Designing engaging learning flows 

Whether it’s guiding a team through a strategic planning session or running NGO leadership training, the journey begins with a well-designed agenda. 

While Tucker had previously used Excel to design his sessions, after using SessionLab, Tucker says he couldn’t go back.

“Excel is not a great tool for professional workshoppers designing a lot of experiences. I wondered what other agenda tools were out there and found SessionLab. I looked around in general and I thought oh, no, SessionLab. This is the agenda tool. We use it every day.”

For visual thinkers like Tucker, SessionLab’s simple overview and color coding is a massive boon to the workshop design process. 

“I love the color coding because it helps us know what we’re looking for in all of our experiences. It lets me quickly see what each section of the workshop is doing at a glance.”

In SessionLab, you can flexibly color-code every block and instantly see a visual breakdown of your session in the mini-map. color code by activity type, learning style or whatever taxonomy suits your needs. 

Tucker and the team at Thrive Impact use a standardized color scheme across their agendas to keep all their designers and co-facilitators on the same page. 

“For example, green is for breakout rooms where participants are connecting with one another while yellow is for group sharing in the main room. Purple is a video or large group activity and blue is when a facilitator delivers content and training. Then we have red for a break or reflection.”

By color coding in this way, Tucker is able to easily see the ratio between different activity types and create a balanced and effective learning flow.

“We’re looking for a good ratio of green, purple and blues activities. If we have too much blue, that means we have too much content and we need to re-balance the agenda, because we already know based on the data around learning experiences that people don’t always learn well that way.”

For Tucker, well-designed and balanced experiences are the foundation of an effective workshop, especially when working in a virtual environment. By using SessionLab, the team is able to quickly create sessions that engage their clients in a spirit of co-creation and problem solving. 

Effective co-creation

Effective collaboration and team alignment is a key aspect of any successful NGO. Similarly, Tucker and his team use SessionLab to co-create their agendas and collaborate on the design together in one-place. 

“We all pull up Session Lab and go through the agenda at the same time. We start with a high level overview of where we’re going and then go down to the nitty gritty details.”

Once a high-level design is agreed upon, the team at Thrive Impact will assign each team member to the section or block they’re delivering so each facilitator can work on their script or content and easily get feedback from colleagues.

At the top of each agenda, they’ll add a note with important links and team roles to ensure everyone is aligned going into the session. With everything they need in one-place, Tucker and his team are able to deliver exceptional learning experiences, every time. 

Creating a repeatable, systematized process in SessionLab has also helped the team streamline their workflow, save time and focus on what matters most.

“We have people on our team who love to systemize the process in SessionLab and it’s immensely important because it saves so much time.”

A big part of this process is about institutionalizing knowledge and making previous agendas and activities available to the team.

Not only does using templates and a team library help the team at Thrive save time, but it also helps them transfer knowledge and train new members effectively.

“With our SessionLab library, we can go in and say, oh yeah, I need to do that paired interview. Let me drag and pull that into my agenda and then I can make it my own. We can say, hey, go into the templates and take a look. That kind of internal collaboration and institutionalization is great.”

Supporting session delivery 

When Tucker first started using SessionLab, what stuck out to him most was the ability to stay in control of time and dynamically update session timing during a workshop.

“The thing that was initially really helpful was the fact that you could have dynamic time in SessionLab. There are many times in the room where we actually add time as we go. So we’re like, wow, this section went way over and we’ll add extra minutes and adjust activities directly.”

In SessionLab, every block has a set time allocation. When you make changes in real-time, your total time and schedule will update automatically, giving you the confidence to make changes and see the impact on the rest of your agenda. 

Tucker is also able to understand how he’s performing against schedule and make informed decisions on what to change while facilitating. 

“We know in real time where the train is on the track from a schedule perspective. That’s an important benefit of using SessionLab for us, too.”

Time-locks have also been useful to the team at Thrive Impact. By locking time sensitive items in place, they’re able to ensure that there’s time left for reflection or breaks and that they cover everything needed. 

“We always put a time lock at the very end of a session for five minutes. We know we always want to end a session with heart, which is really ending with space for reflection. Time-locking blocks gives me a good sense of how long I have.”

Conclusion 

When NGOs are given the tools to plan strategically, reduce burnout and solve core problems, they can create impactful and lasting change. 

For the team at Thrive Impact, that change all starts with a balanced and engaging session design. SessionLab plays a part in helping Tucker and the team design effective learning experiences and help NGOs achieve their goals and make change in the world. 

“We love SessionLab. We run so many workshops that we literally use it, almost every business day.”

Using SessionLab to design learning flows and collaborate with subject matter experts has helped Vlerick save time, be more efficient and create programs that engage learners – whether as part of a degree program, executive learning or bespoke company training. Here’s how.

Structured, efficient learning design

An effective self-paced course, training session or blended learning program starts with a well-crafted learning flow informed by the needs of potential learners. At Vlerick, the process begins with a conversation and an outline in SessionLab.

“First, we analyze the needs of the customer or the audience. Then we talk with faculty and discuss learning objectives, learning activities, topics and the learning journey. When we have an idea of what we need to have in there, that’s the moment we would start using SessionLab.”

Even before they begin to use a content authoring tool or set things up in an LMS, Vlerick uses SessionLab to create a learning flow that serves as a foundation for all of their programs. 

“We use SessionLab as our skeleton before we start creating digital assets and finally add them to our learning management system. The day SessionLab came into my work life I was so happy because it felt so structured.” 

Vlerick starts the process by adding blocks with simple titles to quickly create an overview of their program. By reorganizing blocks and iterating quickly in SessionLab, they’re able to quickly craft a skeleton curriculum that meets the needs of their target audience.

Whether a course is self-paced or delivered in a blended learning environment, a well-balanced program with a mix of different interaction types is a vital part of engaging learners.

Vlerick uses SessionLab’s color coding to ensure they find the right balance and make informed decisions about their curriculum.

“We use the color coding in SessionLab to indicate the different sort of interaction methods and that helps at every stage. We know that if a block is blue, it will be a video, if it’s red, it will be an interactive resource or multimedia. This ensures we create a good balance: not to have five videos in a row, not to have five articles in a row, to have the right interaction moments. It’s very visible.”

SessionLab is designed to be flexible, so whatever kind of learning program Vlerick is designing, they’re able to co-create quickly and with confidence. 

Effective collaboration with subject matter experts

Once a learning design has been drafted in SessionLab, it’s time to get involvement from subject matter experts and members of the faculty.

Finding time in the busy agendas of their faculty poses one of the biggest challenges for the team at Vlerick but thankfully, SessionLab is able to help here too.

“With SessionLab, it’s easy for us to have a meeting where we go through the learning design with our content experts and it helps in the collaboration. We collect their feedback and make adjustments in real time.”

In SessionLab, it’s easy to share your agenda and collaborate in the best format for your collaborators. Invite subject matter experts to leave comments and add materials directly to the relevant learning blocks. Co-create in real-time or stay aligned asynchronously with track changes and comments. 

Subject matter experts at Vlerick often have their own ways of working. However you and your colleagues choose to work, SessionLab’s flexibility allows you to move forward efficiently and save time in the learning design process.

“Sometimes we have faculty who go into SessionLab themselves and add text to blocks or leave comments. Other times, we get the input for the storyboard in a meeting and make notes. Often, we receive a Word document or a PowerPoint from a subject matter expert and we put it into the specific block in SessionLab and brainstorm how we can add activities related to that and analyze how they fit into our storyboard.”

Attaching course materials and content from subject matter experts to your learning design in SessionLab is an effective way to keep everything organized and in one-place.

Never lose a crucial Powerpoint or Word document from a member of your faculty again. Attach key materials to specific blocks in your learning flow so it’s easy for everyone collaborating to find what they need.

Designing and iterating on learning flows as a result of feedback is also common for most learning designers. Rather than having endless versions and iterations of their sessions lost in folders and emails, Vlerick uses SessionLab to collaborate and consolidate their learning designs in one place.

“In SessionLab, workflows with ‘final final version two documents’ are a thing of the past.”

By creating a single source of truth, Vlerick is able to design confidently, save headaches and ensure all their collaborators are able to find what they need.

Saving time and improving organizational efficiency 

Building an entire learning program from scratch is a lot of work. With SessionLab, Vlerick has been able to optimize the process of creating a new program. They’ve also been able to save valuable time by reusing and adjusting their programs and learning material.

“We run a five module program for one of our clients with four reruns every year. Previously, I would know the program by heart and go through every module every time. I would go into the Word document, find the steps where I need to make changes, then write them on an email, add the link to the platform, send it to my colleague and she would go in the platform and make those changes but every time I had to review module by module so it would take me a whole day. Now I have all the content in SessionLab and it doesn’t even take me one hour anymore.”

In SessionLab, Vlerick can simply duplicate their previous course and make notes of what needs to change. Rather than needing to redo the whole program and resend document versions, Luisa and all the learning designers at Vlerick will make changes in SessionLab and invite colleagues to work with her on the specific sections which need their attention. 

The learning designer will mark blocks for the attention of the content builder to use when creating assets and another for her colleague in the admin department. Everyone in the workflow knows exactly what’s expected of them and can collaborate efficiently. 

By switching to SessionLab and improving their workflow, Luisa has been able to make a whole day’s work fit into just one hour of focused collaboration. 

SessionLab is also helpful when it comes to helping Vlerick keep organized records of all their programs in one-place. When creating their materials, learning designers at Vlerick sometimes reuse specific activities or they’ll review previously run programs created for returning clients. 

“Previously, if we had to recreate, rebuild or review the program, it was impossible to find those documents again. One of the values of SessionLab is that if I left tomorrow, and in two years, a colleague has to go back to one of the programs I worked on, she could just find it in SessionLab.” 

By reusing existing designs and creating templates, Vlerick has been able to save time and also unify their style and increase efficiency across the team.  

“We work with a lot of builders and designers who have their own ways of working and we have our own style too. Creating templates in SessionLab has helped us to align more.”

In SessionLab, you can add sections and checklists for each stage of your learning flow. Most of Vlerick’s learning programs have common elements that need to be filled in every time.

By adding sections for each key item to their templates, they can ensure nothing is missed and that their content team has everything they need to quickly add the flow to their LMS.

Leave notes to the template to make it easy for trainers and content experts to follow. Add checklists and color coding to create an efficient workflow and transfer knowledge across your team easily.

For Vlerick, this has been a vital part of onboarding new team members and getting them up to speed with creating learning flows. 

“SessionLab is helpful with alignments and processes. As our team grew a lot and we added new colleagues, it’s now much easier to adapt the process, because it’s all there in SessionLab.” 

Storyboarding and instructional design made easy 

Creating learning programs, whether for a self-paced course or blended learning format can often feel like a balancing act. Instructional designers need to manage the input of subject matter experts, carefully craft a learning flow and collaborate with content designers – all before moving material to an LMS.

When designing materials for their degree programs, executive learning courses and bespoke trainings, Vlerick Business School needed a tool that helped them design effective learning flows and improve efficiency across their team. 

With SessionLab, Vlerick has been able to streamline the process of creating their initial learning designs and storyboards. By also optimizing their collaborations with subject matter experts and templating their programs, they’ve been able to save time across the board – all while delivering exceptional experiences to their learners. 

“SessionLab is the one place where everyone can find all the storyboards for all the programs we designed within the school. It really helps with efficiency and time saving.”

The team at IPK needed a tool that allowed them to meticulously plan and design their sessions down to the minute. With SessionLab, they’ve been able to optimize their workflow and achieve meaningful savings in time and cost too. With contributions from Marc Steinlin and Nqaba Mpofu at IPK, let’s explore how.

Powerful features to support impactful workshops

When it comes to designing impactful sessions, IPK takes a comprehensive approach. With SessionLab, they are easily able to create detailed plans to best meet their client’s needs. 

“For the planning and preparation of our events, we rely on SessionLab as a vital tool in actualizing our designs. SessionLab assists us in meticulously organizing a range of activities into engaging sessions that are executed both virtually and in-person.” 

In SessionLab, the team at IPK are able to create minute-perfect agendas while maintaining complete control over every detail. Facilitators and workshop designers are able to set precise timing for each item in their agenda and add detailed instructions where needed. 

“SessionLab’s automatic time calculations are a critical tool, ensuring that our schedules are precise and free of errors. We can update and adapt them real time, all while staying on the same page. This level of detail, accuracy and synchronicity in planning is instrumental in the seamless execution and success of our events.”

With a flexible Session Planner, they’re able to design their sessions in a way that supports their process. The result? A minute-perfect up-to-date agenda that creates the foundation for an effective session. 

“Our belief is that the meticulous planning of our sessions contributes to 80% of our success in events. This involves detailed planning for every minute of the event, often requiring granular attention to detail. SessionLab greatly facilitates this process through its user-friendly interface, intuitive layout, and efficient session builder.”

Streamlined workflow 

Effective collaboration is a vital part of how a consultancy is able to deliver incredible results for their clients.

In SessionLab, the multi-national team at IPK is able to collaborate in real-time and dynamically design their sessions. Team members can leave comments and iterate on their agendas in one place, streamlining their process and ensuring nothing gets lost in a long email chain. For the team at IPK, it was a massive step-up from their previous tools. 

“Previously, we relied on a combination of Excel sheets for timing and Word documents for facilitation plans. SessionLab revolutionized our workflow by allowing us to create ‘blocks’ of activities, which we can add to our library for enhanced reusability in future designs, thus saving significant time.” 

Creating a library of their best content, IPK are able to streamline their process and reuse activities in future sessions, across their whole team. Best practices are followed, time is saved, and the whole team is able to optimize their workflow. 

“The ability to efficiently pull activities from previously designed sessions into current ones has been a key factor in saving time.”

Another time-consuming part of the workshop design process is finalizing your agenda and getting it ready to share with clients and participants. SessionLab saves the team time at this stage too!

“Another valuable feature we utilize is the ability to export our planned sessions into Word documents, creating well-structured agendas. Before SessionLab, this process involved creating four separate items: a timing sheet, a facilitation plan, a materials list, and an agenda.

Now, with SessionLab, all these elements are consolidated in one location, making it easier to extract and share specific parts with different audiences as needed. This streamlined approach significantly enhances our efficiency and organization in planning and conducting our events.”

By sharing a live link to their SessionLab agenda, IPK can keep their participants updated and aligned, even during an event. Any changes are instantly visible by all viewers, so whatever changes, you and your team can facilitate with confidence.

With SessionLab, IPK have been able to reduce the overhead and busywork of preparing their sessions and focus on what matters: delivering exceptional experiences to their clients and empowering meaningful change.

Effective co-creation with clients 

IPK primarily work with clients in international cooperation and public service sectors. The work they do includes leadership development, navigating complexity, promoting well-being, and fostering innovation.

These are high-impact areas for any team, and IPK are invested in creating long-lasting changes that engage an entire organization. 

“We operate under the philosophy that organizations are complex-adaptive systems. We are dedicated to ensuring that change is not merely a top-down effort but a collaborative and inclusive process, which we consider essential for sustainable success.”

Co-creation is a vital part of making this happen. With SessionLab, it’s easy for the team at IPK to engage stakeholders early in the process and ensure that any design they create is fit for purpose. 

“Another significant aspect is our capacity to share and co-create designs with our clients directly through SessionLab. This collaborative approach enhances client engagement and customization of our services.” 

When designing their sessions, IPK are able to invite clients as editors or viewers, ensuring that each stakeholder can collaborate in the way that suits them best. When it’s time to present materials to clients, they can export their agenda in Word, PDF or Powerpoint to get buy-in and sign-off. 

“Finally, once a session design receives client approval, SessionLab simplifies the process of extracting the agenda. This ease of sharing the finalized agenda with our clients further streamlines our workflow and enhances our professional service delivery.”

Creating solutions to tough problems while working with organizational complexity is a challenge for any consultancy. IPK believe that “for meaningful change or progress to occur, it’s crucial to engage all parts of these systems.” 

With SessionLab, they’ve been able to involve their clients directly in the design process, improve outcomes, and streamline their workflow. 

Saved time and reduced costs 

With the collaborative processes they create, IPK have been able to unleash the power of groups and create change for teams across the world. SessionLab has played a part in saving time during their design work and streamlining their process. 

“Our utilization of SessionLab has significantly streamlined our design process, resulting in a notable reduction in time spent on session planning. The key benefits we’ve observed with SessionLab include time savings, reduced errors, and the convenience of having a central repository for all our activity planning.

This combination of efficiency and reliability has greatly enhanced our operational effectiveness.”

Saving time and improving efficiency by using SessionLab hasn’t just made the team at IPK more efficient. They’ve also been able to leverage this into creating savings for their clients and maintaining an edge in an increasingly competitive market.

“The time savings made while using SessionLab translate directly into cost reductions, which we can pass on to our clients. This aspect of cost efficiency plays a crucial role in maintaining our competitive edge in the market.” 

SessionLab is designed to offer the flexibility and power teams need in order to achieve their goals and meet client goals. By bringing SessionLab to their consultancy, IPK have been empowered to create meaningful change and save costs across the organization.

Groundwork have used SessionLab since 2019, and it’s become a vital part of how they design, deliver and collaborate on their training programs and workshops. Here’s how.

Simple, powerful agenda planning

Organizational culture and personal development is Groundwork’s bread and butter. Whether it’s a single workshop or an ongoing development program, everything starts with a well-structured agenda design.

Previously Groundwork used documents and spreadsheets to design their sessions, but found the process inefficient. When they discovered SessionLab, all that changed.

“We did workshop-planning in the old style with Microsoft Word and all kinds of Excel sheets. A friend of mine showed me SessionLab, and I loved it from the beginning. SessionLab provides a very effective and visual tool to design good workshops.”

With the Session Planner, the team at Groundwork are able to visually create their agendas by simply dragging and dropping blocks into place. Simple but powerful features like colour coding activities and automatic time calculation helps make the design process a flow experience. 

Delivering engaging, successful experiences

When building the foundation for team development, the bare minimum isn’t enough. At Groundwork, they use SessionLab to help them create exceptional experiences for their clients and workshop participants.

“A successful outcome is an interactive, learnful and emotional experience for our workshop participants full of surprises, safety and aha moments.”

That’s a lot of pressure for the facilitators on the team to design and deliver an impactful experience that will produce lasting change. Thankfully, SessionLab is able to help at every step of the process. 

While designing a session, Groundwork facilitators always invite a colleague to review their agenda before delivering them to a client. In SessionLab, it’s easy for the team at Groundwork to invite stakeholders to review their sessions, leave comments and even collaborate asynchronously or in real-time.

“Best for us was that we could all work on the SessionLab agenda together as a team without having to meet in person”.

SessionLab is designed to make the process of updating and refining your agenda quick and easy. Reorder your blocks to quickly test alternative session flows. With automatic time calculation, you can be certain your timing will remain accurate, whatever changes you make. 

And the end result? A well-structured workshop that meets client needs, engages participants and makes it easy to facilitate. 

“We facilitated a vision/mission workshop with one of our clients and through the exact design in SessionLab, we created a 2 day learning arena in which we could fulfil all their requirements.The experience was fun, entertaining and full of learning.” 

Improving team workflow 

Staying organized and managing the workflow of the team is a challenge the facilitation team at Groundwork solve with SessionLab. They reuse and adapt their existing workshop designs and share agendas across the team.

As an international team, they also find it useful to have all their content in one-place that they can access from anywhere with an internet connection.

“SessionLab solves the challenge of having access to all kinds of workshop designs. Because it works like a cloud, we can all access it very easily.” 

A team workspace has made it easy for Groundwork to collect and manage their agenda designs. It’s easy to invite new team members to the workspace for an ongoing collaboration or simply invite a client to review a single session.

When working with clients, Groundwork finds the ability to export agendas in the format of their choice a massive benefit.

“We can easily share an agenda with our clients, that makes us look more professional.”

By working together in SessionLab and making it a part of their design, client sign-off and delivery process, Groundwork have been able to streamline their workflow and supercharge collaboration. 

Better workshops and happier clients

Great results and happy clients are vital for the long term health of any consultancy. Using SessionLab has helped Groundwork design and deliver impactful workshops, training sessions and development programs to hundreds of clients. 

“Through SessionLab we work more effectively, we’re more goal oriented and in the end we do better workshops.”

Whether it’s helping teams create innovation, connect to their values or develop their staff, quality is at the heart of what Groundwork does. With SessionLab in their design process, they’re able to deliver high quality client experiences and save time while collaborating too!  

They help organizations create new structures and practices to support team development while also developing the workforces fit for the future.

Designing sessions to satisfy the needs of clients across the world and collaborating effectively has been a challenge that Joy Guilleux, Jim Wicks and the rest of the team at Cultivating Leadership have been using SessionLab to help them solve.

Let’s find out how. 

A simple, effective design tool 

Busy agencies and consultancies need effective tools to help streamline their processes and deliver value to their clients. 

At Cultivating Leadership, they found the tools they were using to design their sessions were creating additional work and overhead. Since switching to SessionLab, they’ve been able to optimize their design process and work more efficiently.

“Prior to Sessionlab we tended to use mainly Word documents or Google docs. Sessionlab gives us a repeatable structure for session plans/runsheets that is easily shared and takes away some of the messiness – like calculating timing, filing and searching.” 

When designing workshops for clients, it’s common to go back and forth on the session design to find a perfect flow. The team at Cultivating Leadership has found the Session Planner especially helpful at this stage of the process.

“The hardest thing for us is often what to leave out – in Sessionlab we can easily see the flow of a session as well as the timing and can play with this in a dynamic way without losing data or creating extra work.”

Moving from ideation to a completed design can be a dance of finding great activities and testing different flows. With SessionLab, it’s easy for Jim and Joy to simply drag, drop and reorder blocks to quickly try different flows.

As their team makes changes to their workshop design, the session timing automatically recalculates, saving them time and effort they can instead spend on the hundred other things they need to do.

“When colleagues see the flexibility of moving blocks around, the automatic timing adjustments, and the ability to make facilitator notes separate/side by side with the design notes, it makes it hard to go back.”

Creating value for clients 

Cultivating Leadership seeks to create continuing value for the organizations they work with. This means the interventions, sessions and processes they develop for clients are varied and bespoke in nature.

“Much of our work is tailored to specific client needs so we need a way to be constantly session planning and re-planning while also preserving and building on what we know. With more of what we do housed in SessionLab, it is easier to do that.”

To enable this kind of organizational change and deliver value for their clients, the team at Cultivating Leadership collect their existing knowledge and designs in SessionLab and use them to inform the work they do. And when it comes to long term programs, they’ve found SessionLab to be a useful way to stay organized and create impact.

“One way I’ve seen SessionLab shine is by tracking multiple sessions over a year. So, when we are planning an arc of a program, we can have all the session designs in one place and refer back and forward, and keep notes of what was planned, and what actually happened.” 

Collaborating with external stakeholders is a vital part of an consultancy’s workflow. In SessionLab you can collaborate with your clients in a way that works for you. 

Invite your partners directly to your session to co-create and edit in real-time. Working across timezones? Leave comments and notes to your agenda to iterate asynchronously. Prefer to share a simple overview? Export a PDF to share over email or bring to a client meeting. 

“We can easily collaborate with clients or partners without compromising the data security of our wider dataset.”

Secure and efficient collaborations are important to the team at Cultivating Leadership. However you and your client choose to work together, SessionLab helps you collaborate effectively and with confidence.  

Efficient collaboration across time zones 

Cultivating Leadership has team members working from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, USA and more. With a truly global team, they needed a tool that allowed them to stay organized and in-sync when working with clients.

Using Word Documents and emailing agenda designs back and forth can result in an inefficient workflow or cause things to be lost in the process. But thankfully, there’s a better way.

Colleagues who use SessionLab talk about what a time saver it is vs. using Word docs.

With SessionLab, Joy and Jim have been able to collaborate effectively and deliver meaningful results to clients, wherever they’re located. 

“Day to day we use SessionLab as a tool in our design process. It allows us to easily work remotely across time zones and has great features that enables design to be completed from the high-level through to detailed. It allows multiple people to work both asynchronously and synchronously.”

Every session your agency designs and runs is a valuable resource for learning and re-use. At Cultivating Leadership, they’ve found that collecting all of their session design work in one place has helped improve productivity and efficiency. They can go to SessionLab to get ideas, find the right session quickly and save time and energy while designing too!

“Benefits that have evolved have been the ease of access, consistent standards of format and a library of tools and ideas. We are no longer wasting as much time and energy on different styles of presentation or searching the wider filing system.” 

The tools your team needs to succeed 

Cultivating Leadership enjoys working with organizations that seek to do-good in the world and invest in their people. They also walk the talk, creating a culture of compassion and generosity that allows their team to bring their whole selves to work and find happiness in what they do.

“Having the tools to do our work is identified as a driver of satisfaction and SessionLab is one of those tools. Colleagues ask to use SessionLab.”

SessionLab has had a small part to play in helping the team at Cultivating Leadership find satisfaction and efficiency in the work they do as well as making it easier to share their ideas generously amongst the team.

“The structure of the tool helps my thought processes, my interactions with colleagues and supports me to document only what is needed. A bonus is the growing database of reference material from other colleagues.”

Enabling your team with the right tools not only improves productivity and efficiency, but it can also drive satisfaction and collaboration. With SessionLab, Cultivating Leadership is able to free-up time in their design process, collaborate thoughtfully and deliver value to their clients.

Efficient tools and processes that support your work can help ensure you deliver value to your clients and get more done in less time.

Matt Davies is a leadership consultant, executive coach and facilitator who knows what it means to deliver impactful sessions for demanding clients. 

Here’s how SessionLab helps him succeed.

A tool designed for facilitators 

Facilitators deserve a tool designed for their needs. Matt had been using Word and Excel to design and adjust his sessions but found they weren’t the best tool for the job.

“A big chunk of my work is designing and delivering training and facilitating sessions. I’d always used Word to write notes and then something like Excel to work out timings but that was messy and had too many moving parts. It also meant that changes like re-ordering sessions was messy.”

With SessionLab, Matt is able to quickly move from ideation to a complete agenda design without the mess.

Simply add blocks then drag and drop them around to build your session. When you add or adjust timing for each block, SessionLab recalculates your overall duration automatically. Whatever changes Matt makes, he can stay organized and trust that the timing is accurate. 

“SessionLab has been a game changer. It’s the single thing I most often recommend to fellow facilitators.”

When refining your design, it’s also useful to invite a co-facilitator or client to your session to leave comments and notes while you iterate. In fact, it’s how Matt first discovered SessionLab!  

“I didn’t realise a system like this existed until a fellow facilitator asked for my advice and to collaborate on a piece of work she was doing. She sent over a link and it blew me away! I signed up that day and upgraded to the premium version very quickly afterwards.”

Support your design process

Designing a perfect learning flow with a balanced set of activities is one of Matt’s biggest challenges. A long Word document or complicated Excel table can make it difficult to quickly get a sense of how the session will actually feel for participants. 

“My biggest challenges are just being able to visualise the flow of the event and being able to recognise how interactive something is or whether it’s too ‘teach-heavy’. SessionLab’s colour coding is massively useful for that. I take a look at the day overview and get a feel for where the exercises and discussions are, where the breaks are, etc. It’s such a powerful thing to be able to see!”

SessionLab’s simple, visual overview helps Matt ensure his sessions are balanced and well positioned to meet his client’s goals. By color coding his blocks, it’s easy for Matt to get a sense of the learning flow and make educated tweaks at speed.

Impress your clients 

Delivering value to clients is imperative for a successful consultancy. SessionLab helps Matt work effectively at each stage of the client journey. 

When putting together a proposal, it’s hard to impress a client with a back of a napkin sketch or a bullet-point list in a Word document. Matt uses SessionLab to support this process by quickly creating a beautiful PDF of his in-progress session for client review. 

“I LOVE being able to quickly draft ideas for sessions and produce professional looking PDFs by using the Day Overview function – that way when I’m putting proposals to potential clients, I’m not giving away all of my secrets and I can also create them without having full view of the content; i.e. I can come up with a skeleton of a plan where I haven’t fleshed out every single block and still send it over looking slick.“

However you choose to collaborate with your clients, SessionLab supports your process. Customize a printout of your session to share the level of detail you need with your client.

Want a more collaborative process? Invite your client to leave comments and notes on your session or co-create your agenda in real-time in a consultancy meeting. 

Redesign and adjust at speed

Delivering the first draft of your agenda is an important milestone but the work isn’t over yet. After designing a session and getting feedback from a client, it’s time to adjust and prepare for the day of the workshop. 

Matth uses SessionLab to complete new agendas for his clients, but also to refine existing materials and ensure they’re fit for purpose.

“I use SessionLab for designing, tweaking and delivering training and facilitated sessions. I will design sessions directly into SessionLab, but I’ll also take existing facilitator guides (which are often not accurate or realistic in terms of timings, flow, etc and build them into SessionLab so that I can tweak them and ensure that they’re as effective as possible when I deliver.”

Everything you learn as a facilitator is an important learning discovery for next time. Some training activities might go down a storm while others need adjustment. Perhaps you ran out of time during a morning session or a client has a request you need to factor into your next workshop. 

Keep all your notes and any comments from co-faciltiators or clients attached to your agenda to make informed decisions when iterating on your design.

Need to save twenty minutes in the afternoon? Adjust the timing of each activity and instantly see how it affects your overall duration. Quickly adjust your structure by adding new blocks or dragging and dropping existing ones into place. 

Save time and effort designing your sessions

Time is one of the most important resources a facilitator has, especially if working with many clients, all of whom need your care and attention. 

Matt finds the biggest benefit of using SessionLab to be the time saved while designing his workshops and training sessions. By saving time at the design stage, Matt can focus on delivering the best content for his clients and juggling all the other needs of his consultancy.  

“The key benefit of using SessionLab is less time spent on design, because I can pull blocks and groups across for common components. I re-use a lot of content, which I can then tweak and mould to client needs as the thinking evolves.”

Striking the balance between bespoke design and reusing common elements is easy in SessionLab. Add your best content to your library for easy access in future sessions. Turn your regular sessions into templates to reuse and adjust them for your needs. 

And when your client requests a change? Simply drag, drop and reorder blocks to quickly amend the design and get sign-off on your session. Bring your client approved, minute-perfect agenda to your workshop and facilitate with confidence.