For this post, we talked to Anja Svetina Nabergoj – Lecturer at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University – about creating a more effective and engaging learning process by using purposeful transitions between workshop exercises. You’ll learn what workshop transitions are and how to use them in your designs too!

All workshops and courses are an opportunity for learning. Whether it’s about learning new skills or brainstorming or developing solutions, facilitators need to consider how to design the ideal learning experience for their participants. 

This means going beyond simply delivering content and instead, creating an experience that meaningfully engages your participants, helps learners retain information, and delivers better outcomes for all.

It’s about creating the right environment for learning, emotionally activating your participants, and preparing them for success at every step of the process. 

We and Anja explore why you might want to become more mindful when using transitions in your workshops, courses, and lessons. We reflect on what makes a good transition, and how to factor these into your learning experience design.

Thanks to Anja for providing her insight, quotes, and images for this post. We found the subject massively inspiring and we hope you do too.

Let’s dive in! 

• What are workshop transitions?
• What makes a good workshop transition?
• How to use workshop transitions

What are workshop transitions? 

Every workshop, training course or lesson includes content that needs to be delivered. These might be activities, learning modules or discussion blocks. As you go through a training program or workshop, you’ll proceed through content in the hopes of reaching the goal of the session.

In simple terms, a workshop transition is a way to move between different items of content meaningfully, purposefully and without friction – all with the goal of creating a seamless and memorable learning experience. 

A transition might be anything from an energizer to a reflective exercise though the key distinction is that a transition is designed to purposefully help a group go from one task to another without breaking the flow and to help create an ideal learning experience through emotional engagement and presence in the session. 

“You can have the most spectacular content in the world but if the learning experience is not done in a way that extends the forgetting curve and helps the group retain knowledge or experience, then even the best content is irrelevant.”

Think of how a DJ might perform a set. If one song stops suddenly and there is a gap before the next, this can disrupt the flow and mean people are not prepared for the following song. Some people will stop dancing and be unable to start again, others might try to dance and have it be awkward whereas some people might even leave the club entirely! 

The most amazing DJs are masters of transition. They flow from one song to another seamlessly, creating a flow that takes the audience on an emotional journey. They build suspense, build anticipation and trigger different kinds of emotions in the audience. And they do that with attention and intention. No songs or beats are just left hanging.

Very similarly in the classroom, transitions are not there just to stitch together pieces of content. Transitions in a classroom or workshop setting are designed to maintain the flow of learning and put people into the right frame of mind for the learning experience you are trying to deliver. 

For example, you might employ a brainstorming game to transition from a discussion to a high-energy activity so that everyone in the group is put in the right frame of mind to contribute to the next section.

If the transition is carefully designed and employed with purpose it can not only be an important learning experience but it can improve the outcomes of your main activities and help people engage with the content in a more emotional manner. Learning how to use workshop transitions can be a great way to supplement your existing facilitation skills!

“It all goes back to intention. Transitions need to be very specific to what’s coming. Are you brainstorming next? Are you going into deep listening? Do you need to be calm and peaceful or do you need to be stoked and energized?”

What makes a good transition?

A good transition should be purposeful, specific, and designed to support the learning experience you are creating. Transitions are not fillers – they should help participants and learners move between tasks and position them for success in the next. Let’s look at an example from Anja.

Wonder, Wander

A great transition that we use in our d.school programs before going into a brainstorming session is called Wonder, Wander. It is a simple transition exercise that helps participants learn the value of being present and looking to outside sources for inspiration in a gentle, refreshing manner. As Anja explains:

“The idea is that you keep the question that you are solving or the project you’re working on in mind while going for a 15 minute walk away from the computer. And you look for objects that maybe on a regular walk, you don’t even notice. And you see a traffic light, or you see somebody picking up dog poop, or you hear a car honking. And you take that thing that you see and consider how it connects to my problem? Can I use this element to solve my problem or can I approach it from that perspective?

Let’s say you see a preschool teacher with small kids. And you would say, hey, how would the preschool teacher solve the problem I have? Or you would see somebody playing basketball and ask how might I bring a basketball hoop into my solution. It’s not just there to get people out and get fresh air and take a break. It’s actually designed to make them realise the power of inspiration that comes from the outside. For every single part of our Innovation Bootcamp at Stanford, we have an exercise that helps get the group in the right state of mind.”

As you can see here, the Wonder, Wander exercise accomplishes a lot in a short period of time and creates space for participants to take a breath, learn something new, be present, and come back to the workshop space recharged and with something new to offer. 

There is always value to having breaks and space for individual thought, but when designing a program or workshop, consider how a more mindful, purposeful approach to the space between modules or blocks can help improve engagement and create a deeper learning experience. 

First Letter, Last Letter

Purposeful transitions can be about helping participants be present and engaged in preparation for an exercise by using some of the same principals or skills. First Letter, Last Letter is a transition exercise that borrows from improv theatre to help people practice active listening ahead of a session. 

“You pair up with somebody and begin an interview by asking a question. Let’s say I ask, what did you have for breakfast today? And you will start telling me, and then you will end the sentence, you’d say, oh, and then I put things in a dishwasher. I need to use the last letter of your last sentence to start a new question. So my new question needs to start with the letter R because the last word – dishwasher – ends with R. 

What this exercise teaches you is that you cannot have a predefined list of questions to meaningfully engage in a conversation. Your questions must follow up on the story that you just heard, and you can’t know what the story is going to be ahead of time. It also forces you to truly listen. Very often, we don’t truly listen because we’re thinking about what our next question will be. The exercise helps prevent that impulse because I never know which word is the last word all the way. I have to listen and I have to be present in the conversation.” 

As an improv game, First Letter, Last Letter is a fun way to practice active listening and get to know people, but when used as a transition in a user interview session, it does double duty and helps also deppen the learning experience that follows the game.

As Anja explains: “Being intentional when using transitions is critical. For example, a person who does this exercise and goes into an empathy interview, compared to somebody who is dropped in without a transition – the experience they have will be different. In terms of what they learn and how they feel, and how memorable the learning experience will be. Using this transition helps set people up in the right mode to engage in the next module.” 

How to use workshop transitions

Transitions are a great way to maintain engagement, create memorable learning experiences and help build better outcomes with an effective flow.

Bringing transitions into your workshop or course can have a largely positive effect on the outcomes of your program. But how do you use them in practice? Let’s explore! 

Start with purpose

When designing a workshop or course, a great place to start is with purpose. What are you trying to achieve with this content and what is its purpose? Let’s say you have a problem-solving workshop – the purpose of this might be to surface and then solve organizational challenges.

As you design your agenda, you’ll include a mix of activities to help participants productively surface challenges, build and develop skills and solve problems effectively. 

Taking a group of participants through a workshop is like taking them on a journey and requires more thought and guidance than simply placing major tasks or modules one after the other. This is where transitions come in. Not only should they help support the overall process, but they should also contribute to session flow and ensure that participants are emotionally engaged at every stage.

When thinking of how to introduce transitions into your agenda, always start with purpose and design transitions that support that goal.   

“The Forgetting Curve makes me think that why and how we teach is more important than content because if we get that right the content actually gets across to people’s hearts and minds.”

Work to extend the Forgetting curve

In educational science, the forgetting curve is the rate at which information is lost when there are no efforts made to retain that information. Originally posited by Hermann Ebbinghaus, the forgetting curve states that information is lost in a matter of days without efforts made to consciously retain, review and relearn the material. 

Typically, the stronger a memory is, the longer it is retained for. So creating memorable experiences is vital to helping a group retain the information presented in a workshop or course.

As Anja puts it: “In order to create a memorable learning experience, the workshop needs to trigger an emotional response in participants. If you think about your own learning experiences, you remember those that triggered positive emotions or negative ones. It can’t be flat.”

Transitions are used to help reinforce learnings, prepare a group for emotional engagement and build stronger responses to the material – this is key to ensuring the material you deliver is memorable and that you can extend the forgetting curve as a result.

Consider whether you are transitioning people into or out of a task

When thinking about the purpose of your transition, consider whether you are preparing your participants for the next module or bringing them out of a previous activity. This might be the difference between using a reflective transition to help solidify the learning of a discussion or help prepare the group for a user research task with a transition that focuses on active listening.

Be sure to think about the flow of your session and how your transition is going to help speed up or slow down the thinking process and support the learning experience you want to create at any given moment. 

Pair transitions with content and your desired learning experience

Just as not all energizers or games are right for every workshop, not every transition is right for every learning experience. The best transitions help reinforce the learnings of your content or prepare your group for the next module. You should design your transitions to compliment your content and help support the tasks at hand.

If you are running a brainstorming session and want to create space for participants to find innovative solutions, a transition like Wonder, Wander pairs perfectly with the content you are delivering and the learning experience you want them to have. Consider how the strong emotional response to finding inspiration in an unexpected place during that transition can engage participants and lead to a more engaging ideation experience.

“I think it all starts with care. When you deeply care about your participants then you will carefully think about and intentionally design their learning experience.”

Cultivate your emotional intuitiveness

As facilitators, we need to be emotionally attuned to the audience and pay attention to how participants are responding to the learning experience. In the moment, this can mean recognizing when some content isn’t connecting, when energy levels need to be raised, or when you risk leaving someone behind.

As Anja notes: “The challenge for us is that we’re not on a therapist couch one on one. When we have twenty to thirty people in a workshop, it’s very easy to lose five or six. Either losing their attention or losing them energetically required the facilitator to adapt and bring everyone on board. In virtual settings, this is even more important because a distraction is less than a click away.” 

If you’re aware of the emotional state or energy levels of everyone in the room, you can then tailor your transitions to reflect this. If energy levels are low, perhaps swap out a reflective transition for an energizing transition. If people are having difficulty processing the content, perhaps include a transition to improve understanding and encourage more present listening. Being emotionally tuned in to your participants, you can pick the right transition for any situation. 

In conclusion

Personally engaging moments are a major part of creating memorable learning experiences and ensuring the efficacy of the content delivered during the workshop.

Using workshop transitions to help your participants get emotionally and intellectually primed for workshop content is a great way to help your participants remember what they have learned long after they’ve left the workshop.

Do you use transitions in your workshops, classes, or courses? Might you use transitions in the future? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

About Anja Svetina Nabergoj

Anja Svetina Nabergoj (PhD) is Lecturer at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, where she teaches Executive Education programs and co-teaches graduate classes. For the last 10 years she has been developing pedagogy for teaching innovation processes and nurturing creative mindsets. 

She has been working with top management teams from organizations across Europe, Asia and USA including Microsoft, Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation, JetBlue, Uber, GM, Genentech, Arla Foods, Leo Pharma, Novo Nordisk Engineering, Symbio, Coca Cola, Telenor, Kellog’s, Microsoft and Visa. Anja facilitates design thinking workshops, teaches ethnographic research techniques and leads senior leadership sessions on user-centered innovation.

Anja is on the Advisory Board of The Stanford Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions, which is a new initiative with a bold mission to create an open space to explore uncommon interdisciplinary solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Stanford University aims to build an internationally recognized model of purposeful, high-impact and interdisciplinary research ecosystem.

She has contributed chapters to books published by Edward Elgar and Routlege and scientific management journals, including European Management Journal. With her team she founded a Research as Design project at Stanford University introducing creative problem solving techniques to scientists. They recently published a book Creativity in Research: Cultivate Clarity, Be Innovative, and Make Progress in your Research Journey that was published with Cambridge University Press.

She splits her time between Palo alto, California and Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Ljubljana.

In this facilitation story from Daniel Unsöld, you’ll see how he and his team set up and ran an interactive, 4-day hybrid event with 40 live and 10 online participants.

Daniel takes us behind the scenes, exploring the tech set-up and planning of the conference. He also explores how a large scale hybrid meeting plays out in practice, what activities he used to bridge live and online participants, and shares some of his learnings too!

For in-house company meetings, great solutions are available from big names like Microsoft or young start-ups like Owl Labs with their amazing self-focusing 360-degree cameras. But for larger meetings in rented venues, a more flexible setup is often needed, especially for less cash-rich organizations. 

We at du Coaching got a contract to provide consultation and facilitation service for a hybrid board meeting for an international climate change/migration/sustainable agriculture project.

The Our food, Our future campaign is focused on mobilizing and educating young adults as multipliers while advocating for systemic and far-reaching change. Our task was to allow discussion and sharing between all 50 board members – forty of them present in a live setting, and around ten logging in online.  

In this blog, we share our experience in setting up and facilitating an interactive hybrid board meeting for 50 participants. Let’s get started!

• Hybrid event setup
• How did a hybrid setup influence our session design?
• What was the experience of facilitating a hybrid event?
• In conclusion

Hybrid event setup

In this section, we’ll discuss how we set up the hybrid board meeting, covering everything from technical details to how we coordinated the facilitation team. 

We came to the event with a team of two facilitators. One would be the host facilitator of the whole meeting, and one co-facilitator to assist the online group, transport some exercises into the virtual space, and also to visualize content and prepare whiteboards for group and plenary work. 

For the online group, we used a setup of three computers: One fast laptop with an additional screen for the virtual meeting communication and whiteboard visualization, and a second basic laptop for connecting and presenting content to the second projection – both managed by the co-facilitator.

A second person logged in with her own laptop as a troubleshooter for online participant tech trouble from a bit further away, to not disturb the discussion on stage. 

From some of our earlier experiences, we gathered that streamlined virtual visualization and communication are key for the integration of online participants. We decided to work with virtual whiteboard (MURAL) and voting tools (Mentimeter/Slido). For the planning, we used the well-known online facilitation planning program SessionLab. (Surprise!) 

We knew we wanted two big projectors as participants were spread through the room and therefore quite far away they should still be able to read. We had one screen dedicated to showing the online participants and what they had to share. The other screen was used to show whiteboards, presentations, and “Mentis” (questions put on the Mentimeter tool).

It became clear that the main challenge, apart from planning, was to get the audio right.

We wanted the audio quality to be good for our 40 live participants, the facilitator, the ten virtual participants, and the presenter without excessive feedback or delay. For this, we hired a skilled team of audio technicians who happened to also know their way with the camera.  

One tech assistant manned the camera and was the mic runner during discussions. Our second assistant manned the sound and video mixing board while also being logged in in ZOOM with two accounts, one for each camera.

We found that mixing boards were necessary to connect the camera input with the audio input from another source. Getting this right was tricky and we wouldn’t have managed without these guys! 

In addition to mixing desks and audio software, our audio setup included two large speakers, two headset wireless mics for the host facilitator and presenter, and two wireless hand microphones for the audience.

The tech team also brought an extra safe and strong internet connection with their own router into the hotel. The hotel wi-fi was not reliable enough and this really helped things run smoothly. 

We asked participants to use their smartphones for Mentimeter polls and individual laptops when a person chose to be a virtual whiteboard documenter in a group work phase.

How did a hybrid setup influence our session design?

Hybrid affects every aspect of what you do. By having two groups – one live and the other online – it almost feels like planning two events running in tandem. You often have to think “What is the other group’s experience at this moment?” Let me go through this step by step.

Information sharing

We wanted to create a level playing field regarding information for both the online and the live group. Therefore, we decided that all info on the event: agenda, documents, resources, phone numbers, directions, virtual room links, and up-to-date covid-19 regulation info was to be found only via a digital “master” whiteboard using Mural. This became our single source of truth for the event. 

We also ensured all our discussions were documented and continuously updated on this whiteboard. This helped those people who missed a session or came late to catch up easily.

Hybrid Plenary Discussions

Planning a plenary discussion in a hybrid format felt pretty similar to any other online session, though there were many small things we had to account for in order to make this a success. 

In addition to our technical setup, here were some other things we did to make these discussions run smoothly in hybrid. 

• We allotted extra time to account for the micro runner to pass the mic between speakers while also changing the mic cover for Corona! 
• We were also sure to continuously build consciousness in the group to not talk without a microphone, otherwise, the online group wouldn’t hear and get lost. 
• We decided to continuously visualize all discussions on a virtual whiteboard for each session. This was accessible to both online groups and in-person via a projector in the room. This made it easier for the online group to follow the discussion, and the visuals help everybody to stay focussed and get inspired.
• We used sli.do for question management during panel discussions. We asked the live group to log in from their phones or laptops while the online group did the same. This way, the whole group could see and rank the most interesting questions to the panel equitably.  
• We used Mentimeter for group feedback and queries. We used this for everything from gauging interest or soliciting opinions on a subject, to finding out how a discussion influenced opinions or reflecting on how we worked together on a meta-level.  
• Mentimeter was also used in active sessions when smaller groups would move around the space to do exercises on hold discussions on the topic of team communication.
• Between activities, we would run short surveys on how people had perceived communication/collaboration in the project and then talk about it. The movement of groups around the room made it light, and participants were encouraged to use their phones to interact with the survey.
• Using Mentimeter also meant that when a discussion popped up, we could create a survey or poll with a set of options on the fly and get feedback from the whole group quickly. 
• Using a suite of digital tools throughout the session was especially helpful in instantly and automatically creating documentation. Everything was visualized!
• During the breaks, the co-facilitator would organize networking/chatting breakouts with the online group. We didn’t connect the live group with the online group during these breaks as we wanted to make the most of the extraordinary situation of meeting in person for the majority of people who were present.
• We also feared that it would feel too structured for live participants, who already had a lot of rules and structures to follow due to the hybrid format, the packed agenda, and Covid. I had tried to create more space in the agenda, but the organizers couldn’t let go of their list of items. All that time spent not meeting in person had apparently created quite a backlist of pressing issues that needed solving!

Energizers

When running energizers and teambuilding elements, we used a number of different approaches. When running a hybrid event, the key was always to think ahead: Can the online group join in? Can we find a way to do it together? Can we share together? Does the online group need its own activity?

As it was a long event, we did a lot of different things to energize and engage the group, using activities and games while also ensuring that longer sessions on group dynamics had interactive elements. 

Sometimes, everybody did the same activity regardless of where they were located. This meant the co-facilitator had to make the activity technically possible online, perhaps splitting people into pairs or small groups. When it came to sharing feedback and results, we connected both groups together and again alternated between speaking and listening.  

To name a few activities we used:

• 1,2,3: Counting up in pairs before exchanging numbers for sounds, movements, words, and more. This worked perfectly! 
• Do you remember: Sharing a fictive holiday memory in pairs and building a story on the spot together. Awesome. 
• Movement and freeze in positions: This worked especially well in front of the camera! 
• 1-word story: creating a shared story with each person in a group of five sharing one word at a time.  
• All kinds of topical exercises that included sharing and giving feedback such as Storytelling Flavours. In this exercise, one person shared a holiday experience or a success story from work while the other person asks either for more detail, more emotion or to advance the plot. 
• I like about myself: a pair work exercise where participants asked and affirmed compliments to and for each other.

Energizers that used visual elements also worked well in this hybrid format. For example, having a group choose an animal/superstar/tv character/plant that represents their mood for the day.

The co-facilitator could run this exercise visually on the online whiteboard, and the experience was effectively the same for everyone. As with any activity, remember that group size is crucial and that some exercises don’t work with groups that are too larger!  

Inevitably, some exercises didn’t work for people attending virtually. For activities that involved movement through the room or doing something physically together, we had the co-facilitator run a different energizer/networking activity from the virtual energizer toolbox.

We did plan to ask the live group to go online and mingle with the virtual group in an energizer to improve interconnection between the two groups. This was discarded on the day as it was not really feasible with our one-room setup, where it was a little noisy and the internet connection was likely to go bad.

To make up for this, we planned group work formats frequently, where online and offline participants could mingle and connect. 

Group work

Designing group work was difficult due to technical limitations. We only had one fully equipped hybrid meeting space. This meant figuring out which discussions we needed to have with both the online and offline participants present in a single group, and which could be split into breakouts. 

In those situations with hybrid breakouts, we had a small group sit closer to the screen, making it easier to work together with their online counterparts.

For the other groups, we enabled participation by using two laptops. One with an external camera that faced the live group to make it possible for everyone to see each other, and another one manned by a co-facilitator to facilitate the online group and document/visualize discussions. 

We also decided to use a flipchart to have more power visualizing on the spot, as we couldn’t project the digital whiteboard in these lobby situations. We would then position a laptop camera so any physical flipcharts were visible and regularly copy and paste photos of content onto the digital whiteboard.

Conference style mingling

One of the best parts of a conference is after the official program is over and more spontaneous connections and networking can begin. Here were some of the things we did to mix the group up at various stages and enable those chance connections during our hybrid event.  

• We had phone call walks together in longer breaks, chatting on the phone in pairs with a mix of live and online participants.
• For the city tour of Bologna, we had one person take the role of a reporter who streamed the city tour online with a live commentary. 
• On one evening, we played charades in a hybrid group. 

We chose not to plan hybrid activities for every break or evening. Online participants needed a break from their screens and this was supported in a survey we ran, as well as many conversations we had throughout the session. It’s hard to maintain focus when working online for long stretches and having time away from our screens was good for everyone. 

What was the experience of facilitating a hybrid event? 

Planning and running a hybrid board meeting was full of surprises and challenges. Here’s a breakdown of some of my main takeaways from the hybrid conference experience. 

Preparation

Honestly, the preparation and planning process for this hybrid event was stressful and demanding. It took some convincing on the part of the project owner to fulfill our resource needs for the team. Sourcing the right hardware, software, and space meant finding a lot of extra funds!

Some of the limitations in how we could work together were frustrating because some things would just not work in a hybrid setup. The venue was sadly not great for group work as we had no extra rooms, just several lobby-like spaces which were neither undisturbed nor adequately equipped.

Planning for this hybrid session felt like double the work of a regular workshop.

Needing to always consider two separate groups and experiences while thinking of what is needed regarding group dynamics, methodology, facilitators, laptops, spaces, documentation, software… the list goes on!

For the event, we had also created a small co-team consisting of the project lead and several experienced representatives from member organizations. Every evening, and during some breaks, we would discuss the process and see if the agenda needed adaption. This was quite demanding, as we talked through dinners, city tours, and (smoking) breaks. 

We ultimately felt that the main focus of the event was to keep the live group productively working and connecting while including the online group was priority number two. This admittedly took some of the focus away from completely solving the challenge of hybrid but it did mean we could solve the most important tasks at hand.

Technical setup

We were lucky to bring in a skilled tech team for this hybrid board meeting that was flexible and willing to learn as we went. They had never done anything like this – other hybrid events they’d worked on were actually just static streams with a question here and there – no people moving in the room, splitting into groups, running energizers, sharing, working with multiple projectors, etc. 

The main challenge with the hybrid set-up was people logging into Zoom with poor audio quality and weak connections. While this might have been okay in a regular Zoom call, these participants were sometimes hard to understand over the large speakers in a large room.

Our advice here would be to make sure people know they have to log in with above standard quality audio and impeccable internet connection where possible! 

The tech team also faced more of an athletic challenge. The facilitator and audience moved around a lot during more interactive activities. This meant having to adjust the camera while also running, changing, disinfecting, and passing microphones between participants. The tech team sure ran several miles per day! 

At the beginning of the event, the tech team felt overwhelmed by the set-up, technical problems, and the sheer number of tasks.

There was a bottleneck of stress on the first day, but we moved through this phase together by relaxing and laughing in the inevitability of failure, change, and learning. And it got better every day!

Facilitating a hybrid event

It was really awesome to work with a live group for the first time. We had already worked together for a year and a half online and nobody had met in person yet! It felt like magic when we connected with the virtual group in the first plenary session and communication flowed. It was a bit like landing on the moon: “Hello, hello, can you hear us?”

When we first started, it took discipline and patience for the participants to only speak with a mic and having to wait for it to arrive. After two days, it was quite natural.

It also became clear that we hadn’t thought through how some moments would work for the virtual group. Similarly, we didn’t entirely account for how impromptu changes created stress for the co-facilitator, who sometimes had to improvise activities for the virtual group on the spot. 

While we put a lot of effort into the first few days of our five-day agenda, the later days received much less attention to detail. A classic failure! In the end, this turned out to be okay as the agenda changed quite radically as the group asked for less structure and began to take more ownership over the process.  

We also found that virtual energizers and moments of personal sharing online became less crucial as we went on. While they were important to start, the online group felt it was too much after a few days, and they more often preferred to do their own work or go offline.

I also sensed there was some sadness for not being there in person, and perhaps it felt more painful when doing games and sharing personally in this setting.

Of course, there was also a crisis moment during the event where we got lost and needed to find our way out together. We managed, and I feel this is often a part of every group process, even in a hybrid meeting! 

In my experience as a facilitator, I felt it was hard to speak to the far-away camera positioned in the audience when addressing the online participants. I often ended up talking to the screen with my back to the camera that was filming me. Maybe it would have been good to speak to the audience cam, though it was not focussed on me but the whole room and had nobody left to direct it. On reflection, another camera person may have been needed!

Looking back, I admit that I didn’t have a real “feel” for the online group. Especially when the discussion in the room became very lively, it was a challenge not to forget the online group and keep the co-facilitator in view.

One solution could be to include a second screen of the online group in or behind the audience in the room to enable me as a facilitator to constantly have them in view. With this setup, I would have been able to react to them in real-time, stay engaged, and call on online participants up by name. 

It was also distracting to hear the online co-facilitator talk with the online group and the co-facilitator didn’t always have an easy time getting my attention. This is absolutely something we can do better in the future. 

Our co-facilitator Henna-Elise Selkälä was really important for the success of this meeting. Her facilitation skills and ability to multitask and use various online tools at speed were amazing. 

Think of switching between listening and following the room discussion and facilitating/explaining sessions to the online group while also visualizing discussions, projecting presentations, setting up breakouts and questionnaires, and communicating with the facilitator and the tech team when you want to speak up or let the online group be heard! When replacing her for a day we needed three people to do the same job! 

Working together with Henna-Elise for a long time and having a good mutual understanding was an important part of making this work, and I’d be sure to take this into account when finding a co-facilitator for your hybrid events!

In conclusion

Reflecting on the whole picture, I would still say it was a great event. We managed to have a reasonably interactive, collaborative, visual, and effective hybrid meeting. People were happy with the process and especially the facilitation. Connecting with the online group felt special and valuable.

We managed to discuss and share together, with parallel group work/breakouts working on a virtual whiteboard(s) consistently. Through the online visualization and communication, online participants stayed onboard and felt included. One massive advantage of running the meeting in this format was that we ended up with the best documentation ever because everything needed to be visual in an instant! 

As I mentioned previously, we concluded that it makes sense to think of hybrid sessions as two events rather than one when designing and planning. Some questions you might ask when starting to design a hybrid process might be:

• What venue will best support your needs?
• What kind of tech team will support us best?
• How many fully hybrid equipped, undisturbed spaces do we need to enable fluid (group) work? 
• How can we make sure that the facilitator and the participants both have the online group in view all the time?
• How can we involve members of the online group early in the preparation, so they can take ownership of their experience too? Be sure to plan time and space to include them in process reflection during the event.
• How can you balance and communicate the extra work/focus needed for the people present in the room when including the people online? This can create some resentment so perhaps you need to consistently raise awareness while incorporating a lot of movement and off-screen activity for the people in the room.
• Is each exercise really a worthwhile activity for an online group? What else could they do in this time? How far can the attention of the online group go? What are their needs for off-screen time? 
• Sometimes you need to drop the expectation that the whole program can and needs to be transported to the virtual. What is more important: networking online and presence group or fast content work?  Maybe have a few focused on-screen networking moments rather than trying to make everything connected all the time. Choose methods accordingly. 
• How can we simultaneously make content and visuals accessible to all participants with whiteboards, Q&A tools, and surveys?  

My final advice to anyone running a hybrid event is to start planning early! But never forget that sensing and updating an event in real-time according to the real needs of the virtual and the online group is key. 😉 

I am very much looking forward to your feedback and comments, all the best from Berlin, 

Daniel

About Daniel Unsöld

Daniel Unsöld facilitates events and workshops on-/offline, and coaches and trains facilitators in Germany and Europe since 2009.

Having a background in environmental advocacy, systemic coaching, and acting, Daniel works mainly for civil society organisations, social and green businesses, and research bodies with the goal to support social and ecological change.

Want to contribute your facilitation story?

We’re always on the lookout for facilitators wanting to share their experiences and insight with the SessionLab community.

If you have a story you’d like to share, we’d love to feature your unique perspective on facilitation!

Check out our guest post guidelines and get in touch! We can’t wait to hear from you.

But how can we create an environment where it is safe to ask tough questions? How do we know the questions we’re asking are the right ones? What are some of the methods and approaches we can use as facilitators to create a better culture of communication?

To celebrate the launch of The Power of Facilitation – a new book about how groups can use facilitation to create great results – we’re speaking to the contributors to the book about their approaches and ideas.

In this interview, we spoke to Michael Ambjorn and Martin Gilbraith, co-authors of The Power of Partnership between Facilitation and Communication.

We talk about how to ask better questions, how to enable a culture of communication, and discuss some of the methods they use to empower groups to have better conversations and ask the right questions.

Let’s have a look!

Hi Martin and Michael! How might we learn to ask better questions? What makes for an especially effective question?

Martin: I think clarity of intent is a large part of what it takes to ask better and more effective questions, and therefore to facilitate more effectively.

In ICA’s Technology of Participation we articulate the aims of any process in terms of two dimensions – what we call Rational and Experiential aims. The Rational Aims are about what the group needs to know, understand or decide, and the Experiential Aims are about how the group needs to experience the process or be affected by it. 

If you and your group are clear and in alignment on the aims of the conversation, or the broader facilitation process, then you have a chance of determining and crafting effective questions. 

Then of course there is how you express the questions clearly, in a way that they can be understood as intended, and active listening to help you to determine how to frame and express the next question that can take the conversation forward, and deeper. 

Anything that helps the group to build trust and empathy can help, from a simple round of introductions to a shared drink or meal, or well-selected and delivered ice-breakers or team-building exercises.

How can help a group be more comfortable asking and answering those tough but necessary questions?

Martin: The ORID process at the heart of ICA’s Technology of Participant goes a long way to preparing and enabling a group to be forthcoming with the answers that are needed. For example, it is much easier to determine what needs to happen (D = Decisional) after exploring what the options and their implications might be (I = Interpretative).

It is much easier to do that after appreciating one’s own and each others’ experience of the situation (R + Reflective), and to do that after understanding some basic facts about it and about each other (O = Objective).  

Anything that helps the group to build trust and empathy can help, from a simple round of introductions to a shared drink or meal, or well-selected and delivered ice-breakers or team-building exercises.

How might you create a sustained culture of communication inside an organization?

Michael: Consistency is key. And it starts with a clear intent and purpose. As laid out in the IABC Global Standard of the Communication Profession: “Acting as the organization’s voice, a communication professional expresses a single, consistent story for internal and external audiences. This narrative is clear and compelling, it reflects the input and perspectives of diverse stakeholders, and it furthers the organization’s mission.”

In other words, it is an imperative operating at the strategic level. And as for the practical side – Slack channels, monthly all-hands etc. can each play a role. The key is to think of them as enablers of the deeper conversations needed to make progress together. Conversations such as those Martin talks about above.

What’s the biggest obstacle to good organizational communication and how would you approach solving it?

Michael: Topical to this (and often credited to George Bernard Shaw) is the saying that: “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Overcoming this obstacle takes preparation, planning, practice – and presence. You need a clear understanding of where you want to go, who you want to go with – and how to talk to them – and vice versa. You could do this as desk research, but I don’t recommend it.

Draw on the power of facilitation to help inform your approach. Get out there and talk to people. Hiding behind your desk won’t get you far. Communication is an inherently human endeavor after all. 

And if you need help as you engage, consider bringing in a professional facilitator. You’ll get better results. And you’ll have more fun.

Especially large organizations can fall under the spell of a HIPPO [Highest Paid Person’s Opinion]. You do need a HIPPO now and again, but even the best HIPPO can’t be right in every meeting, every day.

What advice would you give to a team trying to create space for more inclusive and authentic communications?

Michael: With a small group it helps to discuss and agree some basic rules of engagement upfront. An oft used shorthand in the UK, as an example, is to invoke the Chatham House Rule: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

A broader framework I also like is what the charity Common Purpose uses as their conventions. Incorporating the Chatham House Rule this set also has a call to ‘Be open – and open-minded’; ‘Avoid both giving and taking offence’; ‘Be a leader’ and ‘Be engaged – and positive’. 

That said, whilst these ready-made frameworks can be useful in groups that have already stormed and formed (as described in Héctor Villarreal Lozoya chapter the Power of Facilitation for Team Development), it can backfire if you move too fast.

For some teams and groups, you’re best of starting from scratch, exploring the possibilities of what might be a good shared culture. The ORID framework Martin has mentioned can be put to good use here.

How can leaders help create space for honest conversations and address power imbalances that might stifle communication?

Michael: This can indeed be the real issue holding you up. Especially large organizations can fall under the spell of a HIPPO [Highest Paid Person’s Opinion]. You do need a HIPPO now and again, but even the best HIPPO can’t be right in every meeting, every day. So how do you overcome it? The answer is so important that it could warrant a book-length response.

As we’re pressed for space I’ll share a favorite technique that can get you started: The ToP Consensus Workshop method. It helps bring everyone to the table, irrespective of rank. Field-tested across the world. 

And if you’re the person in charge, do as the outgoing CEO of SLUSH suggested in a recent article: “…aim to be the Chief Question Asker (CQA). Give space for others to speak up and be curious.” Sage advice. And to make sure you do it well, it won’t harm to get some training – either in facilitation, or active listening, or both. And here’s a whole bookshelf of useful reads.   

Asking people short but interesting questions inevitably leads to stories. “When is this organization most alive?” is one powerful example.

Do you have any favourite methods for helping a group awaken their storytelling instincts?

Michael: Asking people short but interesting questions inevitably leads to stories. An old favorite approach is to draw on some of the classic questions from the practice known as appreciative inquiry. “When is this organization most alive?” is one powerful example. And one that can lead to stories that can potentially also help propel you and your team forward.

Working with a communications professional can then help you develop, test, and refine your stories. The really good ones take on a life on their own – helping inform and educate. It is a practice that can scale influence. Make yours a force for good. 

Why does an organization need a communication strategy and what are some of the elements it should contain? 

Michael: At the simplest level a communication strategy might simply be a compelling narrative that helps people understand where a group, an initiative, or indeed an organization is going. Setting out the purpose in other words. Plus a plan for how to reach, engage, and (where relevant) activate the people who need to be part of it. In other words, it is a vehicle for creating clarity – and alignment – across an organization.  

Which is also to say that if your organization doesn’t have a clear purpose, then it probably doesn’t need a communication strategy… 

What do you do if a conversation goes awry and people are unhappy?

Martin: ORID can help with that too! If people are in disagreement with each other (at the Decisional level) and/or unhappy with each other or their situation (at the Reflective level), it can help to work with them to unpick what different analyses (at the Interpretative level) led each of them to different conclusions and/or how the Objective level facts of the situation have interacted with those of each individual to result in differing Reflective level responses from them. 

The ToP Historical Scan (or Wall of Wonder) process that we refer to in our chapter (and Kimberly Bain in hers on the Power of Facilitation in Resolving Conflicts) is a powerful ORID-based method for a group to visualize together how a situation has developed over time, in order to reflect and learn together from their diverse perspectives and experiences of it and (re-)build trust and empathy as they do so.

About Michael Ambjorn CDir SCMP

With 20+ years of leading people, Michael Ambjorn has run organizations, chaired boards, and developed change makers. As a mentor he provides 1:1 advice to Chairs, Chief Execs, and senior leaders – and the next generation of change-makers – on strategy, change and turnarounds.

Michael is particularly interested in how strategic alignment can focus people – and enable sustainable growth and renewal. Including at the intersect of people, tech, and sustainability. And he is a committed espresso drinker.

You can connect with Michael on Twitter or Linkedin.

About Martin Gilbraith MA CPF|M

Martin Gilbraith works as a facilitator, trainer and consultant to help groups, teams and partnerships work more effectively together to bring about lasting change. What drives him is his passion and commitment to make a positive difference in the world, and to support and enable others to do so as well. He began his career in grassroots community development work in India, Africa and the Middle East, after awakening to his own passion and commitment as an international volunteer. He has been facilitating and training, specializing in ICA’s ToP facilitation methodology, since 1986. Since 1997 he has worked with a wide range of clients in the UK and overseas.

Martin is an IAF Certified™ Professional Facilitator|Master, past Chair of the IAF England & Wales chapter and former IAF Chair and IAF Europe Director. He is an ICA Certified ToP Facilitator (CTF) and a licensed provider and experienced lead trainer of ICA:UK Technology of Participation (ToP) facilitation training courses. He is past President of the Institute of Cultural Affairs International (ICAI) and former Chief Executive of ICA:UK, the participation and development charity. He holds a BA in Business Studies from Portsmouth University and an MA in Development Administration and Management from Manchester University’s Global Development Institute (then IDPM). His MA research was in civil society, development and democratisation.

You can connect with Michael on Twitter or Linkedin.

But how can we best motivate teams who might be resistant to change? How can we help leaders and their teams come together to self-organize change and how might co-facilitation bring something special to the table?

To celebrate the launch of The Power of Facilitation – a new book about how groups can use facilitation to create great results – we’re speaking to the contributors to the book about their approaches and ideas.

In this interview, we spoke to Malin Morén and Trevor Durnford – a married couple who co-facilitate and work on creating radical collaboration with their organisation Facil Profundo. We talk about creating meaningful change, the benefits of co-facilitation, and how to pick potential internal facilitators out of the crowd!

Let’s have a look!

Hi Malin and Trevor! What are the benefits and challenges you find in co-facilitation?

Whilst we’re both Certified Professional Facilitators we have quite different backgrounds – Malin is from behavioral science and Trevor first qualified as a Mechanical engineer. So, for example, Malin’s strength is in human systems and mine is in process and technology which means that when facilitating an exec team on a range of transformation work they have in their sights, we can see things from quite different perspectives whilst both having a common grounding in facilitation.

One tip we give is not to be too ‘heavy-handed’ with both facilitators running a session. See it more as a good tv production where one hands over to the other and then steps out of the limelight.

What advice would you give to people co-facilitating for the first time?

For those co-facilitating for the first time, it’s well worth exploring the role and domain each will take on. For example, while one is guiding the group from the front, the other can be observing the group’s dynamics.

Alternatively, there might be convenient steps in the agenda where the roles could change. One tip we also give is not to be too ‘heavy-handed’ with both facilitators running a session, see it more as a good tv production where one hands over to the other and then steps out of the limelight.

We often talk about the role of facilitation in creating real, profound and meaningful change. How do we do that?

One belief we hold is that we humans support what we build ourselves. So if an entire organization can create a vision collaboratively, then the support for it will be 1000 times stronger than if it was shaped by an Exec team guided by external consultants.

Change that is in words only rather than behavior is not profound….words are cheap, behavior counts. Or when the leadership community is easily distracted to try a newer, flashier transformation project sweeping away the previous activities, roles, and resources. That’s not profound change.

How can the leader of a virtual team help create a more collaborative environment? What are the challenges they must overcome in this virtual space?

One of the good things to emerge from the pandemic is the technology that is now available to help teams collaborate virtually both synchronously and asynchronously.

One way in which leaders can really help create a collaborative environment is to get familiar with tools that help with creativity and collaboration when the team is on the same call/virtual meeting (e.g. Wonder, Mural/Miro, Menti) and also tools that enable team members to share and create new knowledge and insights asynchronously (eg Howspace).

The days of everyone dialing into the same meeting to listen to one present person Powerpoint slides are hopefully over….where’s the Power and what’s the Point!

The leaders should consider themselves a ‘host’ (see Host Leadership by Mark McKergow) where it’s the leader’s role to create the best space possible for the team to collaborate….and then get out of the way!

Rather than spending energy trying to persuade those who resist, just focus on where there is a culture of experimentation and positivity and welcome others who want to join in when they are ready.

How do you promote self organizing change? Is there ever a risk with this kind of change?

Self-organizing change, by its very nature, will always create a certain level of uncertainty and disagreement but we must live with that to reap the benefits that this type of change brings – innovation, novelty, and engagement. Getting clear on the future perfect or vision and some defining principles or essentials tends to help avoid chaos.

How do you help a group resistant to change become comfortable testing, failing, learning? 

Our start point would be to explore parts of an organization where there is a positive atmosphere already….go where the energy is. It’s a little like the famous video of ‘Leadership and the Dancing Guy’. Rather than spending energy trying to persuade those who resist, just focus on where there is a culture of experimentation and positivity and welcome others who want to join in when they are ready.

In situations where there is no choice about location and the teams in question are ‘resistant’ we often find that it’s simply that the vision isn’t compelling enough so creating a dialogue around the future and exploring needs around change will unblock many groups. 

Isn’t it interesting that we take leaders away for leadership development when 80% of the attributes are useful for us all to develop?

How do you enable a team to continue creating change after the workshop, training or briefing is complete? What techniques do you use? 

Simple check-in questions at regular meetings such as ‘What’s better, what’s next?’ or ‘What are the signs that we are making progress?’ and ensuring the leaders are able to ask these questions and facilitate the response from the group.

We find that change is much more successful when it is a part of the regular team conversation in the regular team setting rather than something that is only discussed offsite or in a workshop. So coaching leaders to be good hosts or facilitators with carefully crafted dialogue guides is essential to success.

What advice would you give to an organization trying to create a team of internal facilitators? How do you find and support these people?

There’s a handful of characteristics we would recommend:

1. Excellent communication skills especially listening, asking questions and reflecting/paraphrasing
2. Resilient individuals 
3. Ability to develop rapport with a group
4. Positive, resourceful mindset
5. Huge appetite for learning, hungry for personal development and willing to coach others too!
6. Comfortable participating in group discussions
7. Ability to help the group / individuals reach results applying appropriate tools and techniques 
8. From any level in the organisation 

Do you have a favourite method or technique for teaching a group how to practice self leadership?

We have a good way of highlighting its importance. Split a team into two groups. Group 1 creates a list of the top attributes of good leaders. Group 2 creates a list of the top attributes of a good employee/team member.

The teams present to each other and are usually surprised to see that the lists are 80% the same. Things like passionate, trustworthy, focused, compassionate, supportive, challenging, etc usually emerge from both lists.

The major takeaway is that, isn’t it interesting that we take leaders away for leadership development when 80% of the attributes are useful for us all to develop? So why don’t we do that together!

What facilitation skills are useful when it comes to enabling transformational change?

Of course, the IAF facilitator competencies and ethics are vitally important. What is an additional benefit in the context of change, is for facilitators to grasp the difference between complicated change and complex change.

Once the distinctions are grasped, then it’s much easier to choose the best facilitation methods and tools. For example, if the change being facilitated is complicated such as a process redesign or reduction in waste, then problem solving tools and looking for root causes makes sense.

On the other hand, if it’s complex, then a different approach is more valuable such as Solutions Focus, Appreciative Inquiry, or adaptive thinking. The Cynefin framework is a good way to see the distinctions between these. A good change facilitator knows the type of change in which they are intervening.

You run the annual conference Faciliteringsdagarna (Facilitation Days). What is the most valuable element of this conference for you?

Coming to Faciliteringsdagarna enables participants to get answers to many of the questions they are wrestling with by having conversations with facilitators that work in a wide range of organizations…and with clients who use facilitators in their organizations too.

What we like about Faciliteringsdagarna is that the sessions have real substance and you can tell that many of the speakers have a lot of experience of working with groups.

You facilitate team retreats in a beautiful environment in Uruguay. What’s the secret to a successful team retreat? 

Freedom to choose, wonderful climate, and beautiful inspiring surroundings and activities that build a group by giving a memorable experience like riding horses on the beach, helping with wine harvesting, and cooking a fabulous Uruguayan style BBQ called an Asado. And of course, a few glasses of good wine tends to help a little too.

About Malin Morén and Trevor Durnford 

Malin and Trevor are passionate professional facilitators with a remarkable reputation. Described as “leading lights” when it comes to transforming culture and leadership in organizations, and with a never-ending commitment to get people in flow to achieve radical collaboration and building high-performing teams.

Originally from Sweden and the UK, they now live in Uruguay where they continue to work with clients face to face and virtually in between tending to the vineyard and horses on the farm.

You can find out more about Malin and Trevor and get in touch on their website.

But how might we create those spaces and conversations in practice? What might we learn from the field of visual facilitation and how could we apply it when we facilitate meetings and workshops?

To celebrate the launch of The Power of Facilitation – a new book about how groups can use facilitation to create great results – we’re speaking to the contributors to the book about their approaches and ideas.

In this first interview, we spoke to Rosanna Von Sacken of Advanced Consulting and Facilitation Ltd. about her approach as a visual facilitator and coach, and learned so much about her practice and how her experiences in emergency management led her to facilitation.

Rosanna shares her insight on how to have more courageous conversations, ask better questions, and create encouragement and trust in a group. We also discuss the differences between graphic and visual facilitation and how both processes might help create better workshops and meetings.

We found Rosanna’s insight and approach illuminating, and we hope you might use some of the ideas and discussion points in your own practice!

Let’s take a look!

Hey Rosanna, how do you encourage participants to have more courageous conversations?

Courageous conversations are about speaking our truths and experiences, our perspectives, how we really feel, and what we really want to talk about in respectful ways, even if we are out of our comfort zone.

One has to have a learning mindset to have courageous conversations. Disagreements in courageous conversations are absolutely welcome as they generate new ideas, challenge our thinking and mindsets.

Trust and safety are paramount factors for courageous conversations to take place. Without them, people may participate in conversations but in limiting ways, such as talking about issues on the surface without going deeper, saying things that please others and not truly reflecting how one may feel, not taking ownership or responsibilities when problems occur, or worse still, shutting down or not participating at all.

Fulsome, meaningful and courageous conversations take time. They take time for people to know they can speak their truths, be listened to and be heard without fear of shame, guilt or embarrassment. For real courageous conversations to happen, time must be allowed to build trust and safety, to actively listen, to be inclusive and open, and invite those that may need more time to reflect, to think things over, or to verbalize their thoughts.

What’s the secret to being a great visual facilitator?

I am a facilitator first before I am a graphic or visual anything. I call myself a “visual facilitator” not a “graphic facilitator”. I use my drawings to help me with my work, from scoping with clients, designing a session, developing and preparing materials for a session such as worksheets or handouts or flip charts, and using the same or similar in real-time and sometimes post-event.

I’d like to point out my interpretation of being a “graphic facilitator”, a term that is widely used but which doesn’t always mean the graphic facilitator is actively involved in the design and facilitation of a session.

This term is often used to mean a “graphic recorder”, someone whose responsibility is drawing, on a large chart or digitally, what they hear / sense in the “room”, with little or no active engagement with participants in a session. Although one can argue that the graphic artifact does facilitate participants’ understanding and memory.

If I were hired to facilitate, my primary focus is on the scoping, design and development, preparation, facilitation, and post-event responsibilities. I may use visual tools (not just drawings) in my work and during my real-time facilitation, thus “visual facilitator” not “graphic facilitator”. “Graphic” to me, implies using only drawings.

Visual tools can include a wide range of tools in addition to drawings: physical tools like card decks, die, games, videos, etc. I try to also include movement, music, and other sensory tools depending on a session.

If I knew in advance that a graphic recorder will be part of a session, I’d like to consult with the graphic recorder, if they are amenable to it, about my design and process, in order to co-determine how best to use their drawing as a real-time tool.

One piece of advice I can offer is to be gentle with yourself, it takes time to hone any new skills. Practice your listening skills a lot, and find a trusted buddy who would give you honest feedback, bounce ideas off, and provide a supportive shoulder or ear.

How have you approached creating engagement in virtual or hybrid workshops? 

Virtual and hybrid workshops are different, so the design will need to be different for both. I will touch on designing and facilitating encouragement in general here.

Encouragement is not the same as requirement or compliance. Designing encouragement is creating and hosting space for participants to dip their toes into various territories so to speak, including the unfamiliar or uncomfortable ones. This ties in with the question above, without trust and safety, people tend not to truly and deeply participate despite whether inviting spaces are created or hosted.

Here are some of my go-to ways to facilitate encouragement:

• Explicitly saying to people that passing is ok, it is one way to honour the trust and safety built into the environment. 
• Asking a participant if it’s ok to circle back to them if they chose to pass.
• Asking appropriate prompting questions. This is very much a judgment call in the moment. 
• Allowing time for people to think, to jot down their ideas and thoughts down first before verbalizing or sharing in a big group.
• Paraphrasing and summarizing to make sure I and the group understand. These are also good ways to help folks that may have difficulty articulating their thoughts (with their permission).
• Using drawings to show or summarize what I hear or sense in the room.
• Doing small group work gives people the time and room to share, which is usually more inviting for the quieter, shy or reflective folks.
• Doing round robins so everyone has a chance to contribute.
• Designing multiple and sensory ways to involve people, providing options and different ways to get people to feel heard and be seen.

What methods or approach would you use to repair broken relationships between team members?

I would take a coaching approach to first work with the individuals before working with the team, if that is possible. It’s important to find out the root cause and issue underneath the relationship from each perspective. This would give me a sense of whether something is a common or recurring issue or if it was an isolated event or if it was a team relationship concern or something else.

Repairing relationships is not a simple task, and won’t be repaired unless (guess what?) trust, safety and desire exist for all the parties involved. Relationships take time to build and foster, but they take virtually no time to break down. Minor breakdowns, if repeated, can accumulate in negative feelings, which may or may not be shared amongst all parties involved, culminating in possible growing resentment, gossips, pushbacks, frustrations, etc.

If the involved parties truly wish to repair the relationship, there are a few difficult things that will have to happen first, honesty and self-reflection will be needed in this process. As a minimum, encourage conversations around:

• Awareness – asking oneself about “What part / role do I recognize that I had in this broken relationship? and “How much ownership am I willing to take?”
• Desire – asking oneself about “How important is this relationship to me?” and “Do I want to keep and maintain a good, or at least manageable, relationship with this person / group?” and “What are the consequences if I do or don’t keep and maintain this relationship? And can I live with that?”. Without the desire to make changes, repair won’t happen.

What do you think the role of fun is for a facilitator?

Everyone likes to have fun. Who doesn’t like to laugh or play? We can learn from play. It is unfortunate that some adults and some work environments have lost that way of learning – learning through play and doing, learning through trying and experimenting, learning from mistakes, learning through lightness and delight.

As a facilitator, I try to inject as much fun into an activity as possible. Fun can come in many different forms – humor, music, movement, games, involvement in different types of interaction among people and nature. 

Since Covid, I have been increasingly using applied improv techniques. Depending on the group, I may use different language and call something an activity rather than a “game” or “improv”, as these terms tend to scare people off (like drawing or creativity). Fun activities tend to increase engagement, and connection when people are actually enjoying themselves – that is being human-centric, encouraging people to be themselves, to allow their emotions and heart matters to show. Connection to people should always come first before connection to content or tasks.

What led you to engage in Emergency Management Consulting and what have learned as a facilitator?

Actually, it was the other way around – it was emergency management work that led me to facilitation. In the emergency management field, one cannot do the work entirely alone, it always involves working with multiple agencies, teams, departments, partners, sponsors and/or stakeholders. Collaboration, coordination and communication are key in emergency management work. Like many other fields and professions, facilitation skills naturally blend in. 

I didn’t know facilitation was a field or profession then, I just did it. Until one day, a client shared her appreciation of my approach and the impacts from my work, she said I was a great facilitator and asked if I was certified. That was how and when I decided to investigate and learn more about facilitation and eventually morphed my career from solely being a consultant (although I still do consulting work) to more being a facilitator, and becoming a Certified Professional Facilitator.

Many professions use facilitation skills but do not always recognize the power of effective facilitation, the application of facilitation skills in their work, or even the name of it: facilitation. More still needs to be done around educating and sharing with the world about the power of facilitation. The encompassing umbrella of facilitation cover skills beyond effective communication, leadership, collaboration, strategizing, group dynamics management, problem-solving, team development …. and so much more.

How do you help people learn to ask the right questions? How can we overcome the fear of speaking up? 

One of the first things to acknowledge is that no one knows everything about everything. We all have our own partial views of the world, mostly based on our past, experiences, education, knowledge AND our humility in recognizing we don’t know it all.

A great facilitator always asks questions. Good questions are easy to learn, great and powerful questions are a lot harder, especially when thinking on one’s feet. The questions we ask can influence how, what, why, and whether the other party will share.

In my “Dare to Ask – Powerful Questions” course, I cover different aspects of asking questions – the basics of different types of questions. Distinguishing the good from the great and powerful questions, types of questions that serve different purposes, and of course, different ways and means of delivering a question. On paper, it can look simple and easy to do until one puts that skill into practice.

In my programs, I design opportunities for participants to apply and practice. Sometimes I may even do impromptu demonstration and role-play using a participant’s scenario from their past, and we practice different ways of asking questions, highlighting the words or framing of our understanding, the tone, the depth, the timing, and the mindset at play. It is often a very enlightening experience, both for me and for the participants, because I don’t know how I would respond, or what might be showing up in the role play.

To me, there is a difference between asking questions and overcoming our fear of speaking up. The latter is highly influenced by our past, our experiences, and our self-confidence, all of which determine our self-perception of worthiness, how we see ourselves, and how we think others may see us.

Judgment and comparisons thus can become the biggest barriers to feeling comfortable to speak up. One can speak up by showing off, arguing, or putting down someone else’s ideas. Asking questions is a respectful way of speaking up, the primary reason is to gain a better understanding and to learn.

What do you think are the main obstacles to resolving conflict and how can facilitation help overcome them?

Conflict resolution can be a misnomer – a facilitator may not always be able to resolve a conflict in the room or for a client, nor would it always be possible or relevant for a facilitator to do so.

However, a skilled facilitator will be able to create and hold the space for courageous conversations, create a safe enough and trusting enough environment to at least start an open and respectful conversation, teasing out the multiple layers of issues that cause the misunderstanding, distrust, emotions, etc. Sometimes, all a facilitator can do is to address a conflict by deferring to someone else and outside the “room” with an explanation of why.

One of the main obstacles to resolving conflicts is time. People sometimes expect a facilitator (or anyone for that matter) to resolve a deep-seated conflict in a few hours – that is often not realistic or achievable. That’s why it is critical in the scoping stage and along the project path for a facilitator to discuss with a client, to be very clear about what the outcome(s) might be for a workshop/session, so that expectations can be met mutually by both the client and facilitator and to avoid disappointment or a sense of failure.

Do you have a favourite method or technique for enabling positive dialogue?

Getting to know someone or a group is an important first step in all positive dialogue. It’s not what, you, the facilitator can do or say that matters right away (they matter later), it’s how the other(s) feel about or perceive you. Can they trust you? Do they feel that you are able to do, listen, empathize, support, or achieve their objectives? 

Two of my favorite methods are Appreciative Inquiry and the Art of Hosting. They are tried and true methods that can be used on their own, modified or combined to suit a situation. They help to set a positive tone, honor and appreciate the contribution and wisdom in the room, invite people to host others and themselves, dream together about what the future/outcomes might be. 

How do you prepare for complicated, projects like your “ landslide risk assessment project in British Columbia, Canada”?

That was a big project, involving multi-stakeholders and multiple levels of sponsors (the agency that paid for the project, the engineering firm that did the research, analysis and recommendations, and leading this workshop, and of course all the invited players). 

Having a geology degree helped, and studying a landslide in BC as my thesis topic also helped. That gave me credibility on the scientific front. Having emergency management experiences for 25+ years also helped, that gave me credibility for the stakeholders in that field.

Having worked with First Nations in various projects before helped to give me confidence working with the indigenous communities. Having worked at the federal and local government levels gave me a good understanding and viewpoint of the potential politics that may be involved.

I was hired as a facilitator, not a geologist, nor an emergency management consultant for that project. So my focus was on facilitation-related items.

It took a lot of work, on my part, including project management, interpersonal skills, communication skills, and facilitation skills of course. I had to negotiate what was feasible and what was not feasible given the time allowances, access to stakeholders, realistic and achievable outcomes, and budget. 

Elements of the process included, but not limited to:

• Phone or email interviews with some representatives of the stakeholder groups
• Compilation of the interview results
• Process design and re-design of the workshop, including visual tools to use
• Development and preparation of the workshop materials
• Coordination with and time management for the speakers and with the sponsors for the workshop
• Acknowledgement of the First Nations’ participation
• Face-face facilitation at the workshop
• Writing of a summary report

What is the value of visual coaching to leaders, entrepeneurs, and facilitators? 

Many senior leaders, executives and even facilitators often do not feel comfortable acknowledging that they need help and support, especially in front of their peers, employees or superiors.

They are not comfortable looking vulnerable in front of their employees or other senior colleagues; they may not have trusted people that they feel safe to go to, with whom they can share or express their truths and experiences. It is especially difficult for leaders with an entrepreneurial spirit because they want to innovate.

Private 1:1 visual coaching offers the benefits of specific attention to their priority issues, confidential exploration of their ideas and experiences, and lots of opportunities to learn about their own wholeness, strengths and resourcefulness and to experiment their new ideas in a safe and confidential environment.

The mistaken notion that senior leaders are infallible, know it all, can’t fail, are strong and capable of all things, etc. still prevails in many organizations and sectors. This perpetuates the vicious cycle of people feeling afraid, shameful or uncomfortable to appear vulnerable, thus further erosion of resources to support senior leaders and executives. 

Coaching in some ways is like facilitation – as the coach (or the facilitator), we don’t offer advice. We ask a lot of questions to help the client to think things through, see the possibilities, ask questions, and make their own decisions and commitment.

My visual coaching service offers the additional benefit of a visual summary for each of our coaching sessions such that my coachee can recall what we talked about, and more importantly, the actions the coachee said they are committed to do between our coaching sessions.

About Rosanna von Sacken

I’m a visual facilitator, coach and consultant. I design and facilitate fun & interactive processes and experiences (workshops, meetings, training, conference events, etc.) to help groups & individuals to strategize, collaborate, see possibilities and clarity to reach their goals & become more courageous and impactful leaders. I use visuals to help people see & “hear” each other’s ideas in engaging ways where possible.

You can connect with Rosanna on Twitter and Instagram.

Want to contribute your facilitation story?

We’re always on the lookout for facilitators wanting to share their experiences, insight with the SessionLab community.

If you have a story you’d like to share, we’d love to feature your unique perspective on facilitation!

Check out our guest post guidelines and get in touch! We can’t wait to hear from you.

Every time you turn a corner you hope to see the carriages pulling up but instead you see a sea of heads in that all too familiar winding pattern. Out of the corner of your eye, you spot the signpost that reads, “About 45 mins from here” – ugh! 

The line drags on and on. A commotion is happening just ahead of you. Someone’s Dad is having a meltdown and he storms out of the line, leaving the accompanying kids staring in awe. 

Room by room you proceed and the line continues until finally, the end approaches. The moment has arrived and you are being buckled in. You are off into the world of wizards and muggles! 

For 5-7 mins you are utterly transported into the wizard tales of Harry and his friends. You emerge exhilarated, excited, alive and everyone is saying “let’s go again!”. 

Standing in line is the boring stuff, the dull routine. It feels like a waste of time and can bring out frustrations and bad behaviors in people (that dad who stormed off in the story above? I’m married to him – a post for another day!). 

On the other hand, being on the ride itself is amazing, uplifting, and liberating. People are jumping up and down and bouncing as it finishes. We disembark wanting more, excited and bursting to go again. We can’t wait to share the experience and talk about how fantastic it was!

We don’t often talk about the standing in line part unless it’s to lament how long and exhausting it was or to tell the story of the dad’s temper tantrum.

When I think about running meetings and workshops in organizational life, it’s like a Portkey to this Universal Studio experience.

In this post, I’ll explore what makes workshops magical, and consider how we can bring some of that magic into our meetings.

Let’s take a look!

What makes a meeting unmagical?

Most organizational meetings feel like the “standing in line” part, they are inherited rituals of bringing people together. 

First, we’ll look at what makes a meeting feel like the dull part of a Universal Studios tour by using five parameters – purpose, product, people, process and place. Then we’ll see how workshops might differ and create a more magical outcome.

To get started, allow me to share a selection of damaging characteristics that align meetings to “standing in line.”

Purpose

Often we don’t know why we have this meeting, when it started, or who initiated it. The meeting itself has no clear purpose and even less connection to the higher organizational purpose.

Product

Nothing. Nothing is done, nothing is resolved, nothing has progressed, nothing is decided, nothing is produced.

People

There are people in the room who don’t know why they are there and who don’t want to be there. Key people are excluded, and the people who are there have no role or aren’t invited to contribute.

There are ridiculous behaviors at play: from outright power dynamics to blaming and shaming others to passive-aggressive side comments and exclusionary language. No one intervenes to correct this. 

Perhaps there is a meeting chairperson, but they are most concerned about what they need to say or leading the group to their ideas. People aren’t listening. They are constantly interrupting (if they bother to speak) and directing the conversation towards their hidden agendas.

Participants are not focused, they are multi-tasking and continually distracted by their devices. They spend their time thinking about dinner, all the other things they could be doing or wondering how long before the meeting ends.

Process

Most often a time-boxed checklist of items, which may or may not have been shared with the invitees. Most of the items never get discussed thoroughly enough for a thoughtful decision to be made. Or worse yet, the agenda is a checklist of items that never even get discussed and that get rolled over every week for the foreseeable future. The conversation is all one way. 

There is no little or no engagement of the minds in the room. It goes on for what feels like an eternity. There was no preparation. There is no information shared in, before, or after the meeting, and there is no visible capture of outputs, actions, or decisions. Oh, and did I mention it started 20 mins late?

Place

A large square table in the same four walls people see every day. Or more recently TEAMS or Zoom conferencing, with a selection of people who won’t or can’t turn on their video or audio plus all the extra tech challenges of virtual working; “you’re on mute”, “we are losing you”, “you’re frozen”. I’m sure we could go on and on!

What makes a workshop magical?

If you’ve seen some of the above behaviors in action, you know what it is to be in an unproductive meeting with no workshop magic involved.

In contrast to meetings, well-designed and facilitated workshops can be the “exhilarating” ride from my Universal story.

Let’s explore how! 

Purpose

Workshops kick off with a clear purpose. Purpose is central to ensuring their success and they rarely happen without one. Even before concrete planning begins, just the recognition that “we need to have a workshop” means we likely see a need to be addressed or an emerging purpose. 

We take time to set the context and to align the workshop with the higher purpose of the team or organization. Great workshops will even weave organizational values into the design and subtly reinforce the desired culture that the organization is trying to build.  

Product

As time and care are taken to shape the workshop, we get clarity about desired outputs and outcomes. We also get a sense of what we would like the experience to feel like for the people in the room. These are overt, shaped by, and shared with the attendees before the workshop takes place. 

In great workshops, the product is more than the outcomes or outputs created. The product extends to igniting in attendees the motivation and perseverance to make change happen in service of the organization’s mission.

People

Workshops consider carefully who needs to be in the room and if they are the right people to contribute to the broader purpose. Taking this a step further, we then think about the roles required for workshop success and how we can engage different meeting participants to take on these roles. 

A critical role included in workshops and not often found in meetings is the role of the facilitator. The inclusion of this role creates a focus and performance shift for participants.

Facilitators offer an external, neutral perspective. Their distance from day-to-day happenings and conversations give them a completely different view. This distance also permits them to ask questions that others may not feel comfortable asking and to challenge participants to reframe assumptions they may not even recognize. 

Facilitators work to deepen initial ideas around the purpose and products of the workshop before the session even begins. Facilitators also play an additional role that contributes to workshop success: they create and hold space for participants to do their best thinking. 

The best facilitators create a container that reduces the fear we might associate with entering into ambiguity or going outside our comfort zone. In doing this, they help the group course correct and manage the behaviors that disrupt and damage the safety of this container. 

Having someone dedicated to protecting this container allows the group to go to places that they otherwise cannot reach. The environment created by the facilitator encourages them to deepen their thinking and to be authentic and vulnerable with their contributions.

Process

The process before, during, and after a workshop can be quite different than a meeting. As mentioned before, the most ineffective meetings have little or no preparation by the chairperson or attendees. They are often forced to follow a timeboxed checklist and lack clarity about what is to be done next, by whom, or why.

Workshops invite deliberate preparation. Participants are often required to start thinking about the key questions of the workshop well before the session as they are interviewed and consulted about their desires, expectations, and roles. 

Facilitators consider how participants and leaders should show up in the workshop and they coach and shape preparation activities accordingly. Facilitators spend time helping to turn inputs from pre-reads into inspiration prompts. Workshop preparation is intended to excite and attract attendees, pulling at their curiosities.

Facilitators work to design a participatory flow of questions and activities that culminate in outputs that everyone can buy into. They also think holistically about how expectations, environment, and engagement come together in a meaningful collaborative experience for the attendees. 

When a facilitator designs a workshop flow it is with a thoughtful multi-faceted approach. Experienced facilitators also know that this flow is never what happens on the day itself, so they are nimble and flexible. They continually reshape their in-session plan to serve the broader context and conditions of the session. 

Facilitators also know the importance of opening and closing purposefully and powerfully. They ensure that everyone leaves the room with better understanding and clarity than when they arrived. 

Great facilitators hold group focus by designing variation into the session and use visuals and artifacts to strengthen alignment and unearth connections.

Workshops don’t end when the session ends or the time runs out. Workshops are often just the start of much more work to follow. The best workshops leave people inspired and motivated to start making changes. Changes in their work, in their team, in their behaviors, and the organization. 

Place

Most workshops happen offsite, this provides the potential to think creatively about how to use the gathering place to create both ease or comfort as well as creative stimulation for participants. Place becomes a key shaper of the experience.

A real life example of bringing workshop magic to a monthly leadership meeting

A monthly all-day leadership meeting was leaving the team of 8 feeling exhausted, little work was being accomplished and there was a general feeling of frustration as the monthly meeting drew nearer. 

Team members felt that the meeting took them away from more important work that they needed to be attending to.  Each month there were more excuses why people “could not” attend.  

The agenda was a traditional long list of items that the team never made it through and that carried over from month to month. Each item required a presentation followed by an open discussion of random thoughts from the observers. 

To complicate matters further, there were a collection of big egos in the room and serious power dynamics at play, with each person believing they were the expert and their ideas were the “right” ideas. Interruption and poor listening were standard behaviors. 

Let’s explore what we did to turn things around! 

Reframing 

The first major shift came from reframing the agenda from a list of items to an overarching question. One or two key questions that the group was gathering to explore together and progress that month. The use of the question helped to give context and purpose to the meeting, and people could start thinking before they entered the room. 

Setting ground rules

The next shift came from establishing 2 ground rules that were to be held sacred at all times, no phones in the room (we agreed that there would be frequent breaks to allow for messages and emails) and no interruption (when someone was speaking they had the floor and they agreed to be succinct in return for not being interrupted).  

Introducing flipcharts

The third shift came from banning PowerPoint and introducing “flipchart visuals”.  This meant that anything that needed to be brought into the room, needed to be represented on a flipchart or a large white paper, with a question that the group was being asked to think about while a speaker may have been talking through the visual. 

By the end of the day, the room was filled with flipcharts, flipcharts that were filled with post-it notes and ideas, new sketches, and even tactile prototypes. 

Using facilitation techniques 

The fourth shift came from integrating engagement techniques into the meeting, such as the use of 1-2-4-All conversations structure, small group work, and fist to five voting. These techniques gave everyone in the room an equal voice, improved the way the team listened to each other, and ensured a solution that everyone could support. 

Appointing a facilitator 

And finally, you might have guessed, the last shift came from having one of the team members take on the role of facilitator for the meeting. This person’s role was to work with the team to plan the session, ensure all the inputs were in the “visual format”, design an engagement process for each segment of the meeting, hold the group to the ground rules and keep the team focused!

These changes moved the meeting from a calendar entry that people tried to avoid to one that they looked forward to being part of each month!

In conclusion

Workshops are experiences thoughtfully designed to unleash collaboration and inspiration, leaving people empowered to make change happen. 

We give them more care and attention than we do meetings. We plan them carefully, hold them to higher expectations of performance, design them, and then we facilitate them (often with outside help).

Meetings need more than a stroke of luck and an agenda to be valuable to the organization. We all know the costs of bad meetings, not just in terms of money and time but also in terms of damage to goodwill and the employee experience. 

Meetings are rituals, moments where people gather in a business, they are cultural touchpoints and should reinforce values and purpose. They should bring out the best in people.

Not all meetings need to be workshops but most meetings could do with a bit of workshop magic. We should be thoughtful about the experience we want people to have in meetings and purposefully design and facilitate with this in mind.

About the author

Written by Tricia Conyers, Founder Island Inspirations Ltd., INIFAC Certified Master Facilitator, and Certified Virtual Facilitator. Connect with Tricia on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Want to contribute your facilitation story?

We’re always on the lookout for facilitators wanting to share their experiences, insight with the SessionLab community.

If you have a story you’d like to share, we’d love to feature your unique perspective on facilitation!

Check out our guest post guidelines and get in touch! We can’t wait to hear from you.

But seeing each other at our in-person team retreats have always been an integral part of our culture and are a massive part of building team cohesion.

We previously aimed for a full team retreat twice a year. After a fun and productive team meeting in Barcelona in February 2020, we were already anticipating the summer meeting when we would see each other again.

Sadly, the global pandemic had other plans. The world turned upside down, including the world of workshops and work retreats, too. While we were fortunate enough to have remote working as our default setting, remote team building is still a topic we are looking to master.

We have tried a range of online team events in the past year and half: escape rooms, virtual scavenger hunts, self-designed holiday team events. Alongside our weekly team lunches these have done a good job of helping us stay connected as a team. Yet we have been very much looking forward to the opportunity to come when we can see each other live without taking unnecessary pandemic risks.

After some logistical rearrangement and thorough planning, we were able to find a spot to meet together as an (almost) full team!

Here are some key takeaways from our team trip we hope will help you when planning your own company retreat!

1. Accept that logistics will take more time and things can change

We’ve always tried to find a nice and inspiring location for our meetings. We wanted to ensure that our 2021 company retreat was no exception! 

As a result of the global pandemic, we had some additional considerations. We thought long and hard about where everyone on our globally distributed team had the best chance to arrive. 

And first and foremost, it is important to align with your team if you are collectively fine to take the implications of international travel with regards to the pandemic situation, and decide if you go for a live meeting or stay virtual.

We had to consider the impact of travel restrictions, vaccination passports and visa requirements while also keeping everyone on the team safe. We also wanted to find a place where we could be isolated from larger crowds while still having access to amenities. 

Croatia was not a hard choice for us, given that it minimised the number of border crossings our team collectively had to take and was relatively easy for everyone to reach. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Croatia has a wonderful seaside! 

For several weeks we monitored the covid case numbers and waited to make travel bookings until we felt fairly certain that new restrictions wouldn’t be put into place. While this meant more expensive tickets, this meant we could be flexible in the event we had to reschedule or find a different location for our company retreat.

The extra attention to detail and decision making took a more time to organise than previously, but it was important we got everything right in order to bring the team together safely and effectively. 

Plan additional time and budget for team retreats under such circumstances, and have a back-up prepared. In the event of another global lockdown, we were ready with an all-virtual retreat too.

2. Prepare for hybrid scenarios

While our team retreats are among the most anticipated events of the year, there can be a range of reasons why someone might be unable to join. 

Whether such a decision is due to cautiousness around pandemic travel, personal circumstances or unexpected last-minute events, it’s important to acknowledge and respect the personal choice of everyone in your team.

Just because someone is unable to travel doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be involved in the company retreat. It’s important to think through the agenda and consider when and how you will be able to involve the people who can’t join in live.

In our case, one of our team members wasn’t able to join us in Croatia. Knowing this in advance gave us a chance to prepare and shape our agenda accordingly. 

Prepare the tech to allow remote participation

A large portion of our company retreat was a 2-day workshop on defining our team values and culture. With topics like these, it’s essential to receive contributions from everyone in the team.

Remote participation for fully virtual retreats is simple in that everyone has an equal entry point. Everyone has their own device and so each participant can see and hear one another clearly and without interference. 

Every hybrid set-up is different, though in our case we would have a single remote participant in a room of eight. In our case, we used a single laptop with one microphone and speaker for our remote participant to be present in the room. 

This meant that we reduced possible interference, limited the impact on our internet connection and also ensured there was as little tech in the room as possible.

Having a computer in front of everyone when sitting around a table is naturally not a great setup for live interactions, especially when doing any type of exercise (e.g. grouping cards or post-it notes on the table)

What we ended up using for our hybrid setup was:

• A single MacBook running Zoom
• a GoPro Hero 8 camera with a very wide angle that allowed us to capture everyone at the table  
• External speaker: Initially we tried with the laptop speakers, but the voice output was not ideal, so we ended up connecting an external “party” speaker that was available at the location. After adjusting the sound levels and reducing bass output, we found the voice was loud and crystal clear
• The inbuilt microphone on the Macbook. This was also not ideal as it required everyone in the room to speak more loudly than normal though we unfortunately didn’t have a better one available. Next time, we would bring a high quality microphone to ensure remote participants could hear everything being said without issue. 

This worked well with one remote participant, and could possibly scale with more people connecting while still using only one computer input for the live group. If we were having multiple remote participants from different locations, then it would be useful to consider a dedicated laptop screen for each participant so they can be seen the same way.

This embodiment of the remote participant meant they effectively had a seat at the table. This was extremely effective in helping the hybrid collaboration work for all parties.

Hybrid meeting difficulties and how to manage them

Still with a relatively adequate video conferencing setup we had a couple of things we learnt how to do better:

• Lack of non-verbal feedback for remote participants: The non-verbal communication that you observe so easily on people around is barely noticeable for the remote participants. 
  • Tip: whenever remote team members comment, acknowledge verbally that you’ve heard them and if you agree or disagree.
• Sharing whiteboard content: any notes written on a physical whiteboard is nearly impossible to see through a webcam from several meters away. 
  • Tip: Either have a dedicated camera zoomed in on the whiteboard, or have somebody take pictures and share them regularly with remote participants.
• Involving in interactive activities – e.g. brainwriting type of activities where you note ideas on post its:
  • Tip: We had them written up in Slack and somebody copied them on post-its while others were presenting.

Involvement in games, icebreakers and social activities

While the tips above – and a degree of empathy and patience both from live and remote team members – can help to get remote participants to be heard and involved at important work discussions, there are also the social activities that might make up your company retreat. 

Not everything can be done with remote participants, especially as a great deal of non-work interaction happens spontaneously, but with some foresight you can plan a more inclusive event. 

Here are a few tips for energiser activities that work for hybrid setups.

• Simple games like Giants-Wizards-Elves or a rock-paper-scissors tournament work great in hybrid set-ups. The rules are easy to understand, it’s easy for people in different locations to interact with one another and the slight delay can add laughter to proceedings too. Try to have someone in charge of pairing up players and ensuring remote participants are included. This can keep things moving and help the group all have fun. 

• Physical activities that get everyone moving like Shake Down can also make all the difference in a hybrid company retreat. Remote participants in particular are likely to be seated for a long time and we all know that Zoom fatigue is real! Getting everyone moving is a great activity that can bring some silliness to energy to proceedings!

Outside of scheduled work time, it’s also great to include some social activities where team members from remote locations can join in. Sadly, we only realised after two hours of playing self-defined charades that this would be a perfect activity for a hybrid team setup. Something to keep in mind for next time! 

3. Focus on what is hardest to do online

Prior to the pandemic, we used our live team meetings to align on strategy, plan the upcoming quarters, and workshop more complex product challenges.

After almost 2 years of the pandemic, we had run and improved each of these activities in virtual settings. As a team, we felt that building human bonds with one another is more difficult to do online and so we wanted this to be the focus of our team retreat..

Many of us on the team have kids and thus parental duties call them home after work hours, while others are dedicated to hobbies and sports. In any busy company, it can be hard to find time to just organically hang out and to get to know each other better. (Organised time helps though!)

We also felt that we hadn’t previously aligned together as a team on values and culture. Culture and attitude fit is one of the most important factors we look for when looking for new people to join our team. Yet this was undocumented and so not clearly spelled out for everyone. 

Such a process requires a lot of complex conversation to really understand what matters to everyone, and to align on the values we altogether find the most important.

For this team retreat, we decided to focus on:

• Defining our core values
• Aligning on our team culture
• Teambuilding and give enough opportunity and free time for people to bond

4. Facilitation

It is tempting to think that the working sessions of a team retreat are just like any other intra-company meetings and that we’ll get by with the usual level of facilitation done by managers and other team members. So why not just do the same again here?

• Being a facilitation enthusiast myself, I enjoy designing and facilitating workshops. But the last time I facilitated a team culture workshop was more than 5 years ago. Having someone who is both an experienced facilitator and an expert makes a big difference in the outcomes.
• Hiring a good facilitator and taking your whole team to a retreat comes with a price tag.  But remember: spending everyone’s time well in a properly facilitated session and leaving with a sense of accomplishment and motivation after 1.5 years of not seeing each other is worthy of your time, effort and money.
• Don’t mix roles: The role of a facilitator is to create participation while staying neutral. Facilitating a technical planning session as a team member might be okay, but leading the process of define culture and values is nearly impossible to do neutrally as both a participant and a facilitator.
• Allow everyone to participate fully: Not being the facilitator myself also allowed me to fully participate in the conversation without having to think of group facilitation. I also didn’t feel exhausted by wearing multiple hats, so I still had energy to spend good time with our team members. Win-win!
• Have a dedicated person controlling the room (live and virtual): When seeing your colleagues, it’s great to be able to spend time with them without needing to control the room and the agenda. Having a dedicated person who watches out for everyone being able to participate and keeps the group on schedule. 

The list could go on, and we were super happy to have a great facilitator running our 2-day team values workshop – credits to Ivana!

We are also grateful for Ivana to bring our attention to positive psychology – we used the first day of our workshop to deep dive into identify our core strengths and highlight the strengths we see in each other too. 

Getting to know your strengths is an important part of positive psychology. Gallup’s research has shown that people who get to practice their strengths on a daily basis are three times more likely to be satisfied with their lives and six times more likely to be engaged at work so it really does pay off to bring your strengths to your awareness.

We used the VIA Character Strengths Survey and Positran’s Strengths Cards for that exploration. Everyone had a chance to get to know their strengths, reflect on how he or she uses them at work/home and understand what advantages they bring to their lives. 

We also got to know each other through learning more about everyone’s strengths and what each member has to bring to the team. Finally, we also collectively reflected on what are the team’s strengths – which need not be the same as the strengths of individuals in the team. The whole dive in this topic left people feeling energized, proud and with lots of good insight. 

Some extra comments from the facilitator’s perspective:

• Remember to have people moving around as much as possible, have them do work on their feet, ask them to write something down on the flipchart, use energizers frequently so to keep people on the move
• In a hybrid setting make sure to check often enough with the person joining virtually how they’re doing and whether or not something needs to be changed in the setting so they can participate more easily 
• Smile and have fun :)

For the Values and Culture Definition process, we used the Culture Design Canvas – credits to Gustavo Razzetti for sharing this framework in the SessionLab facilitation library.

We found it an effective way to structure our thinking and engage productively with what can be an especially complicated process! 

5. Work vs social time

Finding a good balance between work and social time is important – especially when you see your teammates so rarely in person.

When bringing people to a nice location that requires long travel, be sure to allow time and space for them to enjoy it. You want the event to be memorable and fun, as well as productive. You have no reason to pull long working hours and burn everyone out!

Remember that the idle time spent next to the pool chatting, eating, or walking to the beach are often the place to have the conversations that build team bonds.

Lastly, give people private time (enough breaks) to catch up with family left at home. Many of us have partners and small kids at home, and getting away from them for nearly a full week is less difficult if there is ample time to communicate. 

We were also sure to include a completely work free day. This was a great opportunity to just hang out while participating in an activity. We went on a boat trip and explored some of Croatia’s natural beauty together! It was so nice to reflect and spend time together outside of our usual working environments.

6. Games to facilitate social interaction

Games and icebreakers were also an important part of building bonds at our company retreat. During working hours, this meant including some energizer games and icebreakers in the agenda to keep things fresh while also ensuring we spent time engaging socially. 

Practical and fun energizer games

Go bananas is a great simple energizer we used twice – once with the phrase Go Bananas and a second time with the Queen song We Will Rock You. Both occasions resulted in high energy and laughter, which was great! Remember that just having fun together and being a little silly can help build bonds between members of your team. 

We also found the equilateral triangles collaboration game to be fun, energizing and instructive too. Moving around and using non-verbal communication to complete the game was a great way to generate laughter and bring new flavours into the workshop. 

The fact it was a beautiful day in the sun didn’t harm things either!

When defining our company purpose, we also played a game where everyone came up with their definition using simple building blocks before explaining it to the group. This was a great way of bringing variety into the workshop and encouraged members of the team to share their creative sides. It was especially nice to see everyone’s different approaches and creations! 

Activities outside of working sessions

We also made sure to make time to go out for dinner as a group and learn more about each other in a relaxed atmosphere. It can be easy to take this kind of social interaction for granted and forget to include it in the agenda for your company retreat. Ordering pizzas and crashing around the kitchen table might work for you, but it’s worth remembering the benefits of a lovely sit down meal! 

Charades is a simple and really fun game to play, especially when you add a twist that everyone present can note down words and expressions to act out, and then we all play as a team to guess (except each time the person who submitted it). It gets fun when words from your own team’s subculture or the previous day’s events start appearing and you see your colleagues get extremely creative both in coming up with hard assignments and then acting out those!

We also brought a set of collaborative board games – where you don’t play against each other, but you rather need to win as a team against the game. Magic Maze was a team favorite this time – giving a good boost of energy while we worked together to escape and win :-)

In conclusion

It’s not easy running a great company retreat during a global pandemic. We found that by carefully planning and focusing on what was important to our team, we were able to build team bonds and be productive too. 

We hope that the above is helpful and might inspire you during your next team retreat, whether it’s hybrid, virtual or live! Have any thoughts or want to share what you did at your company retreat? We’d love to hear from you below!

To define the term, a socially distanced workshop is a live workshop where measures designed to limit close contact are in effect.

This might mean limiting participant numbers, using large rooms with carefully distributed seating, the wearing of masks, the limiting of movement around the room, or other factors based on local or organizational guidelines.

I ran a series of creative workshops for young people this summer designed to engage creative and critical skills and create meaningful connections under these conditions. 

This meant needing to redesign for a socially distanced learning environment, replan activities, and reconnect with an audience who likely hadn’t been in a creative workshop for a long period of time.

While we’ve covered how to run virtual workshops and facilitate remotely before, there were lots of things to learn for this new setting too! 

Here are eight of the main things I learned from the experience of facilitating in this new and somewhat challenging environment. Let’s dig in!

• 1. People really missed workshops (and making connections)
• 2. People might need extra help bringing themselves into socially distanced sessions
• 3. New ideas come from adversity and interaction
• 4. Leading by example has never been more important
• 5. Be clear and patient when discussing workshop etiquette
• 6. Try redesigning activities before removing them
• 7. Remember to create space for reflection and don’t be afraid to hold the silence
• 8. Things take longer, so know where your agenda can bend and squeeze

1. People really missed workshops (and making connections)

As facilitators, we hope that our sessions will have an impact and resonate with our participants. In the current global situation, it’s worth acknowledging that the workshops we run might be one of the few opportunities our participants have to connect with like-minded people.

In my own practice, this meant allowing more space for connection and adjusting my own expectations. I had to acknowledge the purpose of a workshop is often more multifaceted than a single, concrete goal. 

Design for connection first

Bear in mind that balancing your primary goal alongside the need for human connection has never been more important. Coming during a period where many people are feeling disconnected, I felt it was important to design these sessions for connection first.

This meant allowing time for group discussions and breaks to go on for longer and creating additional space in the agenda for discussion and small group work. I also made sure to include a balance of activities that meant people could meaningfully engage with one another alongside deeper work.

Consider how to balance single, pair and group work

1-2-4-All is a workshop activity I’ve used time and time again in both live and remote workshops. I used the activity here, though, upon consideration of the format, group size, and room set-up, I swapped to a 1-2-All format.

Firstly, this was so I could give special emphasis to the pair work portion of the activity. In my experience, more meaningful interpersonal connections – particularly about creative subjects – occur when working in pairs. The subject is often personal, and pair work allows for a safe, engaged sharing environment with the minimum of distractions.

Secondly, skipping the small group step meant I could guide larger group discussion, model the ideal method of engagement, and ensure everyone felt seen, heard, and safe to share. All while carefully observing social distancing and working with the existing room set-up. 

All workshop design is a balancing act. By keeping the desire for reconnection and peer engagement in the front of my mind, I felt that my agenda design best reflected the needs and goals of the participants and we had a great session as a result.    

2. People might need extra help bringing themselves into socially distanced sessions 

Every workshop group is different. Even before the pandemic, we would have participants who were 100% up for whatever we threw at them, while others needed more time to feel psychologically safe and engage with the group.

I think it’s worth reiterating that many people are feeling less psychologically safe or able to participate at this moment in time. In my experience, people really want to engage with others in these settings, they just need a little extra help to warm up and be gently eased into the workshop.

Set up the room for safety

Creating a safe, comfortable environment is a great first step. Remember to plan your room set up for social distancing and ensure everyone can enter the room safely and not feel pressured to put themselves at risk.

Space working areas apart, create clear lines of travel to and from the room and take extra steps with the arrangement to make your group comfortable. 

In my case, this meant arranging seating so that it was close enough to have conversations and create a collegial atmosphere, but far enough away to observe the two-meter rule. 

For this, I created a U-shape table set-up, with a single chair in the center of each table. This meant all participants were spaced two meters apart, had ample room to work safely, and could also converse with the person next to them easily. The U-shape set-up also enabled the group to all see one another and listen effectively during full group discussion. 

I also positioned the tables and chairs in the center of the room, allowing for ample space for each participant to comfortably exit the room without coming into close proximity with other participants.

This really helped create a safe atmosphere where people could grab some water or take a comfort break without worrying about breaking social distancing rules or putting themselves at risk.

When choosing a workshop location, keep in mind that you’ll want space to allow for free movement while observing the correct amount of distance. You may need to find a larger space or limit the number of participants accordingly. 

Use music

As someone who has used music to mixed results before, I wasn’t completely convinced it was an important ingredient for an effective workshop. In the socially distanced classroom, I found that using music for groups entering the room and to guide them while engaging in reflective work really helped create a safe, pleasant environment.

I used a Spotify playlist for concentration that featured classical music and music from film scores. This created nice moments of recognition and potential talking points within the group while keeping things chilled. 

Ultimately, I feel that we all have lots of things influencing our mood right now that can be quite hard to affect. Music has proved to be a simple way to positively counter-balance our collective mood and move things gently in the right direction.

Pay attention to your warm-ups

I also made sure to put special emphasis on the icebreaker and warm-up activities. I was careful to make sure people did not feel ambushed or asked to share too much too soon. As such, the icebreaker and warm-up activities I used were simple and gentle while also introducing the topics of the workshop. 

In one session, I asked participants to bring their favorite book to the session with them or have it in mind. The icebreaker was to recommend the book to the other person, tell them why it’s their favorite, and share what they think we might learn from it as writers. 

Knowing all the participants were keen readers, it followed that they would be excited and able to discuss a favorite book without much difficulty. The energized and passionate conversations that followed were a great way to get the workshops started!

I’d recommend it as an icebreaker in any setting, especially if you are able to include a final question that can relate to your workshop theme. 

Warming people up and breaking the ice with a group has always been an important step. During this period of global uncertainty, baseline preparedness is likely lower and we should plan our sessions and interactions accordingly. 

3. New ideas come from adversity and interaction

One of the things I love about running workshops is how the agenda can evolve and change because of how participants interact and engage with the content. This is even more true in socially distant meetings or virtual workshops, where many of our existing exercises and activities need to change in order to work in these new environments. 

Entire activities can be upended by a group’s reaction and though this can be scary as a facilitator, it’s a great opportunity for learning and growth! 

In one example, social distancing meant we could no longer have people write and add post-its to a shared wall. I still felt it would be effective to have everyone create their own stack of post-its in order to capture ideas and remove the fear of the blank page. 

In one session with 9-12-year-olds, I gave individuals the go-ahead to organize their post-its (and ideas) in whatever way felt good and natural to them. This meant that participants then used and engaged with their post-its in interesting ways.

Some participants organized their post-its in neat columns, rows, shapes, and patterns, while others attached their favorite post-it ideas to their arms, legs, and forehead for others to read.

This led me to consider how I might make using post-its even more fun, and use participants’ inclinations to use post-its in unusual ways in future activities.

How might an arm and a leg respond differently to a design problem? How might we each map out an idea differently and show our thought processes instinctively using our bodies or different shapes?

My point here is that invention often comes out of adversity and as facilitators, we should pay attention to how participants instinctively engage with activities in order to learn and develop even better sessions. 

4. Leading by example has never been more important

Leading people through a group process has always meant considering the effect we have as facilitators. Igniting passions, helping promote self-discovery, and raising energy levels are things many of us think about as we lead a group through a workshop process.

In these socially distanced workshops, I found participants looked to me for direction and to set the tone and energy levels of the session even more so than normal. Being conscious of this and preparing myself accordingly helped make these sessions more fun and effective while keeping sight of what the group needed.

Consider participating

Just as the situation has meant people are out of workshop practice or need a little extra direction, so too must we model the kind of behavior we want to see from participants. 

I found that engaging in some of the creative activities alongside students or have a pair discussion with my co-facilitator had a profound effect on group engagement.

There will always be different approaches when it comes to participating vs facilitating a workshop but as we return to live workshops, it’s worth considering how helpful it can be to model how to do an exercise and engage with others in practical terms too.

Model safe behaviour

Leading by example in this setting also means modeling proper social distancing behavior, remembering to wear your mask where necessary, and helping people be safe while working together. It can be so easy to forget certain social distancing rules or get lost in a group process you might not have done in a while!

I also found that remembering to check in with myself beforehand and preparing a checklist including these additional items before the session was especially useful here. I was a little out of practice too!

Keeping the potential unease of participants front of mind when engaging in the workshop and ensuring I set the right example at every stage meant I was better prepared to facilitate whatever happened. 

Want to run more engaging workshops and meetings?

5. Be clear and patient when discussing workshop etiquette 

The pandemic has meant that many of us are out of the live workshopping and meeting habit. Just as some participants needed a little extra help in bringing themselves to the workshops, others needed some help following directions and corralling their energies. 

For example, some participants needed a little refresher on active listening or would get over-excited and have trouble following directions. I also found that I couldn’t take shared understanding of certain tasks or codes of conduct for granted as I might have done previously. 

Taking the time to articulate good workshop and conversational etiquette at the outset of a session has always been good practice, but as we return to workshopping in a live setting, it’s worth reiterating. 

Be clear about what you expect from your workshop participants, state those expectations in concrete terms where possible, don’t take anything for granted, and be patient – remember that returning to the setting might be stressful or anxiety-inducing. 

Try including a code of conduct in your invitations (especially around social distancing), model good workshop behavior, and don’t be afraid to guide the group if they go wrong. It might even be worth including activities designed to teach good workshop etiquette early in the session. 

Remember that some of us have simply forgotten how to do workshops and as facilitators, it’s our job to bring people back into the room meaningfully, helpfully, and respectfully. 

In addition to general workshop etiquette, outlining the format and expectations of this socially distanced workshop was an important aspect of planning and running the session. 

In my case, it was important to reiterate the following items for this socially distanced workshop:

• Masks should be worn when not seated (unless medically exempt)
• Hands should be sanatized frequently
• Leaving the room is fine, though please follow the assigned route and sanitize your hands upon entry and exit 
• Please maintain one metre plus distance with other participants 
• Snacks and drinks will be provided and will be individually wrapped
• Full sanitisation of seats, handrails, tables, doors and all other contact points will take place before and after each session.
• Windows will be open to increase ventilation
• Materials will be provided and sanatized before and after use

Remember that all organizations, groups, and countries will have their own rules and guidelines that should be followed and are prone to change. Keep up to date and relate any of these items to your participants. This will not only help keep everyone physically safe but ensure they’re comfortable and reassured too!

6. Try redesigning activities before removing them 

In my facilitation practice, one of my key focuses is on creating connections and building shared joy around being creative and expressing yourself. Understandably, the socially distanced workshop could be considered a barrier to this process!

In the design stage, I had to reconsider how some of my tried and tested activities could work with social distancing and an environment where we had to keep students seated as much as possible.

This led to two options – remove activities that weren’t suitable for the setting in favor of something simpler or redesign them to work in the setting. 

Know when to redesign

While redesigning some activities isn’t easy, trying to work with the setting and create something special instead of selecting the easier route felt really important to me. 

Keeping the goals of the workshop in mind was a key part of making this decision. If the activity is integral to the outcome, that’s a good candidate for a redesign. If the activity is a simple energizer, maybe it could be swapped out without much impact.

For example, I often use a creative exercise I adapted from a great user experience activity where participants would trade chocolates and interview one another until they ended up with one they liked.

Thanks to Sara Chizari for sharing this method in her Medium article on running an empathy workshop.

In my version, I start by handing participants a random card containing an archetypal character, places or objects. These archetypes include characters like The Mother, The Warrior, The Mentor, and are a great way to start discussing stories, ideas, and why we might be drawn to them.  

Once everyone has a card, participants then discuss in pairs what they like and dislike about their cards and where they might have seen the archetype before. Next, they trade cards with other group members until they get a card (and archetypal idea) that they really like. 

The lesson in both exercises is the same – people are drawn to certain ideas or likes, and when designing and writing, we should think of who it is for and what they will be drawn to as well.

It’s important to understand ourselves, and our audience, in both writing and design, if we are to create something with purpose and meaning. 

Giving someone who hates nuts a peanut butter chocolate isn’t a great approach, nor is writing a romance story for a horror audience, or trying to write a sci-fi if you don’t know and like science fiction. 

Because of social distancing, getting up and moving around the room to trade archetypes wasn’t possible. Rather than throw out the activity – which I’ve found to be effective and engaging in the past – I elected to redesign the activity for the setting. 

Instead of a single round of trading as a group, I had three successive rounds where I gave out archetype cards, though I changed the level of choice participants had at each stage.

In the first round, people were given an archetype character card at random. They could either keep their card or swap it for another random card. I then asked the group to free-write around the card they received. 

In a later round, we came back to the archetypes and I gave each participant three archetypal location cards to choose from and add to their ideation mood board. Finally, I laid out the archetypal object cards for everyone to see and had each participant choose the one they wanted the most. 

I felt it was important to maintain the elements of choice, discussion, and creative reflection of this activity, even if I couldn’t maintain the trading aspect. The result was a fun exercise that allowed the desired conversations and insights to surface while still prompting creativity – all while maintaining social distancing and safety. 

Be receptive to the opportunities that come from redesign

When running this adapted activity, I changed how the cards were selected. Instead of being given out one by one randomly, I placed a number of the cards face down on a central table at the beginning of the session.

As a result, there was an element of wonder, expectation, and a talking point for participants too. This was something I totally missed when running the original exercise.

Without having to account for social distancing and redesign the activity, I wouldn’t have made this discovery. In the end, the situation meant I learned something I will use in many future workshops, whether they’re socially distanced or not.

The point here is that instead of saying, “I can’t run that exercise in this setting,” ask, “How could I run that exercise? What is the core outcome of the activity and how might I still achieve that under these conditions?”

By considering how I could amend the exercise for this setting, I found a great compromise that was effective and generated new ideas too! 

Inevitably, not every exercise can be run in a virtual, hybrid or socially distanced environment. But by first asking if it can be adapted, you might find creative workarounds or new ideas!

7. Remember to create space for reflection and don’t be afraid to hold the silence

One of my challenges as a facilitator has been in allowing myself to be more comfortable with silence. Allowing conversation to happen at its own pace and giving time for reflection without forcing it has been something I’ve had to work on – my instinct is to jump in and get things moving! 

Just as many participants are relearning how to workshop under these conditions, so are we as facilitators. It was a great reminder to be aware of myself and be more comfortable with holding the silence, letting conversations emerge steadily, and allow space for participants to reflect. 

My advice here is to trust the process and to trust people. If you’ve created the right environment and are supporting the process, connections and insights will occur – they just might take a little longer than you’re used to or need some gentle guidance without forcing things.

Remember that silence is a chance for reflection and reappraisal and that it is a vital part of the process too.

8. Things take longer, so know where your agenda can bend and squeeze

One effect of the relearning process is that tasks, activities, and discussions might take longer. For participants and facilitators, renegotiating the territory of the live, socially distanced workshop takes time.

What might have been a simple activity before the pandemic might take more set-up, or group discussions might overrun because of our being out of practice. This is okay! The key is to know what is most important in your group process and where your agenda can change if necessary.

In the workshops I ran, setting up and concluding activities took a little more time than normal. Group discussions took a little longer to get going and so went over time. Something as simple as moving from one side of the room to the other to get a drink was now a little more complicated because of how we had to negotiate the space.

All told, there were numerous small things that meant time got eaten up more swiftly than previously.

Before the session, I anticipated this might be the case and so pre-labeled those parts of my agenda that could be cut down, swapped for alternatives, or skipped altogether. I made sure to note which parts of my process were integral so I could ensure the process was a success, whatever might change during the session. 

It’s also worth mentioning that because of my goal for creating meaningful connections, I let other activities go on for longer than I had allocated time for.

Being aware of the needs of the group and allowing more time for what is working has always been important – in the socially distanced workshop, this is arguably even more true!

I made sure to note down where changes occurred in my agenda and what happened so I might plan better and make changes in the future. Keeping records is an important part of the development of better workshops!

Making changes to the agenda mid-session has been something facilitators have always had to consider. Be sure to acknowledge the potential for additional overrun when leading socially distanced sessions and plan accordingly. 

Wrap up

Facilitation has always been a profession about working with and creating change. In periods of upheaval such as a global pandemic, workshops have had to change too. 

The important thing to remember is that our role as facilitators is still the same – to help guide a group through a process and towards their goals. 

The socially distanced workshop is undoubtedly a challenge to some of our traditional working methods and facilitation practices. But with some creativity and a dedication to creating meaningful experiences, we can continue to inspire and engage participants, whatever the setting. 

Have you engaged in socially distanced facilitation? Do you have any tips on how to make workshops engaged in this format? We’d love to hear from you!

At SessionLab, we felt it was important to hold a team session to close the year, have fun, reflect, and appreciate everything we had achieved. The goal was to raise spirits before people went away for the holidays, celebrate the year, and build team bonds and experiences that would persist into the New Year and beyond.

As a fully remote team, most of our meetings and team building events are virtual by default- our current team of 6 live in 5 different countries! While we usually meet twice a year in a live setting, the global pandemic of 2020 meant we had to find other ways to meet, work and build team spirit in a virtual environment.  

This is a challenge for organizations of all different shapes and sizes. Adapting to running events in a remote environment while still making them engaging and meaningful is tricky, but with careful planning and design, you can make your events enjoyable for all involved.

In this post, we’ll walk you through how we designed our virtual holiday party and share some tips and takeaways that can help you create effective, engaging virtual team events of your own!  

Nonetheless, the facilitation plan and exercises below work well for a live event, too! In fact, in most of the cases below, we tweaked some of our favorite team building activities to fit the virtual use case.

Goals of the holiday team event

Before the holiday season started, we knew we wanted to dedicate one afternoon to come together as a team, so we booked a three-hour slot that was fitting for our team across Europe. 

Once we’d decided on a time and date for the event, it was vital that we clarify what we wanted to achieve and outline the purpose of the event. As with any workshop, event, or meeting, considered planning is important in ensuring the event will be successful.

What we wanted to achieve:

• Have fun. We wanted to have a light-hearted event to energize the team and make people feel good. Due to the global pandemic, we couldn’t have our usual summer getaway, so it was especially important to have some more virtual occasions during the year for relaxed non-working time together.
• Reflect together on the highs and lows of the past year and create a shared story of the past twelve months.
• Show appreciation. While showing appreciation is something we do year-round, it’s important to find dedicated time to tell each other how much we appreciate working together. Positive feedback creates a lot of energy, and builds bonds – particularly after a challenging year! 
• Build connections. Although we are a small team, there are still people in the company working in different roles who don’t usually work with each other. Such events are great opportunities to get those people interacting and help everyone to feel more connected as a team. 

Timing

While we wondered if it wouldn’t be unusual to have a holiday party in the early afternoon, when we considered the needs and obligations of everyone involved, it made more sense for the whole team to be held during working hours. 

With some team members having kids at home or other obligations, it was important to make the event work for everyone. Our advice here would be to plan the event so it doesn’t eat into your employees free time and to consider time-zone implications when choosing when to hold your event. While it might be wine-o-clock for you, your colleagues overseas might just be waking up!  

Logistics / Video conferencing

Despite being a fully remote company since the beginning, Zoom-fatigue is something that we also do experience. For our end of year online event, we were looking for something more fun and engaging.

At the recent annual alumni getaway of Startup Wise Guys, we had the chance to try spatial.chat which brings back the element of navigating ‘physical space’ in a virtual meeting. The core concept is simple: you have a meeting room and if you (well, your avatar) stands close to someone, you can hear one another clearly and interact. If you move your avatar far enough away, you don’t hear them at all and as such, your group can move around and have breakout conversations organically.

A couple of other features that came handy:

• Ability for multiple people to share their screen, images or music. We weren’t bound to one person sharing like in most video conference tools and it helped create a more real-life alike atmosphere! 
• Pin images and videos to the background – this was particularly useful for some of the exercises we did.
• No app required to download – when it’s yet another video conf tool you’re using, and just for a single meeting, we all appreciate the quick access.

One takeaway here is to be open to changing up your video conferencing software based on the nature or purpose of the event. While there’s obvious value to using a tool everyone is familiar with, easy-to-use tools like spatial.chat (and alternatives such as gather.town) can bring fresh engagement while also keeping the entry barrier low.

It’s also worth noting that just as you would decorate a live space for the holidays, try doing so in a virtual space too! We picked a nice holiday-themed background and set some holiday music playing when we fired up the meeting room and it really helped create the right atmosphere!

Facilitation Design

When it came to designing and planning the virtual team event, it was important for us to get the right balance and provide space not only for fun but for reflection and appreciation.

Here’s how we approached designing the agenda for our virtual end of year event: 

We knew our agenda would have a couple of more thoughtful exercises that included reviewing the year and giving focused appreciation to one another, so we wanted to fill in the gaps before and after them with more active and fun activities including an icebreaker, quiz and awards ceremony. 

We also knew that we would split facilitation duties between our two co-founders. Remember that when running any event, it’s always good to have a primary facilitator to make sure the agenda runs smoothly while having a co-facilitator can make the facilitation process even easier. 

When planning and designing the agenda, we used SessionLab to block out the facilitation plan and collaborate on creating a virtual event that satisfied our needs and fit neatly into the 3 hours we had allocated. Let’s take a look at the step by step agenda and explain the goal of each section.

Holiday team event agenda

We had the following main activities in our year closing session, which we’ll break down for you step-by-step below:

• Gathering & Intro (10 mins)
• Breaking the Ice: Collaborative Song-writing (15 mins)
• Review the Year: History Map (45 mins)
• Break
• Fun Competition: Quiz (35 mins)
• Give Appreciation: The Bus Trip Exercise (40 mins)
• Awards (20 mins)

See how this adds up on a timeline:

If you want to use this template for your own session, check out the complete agenda which includes practical tips and tricks for running the session too. (You can create your own copy of the agenda in SessionLab and tweak it to make it fit for your own team event.)

0. Preparations and Briefing

Ensuring everyone knows about the event and can prepare and allocate time accordingly is the first step in making your online party or event happen.

We wanted this to be a light-hearted, fun event. In the invitation, we asked that everyone dress for the fun, holiday theme if they wished. While some of us appeared in fun Xmas sweaters and Santa hats, it’s especially memorable when one of your colleagues turns up in a full-body giraffe outfit! 

One final item we included in the invitation was a point of what not to bring. We asked everyone to come to the event with an open mind and heart and to remove other distractions. As with any meeting or workshop, it’s important to set clear expectations of your participants and ensure everyone is on the same page – even if that means getting ready to have fun!

1. Gathering and Introduction (10 mins)

The first step for your virtual party or meeting is bringing everyone together! Assuming it’s a tool that not everyone is familiar with, allow a few minutes of time so everyone can experience using the tool. 

Also remember to ask participants to close (minimize) all other apps, tabs, etc. so there are no distractions during the event.

When using our chosen video conferencing tool, spatial.chat, there were some actions we asked everyone to try in order to become comfortable using the app:

• Move your avatar: your volume and what you hear will adjust with the distance
• Try the Megaphone – if you have something important to say
• Zoom in to see people’s face in proper size
• Stay in the first room (since we had multiple rooms in created for the event)

If you’re using any new tool or software for your virtual party, consider having a small checklist of actions to try when starting your event so you can cut down on downtime later. 

2. Break the ice: Collaborative song-writing (15 mins)

Even with established teams, it’s important to get people into the holiday mood and encourage creativity and collaboration. 

There are a lot of options you can choose from depending on your group size and preference. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out our blog post on icebreaker games and online energizers for more great activities you can use to kick-off your online office party. 

In the holiday spirit, we went with a collaborative song-writing exercise where pairs had to write their own verse of the Jingle Bells song: creating new lyrics that fit the existing rhythm. It’s a nice twist if they incorporate something in the lyrics that is related to your own company and culture:

Steps to take:

• Brief the exercise (make sure everyone is reminded of the rhythm of Jingle Bells!)
• Announce pairs and ask them to create and open a Google Doc per each pair where they can co-edit the lyrics.
• Ask the pairs to move into a separate discussion circle (“breakout room”) in  your meeting space so they don’t hear/disturb each other. With our background, we had designated spots such as ‘by the Christmas tree’ or ‘next to the fire.’
• Give 5 minutes to write the new verse in pairs 
• Regroup with everyone. Ask each pair to recite their rhyme/verse. Bonus points for singing! 
• Congratulate each pair of authors as you create your own company version of Jingle Bells.
• Make sure you capture and save your verses in one place for the future!

And what did we come up with? Here is one of the verses (start humming Jingle Bells before you read it below!

“SessionLab, SessionLab,

workshops all the way

What fun it is to drag-and-drop,

And timing calculates”

Does it really rhyme? That’s up to you to decide. But it was a fun time spent together creating it!

3. Year Review Exercise – History Map (45 mins)

The main purpose of this activity is to remind and reflect on what group members or participants have been through and to create a collective experience and shared story. It also creates opportunities to celebrate highlights, bring individual experiences to the group, and create closure on the events of the previous year. 

Steps to run this exercise: 

• As preparation, set up a virtual whiteboard with a timeline representing the last year. Include dates and a few key events, but not too much detail.
• Introduce the exercise to the group and share the link to the virtual whiteboard. 
• Invite the team to populate the timeline with their key experiences (give 15 initially + extend with 5 if needed). Ask the group to include highlights and lowlights of the journey as well as insights, emotional highs and lows, challenges, successes, frustrations, stories and surprises, situations, learnings, and anything else that meant something to them in the past year.
• Next, give everyone 5 or 10 minutes to individually reflect on the timeline and see what their colleagues have contributed.
• Pin highlights and have everyone explain the moment that has been the most important or meaningful to them. 

The result is a nice visual asset that recaps the year your team left behind while also including space for everyone’s individual perspective. Make sure to have this available for future reference. It’s fun to look back on this a year or so later! 

4. Break

Even at a virtual party, it’s important to include time for a break. This might mean giving participants time to get away from the screen, refill drinks or simply take a comfort break. We found this midway point the perfect time to have a quick break, though you have some wiggle room based on the needs of your group.

5. Fun Competition: Quiz (35 mins)

As per the flow of the session, it was time to have a lighter exercise after the previous reflection session. 

This time we competed in teams while remembering what happened in the past year. We prepared a series of questions, around 15-20, referring to some events and achievements relevant to our team. (Alternatively, you may include some trivia questions, too)

When preparing the questions, make sure that the questions are diverse enough so everyone will have some questions that they have the knowledge to answer on Similarly, make sure you set up diverse groups of 3-4 people.

Practical directions for the groups:

• Arrange yourself so you can hear the facilitator and each other, but not the other group.
• Each group opens a shared document where they will record their answers.(As the facilitator, you can prepare that beforehand for each team with numbers for each question. That saved at least 2-3 minutes if not more during the event)
• Ask that the groups not research online for the answer and just use their own knowledge and best guesses, it’s based on trust.
• When ready, the facilitator starts by reading out the questions one by one.
• Once all questions have been answered by each group, swap the documents between groups and have the other group mark the answers as the facilitator reads them out. Each group gets 1 point for each correct answer.
• Declare a winner! If you have resources, give out prizes or simply give the winning group bragging rights.

Looking for alternatives? Check out our virtual team building activities post to see other games that can work great at your online event or virtual Christmas party! For example, virtual scavenger hunt is a great bet if you have a large number of people you wish to split into multiple groups. 

6. Give Appreciation – The Bus Trip Exercise (40 mins)

By this point we’d had some fun and reflected broadly on the previous year. Celebrating the accomplishments of the organization as a whole is a vital part of the year end party, but it’s also important to celebrate each other and give appreciation for the work we’ve done together over the year. 

Strong and meaningful interpersonal connections are the foundation of any organization and taking time to give positive feedback can help make them stronger. When you hear about your strengths from others and receive acknowledgement of your work and working attitude, it also builds your motivation, self-confidence and sense of psychological safety.

We have several exercises that allow people to express appreciation in the SessionLab library and one of our favorites is the Bus Trip from Thiagi Group.

The Bus Trip is a great exercise to use at the end of a session or as part of a project retrospective. It’s very energizing and produces lots of smiles, laughs, and sometimes even a teardrop or two. 

In a live setting, we’d begin by arranging seating to create the impression of an imaginary bus that runs on positive energy. Ask participants in one row to give as much positive feedback as possible to the participants seated in the opposite row in 45 second runs. By rotating seats, you can ensure a great deal of positive feedback is shared among the group.

To recreate this exercise in a virtual environment, we made the following adjustments to simulate the physical environment:

• Add a grid (x times 2 grid depending on how many participants you have) as an image which represents the two rows of ‘seats’ on the bus. These seats are where participants will sit and rotate throughout the exercise. 
• The width of each grid cell should be big enough so that if two people position themselves in the middle they won’t hear the conversation of the next pair. While you could achieve this effect by having breakout rooms in other video conferencing tools, spatial.chat made it easy to move between pairs quickly and easily. 
• In each appreciation round, each participant has 45 seconds to give appreciation to their partner using prompts such as: What I like about you is; what I appreciate about you is; I feel happy whenever you…
• Bus Trip is a fast-paced activity, so it’s important that everyone is aware of the timing when giving feedback. We opened https://timer.pizza/ in a separate browser and screenshared it to the meeting room so everyone was working from the same timer.
• As facilitator, make sure to give very clear instructions when people rotate: nominate who will stay seated (one person must not rotate while everyone else does, in order for everyone to get to speak with everyone), and confirm when the new rounds are starting. It can also be useful to display prompt sentences in the meeting room to help your group get started. 

When you brief the exercise, give 3-5 minutes for people to reflect and note down anything they may want to say to the people they talk to. Feel free to adjust this time based on the size of the group. By giving this prep time, you can help ensure that everyone can give thoughtful and meaningful appreciation to the rest of the team.

The result of the Bus Trip is a fast, uplifting exercise that leaves the group with wide smiles and meaningful feedback.

7. Awards (20 mins)

It’s commonplace to hand out awards at year-closing ceremonies or end of year parties. For us, we didn’t feel that a serious awards ceremony would be fitting for this cheerful holiday event. Acknowledging and rewarding hard work is important for any organization, though this should also be doing at the right time and via the correct channels. 

As a small team, we felt that celebrating and promoting collaboration was a better approach than competition. In this case, we decided our end of year event would take a more light-hearted and fun approach to allocating rewards.

As a remote team, it was also interesting to see how we perceive each other. In this sense, the awards format served double duty as a getting to know you better exercise and a fun way to wrap up the session. 

For this exercise, we brainstormed a set of offbeat ‘Who is the ….?’ type of questions prior to the session in a shared document. During the session, we then voted on who most likely fit the category using ahaslides.com. This meant that everyone could vote anonymously and we could instantly see results via a screenshare in the meeting room.

The quickfire nature of the exercise and the questions asked injected a sense of fun into the event and hearing who we felt was best dressed, most likely to become a dictator or be abducted by aliens were great conversation starters too!

A couple of practical things to keep in mind:

• If you have a small team, be sure to pick a wide assortment of questions so everyone is likely to ‘win’ some nominations and feel included
• Only include questions that have no negative connotations. This exercise is designed to create a cheerful mood and make everyone feel good
• Invite your team to contribute to creating the questions before the session. This not only helps keep things varied but also helps increase engagement too!

In order to conduct this exercise online, we had to find an app that allowed simple online polling without a need to log in which could then display results immediately after the poll for each question was closed. We went with ahaslides.com for this purpose, though there are other options out there.

(As an alternative you can vote offline prior to the meeting and then present the results at the session. While this saves some time, the dynamics of this exercise are more engaging when you mix vote and result presenting on the spot.)

And what questions did we use?

Who would be the:

• Best dressed?
• Most mysterious?
• Best person to take home to mom?
• Have the most organized workspace?
• Biggest coffee gourmand?
• Would be the DJ at a team event?
• Most likely to be found outdoors?
• Most astute observer? (notices small details – e.g. when you have a new haircut)
• Most likely to be a dictator?
• Best traveled?
• Who would survive best in the post-apocalypse? (mad-max style!)
• Who would be the best poker player/ who has the best poker face?
• Most likely to be abducted by aliens?
• Who is the easiest person to read? (most expressive)
• Most likely to spray hair yellow to attend/rave at a Scooter concert?

We found this exercise a great way to end the event and raise spirits before leaving for the holidays. While we didn’t include any prizes beyond bragging rights for either the quiz or the awards ceremony, in retrospect even a small, symbolic or fun prize would have been a good idea.  

Wrap up

After all the uplifting appreciation and award giving, it was a good moment to wrap up the main activities of the session and wish everyone a happy holiday. We were also sure to schedule the event so that anyone who wanted to stay could chat and mingle afterward. Creating space for your team to have more fun and continue conversations from the main activities is time well spent! 

On reflection, while the key principles of a holiday team building activity are present in both live and online environments, there is an additional layer of preparation and technical admin to ensure it runs smoothly. Be sure to plan accordingly and do a dry run of any new tools you’ll be using.

There are also a lot of small considerations that can make a remote session more engaging – starting from small things such as ensuring shared documents and assets are properly prepared, to timers, background music and breaks. While it might be tempting to wing-it and just bring everyone together for an end of year event with conversation and drinks, it really helps to plan your agenda and come prepared. 

While a virtual party or end of year event might not have been your initial choice, given the global pandemic and increasingly remote nature of work it’s a great way to come together and celebrate the year, whatever the circumstances. 

Did you run a holiday team event or to review the year and celebrate? Do you plan on running similar events in the future? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

As the facilitation landscape has shifted to online formats, asynchronous learning, or blended learning environments, those leading courses and workshops have needed to adapt.

While redesigning for online learning is a challenge, it’s also an opportunity. With the right approach, design, and process you can make your remote workshops as vital, engaging, and productive as their live equivalents. 

This might mean switching to a blended learning approach where students or participants work primarily in an online teaching environment with some control over the pace or direction of their learning. It might also mean restructuring your process and agenda to allow for a greater mix of team and individual tasks, some of which might be conducted asynchronously. Online learning is different from the

We’re going to do a deep dive into a case where Anja Svetina Nabergoj and Bill Pacheco – both coaches at Stanford d.school – adapted a 3-day executive MBA course on User-Centered Innovation at the University of Ljubljana into an online format during the pandemic lockdown of spring 2020.

Anja and Bill shared their experience of redesigning a live course for an online environment and gave a heap of insight into effective remote facilitation and how to engage participants with a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous online work.

We’re delighted to share the key points of this conversation and explore how to use asynchronous learning to and make online courses and workshops more engaging when transitioning from live to virtual environments. Let’s dive in!

Tips for creating a great blended or asynchronous learning environment

• Restructure your agenda design for virtual environments 
• Use a mix of synchronous and asynchronous tasks
• Use a combination of team and individual tasks
• Design (and redesign) for your audience
• Create a survival guide
• Make a personal connection with every participant
• Create a team dashboard
• Build-in time for reflection 
• Create engagement by working with the technology…
• … but also create space for tactile, physical exercises 
• Carefully plan your time as a facilitator
• Get a co-facilitator, technical assistant or both!
• Simplify where possible
• Remember it’s a learning process
• Biographies

Asynchronous course design made easy

Restructure your agenda for virtual environments 

“When we faced this transition to move it online and make it remote, the first very obvious thing was you can’t do it in three full days. You can’t get people in front of Zoom and keep them on Zoom for 12 hours a day.”

One of the first parts of transitioning a live course to a remote setting is in restructuring your agenda to work in a remote environment. 

Digital fatigue is a reality for many teams and individuals, especially for those just transitioning to remote work. Simply taking an existing workshop or course and running it online without considering the realities of a virtual workspace is not going to deliver great results.

In the live version of the course, teams would come together for a live three-day workshop. As Anja puts it, these were “10 to 12 hour days, where we would work on a real project and spend three days together and would go through the entire entire design thinking process.”

Quickly recognizing this, Anja and Bill restructured the online course design to accommodate. Here’s what they did.

Changed the agenda from three full days to five shorter days

One of the first things the teaching team changed was the course structure. Anya noted that among students, “the stress level and load at work was – for most of them – much higher than usual and many had kids at home as well.”

As such, rather than having three full days, Anja and Bill switched to five and a half days: starting with a short orientation session on Friday afternoon before having five four-hour sessions in the afternoons Monday through Friday.

Whether you are leading a multi-day course or a one-day workshop, you’ll want to account for the fact that online workshops and meetings are more draining, both mentally and emotionally, than their live counterparts. Using technology often makes these processes more efficient and fast-moving, though as a result you have to be engaged 100% of the time.

This might mean creating shorter sessions – Anja and Bill switched from 10-12 hour working days to four-hour sessions complemented by an hour of bookable 1-1 time. The effect on reducing potential fatigue for participants was massive though bear in mind that shorter days for participants doesn’t necessarily mean shorter days for the facilitator.

The sessions were also held in the afternoons to allow participants to take care of their regular work and perform family chores. It’s worth noting that as this course was held during lockdown this was factored into the workshop design. 

Be aware of all the challenges facing your participants, both inside and outside the workshop in order to make it work for everyone. When considering a switch to a blended learning model, be sure to consider the needs of your participants and their learning: what format best facilitates their learning while allowing for real life to happen?

Created an orientation session

“Friday afternoon was an orientation session to first of all make sure everybody’s onboarded with the technology we’re using, and then a little bit of the introduction, who is who. We even had a dance party at the end which let us get comfortable with each other.”

The potential benefits of having an orientation session before a full working week are many. Participants know what’s expected of them, they can go fill any knowledge gaps, get homework to do over the weekend and get to know one another too!

Depending on the form and length of your workshop, giving some time and space for participants to lead-in to the workshop and orientate themselves ahead of the main session can be an effective way of ensuring everyone is on the same page. 

Creating space to get familiar with tools or conduct admin tasks outside of the main workshop can also be useful. Remote facilitation is often about making an effective use of the more limited time you have together with your participants – getting this stuff nailed before you start can help ensure future success. 

Use a mix of synchronous and asynchronous tasks

“The output was really good. The project results were much more polished, and not just that they looked better because they were digital prototypes. They were actually more well thought through.”

One of the takeaways for this remote version of the course was that not only were results generated more quickly and efficiently than in a live workshop, but that they were generally higher quality. 

What Anja and Bill found was that a mix of synchronous and asynchronous tasks meant that teams and individuals felt empowered to work within timeframes, let ideas sit in their brains and go back to them if they felt the need.

To give an example: for a brainstorming session in a live setting, you might brainstorm as a team and create a wall of post-its. That’s a synchronous task – everyone working together at the same time. In a packed schedule, you might move on from the brainstorming wall and never have the chance to go back to it. How many of us take a photograph of a brainstorming wall of post-its and never look at it again?

In a remote setting, where these brainstorms or prototyping sessions live as Mural boards or shared documents, something different can happen: 

“What happens in the digital world is people actually come back to the brainstorming board later either to look at ideas, or select, cluster and play with them. The same thing happened with prototypes. So it was not a rushed process. Some teams had participants who would spend a little bit of time, maybe 20 minutes on Mural or another tool and bring the design to the next level.”

To facilitate this, create space in your agenda for asynchronous work, either for teams or individuals. Alternatively, set tasks as homework. We all know that sometimes, your best work or ideas don’t arrive immediately, and by creating space for people to asynchronously work or let ideas percolate can improve the results, as was the case in this session. 

Anja also noted that “brainstorming happens synchronously and asynchronously and on both ends.” What this means is that people usually arrive to the session with ideas, they also generate some while working as a team inside the session, and finally generate more ideas afterwards.

One massive benefit of remote workshops and online courses that use shared, living documents is that people can go back, finesse and reflect on these sessions easily. Encourage this practice with time and space for reflection, by encouraging further review after the fact and by setting preparatory tasks too. This combination of mandated tasks and free exploration of what interests your learners the most is a key part of blended learning and something we’d recommend factoring into your design process.

Use a combination of team and individual tasks

Closely linked to our previous takeaway, using a mixture of tasks that encourage participants to work in teams and as individuals is a great way of generating results that extend beyond your online course. 

“I realised in remote workshops, we could build even more individual asynchronous time for great benefit. There’s an opportunity because when somebody is learning about empathy, they’re in that mindset. I think we could really smartly build in time for individual asynchronous work that is less focused on the innovation project, and focusing more on yourself as an innovator.” 

Most workshops or courses have a number of desired outcomes. While one primary outcome might be the creation of a design prototype as a team, another great outcome is that each participant reflects and improves their working practices.

One method the teaching team used to facilitate this was by having a mixture of team tasks and more reflective individual tasks combined with personal 1-1 coaching. This reflective time was used for people to connect with ideas around their own businesses and personal development. 

“I gave them time to book me on calendly, for consultation. My intention was to offer teams opportunity to connect and ask for feedback about a project. However, it turned out they were all coming into these calls with individual questions,  focusing on their own development as innovators. For example: How do I apply this methodology to a project I am working on? How do I convince my leaders to use more human centered approach? How do I get my teammates excited about exploration work?”

In facilitating our own workshops at SessionLab, we’ve also found that much of the most effective work is done in individual work that is then shared and discussed with a team.

In our remote problem solving workshop agenda template, for example, the lightning demo and experimental solution activities have an individual work step before group feedback. These are both quick and effective methods that help the group move forward and use mental energy effectively.

These kinds of activities can also have the effect of combating online fatigue – you no longer have to be listening to others on Zoom and can refocus your energy. Depending on the task, you can get up from the computer or work with a pen and paper too. 

Mixing up your methods and tasks so that people work in a variety of ways can help keep things fresh and also lead to better outcomes!

Design (and redesign) for your audience

Successful remote work is often about companies being flexible around working hours and being sensitive to the needs of their employees.

Encouraging parents that it’s okay to pick up their kids, giving employees flexibility in working hours or rearranging meetings for employee-friendly time zones are just a few examples of how companies can work with their employees.

Online courses and virtual workshops should carefully consider who is coming, what their needs are, and be designed to accommodate and help those people succeed. 

In this case, the first redesign was to accommodate for the busy period of quarantine. People were generally more stressed and had a greater workload, so Anya and Bill redesigned some elements of the course accordingly. 

Another result of the lockdown was that participants were often at home with their families; children would be present, partners may also be sharing a space for coworking.

Rather than ask participants to ensure there were no interruptions, the team created an environment where participants felt comfortable with having their kids around and even asked families to get involved with certain activities.

“We knew that there would be people who might feel it’s not okay to have your son or daughter sit on your lap or people who will think might feel uncomfortable when kids start screaming in the other room or their partner is on another conference call next to them, so we wanted to make it very normal for family members, first of all to be around, and then we wanted to include them.”

Anja and Bill ran a team building activity to not only demonstrate the benefits of iteration and prototyping but also to include family members. Participants were tasked with making a boat capable of carrying coins across water with just a salad bowl, a towel and a sheet of aluminum foil. Over progressive rounds, participants got to add more sheets of foil and improve their designs. People worked with their partners, children and even pets!

This kind of challenge worked as not only was it fun and inclusive, but it was experiential and added a welcome change of pace into the agenda. 

Designing for your audience also means moving in different directions depending on their needs. Remember that while the overall process and outcomes are likely the same, people have different demands on their time and different living situations which may make certain tasks better or less suited to them. 

As Anja puts it: “The students that I’m teaching in my next course are younger, full-time graduate students. Given that they have more time to dedicate to the course between our Zoom sessions, I might give them more asynchronous exercises or something to read or to reflect on between our group sessions on Zoom.”

Blended learning and online course design is all about knowing how your participants will be able to engage with your course content and what learning styles will suit them the most, particularly in multi-day or long-form courses that have time for asynchronous tasks and self-directed learning.

Create a survival guide

Working collaboratively online across different tools and assignments means lots of documents and shared resources. Particularly in multi-day or long-form online courses that have asynchronous or self-directed learning sections, it’s important that people can gain access to what they need and overview available resources easily. 

“The survival guide was a shared document that had all the links, because when you do a remote session, you’re usually using multiple different technologies and even if people get lost or are thrown out of Zoom, they just go back to this page and know exactly where to find things.”

Working with multiple tools, generating resources, and collaborating in shared documents both synchronously and asynchronously means that there can be a lot of material to keep track of. Make it easy for people to find what they need in one place with a single master document – it’s more efficient for everyone and can remove potential friction from the process too!

Remember than any blended learning approach is about empowering your participants or students to learn – providing useful documentation and a simple to grasp framework is integral to enabling that process.

For Anja and Bill’s session, they created a “What you need to know guide” which included:

• contact details
• link to Zmrl – a landing page for a recurring Zoom meeting on one page
• a link to the shared team dashboard
• Links to shared class files – documents and slides
• Timeline and agenda
• Office hours – with a Calendly link for people to grab a slot
• Daily progress report
• Team formation – a table of who is on what team
• Logistical notes – class format, what tools will be used, and when, and where to find what you need
• Technology tips for both Zoom and Mural
• Daily assignments and homework.

Your own master document may include different items but be sure to consider what your participants will need and make it available as simply as possible. Remember to double check permissions and ensure everyone has access too.

If possible, make this document available prior to the online course so people can upskill and prepare, and update it when new resources are created. If you’re using an online learning platform, you might include all this information in the dashboard.

Get this right and you can spend more time teaching online courses, rather than conducting admin! 

Make a personal connection with every participant

“Having a connection to the person who is speaking dramatically increases how much attention you pay. Scheduling individual time with every single student outside of the class session proved to be crucial.”

In a live workshop, personal connections can be made with a combination of organic interaction and well-designed methods. Creating this same sense of connection in an online environment is more difficult but worth the additional time and effort. Participants in remote sessions often report feeling a lack of personal connection with the material as well as among each other.

Creating time and space for one to ones with every student worked for Anja. Using 15-minute blocks and an open booking scheme on Calendly, her participants got to raise questions, feel connected, and engage more with the course. Additionally, using exercises that allowed participants to share personal experiences and share objects from their home or working space helped create connections.

One common mistake made when switching a blended learning model is to simply put an entire course or curriculum online and remove some or all of these teacher/student interactions. As Anja and Bill found, these one-to-one sessions were massively important to the process, and whatever your choice of blended learning format, be sure to factor in time to make personal connections.

In a one-off workshop, this can be more difficult to achieve, though Anja noted: “It can be done in breakout rooms by connecting duos or small teams and by giving them a prompt that is more personal. For example, give a tour of the space you are in, or scavenger hunt for an object that represents you well, or by sharing something about yourself.” 

Using breakout rooms is a great way to connect in smaller groups and have deeper, more personal conversations to help create the (missing) sense of connection. Create some time and space for one on one conversations prior to or following the workshop when possible. Though this won’t be feasible in every case, consider the benefits where you can.

Create a team dashboard

“When you are doing things in a live workshop, you walk around in the space and physically remember which face sits in which corner or where each whiteboard is and have a sense of who’s doing well who’s not doing well. With remote teams, it’s hard, because a lot of work happens in breakout rooms or asynchronously and you have less of an idea how each participant is doing and how well the team is progressing.”

Measuring progress and keeping appraised of where a team is and how they’re feeling over the course of a multi-day session or workshop is vital in ensuring it’s a success for every participant. 

A team dashboard is a great way of delineating tasks, creating space for asynchronous check-ins, and to get a sense of how each team is performing quickly. In a remote environment, having an efficient way to overview each team, just as you would in a live workshop is important. 

Anja and Bill created a Google Sheet for every team to fill in and update every day. At the end of each session, each team would have a short question to answer: “A little question like, ‘What is the most surprising thing you learned during empathy interviews?’ helps a lot. By reading the answers as an experienced coach you know exactly whether they’re doing well or not.”

The teaching team also invited each team to summarise their progress – for example, summarising their top three breakthrough ideas – so that she could effectively monitor progress at a glance before diving deeper if necessary. A team dashboard is also a great tool for helping teams see their own progress and keep up to date with everything they’ve achieved. 

When using a team dashboard or online learning platform, remember to keep it simple. A small amount of administrative work or summarising of progress is great, but make this too heavy a commitment and you run the risk of frustrating participants or seeing poor quality entries.

Build-in time for reflection 

“I think a lot of innovation actually happens when you take a walk or go to the bathroom in a workshop or you walk to the restaurant or cafe during the break and have a little bit of time away from the project to reflect.”

Reflection is a vital part of any group process. Whether the focus of a workshop is on problem-solving or team building, giving participants to reflect on the past and what they’ve done so far in a workshop is valuable. As Anja notes above, live workshops often have reflection time built-in regardless of design: breaks, moving between locations or going out for lunch often means that people get time to organically reflect without pressure. 

It’s important to have reflective activities and exercises where possible, but creating unstructured time in which participants have time to think and be distracted by something outside of the workshop process can yield great results.

When using online learning, this kind of reflection time might be created by splitting a three-day intensive course up over more days as Anja and Bill did. A multi-day structure that has sessions in the afternoon allows for a lot of organic reflection and this is one of the benefits of shifting to a mix of synchronous and asynchronous work and employing a blended learning model. 

Including reflective activities and encouraging check-outs that respond to prompt questions can also be effective. For creating more unstructured reflective time, make breaks a first-class citizen and encourage participants to get away from the computer, take a walk, or find other ways to unplug. Learning online doesn’t mean spending all the time on the computer.

Remember that this is still new to many of us, and finding the right balance will likely require experimentation. Anja notes that this is still something she’s working on: “I was actually wondering if I can get the team or duos to put their headphones on and take a walk outside. Go for a walk for fifteen minutes, talk about whatever they want to talk about. Maybe the best idea emerges or a breakthrough happens while you’re walking or making yourself a cup of coffee.”

The best approach is likely to include a mix of unstructured reflection time, one on one coaching and reflective activities too. While this is an iterative and sometimes organic process, be sure to consider how your agenda design can support participant reflection and create space for it where you can.

Create engagement by working with the technology…

Technology does not need to be a barrier to engagement. While it’s important that facilitators spend time recreating the connection and camaraderie of the live experience, try leaning into what makes technology great, engaging and exciting. 

Simply running a workshop on Zoom without thinking of what tools and processes you could bring in to improve the remote workshop experience is setting yourself up for an unengaging session. 

Utilize the opportunities and unique features of the technology you’re working with to engage your participants. Using online whiteboards with infinite space, or design tools such as Figma or Marvel allows opportunities for fast, fun prototyping that is hard to achieve in a live workshop. Similarly, the right online learning platform can help your course be a success, though ensure it’s fit for purpose. Using an online course platform does require some extra learning from your participants and this additional load may not be necessary.

Working asynchronously or remotely also allows participants to bring things to the workshop sessions they wouldn’t otherwise. For one icebreaker, Anja asked her group to share their most creative quarantine-hacks and post photographs and tips in a shared document.

Creating space for participants to share music and listen together during quiet time and create shared playlists also proved to be conducive to an engaging remote working atmosphere. Think of how sharing memes, Gifs, music, links and family photos is difficult or clumsy in a live workshop, but is an organic part of remote working or communicating online. 

We all have ways of connecting with friends and family online or over text message: consider how we might use those engagement methods in a workshop environment and work with the technology and the remote environment, rather than against it. 

It’s also worth noting that the remote environment allows for possibilities that live workshops do not. As Anja notes: “We had guest speakers, which I think it’s a total benefit of remote. I could bring in amazing speakers that you cannot always fly in for the whole day, when they would just be speaking for 30 minutes. So, this proved to be a huge benefit of the remote workshop, getting in experts for short inspiring session took learning to the next level.”

Lean into the possibilities that an online space creates to deliver something special! It isn’t enough to put your materials online and leave your students to it – consider how tools can build on your process and take advantage of what a blended learning environment has to offer!

… but also create space for tactile, physical exercises 

“I think in remote settings, it will become a must for well facilitated workshops to also include some kind of grounding exercises and planning exercises: a place where you can break from the digital fatigue.”

Conducting workshops or training courses online is tiring, and many facilitators and workshop participants have experienced some form of digital fatigue while working remotely.

An intelligent agenda design that features some asynchronous work, plenty of breaks and a mix of tasks is part of the puzzle, but how can facilitators go further? Experiential activities that involve tactile learning and physical objects are a great way of creating breadth in an online workshop.

For this course, Anja and Bill used a number of techniques and activities to help combat digital fatigue:

• A yoga session using a morning flow for creativity by Adriene Mischler brought a sense of calm and togetherness as well as helped stretch the muscles from all day sitting and standing. 
• A short, 10 minute guided meditation using Calm App and beautiful narration by Tamara Levitt helped participants feel grounded and connect with themselves before one of the sessions.
• A creative exercise where participants made a boat that could carry the greatest number of coins across a body of water from sheets of aluminum foil, a salad bowl and a towel brought a tactile experience (beyond touching the keyboard!), encouraged playful experimentation and also encouraged family members to help with the project. 
• Encourage family members, pets, and children to get involved where possible. Sometimes they can join the brainstorm, sometimes they can be users for an empathy interview or testing prototypes and other times you can invite them to join and listen to the lecture if they find it interesting.

We’d also recommend mixing up your activities to involve some tasks where participants can step away from the computer or engage in physical activity. You might include some drawing or paper based activities where people do solo-work and upload their results into a shared whiteboard. This kind of variety can help make online learning a success.

As lockdown eases and hybrid courses or live courses with some online elements become possible, consider how using blended learning concepts like having physical meetings between students and their teacher between self-directed online learning might help you build an engaging process.

Carefully plan your time as facilitator

“I think this is something that can have a really deep impact on the participants: I think an educator or facilitator needs to be available. If you’re meeting in the afternoons on Zoom, you need to book your mornings for one-to-ones.”

All facilitators know that their workload is not contained to the time spent directly leading a workshop or meeting session. Factoring in time for planning, cleanup and administration has always been a consideration, though in an online environment, there is an even greater pressure on the time of the facilitator.

In a multi-day course for example, you will likely spend time leading sessions, coaching 1-1, setting up Mural boards, reviewing team work, setting future tasks, communicating with co-facilitators and more. 

As Anja and Bill noted, being available and present as a facilitator outside of scheduled meeting time is important in ensuring that the participants have the best possible experience. That said, without careful planning and allocation of time, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed.

The teaching team not only put in place some measures to plan their time, but also some measures and rules to help ensure the workload was manageable:

• Have office hours and a Calendly link for participants to book one-to-one sessions if they need them. Structured time for these means requests are funnelled correctly.
• Create resources such as the team dashboard and survival guide so that both you and participants can find what they need easily.
• Establishing a WhatsApp group for each team and the group as a whole can help with ongoing communication during and between class sessions.
• Create processes that improve efficiencies. For example, when organising breakout sessions and mixing teams, Anja “asked each person at the beginning of a session each morning to rename themselves. So they had the number of the team, the name of the team, and then their first name. So it was very easy to put them into rooms accordingly by the number of their team.” 

Remember that your time will be stretched as a facilitator, and it’s worth considering how you can improve the efficiency and ease of every task that falls to you so that it is less time consuming and easier to perform. Blended or hybrid learning is great, but can create additional pressure on course leaders or facilitators. Careful planning, structuring and pre-creation of resources will all help you spend your time effectively. 

Get a co-facilitator, technical assistant or both!

Creating personal connections, facilitating and doing all the work of a remote workshop is hard: getting help and dividing the workload where possible is an effective way of quickly improving the situation.

Co-facilitators are a great idea in any setting, and in online environments with breakout groups and lots of participants having a second person on hand helps ensure that every participant gets meaningful one on one interaction and the attention they need. Remember that online learning should never just be about materials and content. 

In some environments, a co-facilitator might not be tenable, though having someone on hand to help with technical issues and answer questions about software and tools can really help the session run smoothly and without stress. Any distance learning environment, whether that’s an online course or virtual workshop can quickly become difficult if technical issues arise – get help where you can!

When running webinars or workshops, have one person monitoring and responding on the text chat channel who can feed discussion items to the presenter. Remember that while all of these ancillary tasks need to be done, they can take attention away from facilitating. With an extra person to help, you can ensure that the workshop process is at its most effective.

It’s also worth noting that Anja and Bill had regular catch-ups where they would discuss the progress of the course, reflect on what was working and make adjustments in real time: having a co-facilitator or a teaching team makes this whole process of practitioner reflection and agenda iteration more effective. 

Simplify where possible

While many of the previous points include simplification as part of their thinking, it’s worth noting that simplifying processes, tasks, and administrative items can be a vital ingredient of making an online course or workshop effective.

It’s not necessarily about simplifying outcomes or content, but instead, it’s about removing potential friction and making it simple and easy for you to run the session, as well as simplify how participants might engage in online learning.

What does this mean in the practice? 

Anja and Bill created simple and effective resources such as the team dashboard and survival guide to help participants get aligned with ease. Simplifying the admin that everyone had by having teams give short, simple reports and summaries of their progress while also having all resources in one place meant everyone could focus on the session.

For the end of course presentation and feedback session, Anja had teams submit their presentation in the same Mural board and pre-populate their key information. Then, teams were invited to present for three minutes while participants would fill in a green post-it-note for something they liked and an orange post-it note for something that should be reconsidered. 

The simplification and streamlining of this process not only provided quality results but also saved a lot of time. Remember that the success of any distance learning course or virtual workshop will be evaluated on the outcomes – think always of how to simply and clearly lead a group towards achieving those outcomes.

In our experience, limiting your toolset to those you really need and not overloading participants with too many tools helps ensure the success of a given workshop or online course. Though this will differ from session to session, removing extraneous tools or extra things to learn where possible is a good idea!

When using team-building activities or icebreakers, opt for activities that can be simply and effectively explained and run. Complex activities might have their place in your session, but think about how simple games can be used to break these up and help reduce digital fatigue. 

Remember it’s a learning process

“When this transition happened, I realized that the most meaningful part of my job, which is running in-person workshops and learning experiences – the entire physical context – is taken away. I definitely ended up in a panic mode. I was lucky to have a very tight group of facilitators who helped each other get through the first few remote iterations” 

All facilitators know that trying things, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and improving the process is part of good facilitation practice. Blended learning is new to many practitioners, and finding a method or format that works for your online course and for you as a facilitator might take some trial and error.

Only by running these sessions, learning from other facilitators, and getting feedback from participants can you move forward and improve. In many ways, this period of change is also an opportunity to try new things: while that can be challenging, it can also be rewarding. 

Experimenting and trying new things in this environment is all part of building towards an effective remote practice – take the time to reflect on your facilitation experience and design process and iterate. Collect feedback from your participants and be open to changing your agenda.

Want to learn more?

Over to you

Transitioning from live workshops to online sessions can be a challenge for all involved. We hope that by seeing how Anja and Bill adapted their course for a remote environment you can see how you might do the same and leverage blending learning and asynchronous learning techniques into your online course.

Do you have any tips for adapting your course or workshop content for virtual audiences? How do you make online learning more engaging? How do you feel about building space for asynchronous work? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

A final thanks to Anja and Bill for sharing their insight and experiences with us. You can find their bios below.

Biographies

Bill Pacheco 

Bill is passionate about spreading the design thinking methodology and a firm believer that all are creative. He thrives on helping individuals and teams flex their innovation muscles. He is the founder of Open until 8, LLC; a consultancy focused on helping companies be more creative & adaptable. 

He is also the Innovation and Design Thinking Senior Fellow at Trinity College, an Executive Education Coach at the Stanford d.school and an Adjunct Professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.

In addition, Bill has ~30 years in industry with a track record of getting innovations to market. He has led both engineering and design organizations at Cybex, Life Fitness & Keurig Dr. Pepper. 

Bill lives in Boston, Massachusetts USA with his wife and 4 children. 

Anja Svetina Nabergoj

Anja Svetina Nabergoj (PhD) is Lecturer at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, where she teaches Executive Education programs and co-teaches graduate classes. For the last 10 years she has been developing pedagogy for teaching innovation processes and nurturing creative mindsets. 

She has been working with top management teams from organizations across Europe, Asia and USA including Microsoft, Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation, JetBlue, Uber, GM, Genentech, Arla Foods, Leo Pharma, Novo Nordisk Engineering, Symbio, Coca Cola, Telenor, Kellog’s, Microsoft and Visa. Anja facilitates design thinking workshops, teaches ethnographic research techniques and leads senior leadership sessions on user-centered innovation.

Anja is on the Advisory Board of The Stanford Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions, which is a new initiative with a bold mission to create an open space to explore uncommon interdisciplinary solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Stanford University aims to build an internationally recognized model of purposeful, high-impact and interdisciplinary research ecosystem.

She has contributed chapters to books published by Edward Elgar and Routlege and scientific management journals, including European Management Journal. With her team she founded a Research as Design project at Stanford University introducing creative problem solving techniques to scientists. They recently published a book Creativity in Research: Cultivate Clarity, Be Innovative, and Make Progress in your Research Journey that was published with Cambridge University Press.

She splits her time between Palo alto, California and Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Ljubljana.