them in, as you would with any quiet participant (“We haven’t heard from the folks over in Sydney in a while.. I’d like to just check in if there is anything you’d like to add…?”).
   
3. Those who share the facilitator’s position might prevail – By the mere, inescapable fact of being humans, facilitators may develop an unconscious bias towards the people in our same room or position, creating momentary alliances. Be aware of the “us vs. them” risk. You may find it natural to prioritize those with whom you are sharing space, or a situation (e.g. if the facilitator is online), and should remind yourself to check your biases and act accordingly for all hybrid events.

How to handle power imbalances

Our goal as facilitators is to make sure everyone’s voice can be heard. There are (at least) two pathways to getting there. The first is to work on your awareness as a facilitator, while the second leverages the collaboration of the entire group. 

1. Keep power imbalances in your awareness and be attentive to them. 

Consider this part of your facilitation prep work. Take time to consider where power imbalances might be and how your own stance, language and behavior can worsen or improve the situation. 

If you know you will tend to prioritize in-person participants (because you are in the room with them, or out of pre-virtual-facilitation habit learned from attending online events), make a mental note of this. Remind yourself and your team to take questions from online participants first. Place the screen on which you see the online participants where your attention will be directed to it.

If you catch yourself internally agreeing with the in-person attendees more than with the online ones, ask yourself why. Are you fully understanding them, or are you missing their point (perhaps because of the lack of visual clues)? If you’ve run a lot of virtual events, that experience will help here too!

2. Focus all participants’ attention on the hybrid scenario, open a conversation and co-create support systems. 

If you got the impression that the previous point might leave you exhausted, you are probably right. Holding your attention on the in-person and online groups at the same time is yet one more task for your already pretty busy inner juggler.

What can you do? Use one of the tools facilitators like best: throw the ball right back to your participants! Take time at the beginning of the session to discuss with the group: how are you feeling about being in this hybrid event? What examples of successful hybrid collaboration have you experienced? What would help you participate fully, at your best?

This can be part of the slot you have set aside to present and discuss ground rules/group agreements, or can be a specific conversation. With a large group that will meet only once, for example for a community event, it may be enough to acknowledge the challenge out loud, and propose some basic agreements.

With groups that will work together longer, e.g. in a series of workshops or a company team, it’s definitely worth spending time talking this through together.

At the start of a workshop, kick-start separate conversations in the different groups around such questions as:

• How does it feel to be in this cohort?
• What do you think might be obstacles to your full participation in the event today?
• What would work for you to counteract these? Do you have any requests for the plenary group? 
• How do you imagine the other group(s) feel about this setting? What might support them?

Then, use the What I need from you activity from Liberating Structures to facilitate a dialogue among the different groups of participants and invite them to ask of each other what they need to support full participation.

This process can feed into drafting your group’s unique “hybrid event collaboration agreement”, which you can revise as you go.

Practical tools to support inclusion 

Map the group

For participants – Use maps and diagrams to make sure everyone knows who is in the hybrid event, whether or not they are in the room. If people are joining in a huddle from the same screen, ask them to add individual names as well as the location (e.g. “Marina, Hannah, John – Vienna team” rather than just “Vienna team” or “Marina”). Names of participants joining remotely might be hard to read if they are projected on a screen for the in-person crew: make a map of your hybrid event participants on a whiteboard so everyone can see who they are interacting with. 

For yourself – Draw a diagram, for your own use, of who is where. Keep it on top of your notes. Add a mark next to the name of those who are taking the floor and speaking up. Even if you don’t remember to do this every time, you might still notice patterns emerge. Are people in the physical space, or in one particular room, participating more? What about your virtual audience? Try some nudging to rebalance this, e.g. by inviting a specific group to speak up more “I’d love to hear what our colleagues in Paris think about this…”

Language matters

Take a moment before the event to decide on how you will refer to the different groups in your hybrid event, and stick to it. This can also be part of the explicit agreement you establish with participants. Avoid creating accidental hierarchies in your virtual and hybrid events by referring to one situation as not-that: in-person and not-in-person, on-line and off-line or, worse, “here” and “there”.

Several facilitators and educators have been popularizing the idea of talking about roomies and Zoomies (I first heard of this trend from Judy Rees over at ReesMcCann). While this may not apply to your situation (you may be using another software, or have more than two groups) it’s a great example of what works. The two terms are fun, playful, and neutral, in that they do not imply one is more important or better than the other. 

Hybrid buddies

What do you do when you have a large group of people traversing an unfamiliar landscape, like a big city, and you want to make sure nobody gets lost? You create a buddy system! As we set out with our group to explore the terrain of our hybrid event, we can do the same. At the start of the workshop plan team-building activities in breakout rooms (see here for our handy methods list) to form a buddy pair, triad or huddle.

Inform participants that this group will remain stable throughout the event and be the setting in which they can support one another and draw the best from the different situations they are in. People connecting from their computers are at an advantage in terms of doing quick research. Those sharing a room with a facilitator might find it easier to attract your attention, or to speak out.

A buddy system is an excellent solution to ensure the group shares the challenge of making this the best possible hybrid experience, and lighten your load as well!

Use polls for convergence

When taking decisions or checking the room for agreement, there is a heightened risk that people will stay silent in a hybrid event. Because facilitators will be dividing their attention among different cohorts, it is easier to miss subtle body signals or facial expressions. Make moving towards convergence easier by using polls like those you would use in a virtual event to make sure everyone has an opportunity to pitch in a vote or a comment.

Participants at in-person events can use their mobile phones to take part in online polling apps like Menti and Slido (find more ideas on what tools to use in this article on tools for remote participation). By checking the number of people contributing to a poll, you can instantly verify participant engagement, count votes and move the group towards decision-making.

What technology should you consider when planning a hybrid event?

The tech side of planning a hybrid event can be daunting. There are a lot of choices to make that need to take into account the logistics of both in-person events and virtual events. There’s also some cool new tech (such as Owls, cameras designed to follow the speaker) to consider, but ultimately it comes down to figuring out, based on the constraints of the specific situation, how to enable everyone to hear and see one another, in all possible directions.

How will participants at your in person events be able to see those online? Screens and projectors will need setting up. How will remote attendees see those in person? At the very least, you will need multiple webcams pointed on the facilitator/speaker, the other participants, and any materials (e.g. whiteboard).

In hybrid events, sound is even more important than sight to allow for interaction and participation. Be aware that people might even be joining from their phones, with audio-only, if the connection does not allow for more data sharing.

What exactly to do in order to allow everyone to hear one another depends on the situation, but for sure you will need ways for people connecting online to clearly hear participants in the room, and vice-versa. You might have the option of using a multi-directional mike, or require an assistant with a cordless microphone to move around the space.

Having an established spot with a microphone from which online attendees can clearly hear the speaker is the easiest tech setup. This will probably translate into having to remind participants of where to go when they want to speak, until a routine is established. 

Small group work mixing online and remote participants is the hardest type of activity to set up if your location has limited space: if everyone is working together, with both in-person and virtual audience, there will be a lot of audio interference from hearing different voices and echoes coming from many speakers.

Be aware of the limitations beforehand, and plan activities based on the constraints of the specific location. Make ample time in your schedule for planning and checking your tech, just as you would for a virtual event.

It’s also important to have a backup plan to communicate with cohorts that are not sharing the space with you in case something fails (e.g. by setting up an instant messaging channel for all hybrid event attendees – and another one for just the hosting team!).

Virtual online whiteboards and shared documents, giving the possibility to all participants to visualize the same information and capture insights directly, are a great support to keep everyone aligned and on track. These work just as well in hybrid as they do in a virtual event. Define a single source of truth for your hybrid events where attendees can find all the key information on the program, links, contacts and schedule.

The hybrid event format allows virtual and in-person attendees to create particularly rich shared documentation by working together. Set up shared documents and galleries on which to upload pictures and output from exercises. 

In this facilitation story by Daniel Unsöld, the shared whiteboard used during a multi-day hybrid event functioned as a home base to orient remote participants who dropped out and reconnected, something which is likely to happen with longer gatherings. 

How to prepare for your hybrid event?

The factors limiting your design choices will fall into three categories: distribution (of participants), objectives (co-defined with your client/host) and technology (in which we are including also factors connected to the location). Before starting to create a session flow, define your objectives clearly.

Design based on desired outcomes; especially if these are your first experiments with hybrid events, trim down activities you may be tempted to insert as extra bits but that do not serve the main purpose.

Next, map all the participants of your hybrid event. Even if the map is approximate, it will still help you clarify what is needed for the different cohorts. Think about the technology available and any limitations connected to available spaces (e.g. acoustics). Remember that many of the logistic concerns of an in-person event (accessibility, room size, etc.) still apply!

Similarly to virtual events, and more so, hybrids require a lot of preparation. Get instructions ready for every activity. Virtual attendees will benefit from having instructions written up for them, perhaps in a slide or ready for the tech host to drop in the chatbox. Printed or projected instructions can also help participants who attend in person to understand the activity better, particularly if you expect your attention to be going to the remote cohort at that time. 

What roles need to be covered for successful hybrid events? 

What follows is a list of roles, not of people. A role is a part played by someone in a particular situation. For example, you are probably familiar with the role of time-keeper. You may keep the role of time-keeper for yourself as facilitator, or you may delegate it to a co-host, or even appoint a participant to remind everyone of the time. You may even use an app or automatic reminder to cover the role.

Roles are a useful lens through which to puzzle out the problem of creating the best team for a successful event: a person might fill more than one role, and a role could be filled by more than one person.

In any hybrid event, you need to consider all the roles you would for an in-person event, plus the ones needed to successfully run an online gathering, and a couple of new ones. Depending on the exact nature of your hybrid event, event organizers, number of participants, type of setting and so on, you may need to cover many different roles yourself, or have a hosting team.

There is no point in trying to be a jack-of-all-trades if that is going to be exhausting and result in less attention given to participants. Go through this list whilst planning your hybrid events and make sure you know how many roles you are taking on, whether you have enough resources to delegate the roles you need other people to do, or if you need to onboard apprentices, volunteers, (or even participants!) to cover some of these. 

Event designer

This is a role you are likely to be taking yourself, perhaps alongside someone from the convening team (aka, probably, your client). At the design stage, consider what the experience will be like for all the different groups involved in your hybrid event, create your plans B (and C…D?). Take a look at this template to see how the breakout session function of SessionLab can help you organize your design for a hybrid event. 

Lead facilitator

This is the role mainly responsible for guiding participants through the various activities of your hybrid event. The lead facilitator’s main focus is on awareness, clarity and inclusion. As lead, you’ll need to have the mental space required to sense the room and be as present as possible with the participants, regardless of which cohort they are in.

There is no firm rule or established practice in hybrid events as to where the lead facilitator is. The default may be to attend in person events, but it’s worth considering based on your specific event. They may be with the largest group meeting in person, with one of the satellite groups, or working alongside virtual attendees. This will influence power dynamics and tech needs. 

Tech host/producer

The tech hosting role is the one ensuring that the online environment works as smoothly as possible. This role is usually behind-the-scenes and is often (but not necessarily) silent. Think of who will be answering people in the chat, setting up breakout rooms and giving everyone access to links for whiteboards and polls. Anyone used to running a virtual event will find their skills useful here.This person may also be responsible for choosing a hybrid event platform or which online tools you will use.

Video/audio specialist

The technological aspect of hybrid events is key to enabling full participation. Video is important, and audio is fundamental! This role is there to ensure participants can see and be seen, hear and be heard. Experience in running virtual events and using those tools will be invaluable here.

Visuals curator/designer

Well-crafted visuals can be a great support for different groups to participate and follow. The role of the visuals curator/designer is to support full engagement with the aid of graphic tools. This might coincide with the work of a graphic recorder and/or might be more focused on preparing virtual whiteboards, curating collections of snapshots from the various locations, and so on.

Bridge-builder 

This role’s task is to pay particular attention to the connection between the different cohorts throughout your hybrid events. It may be partially filled by elements of the design itself, or there might be a person tasked with putting extra attention to this element. Though this might seem like an optional role, the bridge-builder can be vital in creating a successful hybrid event.

Time-keeper

A time-keeping role is essential for every meeting, hybrid or not. That said, because different groups at your hybrid events will be in such different settings and probably, at least part of the time, doing different activities, a time-keeping role is essential to ensure everyone stays on track. 

What should you keep in mind when designing and running activities at a hybrid event? 

Facilitators love to mix and match different types of activities to create an engaging flow. Below, you’ll find some practical tips on how to adapt different types of activities for a hybrid event, including plenary sessions, small-group work, individual work and a special new extra hybrid-only category: activities bridging the virtual and in-person worlds. 

In plenary 

When everyone is working together at the same time, the challenge is holding everyone’s attention and keeping the event cohesive. Excellent audio and video are key here, as you want to make sure participants and speakers can see and, even more importantly, hear one another wherever they are. 

Tips for facilitating plenary sessions in hybrid mode:

• Ensure your audio and video setup allows speakers to be heard and seen by all;
• Keep presentations short and interactive, use polls to punctuate longer talks;
• In Q&A sessions, give the floor first to the group that is at a disadvantage in that setting (in many cases this means the online cohort, but other scenarios are possible, e.g. the speaker and facilitator are both online and there is a small group meeting in person, in which case, prioritize them!);
• Make sure discussions are captured in a way that is accessible to all. If you have someone writing on a physical whiteboard, take pictures and upload them on a virtual platform, so your virtual audience can see what was written down and so that attendees to your hybrid events can review later.

Small group activities

Facilitators appreciate the benefits of working in small groups and breakout sessions, where participation is higher and everyone has time to get their say. This remains valid in hybrid events. Here are some specific considerations to keep in mind.

There are basically two ways of organizing small group work in a hybrid event. If your tech setup allows it, you should consider alternating both of these in your design, as they have different benefits. 

1. Different activities for online and in-person participants. 

Beginning with the same objective, design different things to do for the people who are sharing a space and for those who are online. This will allow you to benefit from the best of both worlds throughout your hybrid event. In-person groups can move around and use objects, maybe do a role play. With virtual attendees, you can encourage using the power of quick research and note-taking.

An example of this would be a storytelling activity in which the people who are in the same room tell a story with objects and acting, while the ones who are online create a storyboard using images collected from the web.

If you need to give different instructions to the two groups, make this clear, and share in a slide or chat the instructions for your virtual participants. If timings are different, give the remote crew more breaks, as they are needed to counteract the fatigue of being online.

2. Mixing online and in-person participants in small groups. 

This is the kind of activity that will feel most unique to hybrid events. To enable participants in different settings to work together, each small group will need their device (laptop or phone). You can leverage the fact that both the in person and virtual audience of your hybrid events will likely have a smartphone in their pockets.

The two limiting factors in this event format are bandwidth and acoustics. Firstly, you need to make sure the connection at your location can be trusted with multiple people connecting at the same time.

Next, try to imagine what the space will sound like with numerous conversations going on in hybrid mode: will participants be able to hear voices coming from different audio equipment? The risk is that everyone in the hybrid event will raise their voices and create a distracting cacophony. This can be avoided if the space allows participants to wander into different breakout spaces or use the outdoors. 

Tips for facilitating small groups at a hybrid event:

• Include in your design activities in which each cohort works separately and others in which they work together (as long as this is feasible for your tech setup);
• Keep instructions as clear and simple as possible. 
• Get everyone together again to debrief and share reflections;
• Use shared documents online to capture learnings. 

Individual activities

Make space for individual reflections as well as group work during your hybrid event. Before a brainstorming session, or at the end of a block of activities, learning is enhanced by having a quiet moment for each person to answer prompt questions individually. If you need to create breakout groups online or do other behind-the-scenes work, you will thank yourself for putting some time for participants to do individual work just before the activities you need to do more setting up for. 

Bridging the online and in-person groups

In a hybrid community gathering held in December 2022 in Valencia, which was based on this template, the facilitation team was looking for a simple way to connect people joining online to those in person on a very human level.

With co-facilitators Rowan Simonsen and Szilvia Zsargo, we decided to punctuate the event with what we called hybrid checkpoints: every two or three hours during our hybrid event, me and Szilvia invited the in-person audience in Valencia to scatter in the outdoor space of the campus and use their phones to connect to the Zoom call their colleagues were on.

Once they were in the call, Rowan, who was hosting the virtual component, created pairs (in some cases, triads) and sent them off for a 10-minute chat in breakout rooms. The prompt was simply “how are you doing and what are your insights at this point in the gathering?”. The insights collected were invaluable, and both virtual and in person attendees reported feeling a real sense of connection and empathy. 

Hybrid events checklist

We hope this guide gives you all your need to feel prepared and confident in setting up a successful hybrid event.

And since there is a lot in here, we thought it might be helpful to add a checklist you can go through while planning and designing. Whether you’ve never run an in-person event or or a pro, hybrid events have many moving parts and this guide can help you ensure a smooth process.

In closing… let’s learn together, fast!

Have you thought of how and where you will share your learnings about hybrid events and meetings?

Tools and skills around hybrid events are likely to be the defining topic for the next few years, and this is just the beginning. After all, it’s one of the best things about working in facilitation: the learning never stops!

We can all expect a lot of new things to learn, success stories (and the occasional spectacular failure) from the world of virtual events and hybrids. Learning is faster and more effective when we learn together as a global community of practice, so consider contributing by sharing your stories and experiences of hybrid events with other facilitators, including in comments to this piece!

Course builders will have questions on graphic design and styles. Learners will need clear, fool-proof instructions to navigate the learning management system. And you, working as an educator, corporate trainer, elearning course builder, or learning designer, need to make sense of it all. 

This is where the ADDIE model comes into play. The ADDIE process is a time-tested model that will help you conceptualize and make sense of the steps needed to create an engaging learning experience that achieves your desired outcomes. 

Let’s delve into what ADDIE is, how it works, and how you can quickly start using it to organize your instructional design workflow. In this article, we’ll look into:

What is the ADDIE model for instructional design?

The ADDIE model is a versatile and practical framework that covers all the steps of the instructional design process. The word is an acronym to help you remember all you need to do for the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of a training program. 

What may sound like common sense (“Well of course I need to analyze needs before designing!”) does tend to get lost when we are busy and under pressure to deliver. Evaluation, for example, might be forgotten in the mire of to-do lists and content provider email exchanges.

So keep the ADDIE model by your side (we’ve made a nice visual you can print out!) to make sure you always include all these important elements:

• A for Analyze. In the analysis phase, you’ll seek to understand the organization’s goals and the learners’ needs to define learning objectives. We will see below how the analysis phase can be covered in client meetings, with some facilitation tools and tips;
• D is for Design. The design phase is where you zoom out to craft the overall structure and flow of your course and lesson planning.
• D is (also) for Development. After completing a high-level plan, it’s time to build the course content and materials in a learning environment. This often implies using a suite of software tools (more on this below) and sometimes working with different team members, such as graphic designers and course builders.
• I stands for the Implementation phase. After all that hard work, it’s time to pilot-test the course and get it out into the world.
• E stands for Evaluation. The last step of the flow is to collect data and learnings on course effectiveness, and apply them when you start again!

By following the ADDIE model, you ensure coherence, effectiveness, and a good dose of efficiency in your instructional design workflow. 

Where does the ADDIE model come from?

Florida State University initially developed the ADDIE framework in 1975 as part of its instructional theories for military training. From the very first definition, it acknowledged that the rather universal division in steps can be applied to any curriculum development activity. In fact, it’s not different from any step-by-step approach to project design and implementation. 

When working to write this very article, for example, I had to first think about what readers might need to know (Analyze), then I created a high-level plan for my article, consisting of all the titles and subtitles (Design). I then went on to research and write out each paragraph (Develop) and move it to publication, adding some visuals and links (Implementation).

If I’m smart about it, I’ll check how the article is doing in a few weeks (Evaluation) and see if I need to make any changes to make it clearer or more engaging.

You can go through the same steps for any project. Friends are coming to dinner! To decide what to serve, you’ll think about their tastes, allergies, and preferences (Analyze). You’ll make a list of dishes and consider how to serve them (Design). Next comes shopping and cooking (Develop). You know what Implementation is like. And you might get some Evaluation at the end of the meal, hopefully positive! 

ADDIE is a common-sense framework, yet this doesnt take away any of its import. It is a flexible guideline, easy to remember. Use it and it will quickly become second nature. 

The original 1970s model had many more steps, but it was systematized in the 1980s. It’s the most commonly used model today, with some competition from Rapid Prototyping, which is essentially a variation of ADDIE where more short-term iterations are run in quick succession.

Rapid prototyping, with its focus on speed and less attention to completion and polish, might work well for you if you are short on time and plan future re-runs of the same course.

Why use the ADDIE model for instructional design

The absence of a structured model in instructional design can lead to a messy process and, ultimately, disappointing learning experiences that do not match your client’s expectations.

The ADDIE model provides a scaffold for your thinking and for collaboration with the rest of your learning design team. Use it to ensure you don’t overlook any steps and manage the project effectively. 

Here are some of the key advantages of ADDIE:

• It’s clear, it’s simple, it’s linear. Analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The process easily becomes part of your workflow.
• It’s complete and thorough. The main risk of not using such a model is to go straight to design and implementation without putting time and energy into analyzing needs and evaluating results. 
• It allows for both collaboration and independent work. Some steps are more naturally adapted to individual work (design) while others are collaborative in nature. In this template detailing all 5 steps of ADDIE you can see examples of when to organize team meetings and when to work alone. 
• It integrates feedback for continuous improvement. The essential Evaluation step is all about learning and applying that learning to future designs. 

What are the 5 steps of the ADDIE model?

What does each step of the ADDIE model imply? In the next paragraphs, we’ll go through typical examples of actions that might take place while designing training courses with ADDIE.

Analysis Phase

The analysis phase lays the foundation for your course. Conduct a needs assessment to identify what problems your client or organization wants to solve by providing the new training course you’re tasked with designing.

What are the learning goals? Who is your target audience? What are potential learners’ skills, experiences, and barriers? What should participants be able to do or know at the end of the course? Also look at subject matter analysis: what concepts will need to be covered?

This phase is best served by organizing client calls and team meetings. In this ready-to-use canvas, you can collect essential information from your initial needs analysis. At every subsequent step, you should be designing, developing, and implementing a training program that responds directly to these needs. 

It’s often the case that clients are not 100% clear about what they actually need at the very start. And it’s your job, as a learning designer, to patiently draw the information out until there is a shared understanding of the learning objectives for your course. 

A common issue in the analysis stage is that clients may want to try to cram too much into a single training, so take your time analyzing needs and defining what should be covered in this course and what should be kept for a later one.

Perhaps you will see the opportunity for a more advanced version of the same training, building on existing knowledge. The output of the analysis phase is a needs assessment to feed into the design phase.

Design Phase

After the analysis phase is done, the next step is to create a high-level course curriculum blueprint. As courses are often modular, it could also be the design of a single module, repeated as many times as needed and sandwiched between an introduction and a final lesson and/or assignment. 

In the design phase, you’ll be answering questions such as:

• How many training hours should it take for learners to go through the course?
• What will each module or lesson cover?
• How many lessons will there be? 
• How will learners progress through the course? 
• How will you be leveraging and referencing learner’s existing knowledge?
• Where will there be interactive elements (such as quizzes, surveys, and live sessions)?
• When will there be assignments and assessments? 
• When will you collect feedback about the course itself, to use in the evaluation phase? 

By considering these kinds of questions and using the information in the analysis phase, instructional designers will then create an outline designed to meet learning objectives and satisfy business needs. The design phase deals with all the items needed to get approval from a client so you can then move towards creating course material.

To see an example of a typical learning design blueprint, check out this template for a blended learning course, that combines self-paced and workshop elements.

SessionLab is a particularly useful tool to use at this stage of your instructional design process, as it allows you to see the entire course at a glance, color-code sections, share it with the client, and collaborate with colleagues directly. 

Development Phase

The development phase is probably where you will spend most of your time when creating a new learning program. Once you have alignment and approval on the blueprint for your design, you’ll likely move it to a storyboarding tool and start adding content to the course.

A suite of educational technology tools can help you in the process, and for more on this check out our article on the best instructional design tools on the market. 

Typical actions you’ll be taking at this stage include:

• collecting materials from subject matter experts;
• adapting materials to your course design;
• working with graphic designers to make the course visually attractive (for more on this topic, here is a useful textbook by Dawn Lee Diperi);
• uploading training materials and building up the course in an LMS (Learning Management systems);
• setting up interactive sections such as quizzes and surveys.

During the development phase, challenges often arise that are related more to project management than to actual learning design. It can be hard to collect all the bits and pieces you need, and make sure you get all the materials you need to build your course on time!

Mitigate these risks by taking time to carefully brief subject matter experts and the rest of your team, clarifying any questions, and setting realistic and clear deadlines!

We’ve heard from a business school learning design team that they color-code sections of their courses in a high-level SessionLab outline of the program. Different colors make it immediately evident what is done, what is missing, and where builders and training developers need to do some work.

Implementation Phase

The deadline draws near and it’s (almost) time to make your brand-new course live! Before you do that, there is a last step in the Implementation phase of the ADDIE model: pilot testing. 

Testing and refining an almost-ready course rarely gets the attention (and credit) it deserves. Take some time to look at your product with fresh eyes (and a cup of tea, this will take a while). Run through the entire course as if you were a learner. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Do I have all the information I need to fully understand the content (e.g. take care to expand those acronyms!)?
• How long does it take to read through materials? Is this reflected in the way the course is presented?
• Are modules more or less the same length?
• How is the course holding my attention?
• Does the course curriculum meet the intended learning objectives.

Crucially, it’s important to remember that learners will never go through your materials exactly the way you imagine they will. Try “breaking” the course by following links in unexpected ways or trying to do things “wrong” (e.g. submitting assignments late, or twice). Explore the learning environment fully. Check all the links. What happens? Refine your course accordingly before training delivery begins.

At this point, most of your work is done, as attention will shift to promoting the course and student registration. Keep your inbox monitored for last-minute changes and glitches. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to read all feedback and assignments as soon as they come in, just out of curiosity about how your course is doing! 

Evaluation Phase

Evaluating the effectiveness and impact of any learning intervention is a hot topic. Having the evaluation phase as the last step of the ADDIE instructional design model serves as a reminder to embed opportunities to seek feedback and evaluate progress at every step of the way. 

After the course has been running for a while and completed by a good number of people, you should take time for post training assessments. This means essentially analyzing data from the LMS and drawing hypotheses and learnings. 

What are dropout rates and when do people drop out? What feedback have learners left? Were the desired learning outcomes achieved? Reflect back on how the course went, both as an individual reflection and with clients and team. Evaluation and feedback are the doorways to continuous improvement.

If you have the opportunity to gather the whole team together for a retrospective on how the course went, you might find inspiration in templates such as the Team retrospective or the 1-hour online WARP retrospective. For shorter activities that can help you look back and evaluate the program, check out this list of feedback resources from SessionLab’s library of methods. 

What feedback do you ask for at the end of training programs? This question is also at the center of a lively discussion in SessionLab’s free community. Join to share notes with other practitioners and add your perspective. 

Other useful models for instructional designers

The ADDIE process will give you a great starting point to plot out your work as an instructional designer. It will not give you an instructional strategy or a model of how to organize your course material. If you need some support to decide the order of activities your learners will go through, you can look into other models. Here are two of my favorites:

Kolb’s learning cycle

When designing training sessions, I most often turn directly to this tried-and-true 4-step cycle for experiential learning. This is because I work at the intersection of facilitation and training, where all learning is hands-on and participatory.

Kolb’s learning cycle starts with concrete experiences, such as a training game or learning activity, and follows that with reflective observation, where participants are guided individually or in small groups to draw learnings from what happened directly.

The third step in the cycle is about conceptualizing learning: this is when as a trainer you should offer food for thought, theories, and information. And finally comes active experimentation, which is about applying learnings in the real world, or in simulated real-world situations. 

I find it especially important to use Kolb’s learning cycle when training on communication skills, emotional intelligence, or other topics such as facilitators training, or sustainability. It may not be the model you go to for more technical topics where sharing data and information is the core of your training. This is a template that summarizes how to use Kolb’s learning cycle in the classroom.

4MAT

Another popular theory, building further on the Kolb experiential learning cycle, is the 4MAT model. This model works around the idea that people need to know:

• Why they are learning something
• What they are learning
• How it works
• What will happen if they apply this concept

4MAT is a great reminder of how to frame learning content so that it is more relevant and accessible for learners.

For more on this and other tips and theories for designing training events, read our Train the Trainers article. And remember the wisdom behind the ADDIE model: before getting down to developing a course you’ll need to Analyze needs, and pick a high-level design framework that makes sense for your particular situation and learning cohort. 

Start designing with ADDIE today

Now that you are familiar with the ADDIE model, you’re equipped to launch into designing your next training course with confidence. In this template we’ve put together information and ideas on how your workflow with the ADDIE model might work. Sections are color-coded to show which parts are more likely to involve individual work and which are team meetings. 

You’ll also find a copy of the Needs Analysis Canvas in attachments, and step-by-step instructions on how to organize effective, participatory meetings with your learning design team.

Have you used this template? Let us know how it went in the comments, and best of luck with setting up your next training courses with the ADDIE model! 

On a good day, facilitation can feel like effortless magic, but that is mostly the result of backstage work, foresight, and a lot of careful planning.

Read on to learn a step-by-step approach to breaking the process of planning a workshop into small, manageable chunks. 

The flow starts with the first meeting with a client to define the purposes of a workshop. In other words, we are working on the assumption that the facilitator has already been chosen and hired for a job. 

It’s also possible that you are designing a workshop agenda you have ideated yourself. You have a topic to share with your audience, and potential participants in mind… great! You can still use the same process, although not all steps may be relevant to your case.

How to plan a workshop in four phases

We have divided the process of designing a workshop step-by-step into four sections. This structure is inspired by the insightful design methodology known as Dragon Dreaming, as codified by John Croft. The framework is an invitation to move in a structured way from dreaming to designing, from designing to doing, and from doing to celebrating and learning.

In this workflow, we will go through similar steps, albeit much simplified and adapted to this specific example. If you find this categorization intriguing and you’d like to learn more, here is a page about Dragon Dreaming project design. The methodology originated in Australia, and you can see a wink to its origin in how the design turns counterclockwise! 

Each phase (vision, design, action and learning) is divided into subsections defining specific actions you need to take in planning your workshop. Each also includes a checkpoint with the client. These four meetings, plus a facilitation team meeting to draft the agenda, are described in detail in the accompanying Workshop Planning Template.

In the template, you will find ideas and inspiration for five one-hour meetings in which to:

• draw out the overall vision and desired outcomes;
• define a draft schedule;
• get buy-in for the workshop agenda;
• check-in for a briefing before the actual workshop;
• run a retrospective after the event is over.

I see this process as a dance between working alone and co-designing with a client. In this dance, two different ways of working interact, from being alone at the desk surrounded by sticky notes, to talking things over and getting feedback, into a new iteration of the design, and so on. Successful workshops all start, as most things do, with a vision, and a conversation. Let’s take the first step! 

Phase 1 – Vision

Every project begins as an idea in somebody’s mind, which really starts to take shape once it’s shared with someone else. In the first part of the process, we cover how to lead conversations that will move the idea from the abstract to a more concrete realm.

This process starts with a kick-off meeting attended by the facilitator, the client and, if applicable, other members of the team. To help you set it up, we have prepared a dedicated template complete with a workshop structure you can use to collect all the information from this visioning stage!

What are the desired outcomes of the workshop? Who will be the participants or what is your target audience? Once you have some initial answers to these questions, you can use them to shape a concept note, sign agreements, contracts and/or an MoU (memorandum of understanding). 

Sharing intentions

According to the State of Facilitation in 2023 report, a majority of facilitators find negotiating with clients and stakeholders quite the challenge. In the survey on which the report is based, we asked over 1100 professionals what was hard for them in the previous year.

While the top challenge reported was “keeping up with the trends”, a series of matters more related to difficulties negotiating, designing and getting buy-in from stakeholders emerged as well. We hope the following workshop planning tips can help you overcome such obstacles. Learn more about trends in facilitation in 2023 and the art of running workshops in the State of Facilitation report!

Designing based on the “why” is a necessary premise to design workshops that will prove meaningful to participants and clients. Often, though, this “why” is not entirely clear from the get-go. A skilled facilitator will use a range of communication skills such as probing questions, active listening, and appreciative inquiry to clarify intentions.

In most cases, it’s a matter of slowing the client down, and gently inquiring into their motivations. Run a mini-workshop with your client and transparently share what you are looking for. Time spent on this now will save time and resources by minimizing the risk of misunderstandings and re-writes later!

There are four key elements I check for when looking for desired outcomes with the client at this very early stage:

(1) Non-negotiables. These are the boundaries for your design, the things that are set and cannot be changed. This might be, for example, the duration of the workshop, the location, or the list of participants.

(2) Tangible outcomes (aka deliverables). What needs to be produced, concretely, by the end of the workshop? Is it an action plan? A set of decisions? A report? Try to get as many details as possible on this requirement.

If this point is not initially clear, invite your client to explore the future with their foresight and imagination: at the end of the workshop, what do they want to have that was not there before the start?

(3) Intangible outcomes. What intentions are connected to the workshop in the immaterial world of communications, connections and emotions? Mark down the keywords you hear your client use. Is it a matter of increasing networking opportunities and connections? Deepening trust? These “soft” outcomes can inspire and direct your choices of activities, setting and style.

(4) Levels of participation. If you are planning a workshop rather than a training event, I have found it very useful to introduce the concept of the ladder of participation to clients, early on in the design stage (here is a version relating to citizen engagement).

This involves probing how much power is allocated to participants into shaping future choices. Will proposals selected by participants in your workshop be adopted directly? Is this a consultation process someone else will turn into a decision later? Or, perhaps, the workshop is meant to inform and get buy-in on choices that have already been made?

All these scenarios are possible and valid, but it’s important to know which one your workshop falls into, so as to minimize the risk of disappointment or confusion.

Once you have collected this information, you probably have an idea of where you want your workshop to focus. All you need now is to figure out who is it for before drafting a concept note and initial agenda.

Defining the target audience

Once you have clarity about the desired outcomes, it’s time to focus on your hypothetical participants and your target audience. You may already have a list provided by the client, or it may be a completely open invitation. In any case, it’s a good idea to spend some time focussing, after the “why”, on the important question: “who?”

Things that can be useful to consider doing at this stage, depending on the specific situation, include:

• Creating a “persona” for the workshop. Who will benefit? What are their needs, pain points, interests? Why will they come? This work will initially be based on your assumptions only, but it could lead to an exchange of information with your client to learn more. Here is a canvas from MediaLAB Amsterdam that can help you create a persona for your event.

• Having interviews with potential participants that match your target audience to collect more information on their wants, needs and expectations. If you are able to contact participants before the workshop, aim to talk to a few. If key decision-makers will be in the room, it’s definitely a good idea to ask for a half-hour chat with them! 

Start by clarifying that you are talking to a few people in order to better prepare your workshop. Next, kick-start your exploration by asking them what their motivation for attending the workshop is. Listen carefully and take notes! It’s good practice to have a list of questions that will be the same for all your interviewees, but also let the conversation flow naturally. 

End the conversation by asking your interviewee whether they know of someone who should definitely be at the workshop, and add them to the list of potential invites!If time does not allow for 1:1 interviews, you can also consider sending your questions out via email.

Finally, check back in with the client to ensure they have considered who should be there and whether any important stakeholders or potential workshop participants are being overlooked. 

In my personal practice, I do hold a commitment to widening representation and will often reach out to my clients with questions, for example, on gender balance or including underrepresented groups. Can we get more women’s voices in a conversation about the future of logistics and mobility? (The answer turned out to be yes!). In this urban planning process, will someone be speaking with the interests of elderly citizens in mind? And what about the children’s?

At this stage, it’s also important to start making notes of any special needs. Does your persona include, for example, families with small children? Or people with mobility concerns? These considerations have a bearing on such key planning elements as your choice of venue, location, and timing. Successful workshops are those in which the needs of target attendees are considered and steps are taken to ensure participants can take part.

Drafting the initial concept 

Once you know the “why” and something around the “who” of a workshop, it’s time to start designing the “what”.

What is needed at first is some clarity as to the main points of the agenda, not a detailed run-through. The client will probably have more feedback once things start to look concrete, and it’s not particularly fun to have to revisit the entire thing and do work twice. That is why I have found it good practice to keep the agenda still quite open at this stage.

An initial concept draft for a successful workshop should contain:

• A summary of the desired outcomes;
• A list of benefits for participants (what are their pain points that this workshop will solve?);
• A list of learning/key objectives;
• A description of the main activities or building blocks of the workshop.

At this point, you’ll need to circle back to your client, share the draft with them and ask for feedback. In my experience, it’s a good idea to approach this step lightly, with curiosity, knowing you have done your homework but ready if necessary to change your entire concept around and pivot to something different. And if you still feel yourself having rigidity towards feedback, check out some useful feedback tips by learning expert Skye Suttie. 

Signing agreements

By the end of the vision phase, facilitators and clients should share a feeling of commitment and alignment. This is made visible and concrete through signing agreements, contracts and/or a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

What exactly these contain varies greatly depending on circumstances and location, but here is a useful summary, complete with template examples of what your MoU might look like, from Malia Josephine over at the startup Facilitation Jobs. 

Phase 2 – Design

So now you have a draft outline of the workshop and an idea of who will participate. The next section is all about the nitty-gritty details of planning. Think of any other event, such as a family gathering or a wedding: there are a lot of things to consider so that everything will be ready when attendees arrive in the space you have designed and set up for them. It can be a very creative phase, if a bit solitary at times for the workshop leader! 

In the design stage, we are aiming to answer the question: how will this happen? This includes choosing dates and venues, drafting an agenda, creating a communication plan so that your workshop attendees will get the invite and join, populating a participant list, and refining your draft agenda into a detailed script. 

Establishing time and place

A workshop begins to feel like it’s really going to happen once the date and location are decided upon.

Whether you are scouting for a location yourself or not, you still need to clarify and communicate a list of requirements clearly. Don’t give anything for granted! List any needs such as accessibility, type of space, and equipment such as tables or presentation equipment. No location is going to be perfect, but the clearer your request, the closer to ideal you might get. 

If you’re running a virtual workshop, you still need to put it in the calendar and arrange for a virtual space to hold it in, such as a Zoom account and a whiteboard space. And if it’s hybrid, you’ll need to do both: scout for a location (with great wifi and acoustics, here you can read more about why that’s important) and set up online resources as well. If you don’t know yet what kind of room setup you will need, take a look at our detailed guide here.

Once the location has been chosen and booked, make sure you have an understanding with the location manager of how your session will work and what they can expect.

Will you be using masking tape to hang posters on the wall? Is that ok? How early do you expect to be at the location, and who will be there to open the doors? Will you need breakout spaces for smaller groups to work in? Will participants be milling around using outside spaces, which, and when? What about wifi use, passwords, and other tech needs? 

Having a persona in mind might help establish a schedule. Is this a personal development workshop that people sign up for as individuals (that will probably mean running it in the evening or on weekends?) Or is it going on at the workplace? When are employees free to attend, and what will not clash with previous engagements? Will it be a one-off thing or a series? Successful workshops take all this into account to ensure workshop participants can actually be there!

If you are working on a series of meetings for participatory planning and would like to encourage a diverse attendance, it could be a good idea to switch times and dates around quite often, so that people with different jobs and schedules can fit at least one meeting in. And get a babysitting service, or have someone who works with youth set up a related workshop with the young ones.

Drafting the workshop agenda 

So now the word is out, and there is probably some time to wait before the workshop kick-off. This is the moment to sit down with yourself and work on the facilitation design. For many trainers and facilitators, this is a favorite part of the process.

Here is where we create a detailed schedule, choose activities and methods and assemble them into a coherent flow. You’ll seek to create a workflow flow that balances group discussions, experiential activities and different learning styles in order to meet your workshop’s purpose. Proper planning and a structured process is a proven way of turning a workshop idea into a reality.

Using a workshop planning tool like SessionLab can make the task much easier and save you time in your process.

A successful workshop is one with a clear structure that supports the learning process. With the Session Planner, you can easily drag and drop your content blocks to quickly build an effective flow.

I like to start by creating a skeleton of each item in the workshop agenda and then adding additional content once I feel confident in the flow.

SessionLab also ensures you stay in control of time while creating your workshop agenda. Add timing to each block to confidently plan for the time you have available. And when you make changes, SessionLab will automatically calculate your timing. It’s easy to iterate and plan the most effective workshop flow for your participants.

Need inspiration? Research and exploration into the methods library can help you find suitable activities for your session, as well as other online repositories of ideas such as this one by Untools. 

The actual process of creating a draft agenda is quite personal. You may be working on it completely alone (hopefully, with a hot or cold beverage of your choice, and plenty of time!) or with a co-facilitator.

Results from the State of Facilitation report indicate that facilitators like to work directly with online tools, such as SessionLab, others, me included, prefer to start with pen and paper… or by taking voice notes while taking a walk!

However you approach the matter, you are likely to do all of these things (and more!), while not necessarily in this order:

• Create a timeline, showing when your workshop starts, ends, and how long each section will last;
• Check your notes from meeting with the client, refer back to desired outcomes both tangible and intangible;
• Refer back to your interviews with participants, or any other information you may have collected from them, to pinpoint main needs and expectations;
• Brainstorm activities you believe will meet the client’s and the participants’ needs;
• Pick among those activities: which are “must-haves” and which are optional?
• Assess how much time each activity will take, and add a bit of buffer to account for the unexpected;
• Check that your activities are diverse enough to include people with different styles and approaches (e.g. by having both individual and group activities);
• Add essential opening and closing activities such as icebreakers and introductions at the beginning and feedback and drawing conclusions at the end
• Arrange them in a timeline;

And whatever you do, don’t forget to schedule some breaks! A successful workshop ensures that the workshop facilitator and all participants are able to participate and maintain their energy levels will learning new skills.

Refining the agenda

Once you have a solid agenda, it’s time once more to check in with the client. Run through the agenda together, checking that you share an understanding of what is going to happen, and making any needed tweaks and changes as you go. I always aim to share my reasoning with clients and share tidbits of facilitation along the way. 

If you’re using SessionLab, you can invite clients and stakeholders directly to your agenda so you discuss and co-create in real-time or asynchronously. Collaborating in one-place can really help ensure your workshop preparation is smooth and that your session will meet your goals.

Refining the agenda is the subject of the third client/facilitator meeting detailed in the template that goes with this piece. The first thing to do is restate the high-level purpose and objectives of the workshop, before going into a review of details. This process encourages clarity and alignment, as well as enabling the facilitator to check whether the proposed agenda is fit for purpose. 

This is also the stage in which, if I am facilitating a group discussions on a topic I am not familiar with, I’ll be doing research into that topic. Opinions about how knowledgeable, if at all, a facilitator should be about the topic under discussion vary greatly. Personally, my attention is on the dynamics of their conversation rather than on the content. Because of this, I don’t mind working with groups or companies who are talking about something I am not informed about. 

At the same time, I find it useful to have at least a beginner’s understanding of the discussion. To enable this, I will ask clients to send me some papers or links to study. Mainly, I will be looking for jargon and terminology: I want to have at least a sense of what people are talking about and what terms to use myself. I also try and get a sense of what in the field is clear, and what is contested or up for debate.

Research can lead to changes to the agenda: in a recent workshop I chaired, reading some documentation led me to assume that terminology being used in the field was still not well-defined. Different stakeholders were using different terms to indicate the same things, or the same term to indicate different things!

I checked in with the client to verify if this was indeed the case and we decided to add a section discussing terminology at the beginning of the workshop. We did not aim to settle the argument once and for all, but rather to share with participants the current state of the art in this particular industry and agree on what terms we would use for the duration of the workshop. 

This is also a great time to reconsider the implications of your setting. If you’re running a virtual workshop, how will you encourage participants to take part and explore ideas in such an environment?

Creating a communications plan 

Whether you are opening the workshop for participants to enroll or whether it’s the host preparing a list of attendees, it’s likely someone will be working to create a buzz around the event.

Often this is not handled by the facilitator directly but rather by a communication agency or office. That said, do your part by preparing material for dissemination and helping make sure the news reaches the right ears.

If you are not doing communication and enrollment yourself, avoid missteps (such as the advertising sending a message that is not aligned with your intention and design) by preparing such a brief well in advance.

A basic communication plan for your workshop should include:

• How will people find out about the workshop? Where will it be advertised? Are there networks, groups or individuals that should be reached out to? 
• What should people know about the workshop in advance? Create a one or two-sentence description of the workshop to go out in communication channels and invitations. What is the workshop’s unique value? How can you entice people to be excited to join?
• How will people enroll in the workshop? And how can they find out more? Who should they contact to register, is it you, or the client, or should you set up an automatic registration service (such as Eventbrite)? What information do you need to collect upon registration? Do participants need to sign authorizations (e.g. for audio-video use)? Will they get a confirmation email? Automatically or through you/the client?

Establishing who will be there 

Many hands make light work: now that you have your detail agenda or script set out, you should have a clear sense of whether other people are needed to make it work. Will you need a tech host? An assistant to help with the practicalities? A video-maker? Photographer? Visual practitioner?  If you need to assemble a team, it makes sense to onboard them once you know the agenda and tasks they will take on.

The other aspect of establishing who will be there is having a final (or “almost final”… there are usually last-minute surprises!) participant list. Registration can also be an interesting opportunity to collect information on your workshop attendees that might inspire some final details of the design.

When registering participants for a short (3-hour) leadership workshop for the international organization C40, besides asking for basic information such as names and emails, I added three optional questions concerning people’s motivation for joining, interesting initiatives they might like to share, and a blank space for “any other communications”.

This process was useful for me to start to get a sense of who was going to be in the room and adapt my choices and language to the audience. Furthermore, these questions can kick-start the workshop long before it begins by asking participants to start reflecting on a certain topic.

Phase 3 – Running the workshop!

As the moment of running a workshop draws closer, there are some tasks to do that are very practical, having to do with implementing what has, up to now, existed in words only.

This is the phase for getting things done: assembling materials, briefing your team and any speakers, taking care of your inner work and preparation and then, in a leap of faith…Trusting that all you’ve done is enough, finally doing away with plans, and going with the flow! 

Running workshops can be tough work, so in this section we’ve collected some tips for managing workshop attendees (and yourself) that should help running the workshop easier!

Assembling materials

Shopping time! The stationery shop is like a second home to most facilitators: it’s time to get your gear together and fill up boxes of sticky notes, posters, and marker pens. Now things are getting real! (And if you used SessionLab to plan your session, you’ll find a handy list of materials consolidated on the information page!)

As the date of the workshop approaches, make sure you have all the materials you need ready at hand. This might include your presentations, virtual whiteboards, or physical goodies. I have found myself roaming Rome at dawn to get photocopies of materials in a neighborhood with no such services. Not fun! 

I often wonder how important is it to give participants printed handouts. On the one hand, let’s admit it, such materials don’t often get read. Printing is a waste of energy and paper and my sustainable-minded self would rather avoid it. 

On the other hand, printed materials might be a useful reference a long time after the workshop is over, and many people like to have something physical to hold onto and take notes on. You can also consider the option of having digital-format handouts to send to everyone before or after the workshop. 

Briefing team and speakers 

A few days before the workshop, set a briefing call with the client, your team and, if applicable, speakers or other guests. I have sometimes avoided doing this for the sake of efficiency… and usually regretted it. Even though it seems like everything is clear and smooth, by talking a workshop through, even in a brief 30 min meeting, something might emerge that needs attention.

If you have external speakers joining, e.g. for a keynote or presentation, remember they have not dedicated the amount of time and attention to this event that you have! Brief them on the intention behind the workshop and on the participants in the room, and discuss what will happen before and after their speech. As your star guests, they should feel welcome and well prepared. This will improve alignment and the overall experience for participants.

When running a workshop with a team, it’s very important to know who will take care of what. Take the time to clearly define roles and responsibilities and add to the script the name of the people who will be, for example, presenting or tech hosting at a given time.

You might also have pre-workshop communication you want to send out to participants, perhaps to remind them of logistics or do some prep work. Always include a way to contact you (or someone from your team) if something happens at the last minute! 

Personal energy management

Once all the design and preparation are done, so much rests on the facilitator’s personal stance and attention. Here are some examples of things facilitators I know, or myself, do in terms of personal energy management:

• No work the day before and/or after an important event;
• Meditation and focussing activities;
• Spending time in nature, taking walks;
• Coaching session with trusted colleagues or a professional coach;
• Taking time to reflect on possible biases and on personal intentions. 

What do you do to prepare yourself before a workshop? Do you take time and space before the start to tend to your own needs? We’ve also been sharing this conversation in SessionLab’s community space: join us here. 

Going with the flow

Step by step, you have now reached this exceptional threshold. People have assembled in a physical or online space, which is equipped with all they need to learn and grow together. The workshop is about to begin! 

This is what all the preparation work was for: take a deep breath and delve into the agenda. Skilled facilitators know how to read the room, trust their instincts, and stick by the plan, or change it, depending on what is needed in the moment, here and now. 

Phase 4 – Learn

The workshop may be over but the work is not! Learning, celebrating and reflecting should take just as much of your time, energy and commitment as any one of the other phases. This is the step where we truly grow and become, with time and experience, wise and excellent facilitators!

In this learning phase, we aim to close a cycle mirroring how it was opened. This means continuing a dialogue with our client and making time to think back together. Such reflections are too often swept aside in the hustle of business cycles. Yet, the more space we can make for them, the better.

As we learn together, we consolidate trust and strengthen partnerships. Furthermore, reflecting and celebrating builds momentum for the next workshop cycle, which is often just around the corner! 

Reporting

Agreements taken with your client might include your contribution to drafting a final report. And even if they don’t, it’s still a great idea, for your own records, to take some time to look back and write up a summary of what happened. It will be invaluable in time, e.g. when two years down the line a client calls you back to know: “Could you do that workshop again?” “What made this a successful workshop and what would you change in any future workshops?”

A workshop report generally includes two main parts: one is about information, the other is focussed on learnings.

Report Part 1  – information on the workshop

The first is a collection of data about the workshop: when and where was the workshop held? How many people attended? What was the schedule? 

• Workshop concept 
• Agenda (you can use SessionLab to include a handy printout of the session agenda!)
• Data on attendees (e.g. how many people attended, and whatever data about them is relevant and can be shared)
• Pictures from the event

Report Part 2 – learnings from the workshop

The second part of the workshop report is more subjective. This is the place in which to include reflections on how it went, a summary of key conversations and discussions, recommendations, notes on methodology

• Reflections on the methodologies chosen
• Facilitator’s notes and observations
• Feedback received
• Key recommendations or decisions taken. 

Following-up

Presenting a report, and opening it for final revisions, is a great excuse to set up that precious follow-up meeting with your client. 

Reserve a chunk of time to look back at your work together and reflect: what went well? What would you change next time? This is a time for constructive feedback, expressing appreciation, and really taking care of the relationship. You can find some inspiration on what to include in such a meeting in the last part of our Planning a Workshop template. 

Besides following up with your client, you also may have some follow-up actions to take towards participants. Here are some ideas of what that may include:

• Sending certificates of attendance with the number of hours spent at the workshop and the main topics covered;
• Sending lists of extra materials, bibliographies, and resources;
• Collecting feedback through a questionnaire;
• Inviting people to subscribe to your mailing list, follow you on social media, or in any case providing ways for them to stay in touch. 

And of course, if you haven’t done it yet, it’s also time to do that bit of life admin and send an invoice! 

Collecting learnings

The follow-up and reporting steps are mostly outward-facing, that is, you are writing for others. While you do that, probably some ideas and learnings will emerge that are about your work and practice. A collection of personal learnings can be the outcome of your own reflection or, if you are part of a community of practice or professional development program, of time spent debriefing the workshop with your peers, coach, or mentor.

I don’t always have as much time as I would like to properly debrief and collect learnings. At the very least, I take 15 minutes to think through this quick “Regret, Celebrate, Learn” process I learned from the Mediate your Life program. To do that, I quickly jot down some notes or a mental map in response to the following three questions:

• Regret – what happened at the workshop that I regret, am worried or sad about? How did I feel about that? Do I know why I did it (what needs was I trying to satisfy?) 
• Celebrate – what happened at the workshop that I really celebrate and am glad about? How did that feel? What needs of mine were met? 
• Learn – with those things in mind, are there any learning points I want to draw and remember? 

I might, for example, regret answering a participant’s question rather brusquely, and realize I did that because I was feeling rushed for time. At the same time, I might celebrate that I did take that person aside to check in with them during the break. This may lead me to remind myself to invite people who have off-topic questions to “park” them on a poster to answer at a later time. 

You may want to add some notes next to certain tools or methodologies you used: most workshops present an opportunity to do something slightly different next time. If you are using SessionLab, you can add these to a certain activity’s card, so you’ll find them waiting for you next time you pick the same method from your personal library. 

Celebrating

Celebrating can mean different things to different people. If I am traveling to/from the workshop, I consider that time spent on the train on my way back, taking notes on my diary, part of celebration. 

Plenty of other actions might help you feel like the circle is closed: taking a relaxing break, going out for dinner with your team members, buying yourself a little gift… whatever helps you keep your energy level high and integrate the experience into the flow of your life.

Processing your reflections and giving them some time to settle is likely to lead straight to the next great idea. How about we took this learning from this workshop and did that with it? Time to start taking notes, because these thoughts are the sign that a new cycle of ideation is about to begin! 

Processing your reflections and giving them some time to settle is likely to lead straight to the next great idea.

In closing 

When I asked our in-house designer to come up with the illustration on the top of this article, it felt very appropriate to summarize the complicated process of designing a workshop into a single, perfect circle.

Now that it’s done, I realize it’s really not a circle at all, because once all the work is complete nobody, neither client nor facilitator nor participants, is in the same place they began from. The process of designing a workshop is actually like a spiral, that widens and opens each time we go around.

By the end of all these steps, everyone will have changed in some way. Relationships will have formed, new ideas defined, and lessons learned.

At the start of the spiral, there is only an idea, which becomes a design as it is shared, consolidated and refined. The facilitator’s job is to turn it into an agenda, and go through all these steps, alone or with a team, to make it happen.

By learning from all that took place, the flow will, in time, become more natural, fluid, almost second nature. My hope in setting it down in this piece is that it will help you along the journey.

Want to see an entire workshop journey in action and get help in putting together a water-tight agenda? Explore our workshop planning template to go through a proven agenda design process that will help you dazzle potential attendees.

Does this process describe how you have been designing your workshops? Did it give you new ideas? Leave a note in the comments, and join the discussion in our Community!

In a business, this approach is often employed in a training session where employees learn new skills or work on professional development. But how do you ensure your training is effective? In this guide, we’ll explore how to create an effective training session plan and run engaging training sessions.

As team leader, project manager, or consultant, you may often be asked to put on the trainer’s hat and upskill a team in some new concept or process. 

In practice, designing a training session includes setting intentions and understanding what the practical application of learning will be in the daily lives of the people you are training.

I’ve often had the luxury of being the facilitator for training sessions, supporting the group’s learning journey while expert content providers provided specialized information on key topics.

In this article, I’ve put together some lessons I’ve picked up along the way about designing great learning experiences: tips, tricks, and workflows that will help you create unforgettable training session plans, whatever your topic.

We will be looking into:

The first thing you need to do when designing a new training course is draft a general outline of your training session plan. This should include your objectives, an agenda of activities and timings, a task list, and a list of resources. Let’s see, in more detail, what all of that entails. 

What is a Training Session Plan?

A training session plan is a structured and organized document that outlines the framework and details of a training program or session. It’s a roadmap for trainers and facilitators, helping them design and deliver effective learning experiences. A well-crafted training session plan ensures that learning objectives are met, participants are engaged, and the training session is both informative and interactive.

Key components of a successful training session plan typically include:

• Objectives: Clearly defined learning goals that specify what participants should know or be able to do by the end of the training session.
• Agenda: A detailed schedule of activities, topics, and the timing of each segment within the session. Depending on your style, you might even include a script. If collaborating with other trainers, it can also be useful to delineate who is running which section and who is supporting (see our co-facilitation guide for more advice on this).
• Materials: Any training material, resources, and tools required for the session, such as presentations, handouts, workbooks, or multimedia aids. In virtual sessions, this can also include links to resources you may share during the training. These are great to add to your agenda so everything you need is in one place. 
• Follow-up: Plans for gathering feedback from participants and assessing the overall success of the training session. This might include choosing a survey tool, having a paper exit form, or having an activity planned to facilitate this. 

A training session plan is a valuable tool for trainers, educators, and anyone responsible for imparting knowledge or skills to others. It provides structure and coherence to the training process, helping to achieve specific learning outcomes and create a positive and impactful learning experience.

In SessionLab, you can build your training session plan in minutes by dragging and dropping your training content into place. Add instruction, materials, and clear timing to complete your agenda and refine the ideal learning experience. 

When it comes to delivering your training sessions, you can export a customized PDF to share with your participants and co-trainers. Holding your training session online? Share an online training agenda so your learners can see what’s coming and follow along too! 

Creating Effective Training Sessions in 8 Steps

Having a clear, visually attractive session plan is key to getting clients and stakeholders on board. What began as a mere idea is now turned into a detailed plan.

Having it all mapped out allows you to clearly communicate your intentions, show how you will reach your client or team’s objectives, collect feedback and make decisions about any changes. 

When I’m creating a training plan, the first thing I do is write out the training objective. I’ll then jot down a few ideas of activities I’d like to run.

Next, I’ll open a new agenda (or an old one, if I am modifying an existing template) and set start and end times, so I’m clear about how much time I actually will have with my participants.

While every trainer has their own style and approach to creating a lesson outline, the process of planning a training session can be broken down into 8 simple steps:

Step 1: Set Learning Objectives

Before a training course begins, it probably is just a vague need in the mind of a team leader or client. To turn it into reality, the first thing to do is clarify what exactly that need is. What new skills need to be shared? Is it about sharing information, or learning to do something practical?

This sort of question can lead you (and your team) to define the learning objectives for the training course.

Learning objectives are typically two or three short sentences that describe the condition participants should have reached by the end of the training. It’s common to state these in the present tense. Typical examples sound something like this:

• [At the end of the training] participants are able to articulate and explain the difference between concepts A, B and C;
• And/or are able to apply process D in real-world situations.

To further refine and clarify these objectives you may need to set up interviews with relevant parties, and even, if possible, with prospective participants. 

It’s worth spending some time refining each learning objective. These short sentences can help guide all the choices to come. If you’re following Gagne’s instructional design principles, you’ll know all about how often you’ll refer back to your learning objectives.

If at a later point in the design process, you find yourself undecided among different possible activities, going back to the learning objective will help you make choices in such a way that prioritizes keeping the design coherent. 

Step 2: Use a Framework

When it comes to workshops designed to support learning, the best-known framework to support design is probably Kolb’s learning cycle. Originally outlined in 1984, this model of Experiential Learning describes four stages that support practical, hands-on education. 

Kolb’s learning cycle is widely used in training design, especially when it comes to working with adult learners. Simply go through it step-by-step and include activities for each of the four parts of this cycle.

• Concrete experience, with room for practical, experiential activities;
• Reflective observation: a time to debrief, form opinions on what the exercise revealed, and discuss them with others;
• Abstract conceptualization, when it’s up to the trainer to offer models, theories and frameworks conducive to deeper understanding and, lastly
• Active experimentation, in which participants are guided to begin applying new learnings to real-world situations, for example with a role play or simulation.

You can see a general example of how these activities come together in a workshop in this ready-made template for a training session.

Using SessionLab, open this Essential Training Session template and simply drag-and-drop your additional content onto it, radically speeding up your design process! 

While I definitely recommend basing your training plan designs on Kolb’s learning cycle, it is not the only framework out there. When working on environmental topics, I often rely on Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects “Spiral”, which includes four steps going from Starting with Gratitude to Taking Action. 

For short sessions, even something as simple as “Why/How/What” can help create clarity. Start with an activity to discuss why a new tool or process is needed (Why), include a presentation to illustrate the new process (How) and wrap it up with a practical use case (What).

Whatever your preferred framework, the takeaway of this section should be that basing your training upon a general structure is the antidote to chaotic, unfocussed training experiences. Using such a high-level framework will help you keep it coherent and ensure a smooth learning experience for your participants. 

Step 3: Create an Opening Section

Adult education principles stress the importance of preparing trainees for learning. Before we can open up to new learning, we need to feel safe in our environment, have a sense of who the other people in the room are, and understand what is expected of us as well as the practical purpose of the session. Those are quite a lot of boxes to tick in what is generally a rather short opening slot!

The best trainers out there are skilled in participatory education and have a lot in common with facilitators (for more on the commonalities between teachers and facilitators, you can check out our article on what teachers can learn from facilitation practices). Good trainers and good facilitators, generally speaking, will take a solid chunk of time, let’s say the first 30 or 45 minutes of a session, for introductory activities that help set the stage. 

Far from being a waste of time, these opening sections serve several purposes. Practical information such as going through the agenda or describing certain features of the location (such as where to find drinks, for example) are helpful in that they allow attendees to familiarise themselves with the situation and relax.

Rounds of introductions or getting-to-know-you activities are particularly important. In the words of George Lakey, author of my go-to book for training tips, Facilitating Group Learning, ‘“Who am I in this group?” is the participant’s preoccupying question as any learning group convenes, and there’s limited capacity for learning anything else until this question is answered’. 

As you prepare your training plan, consider what activities you will run at the opening, including making space to describe the general aims for the day and giving time for attendees to reflect on their intentions. Use an agenda planner to easily add important information and structure your session.

Even before the opening section, there are things you can do to start introducing the key topics of your training to your learners, such as sending a welcome email. Make pre-course communications engaging and interactive, for example through a quick questionnaire or a video, to increase the likelihood of participants actually reading it!

Top tip: add a “before the course” section to your agenda plan to include a checklist of actions that need to be taken before the training begins. 

Step 4: Structure the Agenda

Now that you know the general learning objectives and have a framework set up, as well as an opening section, the next thing to do is go through the agenda and add activities for each section of your framework.

If you are using Kolb’s learning cycle, for example, different types of activities naturally lend themselves to being used for each step. Start with a practical exercise, thereby providing “concrete experience”, then move on to structured dialogue, such as a 1-2-4-all or World Café activity, to stimulate reflective observation.

The third step, abstract conceptualization, is the right time for you as trainer to step in front of the group, highlight the most important points mentioned, and provide mental models, frameworks, and information. Finally, case studies and simulations are great ways to include active experimentation in a training setting. 

In my experience with training, less is certainly more. Just a few days ago, I was asked to demonstrate a range of different activities on conflict resolution during a train-the-trainer workshop. Participants had been given a study manual that included three exercises, and my client was keen for them to experience them all.

I argued that, in the limited time available, it was more important to thoroughly debrief activities, answer questions, and for participants to try out giving instructions themselves. In the end, we only ran one single activity, but I am confident that all attendees went home with the ability to lead that exercise. This is much better, in my view, than having experienced a bunch of different “games” with not much clarity about how to use them. 

In many cases, training sessions are set up so that participants can learn how to do something on their own. The most common complaint about workplace trainings is that it was not relevant to participants’ real lives. Your job as a top trainer is to make sure your sessions are relevant. Having less activities but including a lot of space for debrief, discussion, practical applications and trying processes and tools out directly are the keys to success. 

Having participants apply new tools directly, in the safe space that training provides, is the best way to ensure they retain what you are teaching. When I train students to lead workshops, I generally dedicate the last half of the session to asking learners, divided into groups, to create and guide activities for the other participants. Afterwards, they give each other feedback, and try again! 

Let’s look back at the two examples of generic learning objectives we used earlier in the piece. By the end of the training participants should, we said “Be able to articulate and explain the difference between concepts A, B and C” and “to apply process D in real-world situations”.

Having time and space during the training to try to “articulate and explain concepts A, B and C” to their peers, as well as to try out “process D” are essential to achieving those goals. Testing and trying new tools (versus just sitting and hearing about them) is more likely to guarantee they are remembered and put to use.

Despite how obvious this sounds, opportunities for participants to take center stage and put their new competencies to the test are still all too rare in training programs.

Step 5: Include Multiple Learning Styles

As trainers and facilitators, we naturally have a general tendency to develop sessions that are ideal for people who think like us. As someone who loves words, and learns through sharing with others, I tend to fill my plans with dialogue sessions in small groups, huddled around a central question, with a poster and pens to keep notes. 

That’s great, but what about the people in the room who retain key ideas when they are shared visually? And how about those who learn better through individual reflection? When creating an agenda for your training session, make sure you’ve given thought to different learning styles and made some space for everyone. 

An excellent training session will combine ample time for individual reflection, discussion with others, and practical applications. It should include creative spaces such as using visual thinking, art, or building blocks, as well as music. Whenever possible, enable participants to choose their own pathway, for example by offering different ways of interacting with the material (with a discussion, by turning it into a poster, and so on) at various tables. 

Different preferences and tendencies in terms of learning styles are only one of the many ways diversity will show up in your participant groups. As you define activities, remember to keep in mind how accessible they will be to your attendees. You may have this information in advance (is anyone challenged in terms of mobility? Sight?) or you may discover this only during the training itself. 

Just a couple of months ago I was chatting with a participant a few minutes before the training when he told me of a hearing impairment and kindly explained what I should do to make myself heard. My mind raced forward to a moment in the workshop when I had planned to ask everyone to pair up and discuss a question. In the small room we had, twelve people talking at the same time would surely be overwhelming for him! 

Luckily, we had outdoor space available, so I asked trainees to spread out in space and take advantage of the sunny day. This reduced the level of noise drastically, making it easier for everyone to hear one another. 

Unless you are working with an established team, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll know everyone’s needs in advance or notice them during the workshop! I like to improvise, but if you are just starting out as a trainer or know that you like to stick to the plan, make sure you have considered accessibility needs and have activities planned that will work for everyone.

Consider the “cut-curb effect”: an activity accessible for people with disabilities will also be accessible to everyone else. The term refers to how a slide cut into a sidewalk to facilitate access to wheelchairs will also make life easier for families with strollers, or someone with a heavy trolley coming in from the train station.

Similarly, asking my group to spread farther out so it would be easier to hear one another in pairs made the experience more pleasant for everyone, not only the gentleman with a hearing impairment! 

Lastly, as you go through your agenda take some time to ponder: how could I include some elements of novelty and wonder in the space? Bringing colorful items, games, music and posters are all ways of adding creativity, and an element of surprise. 

The most common way for facilitative trainers to bring innovation to a learning space is to start by changing the seating arrangement. As a participant told me recently in feedback: “I came to the event assuming we would sit and listen, but then I saw the small clusters of chairs around those little coffee tables I went ‘oh-oh’, we are actually going to have to do something here!” 

Consider how the seating arrangement and light levels will influence your learning space. To learn more about how seating influences learning and interaction, you can delve into our dedicated guide to room setups.

Step 6: Pay Attention to Closing and Follow-up

As you enrich your agenda with ideas and details, you’ll probably start wondering about how to make it all fit in the allocated time. Rather than shave off a few minutes here and there or, worse, remove breaks, opening or closing sections (more on those later), go back to the original learning objectives, and get rid of whole activities. Remember: less is more! 

As you iterate and change your plan, SessionLab’s agenda planner will come to your rescue by automatically adjusting the time of each slot based on your changes. I usually start my designs by locking the start and end times, as well as the time of any lunch breaks.

While I don’t mind going off schedule during activities if something takes more or less time, I am really keen to make sure the kitchen and catering staff get to do their job as we’ve planned. More importantly, I hold ending times sacred. 

To make sure we end on time and don’t have to hurry through closing activities, I generally reserve a 30-minute slot at the end of the day for closing and feedback. 

For a training session to end successfully, at least three things are needed:

• Clarity about the next steps, whether these are personal action plans, dates of future lessons, or information of the “you’ll be getting a certificate of attendance in your inbox on Monday” kind;
• A closing moment or small ritual, designed to create a memorable connection and a sense of completion. This can be as simple as asking participants to unmute their microphones if you are working online, and saying “goodbye” in their native tongues. I like to close by referring back to whatever activity we started with. If we opened with introductions in a circle, for example, I’ll invite to close the day with a few words from each participant (but standing up, to make it quicker!);
• Time for participants to give feedback back to you, the trainer. I recommend this be done in at least a couple of ways so that people have the option to give you their opinions both publicly and privately, both personally and anonymously. It’s really lovely to hear a big circle of “thank you” at the end of an intense training, but I also deeply value the critical feedback that often only emerges in written form. You can enable this, for example, with posters by the door on which participants are asked to leave a comment before leaving, or in a questionnaire sent soon after the training ends.

With regular evaluation and feedback built into your training plans, you create a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. Your future trainings will get better and more impactful based on the input from participants. Your team benefits from increasingly targeted, relevant, and engaging learning experiences.

Be sure to also find time for some self-assessment, which is essential for your own professional development. Take notes during your session where possible (your agenda is a great place for this) and find space to consider what went well and what could have gone better.

When it comes to running your training sessions again, duplicate your SessionLab agenda and make adjustments with these learnings in mind. Not only will you have saved time designing an effective training session plan, but you’ll also have improved the quality of your training methods!

Step 7: Prepare Training Materials

With your session structure in place, it’s time to build out any presentations, workbooks, exercises, or other training materials you may need. Keep the following tips in mind:

• Focus on visuals: Use photos, graphics, charts, and diagrams to bring your content to life. Visual aids are engaging and can help reinforce learning though be sure to keep it relevant to your learning experience and your audience. GIFs and memes can be great, but are they right for your learners? As with any aspect of your training, be sure to balance and vary such elements where possible. 
• Keep text minimal: On presentations and handouts, use bullet points and headlines rather than long paragraphs. Your verbal explanation and activities are more important than written text. I find it useful to think of the text in a visual presentation as a prompt for me and an anchoring point for learners, rather than a copy of my script. 
• Use real-world examples: Share stories, case studies, and scenarios from relevant work experiences or environments. These make concepts more concrete and easier to apply. Where possible, include further reading or research opportunities for learners to explore after the session is done. 
• Use video as necessary: video content can be a wonderful way to enrich your training materials. Bringing in an outside voice or expert can be transformative, and it also gives you as a trainer a chance to take a breath and adjust if needed. 
• Borrow, reuse and reference: no single person is an island. Find existing resources, references and materials and reuse or adapt them if permission is available. Creating a training program can be an enormous undertaking, and it’s okay to stand on the shoulders of training giants who came before you. Just remember to reference and give credit!  
• Provide workbooks or worksheets: For more complex topics, give participants resources they can refer to again after the session. Workbooks with examples, diagrams, checklists, and room for note-taking are helpful for continued learning.
• Use an interactive presentation approach: Don’t just read through slides. Discuss key points, give examples, ask questions, share stories, and prompt participants to add input in their own words. Your energy and engagement will fuel the learning experience.
• Practice and prepare: Know your content inside and out. Practice your presentation and run through any activities or discussions to ensure a smooth facilitation experience. It can be easy to throw off your rhythm if you present a slide you are unfamiliar with! 

With compelling and interactive materials, your training session will be both impactful in the moment and valuable as an ongoing resource for your team.

Well-designed workbooks, presentations, exercises, and discussions can continue to support learning long after the session has ended, contributing to real change and improved performance. Check out our guide if you need help designing engaging visual presentations. 

Step 8: Share Your Plan

Once you have a draft plan for your training session, it’s time to share it with colleagues and clients, and start collecting feedback. In my experience, when designing trainings on behalf of a client, they will definitely want to see a high-level overview of my plan as early as possible. Discussing concrete details of the plan is often the point where intentions and needs are really clarified.

For example, I recently led a 1-day teacher training session that included some tricky logistics: reaching, and coming back from, the coffee break area took more than 10 minutes each way! At first, it seemed like my clients found this detail irrelevant: it was only when looking at the actual plan for the day that they realized what this entailed. Seeing the timing laid out eventually led to changing the location of the morning coffee break, and using the walk in the afternoon for a paired walk exercise.

As facilitator and trainer, it’s your job to go through the agenda in your mind and imagine how things will work in practice, and communicate this to clients, colleagues and other stakeholders (such as staff in charge of logistics). The SessionLab planner can be a great support at this stage of planning a training course, thanks to visualization features that allow you to share different views of your agenda with different people. 

You can have a general overview to share with participants, for example in a welcome email, as well as a more detailed schedule including materials and practical notes for your clients, and a fully fleshed out plan, with your notes and a script, to keep for yourself. All these can be printed, exported, or shown online, including by sharing a QR code. 

Conclusion: Deliver an Unforgettable Training Session

With careful planning and preparation, you can facilitate a training session that motivates your team, expands their knowledge and skills, and drives real performance improvement.

By following the 8 steps in this guide, you will assess your team’s true needs, establish clear objectives, apply effective adult learning principles, develop valuable interactive content, and build in mechanisms for continuous improvement. Your confidence in your abilities and passion for the topics will shine through as you deliver an engaging learning experience for your participants.

While training sessions require effort and time to plan, the rewards of an empowered, high-performing team make it worth the investment. You help individuals progress in their careers and strengthen your organization by developing talent from within.

Use these strategies to plan future sessions and deliver an unforgettable experience that creates a lasting impact. With practice, you will be facilitating transformational learning opportunities and inspiring your employees to reach their full potential.

What next?

This article focuses on getting your training agenda ready. If you want to continue learning about the other steps required to deliver great workshop experiences, here is our full guide to planning a workshop. 

Ready to plan your training session? Start from an existing basic template for a training session based on Kolb’s learning cycle and add your own favorite activities! 

Many of the theories and tips referenced in this article sit at the border between facilitation and teaching. To learn more about the commonalities and differences of the two professions, and how we can learn from each other, check out our piece on Teachers as Facilitators. 

Designing a training course with live and async elements? Explore our blended learning course template to see how you might structure such a course and collaborate with your team and subject matter experts in one place.

Workshops are dedicated spaces for interaction and learning. They are generally very hands-on, including activities such as simulations or games designed to practice specific skills.

Leading workshops is an exciting, rewarding experience! In this piece we will go through some of the essential elements of workshop facilitation:

What are workshops?

Workshops are a time set aside for a group of people to learn new skills, come up with the best ideas, and solve problems together. In this article, we have defined workshops as “structured and interactive sessions designed […] to guide a group through a process”. A workshop differs from a meeting, training, or conference. Workshops are typically very interactive and participatory.

If someone is standing in front of the classroom delivering presentations most of the time, that’s not a workshop: it’s a training class or a lecture. As a general guideline, in a good workshop 80% of the time should be spent by workshop participants in tasks, activities and discussions. The remaining 20% should be occupied by the facilitator presenting and talking.  

But if the facilitator is mostly not talking during a workshop, what does a workshop facilitator do?

What does a workshop facilitator do?

A workshop facilitator is a guide to a bespoke experience. Like tour guides in rugged territory, they will scout and map the route in advance. Eventually, they will lead workshop participants through it in a planned, pre-designed way. They will know where they are going, yet remain open to change the route based on what happens on the day.

There are two parts to the workshop facilitator’s work:

• Choosing a route. Most of the work actually happens long before the event date, in setting up an agenda, picking activities, and organizing the day. 
• Leading the group. A workshop facilitator will skillfully navigate the territory, giving clear instructions for activities, keeping track of the time, and offering activities that encourage participants to define follow-up actions. 

Facilitating workshops requires the same skillset as facilitation in general, including listening and communication skills and familiarity with a range of facilitation techniques.

There are a few things that distinguish the practice of workshop facilitation from facilitating a meeting or a team retreat. Let’s see what a workshop facilitator needs to know.

Everything you should know about workshop facilitation

The very first thing you should know about workshop facilitation is that it is an intense, rewarding process! One of the things I love about facilitating is how I get to meet all sorts of different teams and projects. Because of the one-off nature of workshop facilitation, you might get to facilitate an ideation session one day and a project kick-off the next. This can be thrilling!

Being a beginner at the game might be daunting for the very same reason. Remember that you are there to facilitate, not to be a content expert (to learn more about your role as facilitator, you can read this article on the topic). 

You should definitely have an agenda planned, but it is also ok to turn to the group for ideas of topics to discuss, and to ask them questions (in facilitator jargon, “throwing it back to the group”). And if you are just starting off, you might want to begin by delivering sessions that have been designed by someone else, in tried-and-tested formats such as the design sprint. 

Knowledge comes with experience. Veteran workshop facilitators get comfortable with flexibility and variation, and have a large toolkit of frameworks, activities, methods and faciltiation techniques they can mix an match.  

Whether you are asked to design a workshop for a client, or decide to create one yourself, the main thing you need to keep in mind is that a workshop is a self-contained experience. It usually begins and ends on the same day or, if it is a workshop series, after a few days. The self-contained nature of workshops conditions the whole approach to designing and leading them. Let’s see how!

How to start a workshop

Whether lasting a couple of hours or a couple of days, a workshop has a clear beginning and end. This simple fact has a few important consequences. First of all, as workshop facilitator, you will need to cover a lot of ground in relatively little time. This is not like accompanying a team throughout its development.

In that scenario, you might work for an entire day at the start of your professional relationship to gain confidence, establish norms, and get to know one another. As a workshop facilitator, you will still need to establish trust and define how to best work together, but you’ll have very little time to do it.

Ground rules are a good example. When I meet a group of new students in my group dynamics course, we generally spend about an hour creating and discussing our own set of agreements. It’s worth spending time on this task since it will shape our rapport for months of classes to come. But if I have a 3-hour workshop, I’ll propose a ready-made basic set of group agreements instead. 

Rather than co-creating agreements with the group, I’ll present some general guidelines (such as “keep your phones silenced” and “respect confidentiality”) and give participants 5-10 minutes to check whether they want to make additions or important changes. If the proposed set of agreements is good enough for now, safe enough to try, I ask the group to just go with it, since they will shape our behavior for a very limited stretch of time.

To quickly establish your credentials and build trust, it’s a good idea to have a few sentences prepared in which you share something about yourself. Participants will be curious about who you are, what you do, and how it is exactly that this stranger now has the authority to tell them what to do for a few hours. 

Every facilitator has their own style and way of establishing trust. It might be telling a story of success, to raise the day’s ambition, or a story of failure, to model openness and enable taboo topics to be spoken. 

There is no need to tell participants your entire life story, but you should have a plan of what you will share. What could you say to maximize the possibility of creating a connection with participants?

I often am asked to give workshops to international students in a peacebuilding program. In this context, I usually introduce myself by sharing my mixed heritage and adding something about how it has enabled me to see the perspective of both privileged and oppressed groups. This little spiel helps participants place me, quickly establishes my ethos in terms of giving voice to unspoken power dynamics, and generally leads to good conversations in the breaks.

In a 15-20 minutes opening part, you should have enough time to 

• go through a presentation of yourself and the workshop,
• introduce group agreements and 
• have a check-in activity.

If the group is large, there will not be time for whole-group plenary presentations. Find alternative ways for workshop participants to check-in, such as using a chat (in online workshops), introducing themselves to two or three people they do not know, or having activities such as group mapping. 

In workshops, you will not have the luxury of a lot of time. Maximise opportunities: if you want to have a check-in and would like for participants to have a moment to reflect on their intentions for the day, for example, you can ask them to share their intentions and expectations as part of a check-in round.

Be mindful of attention spans

Attention will be at its highest in the first couple of hours of the workshop. Treat it as the precious thing it is and think carefully about which activities need the most brainpower, so you can place them in the appropriate slot of the agenda.

Energizers, breaks, and, more in general, a well-designed schedule will help you keep attention levels high, but you cannot realistically expect participants to be on top of their game 100% of the time. Workshopping experts at AJ&Smart put it very well: “Treat energy like it is a delicate, finite resource”. 

An effective facilitator surfs on the physiological, natural ups and downs of human attention, rather than getting annoyed at the waves for being there!

Expecting participants to tackle a complex task or be fully present as you introduce theoretical frameworks just after lunch, for example, is setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, place a relaxing activity during the after-lunch slump, such as watching a video or having a paired walk. 

You’ll need to manage your own attention span as well, of course. Peer-to-peer facilitator spaces are full of advice on self-care and how to keep your own precious energy up while you facilitate a workshop. Working with a trusted co-facilitator is arguably the best way to make sure someone is always available to focus on the participants. 

Engaging workshop participants is key

Being actively immersed in activities is the very essence of the participant experience of a workshop. As a workshop participant, rather than being told what to do or think about, I should be finding solutions myself, discussing with other participants, and discovering my own way through challenges and activities.

The choice of activities for a workshop’s agenda is therefore founded upon the participatory nature of the experience. Everyone should have ample opportunity to interact with materials directly, express their ideas and opinions and work on tasks, either alone or collaboratively. Paired and small-group activities are typically ways to enable participants to work together; smaller numbers allow more space for interaction. 

Of course, for many people it is more comfortable to sit and listen to someone else talk: it requires less effort, and it’s what we have mostly been exposed to in educational settings. The facilitator’s job is to break this pattern!

To avoid encountering resistance to participation, make sure you set expectations as early as possible. Inform participants of what will be expected from them in pre-workshop communication and emails. In invites to online workshops I will for example ask clients to add a note of this kind “This will be a hands-on, participatory event. If you can, please join with webcam on and from a space that allows you to talk and interact.” 

At the start of an in-person event, I generally begin with an activity, such as a check-in or short icebreaker, to set the stage and show, from the get-go, that this will be the tone for the day. Personally, I also do not like to pressure people into participating, so I will add to the ground rules something to the effect that every activity is an invitation, and it is always ok to step out. 

You never know what people may be uncomfortable with; rather than remove all activities that imply some measure of physical contact, for example, I prefer to tell participants that if they do not want to take part in an activity that is always ok, in which case they should take an observer role and feedback to the group later, in the debrief section, anything they noticed. 

The purpose must be clear

One of the few things worth getting in front of the group and talking about, is the purpose of the workshop and its activities. Don’t take it for granted that people have been paying attention to the pre-workshop communications (particularly if this is happening in an office and it’s been put on their calendar for them).

Adult learners need to have clarity about why they are being asked to do things (more than children, who might just jump into a role play with glee). Don’t be afraid to reiterate the rationale behind the whole workshop. 

Before each activity, explain why you’ve chosen it. Even if things go wrong, the group is more likely to be understanding and forgiving of a guide who has explained why certain choices were made, rather than of someone who just jumps into an activity without sharing why.

Having a clear purpose is also the best possible guideline for choosing what methods, tools, and techniques to use. Writing a one-sentence description of the workshop’s purpose is a good way to start designing. If your purpose is “to reawaken creative thinking and playfulness in the team” you have solid, incontestable reasons for pulling out art supplies! 

In SessionLab’s template collection, you can find a lot of inspiration on how professional workshop facilitators select activities that match the workshop’s stated purpose. 

You may never see these people again

Another thing that makes facilitating workshops different from, say, facilitating meetings, is that it is quite common for the facilitator to never meet the group again. Even if you continue working with the same company,  this might be a dedicated workshop on a certain topic, in which members of different teams participate. Next time you see some of these people, it will be in a different constellation.

A consequence of this fact is that the success of the workshop depends on whether group members take ownership of workshop outcomes and results. They should not automatically expect to rely on the facilitator for follow-up tasks and next steps. 

A few days ago I was asked to lead a workshop on sustainability for a small cooperative. We worked together on discussing and defining simple habits they could change to make their workplace more sustainable: what did they want to do to save energy, use less bottled water, make changes to their office supply management, and so on? 

Because this was a workshop, I am not expecting to see this group again for a long time, if ever. It was therefore important to establish early in the process that they were creating actions that they themselves should follow up on. “Who will take this poster with ideas and turn it into meeting notes?”

A good workshop facilitator will know that it might be necessary to discuss with the client such questions as “What do you plan to do with the output of the citizen groups’ work? How will you ensure continuity? Will there be resources allocated to participants to turn their ideas into reality?” 

A successful workshop is practical and action-oriented

If you’ve ever gotten (or given) eye-rolls upon hearing the word “workshop”, it probably has to do with a belief that these experiences are useless, and disconnected from reality. At best, they might represent lovely parentheses where communication flows and everyone is upbeat and nice, at worse boring (Activities that teach us to do things we already know how to do!) or cringy (Forced fun!). Workshops are perceived by many as not useful or productive in relation to what happens in the office, team or local community starting from the very next day.

It is really important for workshop facilitators to avoid this pitfall. Here are a few things to keep in mind in order to design and deliver workshops that turn eye-rolls into enthusiasm!

Negotiate carefully with the client

Ask questions that help you get clarity about the actual needs of this group. A workshop is often the best way to accelerate a team’s next step, and there is no way you, as an external consultant, can know where the group is at the moment. Guide your client with open questions and an appreciative gaze to deeply understand what will work for this specific group. At this link you can find a series of four one-hour templates dedicated to designing workshops with client input. 

Collect information on the group

Learn as much as you can about the group you will soon meet. Sometimes you might have the luxury of some 1:1 interviews. An exploration of the company’s social profiles and blogs is not out of the question nor is asking–with due care for confidentiality–colleagues who have worked with the same people in the past.Knowing a bit more about the people you will soon meet can help you design and lead better experiences for them. Are there special needs you should be taking into account? You might learn of working styles and even inside jokes you can weave into your discourse. What is the group likely to be comfortable, and uncomfortable, with?

Different teams have different learning styles and approaches: if you are casually told these people absolutely loved their latest team retreat, which was full of sports and games, that can give you a clear sense that it is ok to play and be active during the next workshop!

New ideas are often born from pre-workshop conversations. What needs come to the surface? What do people tell you are important skills they are curious about? What new methods do they want to learn?

Co-design as much as possible 

Of course you want to arrive on the morning of the workshop well-prepared and with a designed agenda. At the same time, the more input participants can put into shaping the day, the more ownership they are likely to feel. Something I often do is have a section for a World Café or a similar discussion activity, but I do not decide on the topics for discussion beforehand. Instead, I listen to the concerns and interests expressed in the previous part of the day and add topics to the tables during a break. 

Connect the workshop to the team’s real life

Ask for, and make, examples from their lives and areas of interest. Design checkpoints in the session to ask the group how this or that topic or activity can be useful to solve their own real-world challenges.

The best workshops leave participants jazzed up and energized, ready to get back to work the next day with more confidence and clarity about how to get stuff done. The experience comes to life when activities are connected to real-life experiences that are meaningful for the participants. An example of how to do this is through role plays. A good facilitator might prepare customized examples and storylines for a role play that cannot be exactly superimposed to the team’s reality but does closely resemble it, enough so that learning points can be drawn and quickly applied.

End with an action plan

Dedicate a good chunk of time, usually the last part of the session, to putting learnings into practice. This usually means creating an individual or collective action plan. Ask questions such as “What will you do as a consequence of this workshop?”, and use tools such as backcasting or other action-oriented activities to define clearly the next steps. What will happen after the workshop?

Create memorable experiences 

Once you have your general design put together, start asking yourself what will make this workshop memorable. I recently had a fascinating discussion with colleagues about the role of surprise in learning. Novelty enhances memory! 

Many workshop facilitators aim to create a surprising situation from the start, by being playful about the setting. One of my favorite interventions of all time was when I was asked to run a workshop on earthquake preparedness for community groups. Before the group joined me in the workshop space, I proceeded to carefully and systematically turn the whole space upside down. Chairs on the floor, tables turned to the side, leaving the room a scary and chaotic mess. Not what you usually see when you walk into a carefully designed workshop! 

As participants walked in, I calmly observed from a corner as they took in the scene. What would their reactions be? Some participants spontaneously began putting everything in order, while others looked at me for help and guidance (which I refrained from giving). One man fished out his smartphone from a pocket and began to take pictures. A couple of young girls just decided to sit on the toppled-over tables, finding the new position quite entertaining. 

I let everyone do what they would for about 5 minutes, noting the different possible responses to a chaotic situation. Then I rang my chimes, invited everyone to grab a chair and create a circle in the middle of the disaster, and discuss what our first reactions in an earthquake situation would, could, and should be.

Turning the workshop space upside down certainly made for an unforgettable opening. But don’t worry, creating memorable experiences can be achieved by less dramatic means. Having the chairs arranged in a circle, which facilitates equal participation, may already change the feel of a room if people are used to lecture halls. 

Consider using art, games and play, Lego blocks, songs, poems or practices from theatre to surprise your participants into learning! When I was asked to facilitate a very formal kick-off meeting inside a ministerial building, I decided to start by reading poetry. No tables were turned over, but the overall effect was the same: to jolt people out of familiar patterns and into a new space and, hopefully, a new way of being and thinking.

The focus is on them, not you

Despite having just given some examples that put me very much at the center of attention, let me remind you at this point that a workshop is about the participants, and not about you. Let go of your very favorite facilitation techniques, activities or style, if it does not suit the group you are called to work with. Share something from your personal life to help build a rapport, but remember that this is not your Ted talk! 

As the workshop progresses, the focus of attention should progressively shift from yourself (and perhaps your host, who may want to introduce the day) to the participants. 

Ways of working a thread of empowerment throughout the workshop are many, such as assigning roles to participants or having appreciative inquiry-inspired activities that focus on having participants share stories around what they already know how to do well.

As time goes by, facilitators often have ways of subtly shifting power from themselves to the group. One way I do this is, for example, by stepping just outside the room while small groups discuss their topics. I stay close by and at earshot, ready to step in if needed, but I want the group to know that I trust them and that, yes, they are on their own! 

What to do if the conversation goes in unexpected directions

Great workshop facilitators are able to adapt to what is alive in the group so well that it seems like magic. But it isn’t! A lot of what looks like effortless flow is actually flexibility by design. 

No matter how well-defined your plan is, it will be severely tested by its encounter with the real world. Conversations might shift in a different direction from what you intended. Or, to add a very practical example, the catering will be late, forcing you to add half an hour before the break and divide an activity in half. What will you do? 

Flexibility in workshop facilitation comes with practice. The most important thing to know is that changes to the plan are normal and to be expected. 

Design for flexibility by hacking your own agenda. Add a note for an extra activity you’ll do if you have the time. Note which activities can become optional if you are running late. Highlight the time you must have wrapped up the last activity to leave time for closing, debriefing, and feedback. 

A facilitator’s stance is to trust the group. If you thought the main learning point after a certain activity was about communication and feedback, but your participants focus on learnings related to the need to be more assertive in the workplace, pick that up and weave it into your flow!

If participants start chatting about the next holidays, it’s not a terrible breach of your authority: it’s a sign they need a break. If you feel annoyed, confused or triggered by something a participant is saying, take a deep breath and try your best to listen to where they are coming from. There is usually some important information hidden under “difficult behaviors”. 

How to upskill as a workshop facilitator

Experience is certainly the best way to improve as a workshop facilitator, especially when it comes to learning how to manage group dynamics. If you are beginning this journey, shadowing someone more experienced is definitely something you should consider. 

Whether more or less experienced, here are some ideas on how to up your game and improve your workshop facilitation skills:

• Document your own facilitation journey and collect memories! What has worked well for you in the past? Gather your own top tips about successful workshops consistently in the same place, such as an online document you can keep updated. Refer back to your notes when designing the next sessions.
• Participating in colleagues’ workshops is absolutely key to improving your own. There is no better place to find new ideas, and innovations and be surprised (which, we have seen, is key to learning!). Get to meet other facilitators by taking part in conferences and peer-to-peer workshops. In SessionLab’s free facilitation community, you can find a rich calendar of events! 
• Join courses. Even seasoned facilitators can always benefit from reviewing material from a new point of view. Get insights on workshop facilitation delivered weekly to your email box by enrolling in SessionLab’s free email courses Facilitation is for Everyone and Overcoming Facilitation Challenges, and subscribing to SessionLab’s facilitation newsletter. For deeper dives into specific topics, the folks over at Voltage Control have a great selection of online courses to pick from. 
• Talk to a mentor. Since joining the International Association of Facilitators, their mentoring program has been a highlight for me. You can look for a mentor among hundreds of experienced professionals who generously share their life experiences and time with mentees for about 6 sessions that you can self-organize. Highly recommended! 
• In the 2023 State of Facilitation report, podcasts emerged as a much-loved way for workshop facilitators to stay updated. Here are two episodes on delivering great workshops from Myriam Hadnes’ rich collection of interviews: Finding Your Facilitator Flow: The Art of Balancing Presence and Process with Sean Blair and It’s Not About the Workshop – How to Make Workplace Learning Stick with Steph Clarke

It’s not just about the workshop

The title of that last episode is an interesting note to end an article on workshop facilitation upon: “It’s Not About the Workshop”. Ultimately, no matter how great the experience, a workshop is just one step in a wider process of change within participants, a team or an organization. No experience lives in isolation. In this step-by-step guide you can find out more about what happens before and after the workshop.

During workshops, guided by good facilitation, participants may accellerate that process. A team can come together naturally, but if aided by a team-building workshop, it can all happen quickly and with deeper, more meaningful results. If things are getting bumpy in the road to collaboration, a workshop dedicated to whatever the thirty topic of the day is can help everyone handle conflict in a safe, protected, and generative environment. If the group is lost in details, a workshop can help see the bigger picture.

In this article we have covered a lot of expert knowledge on how to make a workshop meaningful for participants: from how to start in a way that promotes trust and inclusion, all the way to how to end on a practical, actionable note. If facilitating a workshop is the next step in your career, let us know in the comments how this article has helped you, or join the conversation in the Community!

To begin the process that will get you to workshop success, you’ll need three ingredients: participants willing to join, someone to facilitate and guide them through the process (aka, you) and a detailed agenda or schedule of the activities you’ve planned. In this article we will focus on that last point: what makes a good agenda design?

Having a good agenda is essential to ensure your workshops are well prepared and you can lead the group with confidence. A good plan is key for personal and team preparation, and to achieving the outcomes you aim for. In the next pages we will look at the key elements of successful workshop design.

Read on to learn more about:

What makes a successful workshop? 

A lot of preparation goes into creating a great agenda design. In fact, there is a commonly quoted rule of thumb that says it takes at least twice the time to create a workshop design than to deliver a workshop (and that is not including the rest of the preparation work!). That means if you are setting out to host or facilitate a 2-hour workshop, it is likely to take you at least 4 hours just to craft the workshop’s schedule. 

So, if it takes quite a lot of work and effort to design a workshop agenda, that begs the question: what should you be doing with all that time? Long before you actually meet the workshop’s participants, you’ll be at your desk (or sitting on the floor surrounded by a mess of sticky notes and markers) using your foresight, experience and imagination to create the best possible plan for your participants. 

Before we go into our top tips on what to include in your plan to design for success, let’s spend a few words clarifying what we mean by a “successful workshop” in the first place. We could say a workshop is a bit like cooking: you put a bunch of ingredients in, run them through a series of steps and obtain something new, changed and transformed (hopefully, in a tasty direction). 

A workshop is a process of change, so a successful workshop will be one in which participants have undergone some kind of change, big or small. At the end of the workshop, everyone in the group will have learned something, or be on the way to transforming something in the organization, team or project. Other elements of a successful workshop design include:

• Coherence: participants feel that what they did made sense and was directed to achieving a set goal;
• Enjoyment: working together can be challenging and facilitation is not all about “good vibes”. Experiences such as navigating a conflict or raising difficult topics may not be fun per se, but the overall feeling should be a positive sense of energies unblocked, relationships strengthened, having been heard and seen;
• Effectiveness: whether you have set out to choose five new product features in a design team, welcome rookie team members to a company, or decide what the renovated neighborhood playground should look like in an urban planning workshop, the task is done, or at least some tangible steps forward have been taken.

In order to assess a design’s effectiveness you will need a target to evaluate it by. Therefore, before you start to work on your design you will need to have clarity about your desired outputs. 

What do aim to get done by the end of the allotted time? Can you describe the purpose of your workshop in one sentence? Desired outputs can be tangible, such as creating a plan of activities for the next business quarter, or intangible, such as improving relationships between the staff of two institutions working on a shared project. 

Workshops can be about many, disparate things. Being able to describe your purpose in one sentence will be immensely helpful in communicating with clients, hosts, participants and, before all that, in preparing your workshop agenda.

Why is workshop design important?

A workshop agenda is only one of many things required for preparing and designing a workshop (for more on that, see our step-by-step guide). The output of this part of a facilitator’s work is not the actual event: it’s the event’s schedule. 

There are many good reasons to want a well-crafted agenda ready well ahead of time. Some of these include:

• Ensuring you reach your goals. A workshop is much more than a bunch of unrelated activities, no matter how fun or insightful those activities are. With an agenda designed, you can put those activities in a coherent order, mapping the journey you will guide your participants through to get where you want to go.
  
• Getting buy-in from clients. Once there is a design to pore over and discuss, the future workshop really begins to come to life in the team’s mind. The earlier you have even just a draft plan, the more time you will have to get your clients’ comments and integrate them into the design until it works for all of you.
  
• Organising your own work. Even seasoned, experienced facilitators who may have run similar events dozens of times still need an agenda in order to look ahead and see what needs to be done. While creating the schedule you might realise you need to do some extra research on a certain topic, for example, or review the steps of an activity you intend to run.
  
• Organizing your team’s work. A shared agenda is indispensable whenever you need to coordinate with other people who might be involved in the workshop in different roles. Say you are going to bring a speaker in: they will want to know, at the very least, what time they should start their presentation, and how long it will last. If you are sharing facilitation duties with others, a shared agenda is where you can mark down who will be doing what, which is essential to prevent misunderstandings and work together with confidence.
  
• Discovering what materials you will need. By going through activities in a clear design, you’ll quickly see what materials, handouts, or presentations you need to have ready by the time the workshop begins. Personally, this is one of my top reasons for preparing agenda designs as early as I can. I am quite slow with creating materials and presentations and want ample time to do that in!
  
• Picking the right activities for the time you have. As we will see, agenda design often starts by setting clear boundaries. What time does the workshop start and end? When is the lunch break? This will limit your choices of what activities and processes to use; you will have to make sensible decisions based on the time you actually have.
  
• Getting participants on board. Sharing a rough agenda for the day with participants at the start of a workshop is commonly done in order to support a sense of safety and trust, and to share ownership over the workshops’ success, at least in part.

And what about improvisation, you may be thinking at this point, and the flexibility facilitators are famed for?

One way of seeing this is that having a good agenda design is not something that hinders improvisation but rather a great scaffolding to dance upon. If the scaffolding is solid enough, it should allow for changes, but let you keep track of what is important to cover, what the direction you are aiming to go in is, and when you should wrap up activities, even if they are not the ones you had originally planned for. 

Who should you share your agenda design with?  

As you may have noticed, there are actually four different possible recipients of an agenda design: yourself, your client/host(s), your facilitation team, and your participants. All these agenda designs might look exactly the same, but probably they will not. Here are some of the ways different workshop designs (for the same workshop!) might work better for different types of recipients.

Having a workshop design for yourself

If you are going to be the only person looking at the agenda design, you are likely to use your own shorthand and personal notes. Only you need to understand what this is about and you likely have your own method of turning initial thoughts into a coherent meeting.

A good tip here is to be nice to yourself in the future, and make your notes clear enough for you to understand four years from now, when suddenly a participant calls you back to say they have become leaders of their own NGO and would like to repeat a similar workshop to the one you held back then. Organised notes and agendas will save you hours of work later!

Sharing the agenda design with your team

A workshop design to share with your facilitation team, which could include co-facilitators or assistants, must be clear and legible to people other than yourself. The less you have already worked together, the more detailed your agenda will have to be, to the point where some workshop agendas read like movie scripts. A shared design must certainly include information on who will be doing what, so that your team can be prepared to take on the right roles at the right time.

In designing online workshops, for example, it’s common practice to have one person create breakout rooms in the background, while the other is introducing the exercise. Having this noted down in the shared agenda design will ensure technical work gets done quietly in the background and everything is ready in time.

I learned the ropes of facilitation as a trainer for a bottom-up citizen organization where we had a standard format for workshops. The template was for a two-day, highly participatory design, and was always led by two people. Pairings might vary as we had quite a few people in the training pool, so it really helped to have a shared agenda where we would each write which parts of the workshop we would prefer to be responsible for, and take turns with clarity.

A workshop design for clients

The agenda you share with clients is likely to be different from your personal one. Clients don’t need to know ahead of time, word-by-word, what you will be saying, nor read your notes-to-self about what you should pay attention to. A client will probably prefer a simplified, lean design that clearly shows the objectives of each activity and how you plan to achieve them.

Sharing your plan with participants

Lastly, you are likely to want to share a high-level agenda with participants at some point, either before the workshop or in your introduction. Participants at this point will not need to know everything that is in your plan, but it is common practice to share a general overview, as well as the planned time for breaks and for the workshop to end.

This is a slightly contentious point, as many facilitators prefer to leave room for changes and improvisation, so you can also consider it a valid option and not a hard necessity. Personally, I always share a general agenda at the start of my workshops and meetings, as in my experience this makes people feel safer and more mentally prepared. I also will generally say something along the lines of “This is the plan I’ve made, but it might change as we go. I will still make sure we get a 15-minute break, although it might not be exactly at 11 sharp, and we will certainly end on time.” 

You can create all four different types of schedules from the same matrix, by hiding or showing information to different people. If that sounds like a lot of hassle (and it is), you might want to try SessionLab’s planner, which has features designed to help you do all the above: keep your projects organized for yourself, share the with co-facilitators, and create and print overviews, at different levels of detail, for clients and participants. 

Whether you are designing for yourself only, or plan to share your notes with clients, team members and participants, there are some things you will absolutely need to include in a workshop agenda design.

We will cover these next, followed by some nice-to-have elements that may not be absolutely necessary but could make your design even better. Lastly, we will look into some extra ideas you might want to try, especially if you already have experience with agenda design and want to take the next step and experiment with something new to make your designs memorable and stand out from the crowd.

Basic elements of a workshop design

Now that you know who and what an agenda design is for, let’s go through the basic building blocks it should absolutely include. These are the essential elements of a workshop design.

To help you out with the process, here is an agenda design canvas you can use to kick-start your process. 

As you can see from the illustration, at the bare minimum your agenda design needs to include the following information:

• A title that should be enticing and memorable for participants. Your session’s title should also be clear enough to make it easy for you to find the session when you look for it in the future.
• One or more clear objective(s). A short description of what the workshop is for, what the desired outcome or learning goal is and what action items you’ll work through.
• A general description of the session. Key information that will guide the rest of your plan should be noted somewhere prominent. This will probably include
  • some information about participants (e.g. ‘6 people from the customer care team’; or ’24 high school students’, and so on) and 
  • an indication of the location (Is the session in person? Online? Hybrid? Do you have a flexible set-up of chairs and tables or is it a lecture hall?).
• A skeleton agenda. As with any good story, once you have a beginning, an ending and a middle part, you are well on your way. Start with these fixed elements and work from there:
  • A starting time. When will you start welcoming participants? And when does the workshop actually begin? 
  • An introduction section that can include a presentation of the workshop, of yourself if participants do not know you, some sort of icebreaker or check-in;
  • One or two main, core activities you are confident will help you and the group reach your goals, and the timing for them;
  • Scheduled breaks;
  • A closing section that might include a debrief, feedback on the workshop, a recap of next steps;
  • An ending time.

There are a lot of extra bits and frills you can add, but if you’ve got these basics covered then congratulations: you have a workshop design!

Given that we are not just talking about any workshop here, two more points come to mind as essential for a workshop design to be successful:

• A mix of individual, paired, small group and plenary activities – maybe not all, but at least two of these. Changing the type of activity is part of what keeps workshops engaging and ensures your goals of having an enjoyable and effective workshop are met.
• Rest, celebration and reflection after. This is so essential to facilitators’ well-being and learning process that I suggest putting a note about it in the agenda itself, at least in the version you will be using for yourself or your team. I often work in a team of four co-facilitators, and we usually include in the agenda a slot for “team debrief, chat and celebration” after the official workshop ending time. Location: the closest pub or café. 

Agenda design tips for a successful workshop

If you are new to designing workshops, the points above will be enough to give you a great start. Next, you might want to browse through some nice-to-have elements to add to your outline. These are all great bits and pieces of a solid design: you don’t need to have them all, but they can give you some extra inspiration and pointers.

Here are some extra agenda design elements that can pave the way for a successful workshop.

Sections to add to your agenda

Besides the general outline of your session detailed in the above section, there are some other sections you can add to your agenda to make sure you have everything you need. These include:

• A checklist of materials. Next to your agenda plan you can add a checklist of things to do (such as preparing a presentation) and to bring. This can make preparation much easier!
• A pre-workshop section where you can note down how you will interact with participants before the session, for example by sending an email (when will you do that?) to help set expectations.
• In the same vein, a section for post-workshop tasks such as sending resources to participants, or asking them for feedback through a questionnaire.

Extra activities to include in your design

Once you have decided what the key activities for your workshop will be, you can take a second look at your design to determine whether you have time and space for some more creative exercises. These can greatly help with engagement, keeping the workshop interesting and the rhythm varied. Here are some things you might consider:

• Adding sections in which you invite participants to get active, or send them outdoors. A bit of movement, including simply stretching during an online session or having a paired discussion while taking a walk, can greatly increase focus and keep the energy flowing.
  
• Once you are confident in your design, and if your group is large enough, you can include activities that run in parallel for different parts of the group. This could mean, for example, different teams in the same company working on different tasks for a time. In another scenario, you could propose different ways of tackling the same problem (such as collecting ideas on sticky notes, working on a drawing or diagram, and researching inspiration online) and invite participants to choose their preferred task before reconvening.
  
  This type of activity adds complexity to your agenda design but can improve ownership among participants, as you show the flexibility and the respect of enabling different people to work in different ways.
  
• Including in your agenda plan something playful, fun, and colorful, to add some extra zest to the day.

• Adding a 5-minute slot to take a group picture. This works best just before a break. If you are working online, don’t take secret stealth screenshots, but ask participants if they are ok with having a picture taken and invite a smile, or a gesture, or to show something on camera to make the picture more interesting, as online group-photos can be a bit repetitive in style!

How to support improvisation in your agenda

Not only is a good plan useful as a structure upon which to base flexibility and improvisation: you can also find ways to use the design stage to make improvisation easier! Here are three ways you can design flexibility right into your agenda:

• Spend some time considering what could go wrong and adding a Plan B in points of the agenda. If you have an outdoor activity, for example, what will you do if it rains? If you were going to have a very dynamic energizer, what will you do if someone shows up in crutches?
  
• Add a symbol or note next to any activities you are ok with skipping if there is not enough time (and make sure you agree on this with your co-facilitator or team). Going overtime is a common occurrence so it’s good to be prepared for it.
  
• Make your agenda spacious. Filling every bit of the plan to the minute is a risky business, as it is likely to put pressure both on you and the participants. Add a bit of buffer time, for example after a break, to allow for the unexpected to emerge. I often have a 20-minute slot towards the end of a workshop in the program dedicated to “discussing whatever has emerged”.
  
• Have an additional activity noted on the side of your plan, just in case you have extra time instead! This is less likely, but still happens sometimes. Say your group quickly reaches consensus on a certain topic and you have an extra 15 minutes, what could you do in that time? 

Making your workshop agenda design memorable

Once you have the basics of agenda design clear, and some extra bits added that can help you with planning and engagement, you might still be looking at your design and thinking: what could I change to make this workshop design even more memorable? 

Here are 4 tips from my experience and 3 I’ve picked out from shortlisted entries in the innovative template design contest we ran at SessionLab, in collaboration with the NeverDoneBefore community, in April 2023. 

Adding activities over lunch/dinner

Add a fun, light activity that still is coherent with the topic of the workshop, to run over lunch/dinner. Whether this is appropriate or not really depends on your group and local culture, and you should be careful not to “force fun” on participants. That said, the right activity can do wonders for networking and group identity, or push participants to delve a bit deeper and build stronger connections.

In an example from my own practice, I recently designed activities to sprinkle some extra participation around a large, rather formal conference on water scarcity. My client asked me for ideas to make the dinner conversation more meaningful, so I added to the plan a bowl of “conversation starters” to be placed upon each table. These contained questions related to the conference topic, some of which went in more personal directions, such as “what is your favorite memory around a lake or river?” and “do you have any stories of scarcity or over-abundance of water to share?”.

There was not set time or instruction, just a playful invitation to pick questions out and share answers around the table. Some groups delved into the game with glee (and later told me they had loved it), others preferred to talk about other things, and that was absolutely fine!

Enabling participants to work autonomously

Providing matrixes and canvases is a great way to get participants to work on their own. Adding activities that have ready-made canvases for participants to fill out is a great way to get groups working together more autonomously, with less need for step-by-step guidance on your part. It does take more preparation on your part, but you will then have materials to reuse next time!

Make room in your design for art and creativity

Creating something material and memorable with participants is a great way to end a workshop day. Add to your design a collaborative painting or poster creation, or involve artists to guide your group to create something beautiful together. I had the opportunity of collaborating with artists in crafting the design for a conference closing event in 2015: the mosaic we made for the community space we were hosted in is still there, making the experience literally unforgettable. 

Include something new in your agenda

Does your workshop design feel a bit boring to you? Maybe you’ve done the same things over and over many times? If you are not excited by the design, how can you expect your participants to be? It’s time to add something out of your comfort zone.

Perhaps this could be about presenting information in a different way from what you are used to (use objects in your presentations, or make it more visual!), or about telling a personal story (go for it! It generally works).

On a similar note, how about including in your design an activity you’ve always wanted to experiment with but have not had the opportunity yet? In the SessionLab Community, Marie Dubost opened a discussion on the “method you’ve been dying to try” and I found that knowing what that was, and making a mental note of it, helped me dare be more experimental in my next session design and try including something new!

Innovation in template design

In April 2023, SessionLab and NeverDoneBefore ran an innovative template contest, asking facilitators from around the world to contribute their most creative session designs.

Looking through the entries (the winners are now published in SessionLab’s template collection, where you can find many more ideas and examples of great agendas) I picked out three elements that are easy to integrate in your sessions:

Combine online and in-person activities

Make your workshop design blended by adding things to do online before and/or after, if the session is to be held in person, or things to be done in person if the workshop is online. Adding a bit of online work to an in-person workshop design might mean for example sending a video introduction to watch, or adding personal information to an online whiteboard to start getting to know one another with the other participants.

In the template for her Shared Book Insights Workshop, which won the most Innovative Workshop Design award, facilitator Carolyn Keesh distributes pre-workshop packages to everyone (including a snack!) with book chapters to read, so the time spent together is used to work collaboratively on sharing insights.

Use music!

Numerous entries including Perle Laouenan-Catchpole’s template, which won the “Best Use of SessionLab” award, included playlists in their plans, with music picked to suit the mood. Online, it’s easy to share sound from your device and use this to signal, for example, the end of an activity or break. In person, consider adding a bluetooth speaker to your facilitation toolkit. 

Make your workshops multi-sensory

Include activities that use other senses as well! Winner of the Community Choice award Sara Huang entered the competition with an entire session design around scent and associations among feelings and smells. How could you integrate smell, taste, and touch into your design?

In closing – how to start

I hope this article has given you the confidence you need to start designing your next session agenda or to improve your next meeting or workshop. Here are four ideas that can help you begin:

• Braindump all your ideas on sticky notes, pick one or two that you really like, and design around them.
• Print out and use this canvas to put your ideas in order.

• Use existing templates as a guideline. Check out our library of templates to find inspiration and see what agenda sessions look like in practice! Some templates are marked as “essential”, these are basic structures you can easily duplicate to start adding your own content. Workshops are a great place to look, though you might also find meeting agenda templates useful to explore!
• Share your designs and any questions in our friendly Community space, and keep your eye out for the next template design events and competitions!

In the following paragraphs, we will look at:

What is facilitation in education 

An effective facilitator leverages the power of a group to elevate its members so they can work at their best and obtain great results as a team. You can apply its mindset and skills to working with a class of students. Through the lens of facilitation, a class is a group with the specific objective of learning together.

Using facilitation in education settings means focussing on practices that improve group collaboration and use the group’s collective energy to support individual learning. It means paying attention not only to what you are teaching but especially to how you are working with students to create a positive learning environment with lots of active participation. 

Why use facilitation in the classroom

The ability to facilitate and, even more so, to share facilitation tools with your students can help solve some common challenges that come up when you teach, such as:

• keeping engagement and participation high; from energizers to playful toolkits, facilitators know a lot about how to keep learners active throughout long workshops;
• preventing difficult classroom dynamics. Facilitation can really help with conflict prevention, by creating welcoming learning spaces where differences are leveraged to everyone’s benefit and the rules of engagement are co-created and clear;
• designing memorable lesson plans; facilitators are great designers and can share plenty of tips on how to create agendas that work;
• developing facilitation practices in class can help equip students with real-world skills in teamwork, listening, communication, problem-solving, strategic planning and collaboration they are going to need in the workplace (their future colleagues will have you to thank!).

As you may have already realized by now, facilitation is especially easy to pair with teaching methods that are already student-centered, such as flipped classrooms and direct education. Indeed there is quite a lot of overlap between these frameworks and a facilitative approach.

Teaching vs facilitation 

Teachers cannot be “pure” facilitators though, and it’s important to make sure we are clear on the difference between those roles. A facilitator is not a content provider: she brings activities and processes to groups but lets them set their own targets and find their own solutions. This approach can be applied in certain classroom situations, for example, to help students get to know each other and intentionally create their own “classroom culture”, but cannot be used at all times.

A facilitator’s objective is to support the group’s journey, but a teacher has other important roles to keep in mind such as, first and foremost, providing information and content to their students. The type of authority wielded by a teacher, who may be grading papers next week, and by a facilitator, who does not evaluate participants’ performances (actually, he might be the one getting an evaluation at the end of a workshop!), is also different. 

Depending on the type of learning institution you are in, this probably means keeping close at heart the idea that teaching remains your primary role and skillset, with facilitation a helpful “extra” piece that can really make the difference in transforming your lessons into more participatory and rewarding experiences! 

Facilitation skills for teachers

Facilitators have developed skills specific to working with groups which can be useful for teachers as well. The needs and challenges of facilitators and teachers are quite similar, but since teachers’ training is usually more focused on content, some insights from those who spend their time working on process might come in handy.

Some of the facilitation skills that overlap with teaching are:

Let’s go a bit deeper in each of those and see what teachers can learn from facilitators on these topics!

Moderation

Facilitators have developed a series of tactics and tools to improve the flow of conversations. Tools such as using a talking piece or speaking in a round can help make sure everyone has a voice. Positive reinforcement, which of course many teachers already master, is used in facilitation to ensure quieter participants feel heard and grow in confidence that their opinions are valued. 

In classrooms as in board rooms, it’s sadly common for a few voices to dominate the conversation. Help learners understand that building upon one another’s opinion is more fun and interesting than “survival of the loudest” with facilitation games and exercises to boost collaboration.

My mediation teachers say that humans often tend to shout louder when we feel there is more distance between us. If we are physically distant from one another we need to raise our voices to bridge that gap, and we tend to apply the same mechanism to psychological distance. Wanting to be heard, we raise our voices. But as you’ve probably experienced, raising our voices to be heard is a strategy that does not always work, neither for students nor for teachers!

Argumentative discussions and arguments that get louder and louder can signify an unmet need to be heard. And so can giving up and getting extra-quiet. Creating a more inclusive learning environment where students feel comfortable expressing their opinions and hearing that they are valued can do a lot to defuse tensions and prevent classroom conflict. 

Creating an inclusive learning environment

In many schools across the world, diversity is increasing and, sometimes, is seen as a challenge to the flow of learning, exemplified by the idea, still commonly held, that students need to learn a new language before fully participating in classroom activities. That is part of the story, but a facilitation mindset that sees diversity as a gift can be a good lens through which to develop some new classroom management ideas.

Skilled facilitators celebrate diversity and do not shy away from underlining how differences can be enriching for the entire conversation. Teachers as facilitators might use similar approaches by asking students to present stories that display their differences in a positive light and discussing these with the class.

Asked to facilitate a welcoming day for a new cohort of first-year University students I once asked them to share (first in pairs and if they wanted to with the whole group) stories about their ancestry. To me as a facilitator, this was a simple, quite basic getting-to-know-you idea, but students later came up to me to say it had made all the difference, as they no longer felt they needed to hide and conform, but could bring their whole selves (and later in the year, some pretty amazing Indian dance moves) to the course! 

Awareness of group dynamics

A useful area for teachers to explore is understanding group dynamics and how they might influence effective learning. The classic model of team formation developed by Bruce Tuckman can be illuminating if applied to education. Facilitators know that teams must “form” and “norm” (and sometimes even “storm”) before they can “perform.” Applied to education, this means that before we can learn we need to know the other people in the room, feel safe in the space, and understand what is expected from us and how to behave within a certain group.

Note that this process of, in effect, creating group norms and a group culture, will take place independently of whether you facilitate it or not: it’s simply the way humans, being social animals, tend to behave. Teachers as facilitators can harness the way this process works to raise students’ ambitions and help the class become a better version of itself. 

This sounds like a lofty ideal but can easily be facilitated by running activities as soon as the class first meets in which students are encouraged to know one another, share something personal, and discuss together what they hope to achieve during the year or course. Who do we really want to be as a learning group? What will help you learn well, and show up at your best every day? What is harder? What we do to support one another when things get tough? In the absence of such prompts and a safe space to discuss them, it’s easier for the group to fall into trite patterns (unfortunately, very much modeled in society) of power over, bullying, and cynicism. 

Agenda design

Facilitation emphasizes the importance of good planning and foresight. Before a workshop or event, a skilled facilitator will have a detailed agenda which reads a bit like a script of what the day will look like. This might sound like a contradiction with respect to the ability to sense group dynamics and change course accordingly, but we know the best plans exist in order to be changed along the way!

Designing agendas is a practical facilitation skill that can be applied to improving your lesson plans. Start with your desired outcome for the lesson: what are your objectives? Make your lesson “stripy” by combining different sorts of activities such as individual reflection, teamwork, and lectures. Design a flow that is appropriate for your group; since bringing back focus and quiet can be tricky in the classroom, you might want to move from individual reflection to a group discussion in steps, as in this example of a lesson plan template. 

Trust and curiosity

If you think back at your own favorite teachers throughout your education, what did they have in common? The best educators, and the best facilitators, come from a position of trust and curiosity. They can imagine “the best possible emerging future” for this group, and suggest ways to move towards it.

A public participatory method I have used with neighborhood groups called Oasis Game has a whole section dedicated to using an appreciative gaze to find “points of light”: even in the most difficult living situations, what is there that expresses hope and beauty? And how can we build on that to make the whole neighborhood better? 

Appreciative Inquiry is a framework based on the same concept of focusing on the positive, working with what teams are already competent in, and using those “native” capacities to face new challenges. It is not about running away from what is not working, but rather about reframing our orientation from problem-focused to possibility-focused. Trust and curiosity are core elements of the facilitation mindset which are also very much alive in the best teachers, and in the best teacher that lives within us all!

How to use facilitation in the classroom

Now that we are clear about the principles and reasons behind using facilitation in education, let’s take a look at what techniques and methods you may want to introduce in your lesson plans.

There are four main areas of the learning experience that can definitely benefit from adding facilitation skills to the mix! Starting from those more focused on the individual student and moving to those that harness the whole group’s energy, we will look into:

Using facilitation tools to increase motivation and active participation

As teachers and professors you, of course, retain a focus on content. It’s important to transmit concepts, information, and your expertise to students. But have you ever asked “any questions?” at the end of a painstakingly prepared presentation, only to be met with a wall of blank stares? That does not feel good, nor does it give you any insight in how students may actually have experienced your session. Maybe they are deeply reflecting, maybe they are completely distracted, and you have no way of knowing! And it just gets worse online, especially if webcams are turned off.

For six summers, I facilitated and coached teams of Masters’ students in the ClimateKIC’s Climate Innovation and Leadership summer schools. Our students would regularly flood lecturers from the host university with all sorts of questions, and interactions would be lengthy and lively.

Sometimes, the professors would come up to me afterward to compliment us on having “picked and selected such a talkative and engaged cohort of people.” This was nice of them to say, and there certainly was an element of pre-selection (and self-selection, as not all students in the world are keen to spend their summers in lecture halls!) at work to justify why these groups were so active. But that certainly was not the only reason!

Here are three strategies we applied as classroom facilitators that worked to improve engagement and participation of learners, resulting in those lively Q&A sessions:

• We had set “group agreements” with the class, and one of those inevitably revolved around the topic of “it’s ok to ask questions, even if you think they are ‘stupid’ questions”.
  
  In every set of students I ever set group agreements with, there was a moment, when someone confessed to feeling “dumb” when asking questions. The reaction from other students was always one of great relief: “Me too!” “Oh, me too!” and the agreement to be ok with asking questions, including so-called “stupid questions” was always deeply welcomed;
  
• Before each lecture, we ran preparatory activities around personal motivation: why are you interested in this topic? Say you are not really, what angle or connection to another subject might interest you?
  
• Students, divided into teams, had afternoon group work on practical projects and challenges and were expected to find ways to connect information provided in morning lectures to real-life situations. 

Generally speaking, facilitators work with adults and youth rather than with kids and preteens; many facilitation and training principles are therefore derived from knowledge related to adult education. Facilitators and trainers put in practice such tenets of adult education as “adult learners need a varied approach” and “engage adult learners with real-life case studies”. Here are some of the things facilitators do that can help you increase engagement and motivation in the classroom:

• Setting individual goals and intentions. Before introducing a new subject, invite students to reflect individually and write down what they want to learn, what they may find interesting and why.
  
  It’s important to underline that such “learning journals” should be kept personal, or shared only if students wish to, and not be subject to grading! If you want to add an extra level of accountability, you can inform students that at the end of the course or learning module they will be asked to turn in a short reflection on their learning journey, based on their learning journal.
  
• Varying styles and activities. Facilitators know that attention spans are short (and getting shorter!) and keep things moving by mixing and matching different styles and types of activities. Combine moments of individual reflection, play and creativity, group work and lectures. Use direct/active education practices that engage the senses (and not only with children!). 

Facilitation techniques that assist students in their individual learning

A skilled workshop facilitator leverages participants’ different learning styles to create as many opportunities as possible for “a-ha” moments in which participants suddenly grasp new knowledge or a new idea. Inspired by this approach, teachers can draw from facilitation principles and activities to support their students in integrating, understanding and digesting information from their lessons.

Whatever their particular field, trainers and facilitators always include a debrief section to activities. This is an opportunity for participants to reflect on their experiences or on the content presented, mull it over, discuss, draw their own conclusions. You shouldn’t discredit any of the theories presented, no matter how fantastical, but you can gently steer towards discussing the key points and findings you want to make sure your learners understand.

Some of the facilitation activities you can use to help students integrate new concepts in their learning when you teach include:

• 1-2-4-all. Use this well-honed facilitation activity to guide reflection after delivering content. Ask students to write down individually, then in pairs, then in small groups and finally to the whole class what they have learned today. 
• World café. Prepare three key questions that might arise from your content and place them on flipcharts in three corners of the class. Ask students to discuss the questions in small groups and change table every few minutes. 
• Sticky notes wall. As students leave the room, ask them to add a sticky note to a poster with a question about “What have you learned today?” “What questions are you left with?” Allow for anonymous contributions, and you can prepare your next lesson based on the notes you gather. 

Facilitated activities that boost classroom cohesion

“Who am I in this group?” is a participant’s preoccupying question as any learning convenes, and there’s limited capacity for learning anything else until this question is answered. These are the wise words at the start of my top-one recommended book for applying facilitation to the classroom, George Lakey’s Facilitating Group Learning – Strategies for Success with Diverse Adult Learners. 

I have been shocked to discover, while running human rights workshops in high schools, how little students may know about one another, despite being in the same classroom every morning for months! As facilitators, we assume that deeper, more personal knowledge of one another goes very far to build a positive learning environment; facilitation tools can be particularly useful when beginning to work with a new class of students at the beginning of a course or of the school year. 

Getting-to-know you activities and games are how I generally begin the first day of courses I tutor with University students. I aim to keep it light but also challenge students to go a bit deeper, putting them in pairs or small groups of 3-4 (less intimidating!) to answer some personal questions, pointing out they can choose to go as deep or stay as generic as they feel comfortable, and that they will not have to share with the big group unless they want to.

Facilitation can also help create a sense of group identity within the class. Activities such as creating group agreements, a group motto, poster or chant, can be semi-playful ways to discuss “who are we as a group” and raise aspirations to “who do we want to be?” A poster with key words, values and behaviors we want to hold to as a whole can be a great reminder of these discussions—and should always be co-created; it doesn’t work if it’s imposed by the teacher!

Give students the gift of collaboration and communication skills (they’ll thank you later) 

Teamwork activities play a big part in education (more or less so depending on which part of the world you are in), with group assignments being a common part of every student’s life. As it should be: to prepare young ones for future tasks in life and work, knowing how to work with others and reach common targets effectively is key!

Yet, many students lament the experience of being thrown into group work with little or no instructions on how to work together. The resulting dynamics mirror all the dysfunctions teams encounter when collaboration just isn’t that great: the most driven students take on all the work, with the others just tagging along for the ride. It may be easy to empathize with those working hardest, but the ones left behind might be suffering as well, feeling perhaps that they were not given a say in the task. This lack of shared ownership is a common pattern in school as well as in team and office work. 

Facilitation can help to improve shared ownership of projects, create understanding and keep all team members accountable. Share facilitation tools with your students early, when you are working on the first team project of the year. Before they get to work on the content, ask them questions and give them canvases to help them reflect on how they want to work together. Yes, collaboration can be taught!

A big favorite with my students is I DO ARRT; it’s a basic mnemonic of what they should discuss before starting their teamwork. What is our Intention today? Where do we want to be with this project when the hour is over (Desired Outcome)? What willl we work on (Agenda)? Who will do what (Roles)? Do we need to set any Rules? And how much Time do we have? I DO ARRT works because it feels like a game: we set the rules together before getting down to work. It is also a repetitive structure students can then use at each team meeting or for each future project.  When introducing new teamwork activities, a teacher working with her facilitator hat on might lead the groups in an intention-setting activity before starting. Ask each group to take turns in rounds discussing questions you’ll have provided, such as “What excites me about this project?” “What can I contribute?” “What helps me work well?” “How will we help each other get the tasks done?” Make sure each team member has time to speak and is actively involved; bring sticky notes and canvases to fill in with everyone’s answers.

When creating teams for group work, I also like to ask them to apply some creativity to creating their own group name and group cheer or greeting, and show it to all the others to big rounds of applause.

No information provided by the teacher or facilitator is as effective as information or knowledge shared among peers! Leverage this very human aspect of peer communication by having rounds of peer advice. After teams have worked together on a project, ask each group to share one tip they have for all the others: what is working well in our group that you might want to do as well? This kind of practice builds up confidence and collaboration skills in the entire class.

Feedback, I have found, is very very tricky to teach and use in school. I assume this is because many students are used to their work being graded (and would very much like the opportunity to grade someone else’s!). In many education systems, students may be more accustomed to criticism than to positive feedback. I have asked high school students to provide feedback to each other in groups after a workshop and was absolutely horrified when they took the opportunity to tear one another’s work down! 

To avoid making my same mistake, make sure you use clear guidelines if you are asking students to provide feedback to one another. Structured sets of questions such as “What was one thing you really liked about the other team’s project?” and “What was one thing they could improve to get even better?” can help every person in the room practice the essential skill of giving and receiving feedback —- not an easy one at any age!

Creating better lesson plans with facilitation

A lot of the facilitation process has to do with crafting designs that lead participants into a learning journey. There is a lot teachers and educators can learn from the way workshop agendas are put together, that can help improve learning outcomes for your students. Some of these tips may be things you do already: interconnections among research into pedagogy, education, and facilitation are many!

• First of all, facilitators have an agenda! This may seem banal but as teaching is so focused on content, you may be tempted to work a lot on what you are going to say but less on how the hour or day will flow. That may translate into lessons that are rather unimaginative, and leave you more tired at the end! 
• Set up each lesson as if it were a story, with a beginning, a middle, and a (satisfying) conclusion. When a lesson is cut short by the bell, that leaves ideas hanging in the air. Track time and make sure you have a few minutes at the end of each class to debrief, summarise and wrap up. And speaking of wraps…
• Facilitators make content sandwiches! Workshop agendas include sections that prepare participants to delve into an activity or a lecture, the activity itself, and a closing and debriefing part. We’ve prepared a handy visual you can print out and refer to when designing! 

• Combine individual, group, and whole-class activities for best results. Any learner will find it easier to participate if you create different ways of doing so. Encouraging different ways of thinking, enabling reflection and boosting collaboration skills and problem-solving are just some of the benefits of this approach.
• Mix groups around. Some groups will resist this and try to default to the “I’m working with my best friends” mode. Break cliques up often, for example by creating groups at random and having students switch teams as much as you can. This approach may initially meet some resistance, but will do wonders to improve class-wide communication and cohesion. After all, in work and life, students will not always get to choose who they prefer to work with! 

Looking for some more inspiration and examples of what a facilitated lesson plan would look like? Here is a 1-hour lesson plan you can check out and adapt to your own needs!

In this template, you’ll find a combination of reflection activities to prepare your students for learning, a section to facilitate engaging discussions, and space for your content as well. If getting students active is one of your objectives but you don’t know where to begin, take a look!

How facilitation can help make online education engaging

When classrooms and courses moved online due to Covid-19 lockdowns, I was one of the fortunate ones. I had been preparing a higher education (university-level) course which was funded well enough that before moving classes online me and the other tutors and instructors in our particular field had the privilege of getting specialized training in various topics. 

We covered the basics of working with online tools as well as how to keep the class engaged with virtual energizers and Zoom-based improv games. I went from being a skeptic to believing that it is, indeed, possible to create meaningful, participatory learning online.

Sadly, not everyone had the luxury of top-notch tech and expert facilitator training, and I am well aware that being hurled into online learning was extremely difficult for most teachers and educators. Without good internet connections and decent equipment, I appreciate there was little to be done; it is also a completely different ballgame to be working with youth and adults with respect to kids!

So with those caveats in mind, I still feel it’s important to share the realization that, with the help of some facilitation tips & tricks, it is possible for any facilitator to create great online learning experiences.

Here are three ways that facilitation can help create great online education courses and classes:

(1) Cohort-based learning. Creating small groups of people who are going through a course together is a major booster for motivation. In my experience, this is also the best way to decrease drop-out rates. Having some facilitation skills will help you to set up cohorts, using insights from how facilitators create and support effective groups. 

Place your students in small peer groups of about 7-9 participants. Aim to make the small groups self-managing as much as possible. Give them prompts and ideas of what to discuss, but also leave them free to explore materials and talk about personal matters if they feel like it: honest connections and interpersonal communication are valuable in and of themselves and can compensate for the isolation of learning online.

One way of setting up cohort-based learning is for the facilitator to be there at the peer group’s first session, set some ground rules and get everyone comfortable, then help them set times for their own online meetups (this is particularly likely in adult education; for example, it’s how Acumen Academy set up many of their courses).

In different setups, all your students may be attending at the same time. You can still enable cohort-based learning by placing them in breakout groups, always with the same people, and providing a template for an activity each time. Another good practice is to keep 10 minutes at the end of each session for these “home groups” to discuss and debrief the lesson.

(2) Keep the energy going. Use virtual energizers, small groups, and breaks to keep learners engaged throughout the class. We’ve seen how facilitators work to create agendas that cater to many different learning styles.

Effective online education works the same way, but you should introduce more breaks and find ways to encourage learners to look away from the screen and do something in the real world (and then come back to discuss it with you!). Read our guide to virtual facilitation for more tips on this topic.

(3) Don’t forget asynchronous communication. Facilitators know that a learning process begins from the first workshop invitation and ends long after the session is over! How to transfer this knowledge to an online classroom setting? Simply remember that caring for the relationship between you and your students is key, and can be done through emails, videos, quizzes, and any tool your creativity suggests.

Keep in touch with students, send them materials, ask them for feedback. This useful article from Edutopia has tips on what kind of questions to ask to get valuable feedback on your classes. You may, for example, invite the students themselves to come up with ideas to improve the way the class is interacting with technology.

If it’s possible for you (this varies a lot based on location, type of class, privacy issues) to create a group for students to chat on, consider doing it — some of the chat groups I set up are still active years later with participants exchanging resources, ideas and even job offers!

Facilitators also have a lot of expertise when it comes to including different types of participants in online settings. Just last week I attended a facilitated networking space for colleagues around the world; many came from countries with bad internet connections and were using their phones, with cameras off, to interact. The facilitators did a great job with inclusion by, among other things, using the chat space, and giving clear instructions as to how to ask for the floor in different ways.

Design for simplicity to make sure people with all sorts of challenges, be it neurodivergence or just a really shitty internet connection, can be involved in all activities.

For each lesson or practice, find different ways to communicate instructions (e.g. speaking them but also having them up to read on a slide, and/or sent to participants before the day of the class). Check-in with students to find out from them what kind of instruction they would like and what would work to make their interactions easier.

What to keep in mind when introducing facilitation in the classroom (with a real-life story)

My friend Hannah has been on my mind as I was preparing this article. A middle-school teacher and a facilitation enthusiast, she has been using workshop-friendly tools in her classes for years. Her students love it, but it was not always easy! When she began her career, as a substitute teacher, using facilitation tools such as active listening practices and group work backfired on her. Because I was the only teacher doing this kind of thing, she explained I suddenly was perceived as something like the class tutor or psychologist, and students were coming to me with all sorts of personal problems! This was outside my role, and I did not have the tools to cope with it… It was exhausting!

Hannah, like many newcomers to education, learned the hard way that it was very important to set boundaries and clarify limits. If you are working in a formal education system where students are evaluated based on their grades, for example, a more facilitative style could clash with your role as the person responsible for grading their work. You’ll need to find your own way to make this clear to students and make sure they understand that a facilitated class is not a permanent break, but is just as serious a as a formal lecture… just in a different way!

Early on I tried to re-energize the class by asking everyone to change seats, Hannah told me when I interviewed her for this piece which had worked very well for me with adults, like a quick mini-break and a change of perspective. But with 13-year-olds? They took it as a moment to have fun and make chaos, and then I had no clear way to get their attention back! Now Hannah works facilitation activities into her classes a bit at a time, starting with more structured exercises like paired discussions, and getting students used to tools like hand gestures to bring back silence after chatter. 

What my students do love is facilitated teamwork. They understand that it’s not fair if one of the people in the team is doing everything on their own, so they appreciate my tips on how to work together, such as by taking turns to speak, or setting agreements on who will do what, having roles such as meeting time-keeper. Of course not all teams get excellent collaboration at the first try, but I enjoy seeing them improve!

I asked Hannah what worked well for her as a teacher using facilitation in the classroom, and here are her insights—learned the hard way!

– Don’t do it alone. Find at least one other staff member who is interested in facilitation and help one another. Even better if you can get school management on board!
– Don’t do it all at once. Choose some simple facilitation activities to start with, especially at the beginning of the school year to help students know one another.
– Besides using facilitation in the classroom, consider that teachers have many meetings too! I’ve been working to introduce facilitation into staff meetings: this has beneficial effects that cascade, as more teachers get exposed to facilitation tools and ask me about them. 

In closing

If you have some challenges around student engagement, difficult dynamics in the classroom, or want to make your lesson plans more memorable, facilitation might just be the secret ingredient you were missing!

As Hannah’s story shows, it’s a good idea to introduce facilitation into your lessons a bit at a time. Tools that help with forming a group are the easiest to begin with, and maybe this article has already given you some ideas on how to change your lesson plans with facilitation too!

SessionLab’s planner app can help you keep all your lessons well “sandwiched” and organized, adding activities directly from a 1000+ methods strong Library as well as saving one year’s classes to re-use the next.

If you are a newcomer to the world of facilitation, you might want to check out our (free) email course Facilitation is for Everyone for more ideas and resources, as well as join our friendly Community, where you can share stories and ask any questions.

Deciding in a group setting is not always easy! In fact, arguments over whether a decision has been taken (and it’s time to implement it) or not yet (so we are still discussing) are one of the most common sources of conflicts in a team.

In this post, we have put together a collection of 27 decision-making techniques you can facilitate to help your team make a decision together!

What is decision-making? 

Any group process follows a flow, like a story unfolding. We start with a question, a challenge, or a problem to solve. Next, we ideate and brainstorm (aka “diverge”), gathering different ideas on what to do and how to move forward. After a divergent phase comes convergence when we refine and select among different possibilities and choose a direction or solution. At some point, we need to agree that the process is over: we have a decision!*

Deciding collectively is not always necessary (see this blog piece for more on decision-making rules and possibilities), but it can be a key to obtaining high levels of buy-in and enthusiasm from all. For high-stake decisions that require many people to participate in implementation, it’s important to know how to involve everyone in the process of deciding together.

To be honest, the facilitation community has so far dedicated more attention to the diverging and ideation phase of this process than to the last steps, converging and deciding. That said, there are still a lot of decision making tools you can pick from to support making decisions in a group. 

* A decision is not really the end point of the story, of course. Instead of “happily ever after”, we now get the job of implementing and monitoring the decision, coming back to it in a few days, months or years to see how it’s going, revise, confirm or change it. 

What are the benefits of using decision-making techniques?

Trying to imagine how to reach a decision in a group without the support of facilitated activities or processes is hard indeed! By using agreed-upon tools and methods we can streamline the process, make it efficient, and distribute power in a way that makes sense for the type of decision and organisation we are in.

By introducing activities and methods to support a group in weighing up the pros and cons before taking a final decision we can reap a lot of benefits.

Make sure all voices are heard

Many of these activities aim to enable the group to listen to itself, in all its components. At the 2022 Facilitation Impact Awards, co-host Shalaka Gundi reminded the assembly to “encourage the expression of all perspectives, including unconventional ones”. Complex challenges require a diversity of viewpoints and approaches; if we have ways for all voices to be heard, we have a higher chance of finding novel solutions to the challenges we face. 

Pave the way for easy implementation

When people are given an opportunity to express their opinions and take part in shaping a decision, they will be more likely to support its implementation. This is a matter of “buy-in”. Offering activities for participatory decision making will reduce the effort needed later to ensure tasks get done and work goes ahead.

Reduce uncertainty

By spending time in a decision making process together, it’s easier for a team to identify potential risks in fair advance. Going through structured steps to articulate the possible consequences of a decision improves clarity. Many conflicts are avoided by clearing away potential misunderstandings at the start of the process rather than carrying them with us like dead weights.

Save time

When people claim that deciding together is a waste of time, they are probably thinking of unstructured conversations, in which participants take tangents, lose track of the topic, and ultimately agree out of sheer exhaustion. Using facilitated activities, on the other hand, can help reach convergence relatively quickly, even in a large assembly.

Furthermore, in a classic paradox familiar to any facilitator, taking more time to work through a process together saves time in the long run. This might not be initially evident, and in fact is the source of much resistance to facilitated processes: they take time. Over and over again though, we see how involving stakeholders and potential users can save a lot of trouble, time and resources in the long run. An exhaustive cost-benefit analysis, for example, can help ensure more intelligent business decisions are made.  

Increase trust 

Through deciding together, a team grows! We learn to understand one another’s needs and concerns better, both in a personal sense and in terms of the needs of the different roles and departments. In the long run, working together towards a shared course of action increases trust and awareness in a group. 

Better decisions!

What makes a decision “good”? Once the results are out, we hope to see that our decisions have been efficient, get us closer to our goals, and in a cost- or resource-effective way. Deciding on our own might be the fastest solution (and is sometimes a perfectly adequate one, see this blog article for more on why), but deciding together leads to more sustainable decisions in time.

The most effective decision-making techniques

Facilitation often focuses on the divergent part of a group process, brainstorming and creativity, but decision-making can be fun and effective as well!

Here are 27 decision making methods and activities that can help you learn how to decide better as a group, and make more effective decisions together in a well-managed flow.

Decision-making techniques for ranking and prioritization 

Many facilitated decision-making processes go something like this: first we brainstorm options, then we vote on them, then we choose one or more to continue working on and refining. This sequence can apply, for example, to a consultation process, in which a team lead might ask the group for recommendations on actions to take in the next few months. There does not necessarily need to be “one single answer”, but an indication of interest.

In another scenario, the group might be looking for a direction for a proposal. The actual proposal will be worked on by a committee or a delegate and decided upon at a later time. Today, we are looking for ideas on what to base that proposal on. These are two possible situations in which what we are looking for is not yet a decision, but a prioritization.

Here are 6 decision-making tools that can help a group indicate preferences and rank alternatives.

Dotmocracy

This section is all about prioritization, and for prioritization, nothing beats dot-voting!

Whether you prefer sheets of sticky dots or just giving people markers, whether you are working in the physical world or with votes online, facilitators love dot-voting! Dot-voting allows a group to clearly and quickly visualize preferences and priorities at a glance. It’s a flexible, basic tool, easy to adapt to online environments as well.

There is even a mathematical formula for how many dots to assign. The formula is: N=[(T/2)xT]/P, where T=number of issues or topics, P=number of participants and N=number of dots needed for each person. Intrigued by that? Head over to this piece by John Amrhein, over at Michigan State University for a thorough explanation. Also note that it can be perfectly ok to give extra dots to the project lead or team manager, or tweak the system any other way that makes sense for your situation!

Impact and Effort Matrix

When inviting people to prioritize, it’s very important to pay attention to the words you use in formulating a question. 

Rather than using generic terms such as “vote for your favorite” or “put three dots on the idea you think is best”, take some time to consider what kind of direction you are really looking for. An inspiring version of this comes from John Croft, who suggests asking “Which of these actions, if taken first, will lead to all the others happening?”. That gives a clear sense of looking for priority in time, and speaks to unblocking resources and enabling future actions.

Another useful tip is to use matrixes such as this one from the Gamestorming innovation toolkit. In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. While this is similar to a cost benefit analysis, one bonus is that this matrix visualizes your various options as a basis for comparison and discussion.

How-Now-Wow Matrix

The How-Now-Wow matrix follows a similar principle, but while the Impact and Effort matrix is focused on return on investment, this one is designed to select the most innovative and original plans. The X-axis denotes the originality of the idea and the Y-axis shows the ease of implementation, and the group is looking for steps forward toward the most innovative and plausible courses of action.

When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’. The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox and helps the group sift through plans to select the “Wow” ones they wish to continue to work on. 

20/20 Vision

This team activity is useful to increase focus and alignment in a team, particularly when there are a lot of possible options, activities or campaigns on the table. In the 20/20 Vision sequence, participants are called to spell out the perceived benefits of different courses of action, then rank them by general importance.

After this part, which is arguably the real value of the method, the facilitator asks the team to compare initiatives to one another in pairs. Which of these two is more important for the organisation? The question gets repeated, and discussions continue until all proposals are ranked. 

Cost Benefit Analysis

Simple, tried and tested techniques might not be flashy, but they’re still effective ways to help you make a good decision. A Cost/Benefit analysis is among the most universally known way to help a company make a financial decision on how to move forward.

Start by clustering your ideas and then measure each by the cost associated with them as a team. Be sure to involve stakeholders to get an accurate costing, then move onto perceived benefits. Rank your items along these two axes to see which potential decision makes the most sense.

The 100$ Test

Working with restrictions, conditions and limiting factors is very useful to converge on a realistic decision. The 100$ test activity leverages this to speed up decision making and keep discussions grounded in the realities of resource allocation. Participants are asked to rank a list of items, initiatives or ideas based on how they would allocate an imaginary budget spending to each.

By using the concept of cash, this decision making technique captures more attention and keeps participants more engaged than an arbitrary point or ranking system. If this activity had a slogan it would surely be: put your money where your mouth is! 

NUF Test

The convergent phase of a decision making process flows best when constraints are clearly identified. The NUF Test helps with this by encouraging team members to test a potential decision against three limiting factors: is it New? Is it Useful? Is it Feasible?

This test, which is derived from processes used in patents, consists in a simple matrix written up on a whiteboard. Include a line for each idea, and rank solutions in terms of novelty, feasibility, and usefulness. This kind of simple analysis can really help make comparing pros and cons easier.

Decision-making techniques that mitigate the risk of groupthink

One of the most talked-about (and feared!) group dynamics is Groupthink. This refers to the risk that people will prefer harmony over innovation and, in any decision-making process, will go with whatever is the most popular option—or the option preferred by whoever is in charge! This is truly a dangerous dynamic that can take groups down the rabbit hole of complacency. How to prevent it from happening?

In general, groupthink is less likely to happen the more trust there is in the team. In an environment of psychological safety, everyone is encouraged to express their actual thoughts, not what they think others want them to think. Much of the facilitator’s work is directed at creating just such an environment. In the specific context of decision-making, here are 4 decision-making techniques that support psychological safety and will help you avoid groupthink!

1-2-4-All

1-2-4-all is the essential go-to method to combine in a single, effective flow, individual reflection, paired discussion and shared opinions. Any activity that includes individual reflection before making statements that are heard by others will help prevent groupthink.

Ask participants to brainstorm their ideas in their own notes, or to decide what they will dot-vote and write it on a sheet of paper. Give some time for individual work and only then invite actions that make that work visible to all (such as marking a vote on a shared whiteboard). It’s that simple!

The six thinking hats

In De Bono’s classic thinking hats method, the different hats represent different points of view on a topic with the facilitator (blue hat) inviting everyone to “wear” the different hats in turn. The white hat is for collecting data, and the green hat is for innovative ideas. Avoid groupthink by making sure everyone gets to wear the black hat before making decisions.

If a team is afraid to express contrasting views or, perhaps, unwilling to straight-out criticize a plan coming from the manager, a facilitator can make it safer to navigate that territory by explicitly inviting criticism in. In De Bono’s method, this is called the black hat. When we wear the black hat we are looking for risks, weak points and blind spots. Let’s all wear the black hat for a moment and see if we can come up with thoughts on why this is not a good idea!

TRIZ

Remove the obstacles to critical thinking with TRIZ! In this seriously fun method, participants dwell on the question: What could we do to make sure we achieve the absolute worst result possible? Next, in a second round: what are we already doing that looks like that (and we therefore should stop doing)?

Laughter often erupts, issues that are otherwise taboo get a chance to be aired and confronted. With creative destruction come opportunities for renewal as local action and innovation rush in to fill the vacuum. According to this intriguing article from the Harvard Business Review, avoiding groupthink is all about creating enough trust to be able to constructively challenge the way things have been done so far, and TRIZ is the perfect tool for that! 

Affinity Map

Conducting an analysis of various solutions and ideas without relying on intuition is a great method to bring to your process. Use an affinity map when you want to see pattens and make recommendations based the data generated from a brainstorm or other idea generation activity.

Start by putting all your ideas and possible solutions on post-its and then cluster them based on relationships and ideas clusters. Once you’ve clustered your ideas, you can then combine, remove and refine in order to move close to a final decision.

Decision-making techniques to converge upon a solution

In collective decision making it is key to find ways to enable everyone to express their agreement or disagreement with a certain course of action. It’s important to make space to hear different perspectives and evaluate before making decisions. Here are four practical decision making tools you can use to test the waters and enable all participants to make their voices heard.

Agreement-Certainty Matrix

As a precondition to collective decision making, we should know what type of problem we are facing. Different levels of uncertainty require different decision-making rules. If a problem is simple, for example, it’s not worth spending collective energy and time working on. An individual decision will suffice. On the other hand, group decision making is best suited to complicated or complex scenarios which require expertise and diversity.

But how do we know what kind of problem we are facing? The Agreement-Certainty practice from Liberating Structures invites participants to sit in small groups with the question “What type of problem are we facing?” Participants are invited to place their current challenges in a matrix based on these two questions: 

• What is the degree of agreement among the participants regarding the challenge and the best way to address it? 
• What is the degree of certainty and predictability about what results will be generated from the solutions proposed for addressing the challenge?

An awareness of the distinctions between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic scenarios is an important part of a team’s journey toward decision making mastery. The Cynefin framework is a more in-depth look into this topic, designed to support leaders to make decisions in context. 

Let’s Check Resistance

A big obstacle to taking decisions together is a tendency to want to push one’s favorite course of action rather than accept a decision that will work well, but is not everyone’s first preference. A concept that vastly helps to overcome this obstacle is the idea of a range of tolerance.

This activity from Airbus Leadership University invites participants to clarify and share what options are a “Personal preference”, which would encounter their firm “Objection” and what falls in their “Range of tolerance”. Visualising a wider area of tolerance, rather than limiting choices to a narrow Yes/No binary, makes it easier to find solutions that are acceptable to all parties. Very useful before a final decision is made. 

Feedback Frames

Feedback Frames are a colorful and fun solution designed by Jason Diceman in 2014 to facilitate the expression and visualization of preferences after a brainstorming or ideation session. Participants rate statements by dropping tokens in a range of slots that are hidden by a cover, with results later revealed as a visual graph of opinions.

This simple in-person analog tool (which can be ordered internationally at the Feedback Frames website) uses secret score voting to recognize nuanced gradients of agreement towards consensus and avoid traditional voting problems such as groupthink and vote-splitting.

Gradients of Agreement

Once the group has prioritized a few possible courses of action, a decision-making technique like Gradients of Agreement helps clarify how everyone feels with respect to each option. This tool supports inclusion by ensuring team members have an opportunity to specify the level of their agreement or disagreement with a decision under discussion.

By marking their choice of a statement ranging from whole-hearted endorsement to vetoing, participants can express views in a more nuanced way than a mere “yes/no” vote. This version of what is also known as “quality voting” comes from the work of Sam Kaner and associates in the classic Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making.

Fist to Five

Fist to Five is a simple series of hand signals solving the problem of how to test for agreement, and move towards convergence, in a way that is easy to communicate, quick to do, and can work for large gatherings. Like other solutions such as Gradients of Agreement and Feedback Frames, it is based on the idea of giving participants more options than just Yes or No, in this case inviting them to show interest in a certain proposal on a scale from 0 to 5, with a show of hands (or, better, of fingers).

This 1-minute activity can on its own be enough to quickly clarify which course of action the group should take. In other cases, it might not be decisive on its own, but can still help decision makers and facilitators decide the next steps. Checking for agreement in this quick way might, for example, lead to discarding one option but keeping another two to continue working with using other tools.

Closing activities to turn a decision into action

In closing, it’s useful to support individuals in understanding what individual action they will need to take personally to implement the decision. Once the direction has been set collectively, what are the practical next steps? The next 5 decision-making tools are great to close a workshop session on a pragmatic note, ensuring that everyone leaves with a clear sense of their personal next steps. 

Start, Stop, Continue

Start, Stop, Continue is a very flexible exercise developed by Gamestorming methods. It simply asks participants to share their responses to 3 questions: What do we need to start doing? Stop doing? Continue doing?

Use this activity after a decision has been agreed upon to define the practical next steps for its implementation. Sharing what we need to start, stop and continue will of course lead to a discussion. If there is no time left for that, you can still use a variation of the same activity, simply asking each participant for one action they will start, stop and/or continue in order to make sure the decision is implemented effectively. 

Backcasting

Backcasting is a very effective planning tool to support defining next steps. It makes sense to use it after a decision making process if the decision is long-term and implementation steps are not yet clear.

In a bit of time-travel, the facilitator invites participants to describe what success will be like in, say, 5 or 10 years if the decision is implemented. Then, the group moves to ideating what needs to be done in 5, 2, 1 year, in order to put the conditions for success in place. And what about in 6 months? And tomorrow? Backcasting is a wonderful tool for transforming a common goal into a practical plan. 

3 Action Steps

In a similar vein to backcasting, this activity from Hyper Island encourages participants to use their imagination to visualise what will happen in the future once the decision is implemented, then works backwards to define practical actions. In small groups, participants share the overall vision, supporting and hindering factors, and land on defining three next steps to take.

This is a small-scale strategic planning session that helps groups and individuals to take action toward a desired change. It is often used at the end of a workshop or programme. 

15% Solutions

Economist Gareth Morgan popularized the idea of 15% solutions in his 1998 article, where he stated that small actions that can be taken easily have the potential to trigger substantial change. “What is your 15 percent? Where do you have discretion and freedom to act? What can you do without more resources or authority?”

Use this quick, practical decision making technique to encourage participants to take immediate action to implement a decision they have just taken. Make sure to stress that this is about small, easy actions (a phone call, an email, setting a meeting): taking action immediately is a boost to motivation, empowerment and self-organisation. 

Training activities to learn about decision-making

Looking for some activities for a training workshop on decision-making? Here are 5 ideas to start with! These are games and simulations designed to help a group think through a decision together. Run them with your team, then settle down to debrief and discuss what works well for you in deciding together!

Delegation levels

It’s important for a team to build a shared understanding of the different possible ways a decision can be taken. Delegation levels is a decision making technique designed to get your group talking about when it is appropriate for a leader to decide on their own, when consultation is necessary, when to decide together. The group over at Management 3.0 has designed handouts and a set of “poker cards” to help you clarify management styles and possible different approaches to decision-making. Having more options in mind allows for more flexibility and adaptability in the team!

Escape hopeland

Escape hopeland is a game created for an Erasmus+ youth exchange which can definitely inspire you to create something similar based on the specific needs of the team you are working with. Create a map, which can refer to a real-world situation, a board game, or an online whiteboard with a series of “stations”.

Each station represents a decision, a choice, or an ethical dilemma. Participants navigate the map differently based on their choices, then regroup at the end to discuss.

As with all such role-playing games, the debrief part of the activity is crucial. Facilitate a conversation around powerful questions such as: how did you influence one another in deciding?  

Decisions, decisions

Becoming skilled decision-makers also implies being aware of personal biases, styles and approaches in deciding. By learning more about them, we grow in personal awareness, and increase trust and effectiveness in a team.

This activity from Thiagi group is designed to open a discussion around risk-taking. Why are some people more or less risk averse, and how will that influence our decisions as a whole?

Personally, I remember when my co-facilitator casually mentioned in passing that I was more risk-averse than him. It led to a cascade of realizations; talking about this difference in our preferences and styles brought us to a wiser place, where I take decisions for the team if a situation is risky, and he does the same in safer spaces, leading to a better balance and a forward momentum in our team!

The trolley dilemma

In this simulation meant to stretch our moral and ethics muscles, the group discusses options they would take in a difficult scenario. The debrief focusses on understanding that we make decisions based on different personal sets of values.

The implication here is that in order to efficiently make decisions as a group, we need to first clarify our group values, as well as share a general understanding of each other’s value sets, so that they may all be acknowledged and addressed. Shared group values can become north stars to guide and align decision-making.

The cushions game

The cushions game is a playful way to start a deep conversation around competition, cooperation, win-win solutions and the importance of clear communication of goals.

The facilitator assigns three groups different instructions that appear to be incompatible. There is, in fact, a win-win-win solution, but in order to reach it participants must be willing to start communicating with the perceived adversary and reveal their goal.

I’ve led this game innumerable times, and have unforgettable memories of members of a small political party turning it into an unsolvable pillow fight… as well as of conflict resolution students solving it in less than 60 seconds (admirable, albeit anti-climatic). Extremes apart, it is a fun game that can lead to some powerful revelations in the debrief section. 

Activity flows designed for taking collective decision making

Now that you are familiar with the building blocks of converging on a group decision, you might be wondering how to string these all together. Here are four examples of complete workflows going from brainstorming all the way to implementing a shared decision.

Lighting Decision Jam

A very pragmatic, lighting-quick approach to going from ideation to decision comes in this method card contributed by AJ&Smart. Here is a great example of putting it all together in a design-sprint inspired flow!

Start by framing the challenge, go on to ideating solutions, dot-voting, prioritizing via an impact/effort matrix, and selecting actionable tasks for implementation. Short, focused sessions like this are great for making decisions quickly and effectively as a group.

Sociocratic “Consent” Decision Making

Consent decision-making, as described by practitioners of Sociocracy, is a highly effective way to reach group decisions. Once a team is skilled in using it (which, disclaimer, can take some time and training!), decisions come quickly and efficiently. Participants know that their fears will be kept into consideration and included in the decision, as long as they see clear risks to the group and its mission.

In this activity, you’ll find a summary explanation of how consent works in teams. The practice develops as a series of talking rounds, in which participants can ask clarification questions, then express their feelings and comments and finally give their consent or objection to a proposal. In effect, the proposal is co-designed by the entire team through a structured process. To find more details on sociocracy you can refer to the education organization Sociocracy for All’s website. 

Decision-making meeting

Consent decision-making in practice works as a series of facilitated rounds, designed to refine a proposal and ensure concerns are identified and integrated into an improved decision.

Find here a detailed template you can read through and take inspiration from to ferry a group from ideation into deciding based on sociocratic principles. 

How to Facilitate a Quarterly Planning Process (detailed guide)

How to effectively take decisions together while working in a fully remote team? At SessionLab we use a structured decision making process to set priorities and decide what we will work on each quarter. Check out this detailed article to see what works for us, from ideating actions to checking who will do what. 

This is a highly participatory consultation process, as each team manager has the last word as to tasks to prioritize and metrics to assign. We’ve found it an effective way of making business decisions as a team. In the accompanying template you can find further details on how much time to assign to each step. 

In closing

What activities have you used to support decision-making? Do they reflect the ones we’ve collected here? If you have any new ones, consider adding them to SessionLab’s library of methods: as mentioned above, facilitators tend to have a richer toolkit for divergence than for convergence, so let’s work on closing that gap!