THE WORKSHOP

S U RV I VA L G U I D E
How to design and
teach workshops
that work every time

By Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt

All rights reserved, Robfitz Ltd, 2019

http://workshopsurvival.com
 CONTENTS

Why this book (and these authors) can help

Part one: Workshop Design Essentials
Maintain goodwill with regular “a‑ha” moments
Don’t start with the slides
(do start with the Skeleton)
Vary the Teaching Formats to improve energy, attention, and learning
The five essential Teaching Formats
Design your exercises and refine your schedule
Begin with the bare minimum number of slides
Summary of Part 1
Part two: Facilitation Essentials
How to introduce yourself without making everyone hate you
Don’t treat your audience as bigger than it is
Seating and group formation
Getting more from your exercises
Answering student questions
How to recover the crowd after an exercise
Overcoming hostility, skepticism, and troublemakers
Staying on schedule and dealing with delays
Charisma can be manufactured with a clicker, a watch, and some small
behaviors
Protect your own energy by hiding during breaks
Using co-teachers, expert guests, and helpers
What to do when everything goes wrong
Serve the people in the room, even if there aren’t so many of them
Summary of Part 2 (and a facilitation checklist):
Conclusion and final thoughts
Appendix: Advanced Teaching Formats
Appendix: An example of inventing, testing, and perfecting a new exercise
 WHY THIS BOOK (AND
THESE AUTHORS) CAN
HELP

There are many good styles of workshops and many good ways to design
them.
As such, we are in no way claiming that the approach presented in this
book is the only way. Nor are we claiming that facilitators who are doing it
differently are doing it wrong.
But we are claiming that this approach is a very good way (and possibly
the best way for facilitators who are just starting out). It’s good because it’s
simple, it’s reliable, and it works. ‘Simple’ means we can tell you how to
do it in a way which is concrete, understandable, and easy to implement.
‘Reliable’ means that it will work with every type of audience and for almost
every topic and will do so every time. And we know it works because we’ve
used this approach to teach many hundreds of workshops ourselves and have
trained others to successfully do the same.
During our first ten years of teaching, we were enthusiastic amateurs:
first as teaching assistants in university classrooms, and then running small
workshops and lectures to share our ongoing startup experiences with other
entrepreneurs. Workshops then became our full-time profession, first as
freelancers and then while running a small education agency.[1]
We’ve now designed and run a huge number of successful workshops
(and a few major flops) covering every type of audience: executives,
undergrads, MBAs, disadvantaged youths, busy professionals, and more.
We’ve designed everything from 20-minute teasers to 3-month intensives, in
locations ranging from Costa Rica and Qatar to London and Berlin. We’ve
taught for companies like HP and Deloitte and for universities like Oxford
and NYU. We’ve built workshops for every price point, from free upskilling
(paid for by the state or employer) through to $4000-per-seat premium
events. We’ve taught casual sessions, with beer in hand and flip-flop on foot,
through to formal, posh affairs with glitzy venues and high-end catering. In
every case, no matter where it was located or who it was for, the process
outlined in these pages worked.[2]
Perhaps most importantly, we can teach you how to do this. And you
don’t need to turn into some kind of charismatic superstar for it to work. In
fact, you don’t even need to be particularly confident. You only need to know
how to design a good workshop. We’ve trained up teachers from scratch who
are now billing upwards of £2000 per day and getting invited back to teach
again and again. This stuff isn’t complicated. You can learn it and you can do
it.
Our goal for this book—and our promise to you—is that you’ll feel
comfortable designing a workshop from scratch and running it successfully,
regardless of whether it’s 20 minutes or two days long. You’ll also be able to
“fix” a broken workshop that you’ve been saddled with. While the first
attempt at a new workshop is never perfect (testing and refinement matter), it
should still be good enough that both clients and attendees leave happy, and
that you get invited back. Throughout this book, you’ll also gain the skills
and knowledge such that if something goes wrong, you’ll understand what’s
happening and how to fix it. Whether workshops are your whole world or just
a small part of it, we can help you succeed.
Please note that this book is primarily about educational workshops,
where the goal is to teach, upskill, and educate (as opposed to brainstorming
or consulting workshops). Much of what we cover will apply to all varieties
of workshops, but we’ll only be going into the full process for the educational
ones.
This book draws on both Rob and Devin’s experiences. But in an
attempt to keep the language simple and avoid having to constantly clarify
who did what, we’ll generally just merge our stories, anecdotes, and opinions
into a shared first person “I”.
Lastly, a word of thanks. This book wouldn’t be possible without the
expertise and influence of the countless wonderful people who we’ve had the
pleasure of teaching alongside over the years. Huge thanks to all of them, and
especially to Salim Virani, who was with us in the trenches for the pivotal
years when we were all figuring this stuff out together.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Part 1 covers the essentials of workshop design, which includes
picking precisely what to teach, designing brilliant exercises, and figuring out
your schedule. It’s all the stuff you do beforehand to make the day itself as
easy and successful as possible.
Part 2 covers the essentials of facilitation. It starts with how to
introduce yourself and then continues to the challenge of how to smoothly
form groups, run exercises, and recover the crowd’s attention. We’ll also
look at dealing with bad luck, hostile crowds, hostile individuals, slipped
schedules, and more.
The Appendix contains a few advanced approaches to designing
specialized workshop exercises.
Let’s get into it.
 PA RT O N E

Workshop Design Essentials

Every workshop lives or dies by two factors:

What the audience learns
How the audience feels (i.e. energy and attention)
Compared to a traditional class or lecture, a workshop has two special
qualities. The first is that instead of expecting the audience to pay attention,
you’ll be taking responsibility for their energy and attention by designing the
session in a way which continually renews and refreshes them. By working to
boost their energy, you’ll also boost their ability to pay attention, which
ultimately makes it easier for them to learn.
“Attention is the first step in the learning process. We cannot
understand, learn or remember that which we do not first attend to.”
—CDL, Center for Development & Learning[3]
The other special quality of a workshop is that you’re able to coordinate
what you’re teaching with how you teach it. Or in other words, you have the
opportunity to escape the constraints of the lecture and start picking the styles
of teaching and types of exercises best suited to the topic at hand. Imagine
showing up to a yoga class where the instructor put you in a chair, lectured
for an hour, and then told you to go home and practice. You’d be mad! And
that’s exactly how lots of lectures end up feeling. Lectures work fine for
delivering pure “book knowledge”, but are terrible for teaching anything
involving skills, wisdom, evaluation, practice, decision-making, and
judgement.
We’ll get to the question of facilitation in Part 2. But I want to be clear
that the crux of a brilliant workshop lies in what you do beforehand.
When a workshop is well-designed, it does most of the heavy lifting for you,
and facilitation becomes naturally easy. On the other hand, all the fancy
facilitation tricks in the world still won’t save you if you haven’t properly
designed the foundation.
 MAINTAIN GOODWILL
WITH REGULAR “A‑HA”
MOMENTS

Most workshops begin with the audience liking you. You have their
goodwill, they trust you, and you’re credible. It’s like the suspension of
disbelief in sci‑fi and fantasy movies: people show up wanting to be
entertained, so they’re happy to suspend their skepticism and go along with
some crazy shenanigans. But if the movie goes too far and becomes
laughable, the suspension snaps and the viewers become hostile. The same is
true for your audience’s goodwill.
You can think of goodwill as a consumable (and renewable) resource:
You lose goodwill whenever you make the audience sit through
boring stuff (like a long intro) or participate in low-value exercises
(like an off-topic icebreaker[4])
You gain goodwill whenever you deliver a nugget of value (usually
in the form of a valuable “a‑ha” moment or takeaway)
Some time ago, I attended a one-hour talk about innovation strategy at a
beach resort on the Adriatic Sea.[5] Folks were excited to be there, and
goodwill was high. The teacher began with some powerful insights about
what was and wasn’t innovation. Plus, he was charismatic, funny, and was
live-sketching his own talk, which was certainly neat to watch. He soon
started asking questions to the audience: “Who remembers this? Who had one
of these? Raise your hands.” For the next 45 minutes, he entertained, but
didn’t deliver any more big takeaways until the very end. He had still been
sketching and making jokes through that middle stretch, but he hadn’t taught
anything in ages. So each time he asked the audience another question, fewer
hands went up until he eventually found himself making futile requests to a
dead room. That’s goodwill drain in action.
The unspoken contract of a workshop is this: the audience grants you
temporary control of their attention (and actions) in the belief that you will
transmute it into something new and valuable. If you violate this contract by
asking too much before returning sufficient value, then they grow suspicious
of your authority, their goodwill evaporates, and you lose them.
This helps explain the mistakes of the live-sketching teacher. Although
he started strong, the crowd’s goodwill eroded during the long delay between
the big “a‑ha” moments at the very start and very end of his session. (This
simple matter of scheduling was the crucial mistake, which we’ll learn how
to prevent and fix in the upcoming sections.) His second mistake was in
asking the audience to do tasks which didn’t return meaningful insight.
Participating in his hand-raising requests didn’t create additional value for
participants, so people simply stopped responding. And as a side effect, they
became distrustful of his authority and less willing to engage in future tasks.
It’s worth pointing out that this facilitator was both experienced and
competent.[6] But at the event I attended, he got so lost in the razzle-dazzle
that he overlooked the most essential requirement of teaching: to deliver
Learning Outcomes.
Learning Outcomes are important. They’re the specific bits of
knowledge, skill, or insight that your audience takes away. They’re the
difference between what someone knows (and can do) when they arrive
compared to what they know (and can do) when they leave. They’re the
reason folks have bothered showing up.
For goodwill to remain high, you must quickly and consistently deliver
value. Once you’ve started doing so, the audience will be conditioned to
believe that when you ask them to do something weird, it’s going to end up
being awesome, so they’ll be responsive and high-energy about pretty much
everything. When goodwill is low, the opposite holds: they’ll respond
sluggishly to facilitation requests, won’t pay as much attention to lectures,
and will goof around during discussions and exercises.
The best way to ensure that your frequently deliver these “a-ha”
moments is to zoom out and design the fundamental building blocks first,
before you worry about slides, exercises, or any of the details. Taken
together, these fundamentals are called a “Workshop Skeleton”, and in the
next few sections, we’ll learn how to put together a great one.

Lessons learned:
Learning Outcomes are the specific, high-value takeaways that the
audience has shown up for (and which they hopefully leave with)
Attendees typically show up with high goodwill, so you just need to
maintain it by quickly and consistently delivering valuable Learning
Outcomes
 DON’T START WITH THE
SLIDES
(DO START WITH THE
SKELETON)

The first thing everyone does, upon sitting down to create a workshop, is to
open their presentation software and start making slides. This is a huge
mistake and will ruin your workshop by trapping you in the details before
you’ve figured out the fundamentals.
So if you’ve already opened your presentation software, go ahead and
close it. Instead, get hold of a fresh document or a blank scrap of paper.
Throughout the next few sections of this book, you’re going to fill it in with
the three crucial foundations of every good workshop:
1. Audience Profile — Who it’s for
2. Schedule Chunks — When they get their coffee breaks
3. Learning Outcomes — What they’ll take away
Or even more simply: who/when/what. Taken together, these three
ingredients make up the Workshop Skeleton. The Skeleton is the day’s raw
structure and purpose, free of the distracting details of exactly what you and
your slides will say. It looks like this:
 The Workshop Skeleton is easy to create, easy to iterate, and offers a
high-level view of all the stuff that matters. And it starts with the question of
who is in the room.

YOU NEED TO KNOW WHO’S IN THE ROOM

One of my worst-ever workshops was in Moscow. I had shown up
expecting a group of experienced entrepreneurs and had prepared my
Learning Outcomes (and thus my exercises and everything else) on that
assumption. But when I arrived, I found myself facing a group which was
closer to 25% entrepreneurs and 75% “curious onlookers”. This was
problematic. I had intended to skip all the introductory theory and leap
straight into group exercises where attendees wrestled with their own
business challenges. But I now had an audience full of people who not only
didn’t know the basics, but who didn’t even have a business! Although my
workshop had been well-tested and well-refined in advance, it was
guaranteed to fail on this particular day because it didn’t match the people in
the room.
To avoid making a similar sort of blunder, it’s wise to begin any design
by first figuring out who it’s for. Depending on the situation, the audience
can be either a choice or a constraint. For example, if you’re designing an
event from scratch, then you’re free to design toward whichever type of
audience you eventually intend to invite. If, on the other hand, you’ve been
asked to teach for a pre-existing group or event, then the audience is a fixed
constraint who you’ll need to learn about, understand, and design around.
Beyond avoiding blunders like my Moscow mishap, nailing down a
good Audience Profile is also crucial for deciding what to include and what
to cut. Imagine you’ve been asked to run a workshop about “sales”. That’s a
pretty big topic! Given how many books have been written about it, you’re
going to have a tough time getting down to a tight couple of hours.
Fortunately, there’s a way to simplify since what you teach and how you
teach it are based on who you’re teaching.
As such, to decide what’s “in” and what’s “out”, you only need to
consider your audience. Toward that end, here are a few clarifying questions:
Who are they? Students? Professionals? Freelancers? The strong
and successful? The vulnerable and ostracized? Is the audience all
one type of person or will several different groups be present?
How experienced are they? How much do they already know?
Have they put it into practice or is it only theoretical? Do you need
to cover the basics, or can you skip ahead?
Why are they bothering to show up? What do they expect to leave
with? What would make the workshop a huge “win” for them? If
their boss is forcing them to attend, what does their boss want?
What are their concerns and objections? Are they carrying any
skepticism or prejudice about this topic which you’ll need to
maneuver around? Might they be worried that the topic is too trivial,
too complex, or just not for them? Are they grumpy that their
boss/friend/spouse forced them to show up? Are there any other
likely issues?
 If you’re designing a session for an existing group, then discovering
your Audience Profile is as simple as sending a short email to the client or
event organizer:

Hey Mark, looking forward to the session on the

27th about [topic]. Just wanted to get some
details on the audience to make sure I highlight
the right points.
- What sort of people are going to be attending?
- How much experience do they already have with
the topic?
- What are they hoping to get out of the day?
- Is there anything they’re likely to be
skeptical or concerned about?
- From your perspective, what would make the
session a big win?
And to re-confirm, is it still correct that
we’re looking at 50-70 attendees and a 90-minute
running time? Thanks!

The main purpose of an Audience Profile is to help you decide exactly

which Learning Outcomes will be relevant for the people in the room and
what you can cut. A workshop about “everything” will always end up wishy-
washy and vague.
If you find yourself facing a wildly varied audience, then you’ll need to
search for the unifying thread which ties them all together. For example, do
they share a common challenge, goal, worldview, or problem which unites
them? If so, pull on that thread until you find a few important insights,
takeaways, skills, or tools which will be high-impact for most everyone there.
If there’s simply zero overlap between the groups, then you’re in an
admittedly tough spot. The best option is to outmaneuver the whole issue in
advance through proactively announcing who the event is not for. If you must
teach everyone (for example, in corporate training), then you can try splitting
the group into multiple separate sessions. If that’s not viable, then you’ll
sometimes just be forced to choose one sub-group of the audience to serve
while ignoring everyone else.
Gathering an Audience Profile is simple, but important. It’s not
something you outgrow. I still ask the organizer for this sort of info for every
workshop I run. And when I mess it up, my workshops suffer, as we saw in
Moscow.[7] Don’t design blind; start with who’s in the room.

Workshop design task (2-5 minutes): Write down your Audience

Profile. If you aren’t sure who is likely to be in the room, send an
email to the event organizer or host asking them to clarify.

ADD THE BREAKS BEFORE DESIGNING THE CONTENT

Coffee breaks tend to get treated like second-class citizens in the world
of workshop design. But if your workshop is longer than about 90 minutes,
then the breaks are really, really important.
In fact, nothing will maintain your audience’s energy as effectively as
just inserting an ample break (i.e. 15 minutes for coffee, 60 minutes for
lunch) after every 60-90 minutes of content. Sounds simple, and it is. But
you’d be shocked at how often facilitators scrimp on their breaks in order to
bludgeon the audience with Just One More Thing.
Pre-allocating your breaks ensures that you never create a toxic schedule
with insufficient time for rest. It also simplifies the design challenge by
dividing one big stretch of time into several little ones, each of which can be
attacked independently. Plus, the existence of these small “schedule chunks”
forces you to define precisely how much time you intend to spend on each
Learning Outcome, which prevents you from ending up with a lopsided,
awkward schedule and feeling like you’re rushing to get through everything.
Here’s the good news: chunking a schedule is ridiculously easy. There’s
usually a clear “best” way to divide up any particular block of time. And
while you might adjust it a bit to account for something like an unusual lunch
time, there’s nothing overly mysterious at work. Here are a few examples:
 Seen above, a full day (eight hours) divides beautifully into four chunks
of 90 minutes, plus two coffee breaks, an hour for lunch, and 15 minutes on
either end for folks to arrive and mingle. One downside is that an early start
can lead to a strangely early lunch (0900 start means lunch at 1230). One way
to delay the lunch would be to use three (much shorter) chunks in the
morning, followed by two (slightly shorter) chunks in the afternoon. The
second example has also done away with the buffer time at the beginning and
end, although that isn’t strictly necessary.
A half day (four hours) works easily as either two or three chunks:
 Four hours can also accommodate a lunch break by using two chunks
and sacrificing some of the padding on the ends.
A three-hour workshop fits well as two 75-minute chunks, plus a 15-
minute break and an extra 15 minutes at either start or end for arrivals or
networking. And a two-hour workshop will usually be a single chunk, plus
some optional padding:
 While the question of starting late will depend largely on cultural
expectations, secretly planning for an early ending is always a good idea if
the workshop is longer than a couple hours. The benefits are numerous: a
buffer for slipped schedules, an extra opportunity for Q&A or networking,
time for beer, or allowing for individual work on homework tasks or
feedback forms. Plus, people hate running late, whereas nobody in history
has ever been upset about ending 15 minutes early.
Schedule Chunks aren’t set in stone and can be adjusted as you start
developing your content; the main point of figuring them out first is simply to
ensure that you never inadvertently create a day with a toxic schedule and
that your attendees always get their breaks.
Coffee breaks are sacred. It’s a big blunder to skip (or even just reduce)
a break in order to cram in more stuff. In one fell swoop, the break-skipping
facilitator manages to damage energy levels, violate the schedule, and
diminish the audience’s ability to pay attention. Unforgivable!

Workshop design task (2-5 minutes): Create your Schedule Chunks

by adding your breaks. Draw out your total available time, decide on
whether to use an intro/outro buffer, place your breaks, and figure out
how much time you have for teaching.

SHARPEN YOUR LEARNING OUTCOMES

There’s a right and a wrong way to define your Learning Outcomes.
And doing it right is surprisingly tough, since making them specific enough
tends to feel like you’re leaving stuff out. But in order to succeed at teaching
something, you must be willing to exclude everything else.
Your first pass at your Learning Outcomes will always be too vague.
Resist the urge to settle at this point. You are not a Wikipedia article; it’s not
your job to summarize an entire subject. Instead, your job is to provide your
audience with a small, curated set of sharp, useful takeaways which
meaningfully improve their lives. A workshop designer is a curator and
deciding what’s out is as important as deciding what is in.
Here’s what I mean:
Broad Topic Bad Learning Outcomes Sharp Learning
(too vague) Outcomes
Sales Negotiation How to de-
escalate a tense
negotiation when
you’re in too deep
Proposals The three
requirements of
every great sales
proposal
Weddings Decorations The most
beautiful (and
cheapest!)
solution to the
flower problem
Planning How to build a
budget
spreadsheet to
save dozens of
hours of
frustration and
fighting
Careers CVs (resumes) What to delete
from your CV to
make it stronger
Interviews The right answers
to the toughest
interview
questions

A bad Learning Outcome is a too-vague topic. As a designer, it offers no

help in deciding what to include and what to cut. The clearer you can be at
this stage, the simpler everything else becomes.
I was recently helping a friend prepare for his first full-day workshop
(about enterprise sales). He started asking questions about tactical stuff like
facilitation and exercises and group work, so I interrupted:
“Who is in the audience? Why have they shown up? What are they
hoping to learn?”
He knew his audience well, which was great, so I continued probing:
“Okay. Your workshop is about ‘sales’… But what’s the specific
argument you’re making? What are you really trying to convince them
of? What do they believe differently at the end of your session
compared to when they first walked in?”
He thought for a moment and replied:
“That ‘good sales’ isn’t about your pitch or presentation or banter, but
is really about asking good questions.”
Boom. There’s his sharp Learning Outcome: “Good sales is about
asking good questions”. After going through the same process for the rest of
his talking points, he soon had a short list of clear, concrete takeaways. Now
that he knew what his workshop was actually about, he was able to tear
through his deck, deleting everything which didn’t directly support his
Learning Outcomes and strengthening the bits that did. Following his
workshop, he mentioned that it had felt more “organized”, which made it
easier to prepare for, easier to keep on schedule, and easier for his
participants to understand. That’s all true. Once you’ve got good Learning
Outcomes, everything else gets easier.
Alright. So how many Learning Outcomes can you fit into your
workshop? The annoyingly vague (but honest) response is that it depends on
how long you’ll need to properly teach each of them. The more concrete (but
less true) suggestion is to start with a guess of 30-45 minutes per Learning
Outcome, and then modify it as needed.
Thirty minutes might feel like too much time to spend on one (big) idea,
but it actually vanishes rather quickly. For example: 10 minutes of
introductory lecture, 10 minutes of some sort of exercise and discussion, 5
minutes of follow-up lecture, and 5 minutes of Q&A. That’s your half hour
gone. And if you’re hoping to run more than a single exercise, then you’re
almost certainly going to be brushing up closer to 45 minutes than to 30.
This guideline means that a 90-minute chunk can fit 2-3 Learning
Outcomes, which gives you 3ish big takeaways in a 90-minute session, 6ish
in a half day, and up to 12 in a full-day. That being said, my personal
preference with longer workshops is to spend more time per Learning
Outcome as opposed to trying to squeeze in more of them.

Workshop design task (5 minutes): Take a first guess at how many

major Learning Outcomes will fit in your available time, and then
write out a list of them. If you end up too many or too few, that’s okay
for now.

Workshop design task (10-15 minutes): Go through your list of

Learning Outcomes and try to sharpen them as much as possible. Ask
yourself whether this a clear, meaningful takeaway for the people in
the room, or just a description of a too-vague “topic”.

EACH LEARNING OUTCOME IS A CLUSTER OF

RELATED IDEAS
The exact size and scope of a Learning Outcome is a bit slippery to pin
down. You can think of it as a cluster of closely-related ideas, each of which
needs to be worked through and taught before the main takeaway can fully
click into place. Or you can think of the Learning Outcome as the thesis for a
high school essay, which needs to be built up to and delivered through a
handful of supporting or key ideas or building blocks. These talking points
are the mini-takeaways on your path toward the big one.
The crucial question when figuring out these sub-points is:
“What else do they need to know, believe, or be able to do in order for
them to properly absorb the main Learning Outcome?”
 As before, you’ll likely have more ideas than will fit in your workshop.
And as before, it’s about both curation (picking the highest-impact few) and
sharpness (honing them until they offer a concrete lesson-learned).
Here’s an example of a full outline for a workshop on weddings. It has
three Learning Outcomes, each of which has been expanded out into a small
cluster of closely related ideas:

“Stress-Free Wedding Planning”

1. The budget spreadsheet is your new best
friend
- The most common ways weddings go over budget
- Fixed expenses (venue, dress) vs. per-guest
expenses (food, booze)
- How to use your spreadsheet as a project
management super-tool
2. Turn your big day into a no-stress checklist
- How the humble checklist keeps hospitals
running
- The challenge with weddings: too many cooks in
the kitchen
- How to create and use your three crucial
checklists
3. How to delegate without going crazy
- The trouble with “free” help from family and
friends
- How to keep an eye on everything without
turning into a micromanager

This outline shows what your workshop is really about. Not a vague
topic, but a set of clear takeaways. It’s quick to create, quick to iterate, and
hugely simplifies the task of delivering a wonderful workshop.
 When you eventually start making your slides (not yet!), you can follow
the outline to create a deck which is laser-focused on exactly what you’re
trying to say. This helps avoid rambling, keeps you on schedule, and ensures
a session where the attendees actually learn something.
Although it usually only takes about an hour to get through all the steps
up to this point, it can be wise to pause here and let it simmer in your mind
for a few days, if you have the time. It’s a bus-stop task: when you’re stuck
waiting somewhere, you take out your workshop outline instead of your
phone.
Another purpose of the pause is to gather feedback from a client,
organizer, or potential audience-member. This moment right now is the
highest-impact for getting feedback. The outline provides enough detail that
folks can understand exactly what you’re going to be teaching, and you
haven’t done any “extra” work (like slides) that would need to be discarded
in case of major changes. Nobody bothers to do this, which is ludicrous. It’s
an easy email to write:
Hello Jackie, I know you’re starting to think
about your wedding and hoped you might give me
some feedback on a workshop I’m putting
together, called “Stress-Free Wedding Planning”.
The outline is below. Do any topics jump out as
something you’d really like to learn? Do any
seem boring or irrelevant? And is anything
missing? Thanks!
“Stress-Free Wedding Planning”
1. The budget spreadsheet is your new best
friend
- ...[Full workshop outline continues]...
-----------------------------
Hey Beth, I’m already stressing like crazy, so
sounds like something I need. Although I’ve got
to say, I’m not so keen about poking around in
 spreadsheets for half the time. I get enough of
that at my job.
Also, something I’d love to hear about is what
to do when something goes wrong... Like the
flowers get lost or you forget your dress at
home.[8] I know you’ll probably say I don’t need
to worry about what hasn’t happened, but I do,
and I think I’d feel a lot better if I knew how
to handle even the rare disasters.
If there’s nobody to get feedback from (or you’re doing everything last-
minute and don’t have time to ask), then you’ll just have to use your best
guess. After you’ve run the workshop the first time, you’ll spot opportunities
for improvement and can tweak it from there.
Even if you don’t make meaningful changes to the content itself, this
sort of feedback is still invaluable for finding the words and descriptions
which most resonate with your attendees.
Once you’ve got the outline, you can use it verbatim as part of your
marketing and promotional material. (If you’re marketing your own events,
this also means you can start selling tickets at this point; if nobody buys any,
then you know you need to fix something.)
Some facilitators flinch away from being so specific in their event
blurbs, because they don’t want to “exclude” anyone. But it’s much better for
folks to know precisely what you’re going to be covering, which allows them
to decide whether your workshop is going to be relevant for them. When you
promote too vaguely, you end up with a bunch of people in the room who
don’t actually want to learn what you’re teaching.

Workshop design task (5-10 minutes): Create a full workshop outline

by expanding your Learning Outcomes into a cluster of supporting
arguments or key ideas.

Workshop design task (2 minutes, plus some waiting): Send your

workshop outline to a client or potential attendee for feedback.
WORKSHOP OUTLINE + SCHEDULE CHUNKS =
WORKSHOP SKELETON
At this stage in the design process, you should be holding three main
building blocks for your soon-to-be workshop:
1. An Audience Profile (which has already done its job of
informing your Learning Outcomes, and can thus be set aside
for now)
2. A set of Schedule Chunks (which you got by inserting
generous coffee and lunch breaks into your allotted time)
3. An outline of Learning Outcomes and supporting
arguments (a simple list on a scrap of paper is fine)
We’re now going to do some complicated science by smooshing
together the outline and the schedule. Let’s review what we’re working with
and build it up into a completed Skeleton. To start with, we’ve got our
Workshop Outline:
 No surprises so far. Then we’ve got our schedule. I like to draw it out as
a little timeline. Here’s an example of a three-hour session:
 You’ll see that in this case, I’ve chosen to include 15 minutes on each
end for arrival, departure, and as a time buffer, which uses 30 minutes. And
including a break reduces our “3-hour workshop” down to 2 hours and 15
minutes of actual teaching time. But you could also easily decide that the
introductory time isn’t needed, expanding the content to 2h 30m.
(Incidentally, failing to allow time for these sorts of predictable delays is the
reason certain facilitators seem to run late every single time they teach.)
Now we smoosh it together. Before getting fancy, I recommend the
time-tested approach of just blindly jamming your Learning Outcomes into
whatever schedule you’ve come up with. It doesn’t always work, but it works
more often than you’d expect. So it might look something like this:
 In this example, my 2h 15m (135 minutes) of content are divided
between three Learning Outcomes. This allows 45 minutes for each major
takeaway, which is extremely comfortable.
Having extra time is rarely a problem: just run more exercises or take
more questions. But having too little time (and too many Learning Outcomes)
very well might be. So we pause at this point to take a quick look and see
if it passes a sanity check. Does it seem roughly plausible? Or are we
trying to teach something too complex in too little time? If it feels
crammed, then we’ll need to free up some time from somewhere, which
usually means cutting something. This is a hard choice, but it’s best to do it
now. If you ignore the squeeze, then it’s still going to hit you, except it will
do so on the day-of when it’s too late to fix. And then you’ll feel rushed, talk
fast, compromise the breaks, drain the energy, snap the goodwill, run late
anyway, and generally make everyone sad.
We don’t yet know any of the specifics of our exercises. But that’s
okay! Our goal for now is to build is a set of guidelines and constraints which
will keep us on track when we eventually are dealing with those details.
Three hours of blank space is a scary and difficult thing to fill; 45 minutes (or
whatever) to figure out how to teach “Why they lie” is far more doable.
I like using the visual timeline to see the overall shape of the session,
and then add timings to my outline to get a (mostly) finished Workshop
Skeleton:

Super simple, super helpful. It provides the constraints that allow you to
be creative without going crazy. Later in the design process, we’ll improve
this Skeleton by adding exercises and activities. It’s our guiding light for the
rest of the design process.
The Skeleton also helps during facilitation. Whenever I run a workshop,
I keep a folded sheet of paper in my pocket with the Skeleton written on it.
As I finish each section, I take a quick look and mentally (or literally) tick off
its Learning Outcome(s). This reminds me to cover everything, and also
offers early warning if I’m starting to run late. Great! (Incidentally, much of
becoming a better facilitator isn’t actually about getting “better”, but rather
about doing stuff ahead of time which makes your life easier on the day-of.)
Next up: picking your exercises and improving the workshop’s energy
levels.

Workshop Design Task (5-10 minutes): Create a Workshop Skeleton

by inserting your Learning Outcomes into your Schedule Chunks.

Workshop Design Task (5-10 minutes): Do a quick sanity check on

the Skeleton. Does it seem plausible to teach those ideas in those
amounts of time? If your content doesn’t seem to fit at all, try
adjusting either the Learning Outcomes or schedule chunks. Or try
reordering to see how that might affect the flow. If it’s still too
crowded, you probably need to cut something.

Lessons learned:
Workshop Outline + Schedule Chunks = Workshop Skeleton
Creating a good Skeleton is the single most important step in
designing an effective, high-energy workshop and should be
completed before getting into slide design
 VARY THE TEACHING
FORMATS TO IMPROVE
ENERGY, ATTENTION, AND
LEARNING

Teaching Formats are the “genres” of teaching. They’re what you use to
actually deliver your content. They define the feel and structure of your
exercises. You already know a bunch of them: lecture, small group
discussion, Q&A, and so on.
But even for the familiar-sounding Formats, folks still tend to
misunderstand how and when to use them. Before getting into the details of
each, here are two overarching principles:
The Teaching Format should “match” whatever you’re currently
teaching
The Teaching Format should switch at least every 20 minutes
There are a couple reasons for these rules. First and foremost, different
types of lessons are best delivered through different styles of teaching. To
play off the example from the intro, let’s say you were defying common
sense and attempting to “teach yoga with a lecture”. Furthermore, let’s
imagine that it wasn’t going terribly well, and that your students weren’t
improving as much as you would like. The solution, in this case, would not
be to deliver a better lecture. No matter how brilliant your story-telling or
how charismatic your delivery, a lecture is simply the wrong tool for the job.
Yoga is a hands-on skill, so you’d need to teach it with some sort of hands-on
practice (as opposed to with a knowledge-heavy lecture). That’s the
“matching” of a Teaching Format to a topic, and it goes a long way toward
ensuring that folks can successfully learn from you.
The second rule—to regularly switch between different Formats—is
partly because the variation boosts energy levels and attention, and partly to
force you outside of your teaching comfort zone. Each of us has a “comfort
Format” (usually lecture) which we overuse by default, despite secretly
knowing that a better option might exist if only we spent the time and effort
to search for it. So a big benefit of the “you must mix it up” rule is simply in
forcing yourself to stare at a blank page for long enough to invent something
non-obvious.
When I was little, I remember sitting on the countertop while the kettle
was boiling. As the steam began to swirl and whistle, I assumed it was some
sort of refreshing mist and crawled in that direction, intent on sticking my
face in it. My dad caught hold of me just in time, and while I’m sure he was
tempted to react with an enthusiastically-delivered lecture, I’m equally sure
that I would have completely failed to learn from it. But instead, he cobbled
together a sort of impromptu workshop, complete with a variety of Teaching
Formats.
He seemed to want to teach me that a) heat can hurt and b) things can be
hot even when they don’t look hot, so c) there are certain things that you
should always be cautious about getting close to. We began by using a
thermometer to measure the temperature of the tap water as it heated up. We
felt it by hand, and also wrote down the numbers from the thermometer up
until the point where I said it was “really hot” (say 40°C) and took my hand
away. We continued by measuring the temperature of a pan of boiling water
(“so much hotter!”), running a little experiment to prove that hot water
becomes steam, and discussing the implications. In the end, I resolved never
to go near the kettle again, and—once I was old enough to make these sorts
of decisions for myself—to refrain from casually storing a thermonuclear
device on my kitchen counter.
Throughout this little “workshop”, dad used three different Teaching
Formats: hands-on experiments, pair discussions, and brief bits of lecture to
string it all together and deliver missing theoretical concepts. Each activity
was well-suited to the takeaway under discussion, and they worked
cohesively to build toward the primary Learning Outcome. And since he
repeatedly switched between different types of activities, it was easy for me
—even as a hyperactive young child—to stay focused on the task at hand.
And more importantly, I actually learned. While you, as a teacher, will
never be able to unilaterally cram knowledge into an unwilling student’s
head, you certainly can design your workshop in a way which creates the
right conditions for them to more easily pay attention and, hopefully, to learn.
Variation between Formats acts to refresh attention and energy. And
conversely, staying with the same Teaching Format for too long will
eventually start to drain the audience, no matter how “high energy” that
particular exercise appears on its own. This phenomenon is called Format
Fatigue and can help explain why something that worked brilliantly for 15
minutes can start feeling like a real drag at 30.
When new facilitators notice their audience nodding off, they’ll often try
to fix it by cranking up their own performance as a teacher. This doesn’t
work. Dancing around the stage like a wide-eyed lunatic may prove that you
care, but your enthusiasm still can’t cross the air gap. What your students
actually experience is the workshop’s underlying design, and that’s where
you must work to influence their energy and attention. It doesn’t require any
fancy facilitation or grand performance. Once you know the “trick”,
maintaining strong energy across a long workshop is laughably simple: all it
requires is good breaks and variation between Teaching Formats.
But what if you’re facing three back-to-back sections which are each
begging to be taught with the same Format? Should you accept the penalty of
Format Fatigue, or should you switch one of them to a suboptimal Format?
This turns out to be a false dichotomy. Much better, instead, to either swap
the order of your existing sections (AAABB → ABABA) or to create and
insert some small new exercises in the middle, just to keep everyone feeling
fresh (AAA → ACADA). Or, if it’s a long enough workshop to have a coffee
break, you can sometimes jiggle the schedule such that the break falls right in
the middle of the too-long section. Any of these options will prevent Format
Fatigue, boost energy, and refresh attention. (Incidentally, this is a perfect
example of how workshop design—rather than facilitation—creates strong
energy levels.)
Format changes don’t need to be big to be effective. For example, you
could switch from working in small groups to working in pairs. Although
both “group work”, the shifting team dynamics will be enough to partially
refresh your audience. Similarly, the switches don’t need to be lengthy. If you
have a long and unavoidable lecture, for example, then you might choose to
interrupt it every 15 minutes for a quick, five-minute micro exercise.

Lesson learned:
To avoid “teaching yoga with a lecture”, pick a Teaching Format
which matches the nature of what you’re currently trying to teach
To maintain attention and energy, switch Teaching Format at least
every 20 minutes
 THE FIVE ESSENTIAL
TEACHING FORMATS

So, what are your Teaching Format options?

Although there are plenty of specialized options for difficult and unusual
situations (which are detailed in the Appendix), the five essential Formats
covered here will be used in pretty much every workshop you ever design.
And furthermore, they are sufficient—all on their own—to design and run a
brilliant workshop on almost any topic.
As mentioned, you’ll already be broadly familiar with the essential
Formats. Still, I’d encourage you to read through the upcoming sections
anyway. The magic is often in the details and folks tend to get these “simple”
Formats more wrong than right.
The five essential Teaching Formats are:
Lectures (for delivering “book knowledge” and extracting
takeaways from exercises)
Small group and pair discussions (for wrestling with ambiguous
options and personal implications)
“Try it now” practice (for building hands-on skills)
Scenario challenges (for building wisdom, evaluation, judgement,
and decision-making)
Question & answer (for catching major objections/confusion and
adding some flexibility into your schedule)
These formats are easy to design around, simple to facilitate, and can be
used to teach a brilliant workshop of any duration about practically any
subject. Each has its own strengths and constraints which you must
understand to properly wield it.
FORMAT 1: LECTURES HAVE THEIR PLACE
During any workshop, there will be times when you need everyone to
stop talking, pay attention, and listen to you deliver some crucial piece of
knowledge. These are your lecture segments. They’ll typically last for 5-20
minutes and be tightly focused on delivering some knowledge-heavy piece of
a Learning Outcome. A typical workshop will include several different
lecture segments, arranged such that they alternate with more engaging types
of exercises.
Lectures are the scapegoat of the workshop world. It’s common to hear
an event organizer say, “We want a fun, interactive workshop, not a boring
lecture.” And while I agree that lectures do tend to be overused and
misapplied, they’re invaluable when applied properly toward what they’re
good at.
In the context of a workshop, lectures are good for:
1. Delivering “pure” book knowledge, theory, examples, and
stories
2. Supporting an upcoming exercise by establishing the
theoretical foundations
3. Supporting a just-finished exercise by extracting and
discussing the lessons-learned and takeaways
Lectures become bad when they overstay their welcome, running
uninterrupted for too long (i.e. more than 15-20 minutes) and when they
attempt to teach topics and takeaways for which they are poorly-suited.
If you have a tendency toward lecture, then here’s a rule of thumb to
greatly improve your workshops:
Every piece of lecture should be paired with an exercise which attacks
the same topic from a more interactive direction.
For example: First you do a bit of lecture, and then you run a small
group discussion about its implications. Then a bit more lecture, and then a
dose of hands-on “try it now” practice. A bit more lecture, and then a
scenario challenge focused on evaluation and decision-making. This
approach allows you to continue using lecture segments as the core vehicle of
knowledge delivery, while also ensuring that you’ve built a lively,
interesting, and effective workshop.
For more practical topics, you can just as easily reverse this pattern,
treating the other Teaching Formats as the core of your workshop, and then
occasionally including a touch of lecture to add the theory, anecdotes, or
examples. After all, even the most hands-on skills still depend on at least a
little bit of theory. For example, if you were teaching a pottery workshop,
you might find yourself interrupting the hands-on practice to deliver a short
lecture explaining the trade-offs of the various types of clays and glazes. And
an hour of hands-on yoga could easily include a few minutes of “lecture” on
the safety considerations of a certain posture.
So, if workshop lectures can be good, then why are most of them so
bad? Even if you’re using a lecture in the right place and for the right
purpose, it’s still possible to fail in its execution. I think this happens largely
because folks lose sight of their Learning Outcomes and end up waffling
along on tangents (and then wondering how they’ve run late yet again).
Some time ago, on a trip through Romania, I attended a lecture-heavy
workshop featuring lovely slides, a charismatic speaker, and a compelling
metaphor of strategy-as-dance. The facilitator clearly held the knowledge I
wanted to learn, proven by the fact that she was continually sharing
fascinating examples and case studies. But I couldn’t figure out how they fit
together into a lesson I could take away. In other words, she had topics, but
no Learning Outcomes.[9] In any case, despite paying full attention and taking
diligent notes, I left her session with zero understanding of what I was
supposed to have taken away.
Folks with deep expertise are especially vulnerable to the tangent trap,
since they know a ton of stuff and are highly tempted to include it all. But
that’s how you end up with a rambly, vague lecture. Instead, start with the
main Learning Outcomes, add a few key supporting arguments, and delete
anything which doesn’t directly support those points. (This should sound
familiar… It’s Workshop Skeletons 101.)
You may think that this reduction leads to an empty, vapid lecture, but
it’s really quite the opposite. Most speakers greatly underestimate how much
time an audience requires to absorb and digest what’s being said. Even the
great Sir Ken Robinson, orator of TED’s most-viewed presentation of all
time, limits himself to three main points per 20-minute talk. And rather than
obsessing over the exact details of every slide and sentence, he says that the
bulk of his preparation involves nothing more than a short outline of key
takeaways. Here’s his description of his process:[10]
“I hadn't written the speech out, I hadn't rehearsed it, I hadn't practiced
it, and I certainly hadn't memorized it. But what I had is the arc of the
talk I wanted to give.
I always think of it in five pieces, truthfully. It's bookended by an intro
and a conclusion, and there's a three-part section in the middle with a
set of premises I want to deal with. I kind of develop them and then I
wrap it up.
I have some notes in my pocket with just some bullet points. It's like a
set list, is how I think of it, because every audience is different, and
every occasion is different.”
As far as I can reckon, Sir Ken’s three-part middle isn’t so different
from a Learning Outcome’s cluster of closely related ideas. And there is also
a certain similarity between your Workshop Skeleton and Sir Ken’s “set list”.
There’s something to be said for creating enough guidance to keep you on-
track, without becoming so detail-obsessed that you limit your ability to
deliver something tailored to the folks in the room.
A vicious cycle exists between lengthy (and thus draining) lectures and
trying to include too much stuff in your workshop. From the teacher’s
perspective, lectures feel like the fastest way to “get through” something. So
if you’ve flinched away from making tough cuts when designing your
Skeleton, it’s tempting to start dropping exercises and turning everything into
a lecture to “get through” it all.
But even if you can manage, this apparent success is an educational
illusion: although your lecture has told the audience what they are supposed
to have learned, there is absolutely zero guarantee that anybody has actually
learned any of it. Worse still, by zipping ahead to “get through” the next
topic, you won’t even realize how lost the students have become.
The crucial takeaway? Use lecture in small doses for what it’s good at,
constrained by well-defined Learning Outcomes and complemented by
exercises built from the other, more interactive Teaching Formats. Speaking
of which…
FORMAT 2: SMALL GROUP & PAIR DISCUSSIONS
Let’s go out on a limb here: small group discussion is the ultimate
Teaching Format. When used properly it’s engaging, inclusive, widely
applicable, encourages debate, is easy to run, and lets the attendees get to
know each other in an educational and non-awkward way. If you get good
enough at designing and running discussions, you’ll be able to successfully
create workshops of any duration about pretty much any topic. It also
requires no equipment or fancy room setup. It’s so easy and so reliable that it
nearly feels like cheating.
That being said, almost everybody screws it up. This can happen on the
facilitation-side thanks to slow and high-friction group formation (which
we’ll return to in Part 2). But the biggest mistakes tend to be committed
earlier, during the design stage, in the form of weak prompts for what to talk
about.
Asking your students to, “Turn to your neighbor and discuss” seems
harmless but is actually impossibly vague. Nine times out of ten, someone
in each group will tentatively ask something like:
“So, what did you think?”
And their partner(s) will respond with:
“Well, it seems pretty interesting. What did you think?”
At this point, the conversation is already dead, your exercise has failed,
and your workshop has worsened. The students will sit in awkward silence
for about 30 seconds and then start either talking about their personal lives or
turning to their phones. This one lazy discussion prompt has now damaged
your energy levels, reduced your goodwill, and has also failed in its goal of
supporting your Learning Outcomes. Not good.
Instead, you need to instruct your participants—explicitly and
specifically—what they’re supposed to be talking about. And just saying it
out loud isn’t enough, because they’ll inevitably forget and go off track. You
need to write it somewhere visible (usually a slide) and leave it there for the
duration of the exercise.
Prompts don’t need to be complicated to be good. For example, here’s a
perfectly sufficient prompt for a discussion about entrepreneurial career
paths:

Good prompts allow for good conversations, and it’s your job to figure
them out, in advance, and ensure that they’re clear, interesting, and relevant.
Now, although the discussion’s question should be clear and specific, its
answer should be ambiguous and/or personal. Small group discussion is at its
strongest when folks are wrestling with—and hearing multiple perspectives
on—tough issues with no factual “right” answer. For example, there’s not
much value in doing a group discussion about something factual, like the
legal implications of certain types of business funding. But there’s a lot of
value in having folks discuss which type of funding they think would be right
for them, and why. Make the question sharp, but its answer personal.
Let’s say you’re running a career planning workshop for graduating high
school seniors. Some of your students have been primed (by their family,
friends, and pop culture) to choose the career with the highest status and/or
salary, so they all want to be bankers and lawyers. Others have been primed
(by those same forces) to prioritize purpose, so they all want to be artists and
dolphin trainers. There’s no “right” answer to the question of which path to
pick, or even of how to evaluate the available options. But there certainly
might be value in mixing up those two types of people and having them
wrestle with some meaty questions about, for example, lifestyle goals and
monthly budgets and where else they might find both purpose and pleasure.
Group discussion allows them to reflect on those questions, while also
hearing fresh perspectives on the same.
Of course, the prompt still needs to relate to and support your Learning
Outcomes. Your attendees will smell trickery if you’re having them talk
about pointless stuff. But pretty much every Learning Outcome will have
some sort of opportunity for discussion and reflection. Even for something
impossibly dry (like talking about safe driving at traffic school), you can
usually still find a good discussion prompt with a bit of creative effort (like
asking folks to share the story of when another driver made them most
frightened on the road).
In terms of scheduling, the discussions themselves should be fairly brief
(2-5 minutes), but the overall exercise will still end up consuming a decent
chunk of your schedule (10-15 minutes).
Where do those extra minutes go? The first minute might go into
ensuring that everyone has a group and that nobody is stranded. (Always
finish group formation before showing them the prompt.) If this is the first
time these particular groups have worked together, then you may (optionally)
carve out 2-3 minutes for them to say hello and get to know each other. Once
everyone is settled, the next minute is spent explaining the discussion prompt,
followed by the 2-5 minutes for the small group discussion itself. Taken
together, this all puts you at the 5-10 minute mark. After the task, you’ll want
to run a class-wide discussion, asking a couple participants to share their
takeaways, spreading the learning while also allowing you to chime in with
your own perspective. These post-exercise discussions can be wonderfully
high-value and will easily fill 5-10 minutes without feeling like a drag. (We’ll
talk about how to smoothly facilitate this step in Part 2.) And that’s your 15
minutes up and gone.
If you feel that the discussion topic is so large that folks will need more
than five minutes to get into it, then it’s probably too vague and should be
broken into pieces. Attendees tend to get wildly off-track if they’re given too
much time on any one task, so you should strongly consider subdividing large
discussions into several smaller, more time-constrained prompts, run one
after the other.
Using pairs instead of groups offers a slightly different set of benefits.
Small groups have the advantage of multiple perspectives, with the downside
that some attendees might choose to zone out and become a passive observer
throughout the exercise. Pairs, on the other hand, have the advantage of
forcing everyone to participate, but with less exposure to multiple ideas. This
makes groups better for exposing folks to new perspectives, whereas pairs
are better for tasks where you want attendees—all of them—to work through
a problem or come up with an idea.
Small group and pair discussions are game changing. Use them! As long
as you’ve spent the time to design good prompts (clear question, ambiguous
answer), I promise it will work wonders.

Workshop Design Task: For each of your Learning Outcomes or key

ideas, try to come up with at least one good discussion prompt. You
don’t necessarily need to use all of them, but it’s useful practice to
force yourself to identify the ambiguous, personal side of what you’re
teaching, even for topics which don’t seem to be an obvious fit.

FORMAT 3: Q&A IS FOR FLEXIBILITY, NOT

INTERACTIVITY
You should add a bit of Q&A (question & answer) to pretty much every
workshop. But perhaps not for the reason you think.
Unstructured Q&A is a bad educational format. Even when used
properly, Q&A suffers from an irredeemable flaw: the least confident
students will never speak up. This is less of a problem if you’re teaching
people with universally robust egos, like executives. But when trying to
educate regular people, Q&A abandons those who need you most.
While that one issue is more than enough to condemn Q&A, it also
tends to hurt energy levels rather than to help them, since the pace is slow
and it’s not actually interactive for anyone except the one person currently
asking the question. Plus, students can easily hijack Q&A (either accidentally
or maliciously) to self-promote and showboat. And all these problems only
get worse as the audience gets larger.
Q&A’s most gratuitous abuse is as a way to pretend that a long, dreary
lecture is actually a fun, “interactive” discussion. This is extremely common
and is clearly just a coverup for a speaker who forgot to design an actual
workshop.

So, Q&A has problems. But you should still include it. And there are
good reasons for that.
The most self-evident benefit of Q&A is that it allows the crowd to
catch you if your teaching has missed the mark by such a grand degree that
nobody in the audience has any idea what you’re talking about. While you
can never count on a confused individual to speak up, you can always count
on somebody within a confused class to do so. In this latter case, the
confident students can speak up on behalf of everyone else to let you know
that you’re going to need to loop back and clarify. This is obviously a
reassuring safety net, especially when dealing with a new topic or audience.
But that’s not the main reason to include it.
Q&A’s primary purpose is to be deleted when you’re running late.
This Format’s greatest value lies in the fact that it is a credible—but not
essential—way to fill an ambiguous amount of time. And it’s flexible. You
can easily shrink a section of Q&A to five minutes or lengthen it to 20
without anyone knowing that you’re deviating from the plan. This sort of
flexibility is extremely helpful for staying on schedule and ending on time.
Most of a workshop’s schedule is fairly rigid, which means there’s no
way to recover from schedule slippage without deleting something important.
So you include Q&A as a flexible “schedule spring” which can stretch and
shrink to soak up changes in the timing elsewhere. The inclusion of these
springs is the secret to finishing exactly on time, even if you’re starting late
or running behind. You’ll never be able to recover time by just talking faster;
instead, you need to design some flex into your schedule. Springs are a useful
general design concept, and I recommend including at least 15 minutes of
spring in every 90-minute chunk of your schedule. If you’re spending 30
minutes per Learning Outcome, this works out to just five minutes of Q&A
per takeaway, which is fairly easy to accommodate.
Given that you’re going to be using a bit of Q&A, you should make two
small tweaks to help compensate for its problems:
Instead of doing one long Q&A at the end of your workshop, do a
shorter Q&A after each Learning Outcome
Instead of vaguely asking if anyone has “any questions?”, be more
 specific and encourage them to ask questions which are relevant to
exactly what you just talked about (and include a helpful reminder
about what those things are)
By breaking Q&A into small pieces pinned to each Learning Outcome,
you reduce Format Fatigue and increase energy levels. And by keeping the
questions tightly focused on the most recent Learning Outcomes, you
improve the educational potential and make it easier to stay on topic.

Polling the class with Dot Votes and Post-Ups

I often hear teachers polling their class with a question like, “What else
do you want to learn?” or “What would you like to spend more time on?” But
that will only succeed in telling you what the most confident and outspoken
want to learn, and it actively silences the folks who are already feeling
uneasily behind. To get a representative sample of data from everyone, you
need force everyone to answer by using something like a Dot Vote or Post-
Up.
Dot Votes are used to let the class quickly decide between several
options. Each attendee is given a fixed number of votes (usually three), which
are represented physically as either a sticky note, a small sticker, or as a pen
mark. The options are visibly laid out on a wall, allowing everyone to
approach simultaneously to place their votes on their preferred choices. (If
they really like one choice to the exclusion of the others, it’s fine to spend
multiple votes on one item.) I used this recently when I had an unallocated 90
minutes toward the end of a two-day workshop and wanted to ask the class
what they’d like to spend it on. Here were the results:
 The results of this vote were fairly even, with no obvious “winner”
(although it did eliminate a few universally unwanted options). As such, I
picked the top three and spent another half-hour on each, using part of my
lunch break to plan the details. (I had created extra exercises for each of the
six[11] main topics while designing the main workshop, so I knew I’d be
prepared regardless of what was chosen.)
Another good option is a Post-Up. In a Post-Up, you ask the audience a
question, and everyone responds by writing something down on a sticky note.
They then come forward and stick it on the wall. I sometimes do one at the
very beginning of a session, just to make sure that I’m focusing on the right
issues. For example, at a recent session on the mechanics of equity
investment, I spent the first five minutes of the workshop by saying:
“I want everyone to grab a sticky note and to write down the #1 thing
you’re hoping to learn from this session. What’s the big question that
you’ want to have answered? Write it down and then come up here and
stick it on the wall. You don’t need to wait until I call on you, just come
on up whenever you’re done writing.”
As a teacher, this little Post-Up has basically given me a mind-reading
super-power, since I know exactly what I need to cover in order to make this
session a huge win for everyone in the room.
Once I finished teaching and was ready to shift into Q&A, I first looked
at the wall to see if I had missed anything. And of course, I had. I answered
those questions first (as if an audience member had asked them to me), and
then opened it up to a normal Q&A.
 If you’re running the Post-up at the end of a session, after you’ve
already taught the core material, then the prompt would be more like:
“What were you hoping you’d learn, which we didn’t have a chance to
cover?”
“When you go home and try to put this into practice, what are you most
worried about not being able to do?”
“Any questions? Everyone has to write down at least one, so take a
minute to think through what you’re still keen to hear about.”
And then, as the sticky notes start appearing on the wall, just start
answering them.

So, next time you’re tempted to schedule 20 minutes of Q&A, try

something different by spending the first few minutes of it on a quick Post-
Up. (You can also use a Post-Up at the very end of a session to collect
testimonials and feedback as a quicker—but less informative—alternative to
a paper feedback form.)
Neither Dot Voting nor Post-Ups can fully replace unstructured Q&A.
But they’re certainly helpful additions which allow you to get more out of it
in certain circumstances, especially when you need to know what the whole
audience cares about.
FORMAT 4: “TRY IT NOW” FOR PRACTICING HANDS-
ON SKILLS
“Try it now” is both incredibly powerful and tragically underused. The
idea is simple. After introducing any concept which is even slightly skill-
based, give the students a small task which allows them to immediately put it
into practice in a safe, controlled environment, and under enough supportive
restrictions that they can’t get too far off track. Depending on your topic, this
could be a major, recurring exercise within your workshop, or it could be a
quick, 2-5 minute micro-exercise. Either way, participants get to try doing it,
and that makes all the difference.
Some topics are so clearly skill-based that they’re almost always taught
via this sort of facilitated practice. For example, computer programming
courses are often run with as many hours in the lab as in the lecture halls. The
same holds true for music, pottery, art, sailing, sewing, writing, massage,
cooking, math, medicine, and countless other hands-on disciplines. For these
sorts of topics, it’s easy to imagine designing a session which oscillates
happily between theory and practice. For example, throughout a calligraphy
workshop, you might interrupt an overarching demonstration of lettering
styles (i.e. a lecture) with frequent breaks where students “try it now” by
attempting to emulate a given script.
Despite its obvious virtues, this format is often overlooked when
teaching theory-heavy topics. But it’s crucial to remember that even the
“purest” theoretical topic will still depend on a few practical sub-skills. For
example, although much of an MBA can be learned from a lecture, it also
depends on various hands-on tasks, such as figuring out the size of an
emerging new market. And if momentum carries the teacher past this topic
without stopping to do a bit of practice, then students will completely fail to
learn how to actually do it. Sizing a new market depends on both knowledge
and skill. And as such, it needs to be taught with both lecture (for the
knowledge) and “try it now” (for the skill).
In terms of scheduling and facilitation, “try it now” is similar to small
group discussion: form groups, assign a task, watch and listen to them work,
and then run a class-wide discussion about what just happened. And as
before, five minutes of practice can easily fill 10-15 minutes of classroom
time.
 Some care must be given to create a task which is neither too easy nor
too hard; erring too far in either direction will prevent learning. Instead,
there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where students can complete
the task, but only with some amount of support and guidance.[12]
Thankfully, it’s possible to deliver this guidance without needing to run
a 1-on-1 intervention with every single participant. (Which would severely
limit your audience size.) Instead, the assistance can be baked into the design
of the exercise itself, guiding attendees through an otherwise undoable task
and maximizing their learning in the process.
Although tasks can be “too difficult” in a variety of ways (e.g. by
depending on skills that some students are missing), the most common
mistake is to assign a task which actually contains several hidden sub-steps.
From a students’ perspective, it feels a bit like this:

Although the example seems absurd, the mistake is incredibly common.

For example, when I was helping my aforementioned friend prepare for his
full-day sales workshop, one of his exercises looked like this:

While this prompt seems quite simple, it should set off mental alarm
bells. This is exactly the sort of task which, to an expert, seems clear and
easy. Whereas for a beginner, it is impossibly vague. The problem is that
several steps are required in order to succeed at “describing a perfect
customer”. It’s a multi-step prompt disguised as a single task. It’s asking
them to draw the owl.
And sure enough, when he had used this exercise in previous, shorter
workshops, he was constantly needing to clarify and answer questions from
confused students: “But what makes a good customer?” “Do you mean I
should write down their age and income?” “What if I don’t have any
customers yet?” All these clarifications were easy for him to make. And once
he had done so, participants went on to achieve good results. But the simple
fact that the questions had been asked in the first place proves that his prompt
was weak and vague.
You’d fix this prompt in exactly the same way you’d fix the owl tutorial:
by adding clearer intermediary tasks. To figure out what those intermediary
steps might be, I asked him to talk me through what he’d expect his students
to consider during this exercise. He rattled off a quick list:
 “They should think about where the customers might be physically
located. And where they spend time online. Whether or not they’ve
already tried to solve this problem and how much money they’re
spending on it. And… etc.”
And this, as you might have noticed, is precisely the series of steps a
never-done-it-before attendee should go through in order to reach a good
answer of who their perfect customer might be. To fix his exercise, all he
needed to do was break the single big task (i.e. “draw the owl”) prompt into a
series of smaller ones:

Instead of expecting everyone to know how to reach the final goal, you
help guide them with small sub-tasks. Beyond helping support the new and
inexperienced, the step-by-step structure also simplifies timekeeping and
facilitation by ensuring that the whole class is doing the same thing at the
same time. Plus, it gives you an easy opportunity to inject little bits of
instruction, commentary, guidance, and discussion between each of the sub-
steps.
Depending on your available time and the importance of the skill in
question, you may want to run several “try it now” exercises which all
reinforce the same skill. With each repetition, as your students become more
proficient, you can reduce the level of assistance[13] (and/or increase the
complexity of the task) to keep them in that sweet spot of learning where they
can succeed—but only just. That’s where learning happens.
You’ll never have enough workshop time to advance a group all the way
from novice through to mastery. But that’s okay, and you don’t actually need
to carry them that far. You just need to get them to the point where they feel
comfortable enough to start trying it for themselves—and making mistakes
for themselves—in the real world.

FORMAT 5: SCENARIO CHALLENGES FOR CRITICAL

THINKING, EVALUATION, JUDGEMENT, AND DECISION-
MAKING
In a “try it now”, you tell everyone what they need to do. In a scenario
challenge, you ask them to figure out what they ought to do. The former
builds skill; the latter, judgement.
You can’t force a student to spontaneously become a critical thinker.
But that doesn’t render you powerless to help them get there. Here’s how Dr.
Kenneth McAlpine, Academic Curriculum Manager at Abertay University,
thinks about it:
“True, you can’t teach experience or good judgment, but you can
provide opportunities for students to gain that experience, and, perhaps
more importantly, to reflect upon it.”
The very simplest version of a scenario challenge is a prompt to decide,
“What would you do if ______?”. This small group task would then be
followed by class-wide discussion.
For example, let’s say you were helping skilled chefs begin their journey
toward becoming a head chef who is responsible for a whole restaurant.
Straightforward Scenario Challenges could include:
The shipment has been lost for a crucial ingredient and you can’t get
more in time. How do you respond? Why do you do it that way?
How do you prepare the staff and inform the customers (if at all)?
A server drops a tray of expensive steaks on their way out to the
diners. What happens? How do you react to solve the immediate
 issue and what do you do afterwards (if anything)?
At a slightly deeper level, you can begin by sharing a complex scenario,
and then progress through several stages of challenges, like this:
Scenario: Here’s a menu marked up with the profit margins of each
dish, the preparation time, and their popularity. The restaurant is
losing money.
Challenge 1: Evaluation: What’s the problem with the current
menu? Identify the biggest issues in your groups, and then we’ll talk
about it as a class.
Challenge 2: Decision: Given the above, what would you do to fix
the menu and improve the restaurant’s long-term profitability?
Again, work in groups and then we’ll discuss as a class.
As seen here, the challenge itself is often split into two distinct pieces.
The first task is about evaluating the situation, identifying what matters, and
demonstrating insight about the situation itself. Pausing for a class-wide
discussion at this point will help recover any groups who are stuck in a dead-
end while also allowing you to chime in with some relevant insights of your
own.
The second task is about decision and action. Given the insights and
understanding that have been gathered and discussed in the previous step,
what would they do next? How would they move forward? What are the
trade-offs? And again, you’ll follow this task with a class-wide discussion.
Here’s a Scenario Challenge I used in a session with a group of
entrepreneurial scientists to help them start thinking about business strategy
and product roadmaps based on their research and inventions:
Scenario: You have a breakthrough technology with many
wonderful applications. The technology is proven and works, but
there are so many possible markets, customers, and applications that
you really aren’t sure where to start. (At this point, I give each group
a paper handout with full details about the technology and its
possible applications).
Challenge 1: Evaluation: What are the biggest risks and priorities
that you would be worried about, if this was your business? Make a
list of all the crucial questions.
 Class-wide discussion: What has everyone judged as crucial? Why
those things and not others? This also allows you to add
commentary and suggestions about what they might have
overlooked. (As they mention salient risks, I’m writing a list on the
whiteboard or flipchart for them to refer to during the next task.)
Challenge 2: Decision: Given all of the above, how would you
spend your team’s time and what would you try to do in the next
week, quarter, and year?
Class-wide discussion: Chatting through their choices, the
implications thereof, and situations where alternatives might have
been stronger. Plus, a general wrap-up to the exercise.
These longer Scenario Challenges are brilliantly engaging (if designed
well) and can easily act as the backbone for an entire 45-90 minute section of
your workshop. Of course, it will still feel fresh from your student’s
perspective since it shifts continually between explanation, group work, and
class discussion.
Simple scenarios may be able to fit on a slide. More complex ones will
generally require a paper handout for teams to review at their own pace.
Although good scenario challenges can take a bit of preparation to
design, they’re infinitely reusable once you’ve made them. Facilitating this
sort of exercise is both easy and rewarding, since you’re mostly just leaving
the attendees alone to wrestle with an interesting challenge. And despite
being largely hands-off to facilitate, good challenges are extremely high-
energy and fun for attendees.

Lessons learned (for the five essential Teaching Formats):

Lectures should support your Learning Outcomes and help extract
lessons-learned from other Teaching Formats, but shouldn’t overstay
their welcome
Small group and pair discussion allow students to wrestle with clear
questions with ambiguous answers
Q&A has a ton of problems, but should still be included after each
Learning Outcome (or before each break) to catch
misunderstandings and act as a schedule spring
“Try it now” builds skills through a bit of hands-on practice, though
the prompt must be carefully refined to be neither too easy nor too
hard
Scenario Challenges help foster judgement and critical thinking by
asking students to understand, evaluate, and decide how to act in a
difficult situation
 DESIGN YOUR EXERCISES
AND REFINE YOUR
SCHEDULE

Let’s review where we’re up to:

You have a vague topic of what you’re meant to be teaching, plus an
Audience Profile of who is likely to be in the room.
You’ve then clarified that topic into a small set of sharp, focused
Learning Outcomes, which have been expanded into a short outline
with some supporting arguments or key ideas.
You’ve fit these points within the constraints of your schedule by
first dividing the available time into rough Schedule Chunks (with
good breaks!) and then smooshing the two together (and potentially
trying a different arrangement if the first attempt seems too
ridiculous).
You then got familiar with the 5 core Teaching Formats:
Lectures (for delivering “book knowledge” and extracting
takeaways from exercises)
Small group and pair discussions (for wrestling with ambiguous
options and personal implications)
“Try it now” practice (for building hands-on skills)
Scenario challenges (for building wisdom, evaluation, judgement,
and decision-making)
Question & answer (for catching major objections/confusion and
adding some flexibility into your schedule)
 You’re now ready to your workshop’s exciting high points: its exercises.

ADD EXERCISES AND BUILD YOUR DETAILED

SCHEDULE
Exercise design begins by picking a Teaching Format, filling in some
facilitation details, and then designing the full prompt and any supporting
materials. However, you won’t go through this full process one-at-a-time for
each exercise. Instead, you’ll work across the whole workshop in a series of
passes, going slightly deeper on each pass while maintaining a high-level
view of how the whole thing is shaping up and fitting together.
You’ll be using your Workshop Outline or Skeleton as a base for
exercise design. After all, each item on the Outline is a takeaway of some
sort, which means that each item could be either taught by or supported with
an exercise in one of the non-lecture Teaching Formats.
Scan for essential exercises: Begin by scanning the outline for any
takeaways which must be taught by a certain Teaching Format. For example,
if one of your Learning Outcomes (or its supporting points) depends on a
hands-on or practical skill, then you’re almost certainly going to need to use
some sort of “try it now” exercise in that section.
My shorthand for this task is “knowledge/skill/wisdom” (K/S/W), where
knowledge is taught by lecture, skill by “try it now”, and wisdom (or
judgement or decision-making or evaluation or whatever you want to call it)
is taught by scenario challenges. So, going through your Outline or Skeleton,
mark each line with either a K, S, or W.
For each S(kill) and W(isdom), try to come up with the broad strokes of
either a “try it now” or scenario challenge, respectively. Without one of these
hands-on exercises, you’ll be “teaching yoga with a lecture” and will have a
very hard time getting these lessons to stick. (If you’re unable to find a
suitable exercise, there are a few extra specialized Formats in the Appendix
which might be helpful.)
For each K(nowledge), try to think up a potential topic for a small group
discussion. What are the personal implications, applications, or questions
around this piece of knowledge? Is there a meaty and interesting discussion
to be had around not the knowledge itself, but the implications of that
knowledge to the people in the room?
 Redraw your schedule. Remember the timeline you drew when
combining your Schedule Chunks with your Learning Outcomes? Sketch out
another one, and this time mark where your exercises might fall. You can
expect to spend 5-15 minutes per exercise, depending on whether you want to
include the facilitation extras like a Stand and Share, adding your own
commentary, and giving teams time to say hello to each other before the
exercise.
Search for (and fix) long lecture segments. On the timeline, search for
periods of time where you’ve got more than about 20 minutes of lecture in a
row. Those spots are likely to be a drain on the audience’s energy and feel
like a drag. You don’t need to fix every single one of them, but the more you
can fix, the better.
One solution is to reorder your material to end up with either an exercise
or a break splitting up the lecture. Another is to insert an “optional” exercise
which isn’t strictly necessary, but which fits well-enough and can plausibly
support the surrounding Learning Outcomes. Small group discussion is the
most common candidate here, but you can use any of the Formats for this
purpose.
Add Q&A and other supporting activities. Now’s as good a time as
any to start placing your Q&A sections. Remember that they also function as
flexible schedule springs to help recover time if you’re running late. As such,
I like to aim for about 15 minutes per 90-minute chunk. This can either be
one long block right before the coffee break, or 5ish minutes after each
Learning Outcome within that chunk.
If you’d like to use either a Post Up or Dot Vote, now’s also a good time
to get those exercises onto the schedule.
As before, give the overall schedule a sanity check and search for
potential Format Fatigue from using the same Format (especially lecture) for
too long without any variation. Continue this process of adjusting the
schedule and exercises until you’re happy with the overall shape.
This is your detailed schedule and is the final ingredient of a 100%
finished Workshop Skeleton. At this point, you should be able to get a fairly
accurate sense of what your workshop is going to “feel” like on the day-of. In
particular, ensure it has these two shining virtues:
1. The Teaching Formats “match” the Learning Outcomes, which
 avoids the trap of over-relying on lecture and maximizes the
chance that the lesson will stick
2. There’s lots of variation between different Formats, which will
go a long way toward maintaining strong energy levels
If you’ve got those two qualities on your schedule, then your workshop
design is finished and you’re ready to start creating the supporting materials:
first your exercise details, and then your slides.

DECIDE ON THE FACILITATION DETAILS FOR YOUR

EXERCISES
Designing exercises is mostly about picking your Teaching Formats.
Once you’ve got that, you rattle through a checklist of additional facilitation
details, which typically includes the following elements:
Prompt or task (“Discuss this case study, think about X, and decide
on Y”)
Group size (“Working in pairs”)
Task time limit (“Five minutes”)
Facilitation extras (“Followed by a stand & share and class
discussion”)
Supporting materials, if any (Case study delivered as a paper
handout)
Total exercise time (15 minutes total to introduce, run, stand &
share, and discuss)
The only thing left (which we’ll get to shortly) is making the slides to
tell the students what they’re supposed to be doing.

Workshop Design Task: On your workshop outline, mark up each

line (i.e. either a Learning Outcome or a Key Idea) with a “K”, “S”, or
“W” to identify whether it is knowledge, skill, wisdom, or some
combination thereof.
 Workshop Design Task: For each line of your outline, start coming
up with possible Teaching Formats (and potentially even specific
exercises) which match its category of knowledge/skill/wisdom.

Lessons learned:
To design workshop exercises, start with a Teaching Format and
then add a prompt, timing, grouping, and facilitation details
With the addition of exercises to your workshop outline, you’ve
pretty much got a completed Workshop Skeleton
 BEGIN WITH THE BARE
MINIMUM NUMBER OF
SLIDES

Slides take a ton of time to create and often fail in their purpose. They don’t
fail because they’re ugly or overcrowded, but because they obstruct (or at
least don’t support) your Learning Outcomes.
Used properly, slides serve a clear set of goals:
For the facilitator, slides help keep you on-track, ensure you don’t
skip major points, let you know when you’re falling behind
schedule, and remind you to pause for exercises and discussions
For the attendees, slides clarify the major takeaways, remind them
of exercise instructions, reduce some of the stress around taking
notes, and improve comprehension for non-native speakers
Folks tend to make too many slides. They spend too long on them, and
then the pile of slides hurts instead of helping by causing them to run late
when they try to “get through everything”.
My preferred solution is to begin by creating only the absolute minimum
number of essential (or at least very high value) slides, and then cautiously
expanding from there.
These essential slides include:
1. Summaries of your Learning Outcomes and supporting
arguments
2. Exercise prompts (instructions, rules, discussion topics, etc.)
3. Resource lists (recommended books, your contact info, etc.)
 And if you’re teaching a topic which demands it:
4. Visual examples for fundamentally visual topics (fashion,
architecture, etc.)
That’s it. Anything else is a nice-to-have, added later for flavor or style.
The classic mistake with slides is to put every single thing you intend to say
onto a slide, which then lures you into a mode of narrating the slides to the
audience. Your slides should guide and support you, not dictate every
sentence that comes out of your mouth.
Note that although the examples in this section are aesthetically
minimal, that’s not strictly required, and you’re free to make beautiful slides
if you prefer. But if you are planning on making them beautiful, delay doing
so until after you’ve laid down the essential content for the whole deck. The
more work you’ve put into the aesthetics of your slides up front, the harder
they are to adjust and delete as you refine your workshop.
So, how many slides is “minimum”? The answer will depend on the
number of Learning Outcomes and exercises in your workshop. As an
example, I recently built a 2-hour workshop with 4 major Learning
Outcomes. I ended up with 33 must-have slides:
15 summary slides for the crucial takeaways

4 for my main Learning Outcomes

11 for additional key ideas and supporting arguments

15 slides for exercise prompts

9 for small group tasks

2 for individual work
4 for full-room discussions

3 slides listing resources

1 with suggested reading

2 with my contact details (standard intro/outro slides)
These slides are “essential” in the sense that the workshop would be
worse—and harder to facilitate—without them. They are the bare minimum
needed to effectively communicate your Learning Outcomes and to help keep
both yourself and your audience on track with exercises.
Building the essential slides should take less than an hour. If that
sounds impossible, it’s because you either a) haven’t put together a real
Skeleton, so you’re designing your workshop from inside the slide software,
or b) you’re fiddling with style and layout. Both are huge time traps. Come
back to the style later in a single pass. If you’re not sure what a slide needs to
say at any given point, close your laptop and go back to figuring it out on
your paper skeleton. It’s far too easy to spend dozens of hours fiddling with
your slides’ details when you should be figuring out the fundamentals.
We’ll now take a quick look at each of the three types of essential slides:
Learning Outcome summaries, exercise prompts, and resource lists.

ESSENTIAL SLIDE 1: LEARNING OUTCOME

SUMMARIES
Learning Outcome summary slides come directly from your previously-
created Skeleton. This is not the time to go back into improvisational mode.
You’ve already (hopefully) spent the time to decide what’s important for
folks to learn. Trust your earlier decision and simply move those points into
your slide deck. It’s the fastest way to get to a good-enough first version of
your complete deck and prevents you from getting bogged down.
While Learning Outcome summary slides can come in any number of
forms, don’t be afraid to keep it simple. After all, not every slide needs to
have a bullet point list on it. Depending on the particulars of the takeaway, a
summary slide could look like this:
 You’ll show one of these slides while concluding each talking point or
takeaway from your Skeleton. It’s a chance for you to pause, summarize, and
check for confusion. I also like to use these slides as the backdrop for focused
bits of Q&A. (“Here’s what we just covered; any questions or concerns with
any of this stuff?”)
Learning Outcome slides are helpful for you as a facilitator because they
force you to explicitly state your message. And it’s helpful for your attendees
to see what they’re supposed to be learning, laid bare and without all the fun
and fluff of your speaking style. If they take notes of what they see on your
slides (which is common), then they’ll end up with a handy little list of all
your Learning Outcomes. And this, conveniently, is exactly what you want
them to take away.

ESSENTIAL SLIDE 2: EXERCISE PROMPTS

 You’ll need at least one prompt slide for every exercise. (People never
understand the task if you only tell them verbally.) If the exercise involves
group formation, finish forming groups before you show them the slide
which explains what they’re supposed to be doing.
Prompts must be short enough to legibly fit on one slide while also
being comprehensive enough to resolve any disagreement or confusion
within the group. This requires some delicate copywriting and is something
to iterate and refine over time as you identify the ways in which participants
seem to get lost.
Just like Learning Outcome summary slides, prompt slides don’t need to
be terribly text-heavy or complicated:

If the prompt is too complex to fit on a slide, then it’s possible that
you’ve combined multiple tasks (i.e. drawing the owl) and can split them
apart into separate steps, each with its own slide and timer. Or, if the
complexity is unavoidable, then consider moving the details onto a paper
handout.
Prompts should remain on screen for the entirety of the task. You’d be
absolutely shocked at how often attendees seem to “forget” what they’re
doing and need to re-read the prompt to continue working. This means that
you shouldn’t use the projector screen for anything else during an exercise
(like showing a timer or image).
That’s it. Still, it’s worth giving your prompt slides a few extra editing
passes since bad ones will invariably introduce workshop-delaying confusion.

ESSENTIAL SLIDE 3: RESOURCES LISTS (AND

INTRO/OUTRO)
Attendees adore lists of resources: recommended books, blogs, tools,
where to learn more, etc. As soon as you put one of these resource lists up on
screen, everyone will start frantically taking notes and snapping pictures.
While lengthy lists may require a paper handout, shorter ones can fit on a
slide. A resource list is rarely required for your workshop to succeed, but it’s
a nice way to wrap things up and acts as a high-value takeaway.
You’ll also need an intro and outro slide with the talk’s title, your
contact information, and an optional call-to-action to ask attendees to do
something like send you an email, perform a homework task, go to a website,
or buy something.
Although your deck is still very bare-bones at this point, it has
everything needed to keep your exercises and Learning Outcomes on track.
And as such, you can rest easy in the knowledge that if you run out of prep
time, what you’ve already built will be more than sufficient for you to
succeed.

Workshop Design Task (30-60 minutes): Create your essential slides

without worrying about style or layout. This includes Learning
Outcome (and supporting argument) summary slides, exercise and
discussion prompts, an intro/outro, and optional resource lists.

SPRINKLE ON THE FLAVOR SLIDES

All that being said, a bit of flavor can really help the overall feel of your
workshop. Once you’re happy with your Skeleton and have built the
essentials, you can spend as much (or as little) time as you like making them
beautiful, personal, and fun, as well as adding extra nice-to-have slides.
While there are any number of ways to add flavor to your deck, one
that’s particularly useful is a series of slides that build up toward a Learning
Outcome or key idea. Often, during a lecture segment, you’ll use a bit of
creative storytelling, metaphor, or examples. These narrative stepping-stones
are excellent candidates for some extra (non-essential) slides to help carry the
story and illustrate the plot.
For example, you might be making the observation—in a session about
product design—that something which is beautiful is not necessarily also
functional. And you might choose to illustrate this point by comparing a
common and effective juicer against the one which won all the design awards
despite being completely awful to use:

These sorts of slides break up the tempo of your lecture and can get a
laugh. But be careful to use them for a purpose. Some facilitators go flavor-
crazy, and the purpose of their talk gets lost in its attempt to be entertaining.
It’s like cooking: the spices should support the dish, not overwhelm it. (The
flavor is becoming a problem if it’s messing with your timings by causing
you to spend too long on takeaways which don’t warrant so much time
relative to the rest of your material.)
No matter how you choose to teach a particular Learning Outcome—
whether via lecture, challenge, exercise, discussion, or whatever else—
remember that the Learning Outcome comes first. Slides are built to serve.

YOU ARE NEVER OBLIGATED TO INCLUDE AN IMAGE

Images are a double-edged sword. When used properly to directly
support a talking point, they can enhance the message or deliver a punchline.
But facilitators often feel obligated to include an image on every slide, which
leads to a doomed quest for mediocre stock photography and ends up
distracting from your talk instead of adding to it.
Superfluous images backfire. Every time an image appears on your
slides, people look at it, shifting their attention away from you and what
you’re saying. If the image is delivering your core message, then this is fine.
But whenever you include an inessential image just to “look nice”, you’re
guaranteeing that your whole audience will spend several seconds trying to
interpret what it means, when you’d prefer that they just be listening to you.
Even something as “neutral” as an image of a landscape will still dominate
your audience’s attention while they try to figure out why it’s there.
Also, never use sexy images to try to be controversial or engaging. I
know this sounds ridiculous, but you’d be surprised how often presenters try
something saucy to “keep the audience paying attention”. It backfires
frequently and badly. Much better to just design a good workshop which
keeps the energy high without resorting to cheap tricks.
Images are great, but only if they support your talking points. Never
include them simply because you’re scared of leaving empty space on a slide.
A slide’s design should serve its content, and your content should never be
fluffed out to fill an arbitrary slide template.
TITLES SHOULD CONTAIN THE MESSAGE, NOT THE
TOPIC
Too often, slide titles say nothing of value. Instead, they act as a vague
“topic” introducing and describing the slide without actually conveying any
information. But that’s silly. A slide’s title is its most valuable real estate and
should therefore contain the most important part of the message. Here’s the
text from a slide which has fallen for this trap:
Sales 101
- Sales is about asking good questions
- What you’re learning is more important than
what you’re pitching
- If you’re doing all the talking, then you’re
failing

Look at the title: “Sales 101.” It’s wasting the most valuable, most
visible, highest-priority spot on the slide with a line of text which is
absolutely devoid of any useful information. If you ask me the secret of sales,
and I lean in, confidentially, and whisper, “Sales 101,” then you’d be right to
roll your eyes and walk away.
To make better use of the natural hierarchy of a slide’s title and contents,
the first bullet can be promoted to take the old title’s place, since that first
point is really the main message of this slide:
Sales is about asking good questions:
- What you’re learning is more important than
what you’re pitching
- If you’re doing all the talking, then you’re
failing

This critique may seem weirdly specific, but it’s a super common
mistake. And it’s also more impactful than it seems, since it leads to a stilted
speaking style where you find yourself “introducing” every new slide instead
of just getting to the point. With a slide like the first one, a speaker is tempted
to say,
“Okay, now I’m going to talk about Sales 101 (a nebulous sentence
with no value). The most important thing you need to know (an empty
transition which was forced thanks to the previous sentence) is that
sales is about asking good questions… (finally we’re on to the real
material)”
Whereas with the second version, it feels natural to cut the fluff and
simply begin with:
“Sales is about asking good questions… (straight to the value)”
Plus, if an attendee is trying to follow along with your slides, the first
version delays and (slightly) confuses them, whereas the second version is
crystal clear about what they’re supposed to be learning.
I think the reason this mistake is so widespread is that folks design their
slides before defining their Learning Outcomes, so they end up titling their
slides with vague topics instead of their real message. To avoid this trap,
design a good Skeleton first and then put the main message into your slide
titles. If that makes the rest of the slide feel too empty, fear not! Simply
switch the slide template to something which highlights the important stuff
even more:
 Workshop design task (10-20 minutes): Flip through your slide deck
and search for slide titles which don’t say anything. What’s the point
you’re really trying to make with that slide? If possible, promote that
to be the title. If that makes the rest of the slide feel “empty”, then
perhaps you can try deleting everything else and putting the title front
and center. While you’re at it, also consider deleting any “filler”
images and stock photography which distract without informing.

Lessons learned:
Your first pass on a slide deck should contain only the absolute
essentials (Learning Outcome summaries, exercise prompts,
intro/outro and resource lists, and visual examples)
Once you have the essentials in place, you can (optionally) add fun,
nice-to-have slides which offer examples, storytelling, and
personality
 SUMMARY OF PART 1

Start by defining your Audience Profile (who):

Describes who is attending the workshop
How experience they are
Why they are bothering to show up
Any concerns or objections the audience may have
Next, insert breaks to divide the available time into Schedule Chunks (when):
Draft your schedule quickly by first allocating your coffee and lunch
breaks
60-90 minutes of workshop between breaks is the sweet spot
Given those constraints, decide on the concrete Learning Outcomes and
takeaways (what):
Learning Outcomes are the sharp, specific, high-value takeaways
that the audience has shown up for
Add supporting arguments to each Learning Outcome to highlight
key ideas or talking points
Combine into a Workshop Skeleton:
Complete your Workshop Skeleton by inserting your Learning
Outcomes into your Schedule Chunks
Remix and cut content until everything fits into the Chunks
Pick the best Teaching Formats to maintain education, energy, and attention:
Vary teaching formats at least every 20 minutes to keep the audience
 feeling fresh
Select Teaching Formats that match what is being taught — you
can’t teach yoga with a lecture
Lectures are great for delivering “book” knowledge and addressing
takeaways from exercises
Small group & pair discussions allow audiences to engage with
topics from lectures
“Try it now” exercises allow new skills to be practiced
Scenario challenges develop critical thinking and decision-making.
Question & answer sections add flexibility to your schedule
Before getting stuck in style and layout, create the most essential slides:
A slide deck only needs to contain the absolute essentials — less is
more in a workshop
Essential slides include summarizing Learning Outcomes and
supporting arguments; exercise prompts; and important resource
lists
Flavor slides are fun, nice-to-have visual that enhance examples,
storytelling, and personality

CLOSING THOUGHTS ON WORKSHOP DESIGN

Hey there, it’s Devin. One of my first professional teaching gigs was
training non-programmers to program. (Creatively titled “Programming for
Non-Programmers”.)
On paper, it should have been a cakewalk: I was comfortable in front of
an audience, the materials had already been prepared (mostly lectures with
some large practice exercises), and the tickets had already been sold. All I
had to do was to stand up front and lead the audience through the magical
journey of launching their first website. But 30 minutes into the first session,
it was clear that I had already lost the whole class, who seemed to just be
silently mouthing “huh?” over and over again.
Being unable, at the time, to recognize the deep flaws in the workshop’s
underlying design, I pushed forward the only way I knew: an increasingly
enthusiastic—but ultimately doomed—delivery. Although a few of them did
walk away having learned a thing or two, the majority left drained and bored.
It was a big failure and a major wake-up call. A great workshop is so much
more than just being an enthusiastic lecturer. The design is paramount.
Suffice to say, the workshop was broken. But it was broken in ways
which you would now be able to recognize and fix: long lectures about
practical skills (I can’t believe I seriously tried to teach programming without
programming), followed by too-vague, too-long exercises which required
constant 1-on-1 assistance for every single student.
Over subsequent iterations, I tore up and reworked the whole Skeleton:
sharper Learning Outcomes, better choice of Teaching Formats, clearer
exercises, and a far more pleasant energy level throughout the day. Much like
how a fledgling chef is told to “let the knife do the work”, I had started to
design a workshop that did the teaching for me instead of relying on my
personal performance alone.
A few sessions later, this workshop had become hugely effective for the
students, and second nature for me. Far from the stressful, overwhelming
experience of fighting against the originally flawed design, these full days of
teaching were even starting to become pleasant.
And now that you’re up to speed with the essentials of good workshop
design, I think you too will find the facilitation to be far easier than you
expect—and perhaps even a little bit fun. Coming up next, we’ll turn out
attention to the question of how to do it.
 PA RT T W O

Facilitation Essentials

In Part 2, we’ll cover facilitation chronologically, beginning with how to

introduce yourself and continuing with how to start an exercise, keep it
moving, and recover everyone’s attention once it’s finished. We’ll then get
into how to deal with common challenges like slipped schedules, hostile
audiences, and your own fatigue.
In general, facilitation is easier than you think. After all, folks have
shown up because they want to learn something, which means that they want
both you and your workshop to succeed. They’re rooting for you. And with a
little bit of facilitation know-how, you’ll be able to keep it all on track.
 HOW TO INTRODUCE
YOURSELF WITHOUT
MAKING EVERYONE HATE
YOU

I recently attended a beer tasting — hard to screw up, right? But the host
mysteriously chose not to begin by handing us a tasty beer. Instead, she fell
into the common trap of trying too hard to justify her reason for being there
by using a long, overwrought intro. She talked about her passion for beer and
her trips through the hops fields and her childhood experience of tasting the
foam from her father’s brew... She’d clearly been watching too many
inspirational internet talks and had lost sight of what her event was really
about: attendees tasting beers.
The purpose of your intro is to offer just enough credibility for the
audience to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you start delivering the
value they showed up for. In the case of a workshop, the “value” is in
delivering your first high-impact Learning Outcome. In the case of a beer
tasting, the “value” would have been in the first sip of a surprising and
delicious beer.
Remember, the audience has generally chosen to be there, and thus
already believes that you’re credible. As such, you don’t need to beat them
over the head with your CV, work history, or life story.
Of course, you do still need to tell them who you are. But it can be quite
short, including only a) your name and b) one or two relevant details. Here
are a few examples of great personal intros (assuming, of course, that the
details being shared are relevant to the topic being taught):
 “Hey, I’m Katie. A few years back I quit my job and spent the next two
years as an apprentice woodworker learning traditional furniture
making, and now most of my home is filled with stuff I’ve made myself.”
“Hey, I’m Sophie. I’ve trained and managed high-value sales teams in
a number of Fortune 500s, and at the peak was responsible for
delivering $400 million per year in partnership-driven sales.”
“Hey, I’m Jacob. I’ve never done this stuff professionally, but I’ve
worked on a bunch of hobby projects over the years, and I wanted to
share some of my lessons-learned from trying to apply all the advice
and best practices from the ‘experts’.”
“Hey, I’m Ian. I’ve spent two decades freelancing, although now I’m
primarily a full-time dad for my two boys. I’m going to talk about how
to fit freelancing into your life without sacrificing on either side.”
“Hey, I’m Imran. I’m a data analyst and have recently been helping
optimize a bunch of Facebook ad campaigns. I’ve seen that with a bit of
patience and the right approach, you can usually increase your
campaigns’ initial performance by 10‑20x.”
All of these are great: one key piece of relevant information, chosen and
presented in a way which suggests you have something worth saying. If you
have a brilliant stamp of credibility (like Sophie’s huge sales number or a
Nobel Prize), then by all means, mention it. But the other examples work fine
without anything like that, because they’ve packaged up whatever experience
they do have into a clear, focused explanation of why they’re worth listening
to.
So, what about our misguided beer host? If I were in her shoes, I might
try something like this for the next event:
“Hey, I’m Jackie. I used to be a wine sommelier, but I’ve always loved
—and have recently been obsessing over—beer. Today I’m excited to
share a few of the most interesting I’ve found, all produced locally
around Barcelona.”
When it comes to intros, short is good. You can add in more personal
details later, during the workshop itself, if and when those details are
applicable to the Learning Outcome at hand.
At a slightly more advanced level, you can placate skeptical and
unwilling audiences by tailoring your (still short) intro toward their biggest
objection. For example, imagine I’m teaching a sales workshop to a group of
technical folks who are deeply suspicious of salespeople. To help alleviate
their concerns, I might say:
“Hey, I’m Rob. I’m a programmer who was forced to learn sales in my
first business. It was a tough couple years since there aren’t many sales
books written for introverted techies. But it turns out it’s actually pretty
straightforward once you know how to do it, and you don’t need to turn
into some sort of pushy sales guy.”
That’s enough. It shows that I understand their concerns and their world,
and that I might be worth listening to even though they aren’t too keen on the
broader topic. They’re now a bit more likely to give me the benefit of the
doubt and wait to hear what I have to say. And then I can jump straight into
delivering value.
Now imagine that I’m teaching the same material, but to a sales-friendly
crowd who is more worried about my personal experience and credibility. In
that case, I might instead introduce myself this way:
“Hey I’m Rob. I’ve been running startups for about 10 years, have been
through YC,[14] and have raised funding in both the US and UK. I’ve
bankrupted a couple businesses—which isn’t much fun—and have had
better results with the more recent ones. We’re going to be talking
about what we can do to avoid the bad results and get the good ones by
changing the way we think about sales.”
Crafting these sorts of tailored intros relies on having a clear Audience
Profile (which we covered at the start of Part 1). If possible, I’ll even ask the
event organizer to predict the crowd’s most likely concern, or I’ll try to get a
sense of it during a few minutes of pre-event chit chat.
In terms of your intro’s tone, never joke that you’re tired, hungover, or
unprepared. The audience is giving up their time to be there. Humility and
self-deprecation are fine, but don’t imply that you’re disrespecting their time.
On that note, it’s a mistake to go too far with the self-deprecation. Self-
deprecation only works when counterbalanced against the audience already
believing that you’re great. I’m not saying you need to pretend to be amazing
at everything, but do give them a teacher they can believe in.

Lessons learned:
The purpose of an intro isn’t to summarize your life or CV, but to
give the audience just enough for them to start listening to you
When facing a skeptical audience, tailor your (still short) intro
toward their biggest concern
Get through it quickly and start delivering the value folks showed up
for
 DON’T TREAT YOUR
AUDIENCE AS BIGGER
THAN IT IS

Your facilitation needs to be right-sized. If you’re running a session for 10

people seated around a single table, you might want to take a seat yourself
and to use a more conversational tone than you would when standing on stage
with a microphone. On the other hand, if you have 1,000 attendees in a large
event, it would be a fool’s errand to tell folks to interrupt you whenever they
have questions.[15]
Think of yourself as a party host:
Fewer than 12 attendees is a dinner party. By the end of the session,
you’re going to be able to understand every single person and address their
individual concerns. The energy level may not be frenetic, but that doesn’t
mean people aren’t fully engaged, attentive, and happy to be there. You are
the host of this dinner party, and while you certainly can give firm
instructions (“Get to your seats please, it’s time for dessert!”), you can also
just sit alongside and talk to them in a normal, conversational tone.
12–20 attendees is a birthday dinner. It’s a little bit rowdier, so
sometimes you’ll need to stand up and demand attention to make yourself
heard. That being said, you’re still going to have an individual interaction
with every person in the room, even if you don’t learn every detail of their
lives. This sort of size works well in a few clusters of cabaret seating, or with
the whole class arranged in a circle of chairs or around a big boardroom table
where everyone can talk to each other. And conversely, it’s a small enough
group that it’d be a little weird if you put them in lecture seating and make
them just sit quietly and listen to you all day.
 20–50 attendees is a house party. While it’s quite likely that you won’t
get to talk directly to everyone who shows up, that’s okay. It’s still small
enough that attendees feel they can come find you if they have some sort of
problem. And apart from that, they’re enjoying being at the event you’ve put
together. Depending on how energetic they are, you can sometimes talk to
them normally (e.g. going to each cluster of people and asking them to stop
pouring so much red wine on the carpet), and other times you might choose
to use your authority as a host to seize their attention and address them as a
group (“No more red wine, you maniacs!”). This is about the size where your
skills in design and facilitation really start to be essential, and you won’t be
able to run a smooth session without them.
50+ attendees is a wedding. Everyone is there for the same reason, but
it’s a big enough crowd that you need to be more structured. To be heard, you
may need to use a stage and a microphone. This makes it harder for the
audience to ask questions, express their concerns, or generally influence the
day. Since you aren’t able to help everyone individually, the design and
execution of the event are absolutely crucial in ensuring everyone has a good
time.
The size of your audience determines your tone as well as the technique
you’ll use to get their attention. At a 20‑person dinner party, you can just say
“Hey everyone” and you’re pretty much done. If someone is still having a
private conversation, it’s easy to single them out and bring them back into the
group. But not so much at a 50‑person wedding reception. This is why
getting everyone’s attention by banging a spoon against your glass seems
acceptable at a wedding, but a little strange at a smaller gathering. You need
to use a tone and technique appropriate to the size of the group.

GOING INDIVIDUAL
In addition to being right-sized, remember that even large crowds are
still composed of individuals. There’s a massive temptation—especially for
newer facilitators—to treat every audience as a gigantic, anonymous,
homogeneous crowd. It feels safer, somehow.
I remember spectating a workshop with a total of five attendees, all
sitting around a single table no larger than you’d find in a dining room. The
facilitator—to his credit—had designed an amazing workshop, and two of the
attendees were so engaged in the exercises that they kept failing to hear him
announce that it was time to move on. But instead of saying, “Hey James,
Jackie, bring it back in,” he would raise his voice and start yelling at the sky:
“THAT IS TIME, EVERYONE STOP. TIME IS UP. STOP WORKING.”
Meanwhile, the other three students (who were paying attention) were
justifiably beginning to suspect that their teacher was a crazy person.
What he didn’t appreciate is that up until about 30 attendees, crowd
control is generally fastest and most effective if you treat distracted
participants as individuals.
For an explanation of why, consider the following common scenario:
your attendees are working in groups and you find yourself needing to give
them a bit of further instruction. The typical approach is to treat them as a
crowd: gathering everyone’s collective attention, telling everyone what you
have to say, and then setting them all back to work. That’s fine, but fairly
labor-intensive. Instead, so long as you have fewer than about 10 groups, you
could just walk through the room, stopping at each cluster and telling them
what to do next. The groups will end up slightly out of phase with each other
(by as long as it takes you to walk through the room) but will all be
guaranteed to receive the new instruction with zero delay or friction.
Another common scenario is to have given a set of instructions to the
class but failed to reach a small number of distracted individuals. Many
teachers will delay the entire class until they’ve recovered these few, when a
far better option is often to let the bulk of the class get started and then walk
over to the off-track individuals to scoot them forward by hand.[16]
If you really need everyone’s silence and attention, then you can single
out the relevant individuals by name or walk over and tap them on the
shoulder while telling them (in a normal speaking voice) that it’s time to
move on to whatever’s next. You never want to scold your attendees as if
they are children (which decimates goodwill), but it’s fine to respectfully
address them as an individual.
Make a habit of going individual during every exercise. Once you’ve
assigned the task, don’t just stay in your teaching area. Instead, walk through
the room, visiting each group to watch and listen to them work, checking on
their progress and scanning for problems. If you see that they’re stuck on
something, it’s a chance to proactively unstick them without having to rely on
a student being willing to ask a question in front of the whole class.
We’ll look at more advanced approaches to crowd control a bit later,
which can be used to manage larger audiences. But for now, just remember
that every crowd is composed of individuals, and your quickest way to
influence the former is often to speak to the latter.

Lessons learned:
Your style of facilitation should be “right-sized” to match the
audience
It feels safe to always address the entire crowd as a single unit, but
it’s often faster and more effective to address them as individuals
 SEATING AND GROUP
FORMATION

The difference between a brilliant exercise and one which flops will often
come down to little more than the friction of your facilitation. And although
obsessing over something like chair arrangement and group formation sounds
fairly mundane, polishing these seemingly trivial edges will allow you to
build a day which flows smoothly, tightly, and effortlessly from one exercise
to the next. And this, in turn, helps keep energy levels at their highest.
As simple as it sounds, “Get into groups of 3” is a slow and difficult task
for audiences to complete. Although most of the class will be fine, a small
subset will take long enough to create a problematic delay for everyone else
(and it also risks isolating the shyest and most socially vulnerable
participants).
The solution is part room setup and part facilitation:
1. If possible, use a seating arrangement which creates “natural”
groups

2. In either case, help organize the grouping yourself and find a

home for any isolated individuals
Good seating allows for quick, unambiguous group formation. As such,
the chair (and potentially table) layout is the most important quality of any
teaching venue. For example, if everyone is already sitting at tables of six
when you ask them to get into groups of three, then there’s really no way for
them to end up stranded.
As such, the absolute best seating is cabaret (clusters of attendees
around individual tables) with six people per table. The magic number of
six allows you to rearrange them as pairs, triplets, or a full half-dozen without
requiring anyone to switch seats. (But anywhere from 4-8 attendees per table
still feels great.) Plus, cabaret makes it easy for you to walk between the
tables and listen in on them working during exercises.

Cabaret seating doesn’t need to look like formal wedding. Here, students are seated around tables in groups of
three or four, ready to get back into groupwork without any delays from group formation.

Of course, you’ll often find yourself stuck in nonideal venues. In those

cases, you should rearrange it into the least bad version of itself. For
example, if the room is set up as a lecture, but with movable chairs, then you
can improve group formation by arranging the chairs into loose clusters
before the event starts or during a break.
The absolute worst arrangements are lecture auditoriums with fixed
seating (especially if they have “movie theatre rows” which prevent people
from relocating and turning). In these cases, the best you can do is to scoot
everyone toward the front and pack them together, so nobody is stranded
without a neighbor. Attendees hate being moved after they’ve already taken a
seat, so it’s best if you begin doing it while people are first arriving, as
opposed to trying to move them after they’ve already sat down. (You can also
simplify the issue by using a bit of tape and paper to barricade the prohibited
rows.)
If you do need to move them, you’ll have to insist on it fairly firmly and
be willing to stand your ground until everyone is sitting where you need
them. One way to facilitate this is to conceal what you’re asking them to do
while giving one (polite) instruction at a time. And to continue repeating
yourself at each step until everyone has done it. It sounds a bit like a crazy
person’s rant, but it works:
“Everyone stand up. Everyone. Okay. Now pick up your stuff and move
out into the aisle. Yep, for real, grab your stuff and get into the aisle.
Great. Walk to the front. Come on, get up here—I can’t smell that bad.
Okay, take a seat in one of the first four rows. Nice, thanks for that and
sorry for the shuffle—we’re going to be doing some group work so I
need you all sitting together.” (All of this is said with a bit of a playful
wink, as opposed to with a demanding or authoritative tone.)
If you just ask them to move and then stop talking, I can 100%
guarantee that almost everybody will ignore your request. Instead, you need
to dig in your heels and keep talking (and making a bit of a scene of yourself)
until everyone is where you need them to be. This sort of rearrangement does
take a couple minutes and it does affect your energy levels. But in bad lecture
halls, it’s generally necessary if you hope to run any exercises at all. (And as
mentioned, it’s much easier to catch folks when they’re first arriving as
opposed to trying to fix it later.)
Regardless of the room setup, you should remain on full alert and ready
to assist throughout group formation, especially with regards to spotting
isolated folks who are having trouble finding a good group. You’ll be
pleasantly surprised by how quickly you can manually assign groups, even
with an audience of 50 or 100 people. All you need to do is gesture toward
them and say:
“You three, you’re together. You lot have too many, so split into two
groups of three. You there, leave that group and join those two over
 there.”
Then scan for stranded individuals and ensure they have a good home.
Note that this only works if you’ve finished forming groups before telling
them what they’re going to be working on. If they already know their task,
then you won’t have their attention and these sorts of corrections become
impossible.

Workshop Commandment: Finish group formation before revealing

the task they’re going to be working on.

In rooms where it’s difficult for folks to move around (like in lecture
auditoriums), you won’t always be able to fix uneven groups and will need to
account for that in your exercise design. As such, if I know I might be dealing
with fixed seating, I’ll design my exercises to handle flexible group sizes of
2-3 (or 3-5), which usually allows sufficient wiggle room to find a group for
everyone without requiring them to shift seats.
In longer workshops (> 2 hours), consider rearranging the groups each
time you take a break. Fresh groups help lift the energy, vary the perspectives
that folks are exposed to, and also to spread the damage wrought by hostile
attendees and group dominators (more on them in a moment).
But changing groups generally requires switching seats, and there’s an
inertia and social pressure which keeps folks staying put. Plus, people tend to
“nest” in their original seats, spreading out their papers and notes and bag all
over the place. As such, I like to force them to switch seats/tables after each
coffee break. Before calling the break, I warn them that they’ll be sitting
somewhere else when they return, so they might want to consolidate their
belongings. And upon returning, I treat the rearrangement as the first
“exercise” and facilitate it as if it was any other workshop task.
If you can’t (or don’t want to) switch their seats, you can still get some
of the benefits by just changing the number of people per group across
exercises. For example, in a series of exercises you might start with triplets,
then go down to pairs, then up to groups of six, and so on.
Keep an eye out for group dominators and try to curtail them. The most
obvious version is the loud alpha who talks over everyone. When you notice
one, just sit down with that group, gently-but-firmly cutting off the alpha and
creating space for the contributions of the rest of the group.
A more subtle type of dominator is the “secretary” who acts as an
implicit judge and gatekeeper by controlling what gets written down during
exercises. This is detectable when only one person is holding a pen or all the
exercise notes are written in the same handwriting. In this case, try to get
everyone else to pick up a pen and encourage them to “get it written down
before you start talking about it.”
You usually won’t need to be too heavy-handed with any of these folks.
Most group dominators are doing it accidentally and will quickly self-correct
once you intervene and demonstrate a better group culture. (And for the truly
hostile ones... We’ll return to them shortly.)

OTHER VENUE CONSIDERATIONS

Beyond helping with group formation, the venue also influences energy
levels. Energy drains faster in bad venues, which means that you and your
workshop will need to work harder to compensate. This is less of an issue in
short (<2 hour) workshops but can have a significant impact in longer
sessions. Apart from seating, bad venues can have a few other shortcomings:
No natural light. Energy drains much faster in a venue with bad (or
no) windows.
Limited access to coffee. Made in bulk, coffee is as cheap to
produce as water. I don’t understand how venues still screw this up,
but they do.
Limited access to good snacks. Blood sugar matters. Plus, people
skip breakfast and event food is often terribly bad for sustaining
energy.
Venue distractions. Noisy coffee machine in the back of the room?
Sloppy operations which lead to unexpected delays or interruptions?
Missing materials? A door which creaks loudly whenever someone
leaves for the bathroom? It all hurts.
A too-small space. Limited wall and table space restrict exercises.
Packed seating prevents you from walking the room and rearranging
attendees. And being stuck in a single small room for an extended
period can make the workshop seem extra monotonous.
 Although these sorts of issues probably feel outside of your control, you
can dramatically increase your chances of having a good venue through
diligent pre-event communications with the client, venue, or organizer. Ask
them what your room is like, tell them how you’d like it arranged, and clarify
the equipment that you’ll need.
If they can’t do what you need, then either find ways to work around the
constraints or ask if it’s possible to switch to a different room. In the worst
cases, you may need to adjust your workshop’s design to account for the
room’s shortcomings (for example, by eliminating or adjusting exercises
which won’t work with the space available, ordering in your own coffee to
compensate for bad catering, or lengthening your breaks to let folks walk
outside to get some natural light or buy a snack). If the venue is an unknown
it’s always wise to show up early, just in case you need to rearrange anything
before folks arrive.
It’s possible to survive (and thrive) within a bad venue, but you’ll need
to work extra hard to refill attendee energy and attention. On the other hand, a
perfect venue—with tons of natural light, great snacks, and seamless
operations—can keep the energy topped up practically by itself. Top-tier
venues compensate for a lot of mistakes in your workshop design and help
ensure that your audience stays at their sharpest.

Workshop Design Task (2-20 minutes): If you’ve got a workshop

coming up, do you know what your room setup will be? If not, who
can you call or email to find out? Even better, can you visit it or see a
couple pictures? If it has problems, try changing either the room, your
facilitation, or the design of the workshop itself.

Lessons learned:
The best seating arrangements—like cabaret—allow for natural
grouping and easy rearrangement
The worst seating arrangements—like fixed lecture halls—make
group formation extremely difficult and you’ll need to work hard to
overcome such a disadvantage
Energy levels will stay higher for longer in venues with natural light,
readily accessible coffee, snacks, a distraction-free environment, and
plenty of space
 GETTING MORE FROM
YOUR EXERCISES

As tempting as it can seem, group exercises are not a chance for you to kick
back and relax. To unlock an exercise’s full educational value, you need to
perform two additional facilitation tasks:
1. During the exercise, “walk the room” and listen to the groups
working

2. Immediately after the exercise, run a brief “stand and share”

discussion
Let’s take a quick look at each.

WALK THE ROOM TO SPOT UNKNOWN-UNKNOWNS

During the exercise, you’re going to “walk the room” and listen in on
the groups doing their work. You’ll use what you hear in two crucial ways:
1. Listening to them talk will show you how they’ve
[mis]understood your message, which allows you to explicitly
fix their misconceptions, either individually or when you return
to teaching

2. The ideas you overhear will become an anchor for asking them
to share their thoughts during “stand and share” presentations
after the exercise
 There’s also a third bonus benefit:
3. Shy and confused students often feel comfortable asking
questions when you’re nearby that they wouldn’t ask in front
of the class
You don’t need to say anything while walking the room, and you
shouldn’t join the conversation unless a group has misunderstood the prompt
or is stuck in a bad conversational dynamic (e.g. someone is dominating the
whole discussion). Instead, just eavesdrop while strolling slowly past. But
don’t start talking; if you engage in a group’s conversation, they’ll generally
pay deference to you, which degrades that group’s “discussion” into a tiny
lecture with you at its head.
You’ll sometimes find that as soon as you approach, groups will go
silent and turn to you, as if awaiting instruction. Or that they’ll start directing
their questions and comments toward you instead of each other. I like to
handle this by staying silent, shrugging in a helpless sort of way, and
gesturing back toward their peers. If they still don’t get the hint, I just turn
and walk away.
That being said, sometimes a student will feel safe enough in this
context to ask you an off-topic question which they were too shy to ask in
front of the whole class, and which is obviously important to them. This
typically reveals a deep need and I think it’s worth trying to find a way to
help them. If it’s a quick and simple question, you can answer it right then.
But if it will take more than 10-30 seconds, it’s better to let the group
continue working by either a) telling the student to follow you away from the
group, where you can talk privately, b) suggesting that you chat about it at
length during the next coffee break, or c) waiting until the whole class
reconvenes and then giving your answer to the anonymous question for
everyone to hear.
Walking the room is crucial for spotting unknown-unknowns. Students
often believe they know something, when they are, in fact, 100% wrong. As
such, they’ll never be able to explicitly ask you about it. But their confusion
will be immediately obvious if you listen to them working and talking, which
allows you to intervene.
Once you’ve repeated a workshop several times, you’ll become familiar
enough with attendees’ thought patterns that you can anticipate and prevent
the unknown-unknowns from ever taking root. But in the early iterations, it’s
usually a matter of listening for confusion during group exercises and then
adding a quick verbal correction.

“STAND AND SHARE” AT THE END OF EACH EXERCISE

After each pair/group exercise, you’ll want to hear from a subset of the
teams. This motivates everyone to work harder for future exercises, but more
importantly, it provides a chance to spread good ideas and correct
misconceptions. But people are shy, so we’ll use a bit of facilitation magic to
make it easier for them.
In most cases, you want to “randomly” sample from just two or three
groups. Four can start to feel tedious unless the exercise happened to include
some unusually interesting and varied results.
The first person who shares will set the tone for everyone else. So rather
than ask for a volunteer, I’ll single someone out who I know is happy to be
the center of attention and whose group seemed to have had plenty to talk
about:
“You folks back there seemed to have a lively discussion. Susan, would
you mind summarizing some of the stuff you were talking about for
us?”
The reason for first singling out a confident student is that you’re going
to use them to set a (positive) example for everyone else:
“Wait wait—could you please stand up where you’re at, so we can all
see you? And turn to the class—you’re talking to them, not me. Perfect.
So, what did you end up with?”
Asking them to stand up and face the class is important. The real benefit
is for everyone else in the class who is supposed to be listening. If the
volunteer simply stays in their seat and talks toward the teacher (as they’ll
almost always do by default), then every other student in the room will zone
out, get distracted, and lose energy. As an added benefit, having a student
stand up and address the room will quickly bring all other distracted chit-chat
to an end, since people rarely want to be rude to their peers.
After starting with someone talkative to break the ice, my next ideal
participant would be an individual or group who hasn’t yet spoken up, but
who seems alert and engaged. And then any eager volunteers. As mentioned,
you don’t need to hear from everyone, since that turns into a long drag. The
other students will have a chance to share their work after future exercises.
If you’d like to subtly guide the focus of the conversation, you can
prime your “volunteer” by asking them about something you overheard while
walking the room. This is especially helpful in motivating shy participants to
talk, since they’ll find it easier to speak when given a more constrained task:
“I heard the group over there saying something interesting about the
drawbacks of digital tools. Jeremy, would you mind standing up and
talking us through it?”
You can also springboard off an overheard discussion to go into your
own little anecdote or lecture segment. For example, you might say:
“I heard a few of you talking about X. That’s a super common concern,
and what people normally do is...”
Although this is technically a monologue, the fact that you’ve framed it
as a response to a group’s discussion improves its tone and makes it feel
more relevant.
If the class was working on something personal (like career goals), then
people can be prohibitively nervous about presenting their own ideas. In
addition to using the priming technique mentioned above, you can
outmaneuver this reluctance by asking them to present someone else’s ideas
instead of their own. For example:
“Who overheard something in their group that was interesting or
different? (A few hands go up. You single someone out.) You don’t need
to tell us who said it, but can you tell us a bit about the big idea and
why it stood out to you?”
Whether or not this matters will be a bit culture-specific. You probably
don’t need to bother with this sort of encouragement for an American
audience (they’re happy taking credit for their own ideas), but you’ll find
yourself using it constantly when teaching in more reserved countries.
You can also shift the focus away from the results of the process and
toward the experience of the process itself. This involves asking folks to talk
about how it felt and whether it worked and what was surprising or
interesting about approaching the issue in this particular way. For example:
“Who found that experience to be a little bit weird or awkward? Raise
of hands? Hah, yeah, I did too, when I was getting started. (Gesturing
toward someone) Would you mind trying to describe what felt strange
or surprising about it?
After each “stand and share”, I like to lead a quick round of applause. Of
course, if you clap for one person, you’ll want to clap for everyone else who
presents as well, since otherwise the absence of applause implies criticism.
“Stand and share” is one of the reasons that seemingly simple formats
(like small group discussion) can end up being so powerful. It’s not just the
exercise itself, but also the class-wide sharing, discussion, and commentary.

Lessons learned:
During exercises, walk the room and listen to people working, while
being careful to avoid joining the conversation as its “leader”
After each group exercise, ask a few people to stand and share their
thinking (speaking to the class, not you)
 ANSWERING STUDENT
QUESTIONS

While student questions can (and will) pop up at any point throughout the
workshop, they’re especially common during the chatty discussion which
follows a lively exercise. Learning how to give compelling responses can be
a real boon to your facilitation toolkit.

ELOQUENT ANSWERS COME FROM PREPARING A LIST

OF STORIES
You may have seen speakers who seem able to immediately respond to
every question with an elaborate, subtle, insightful, and entertaining answer.
The speaker never stumbles or gets off-track. And you might then compare
their performance to your own inarticulate, stuttering replies and wonder
whether you’re just missing something. But it turns out, there’s a trick.
Some years ago, I ended up inadvertently following one of my
intellectual heroes from conference to conference, listening to him speak and
answer questions at each. At the first event, I thought he was the smartest and
most articulate human I had ever seen. At the second, I wondered why he was
repeating himself so much. And by the third event, I got it.
The “trick” is to write down a list of powerful stories from your own life
and experiences which are relevant to your field: unusual case studies,
humorous anecdotes, adventurous struggles, personal blunders and triumphs,
etc. And then, when someone asks you a question, you simply riffle through
this mental file, extract the most relevant entry, and deploy it in all its glory.
If you’re having trouble dredging your life for memories, it’s helpful to
grab a notebook and walk through each of your life’s major threads—
personal, social, professional, geographic—from start to finish. Throughout
each, you’ll find a few major “anchor memories” which you can mentally
explore around to recover other forgotten fragments. Then repeat the process,
but with an eye toward the second-hand experiences of the friends and
colleagues you’ve met along the way. You shouldn’t take credit for other
people’s experiences or ideas, but you can certainly use them with attribution.
If you’re teaching complete beginners, then you can get away with
“borrowing” your stories from popular books and blogs and other people’s
presentations. But as an audience becomes more sophisticated, they’re
increasingly likely to have heard those famous stories before and are unlikely
to be overly impressed by your retelling. Delivering a relevant and insightful
story of your own, on the other hand, can surprise and delight even the most
jaded of attendees.

QUESTIONS YOU CHOOSE NOT TO ANSWER

You aren’t required to answer every question. If it’s off-topic, overly
specific, or out of scope, then you’re allowed to say something like:
“That’s a fair question, but it’s a bit specific (and/or out of scope) for
what we’re talking about today. I’d be glad to chat about it after the
event, if you don’t need to rush off.”
If it’s about something you were already planning on talking about later,
then you can say:
“That’s an excellent question and is something we’re going to be
talking about at length in about 20 minutes from now. So let me delay
answering until then, and please remind me if I don’t manage to get
into it in enough detail.”
Or if you’re simply out of time:
“I’d love to keep talking about this stuff, but we need to charge
onwards if we’re going to get through everything and get you guys out
of here on time.”
Or if they’re being highly contentious and won’t let you move past a
point they disagree with (usually around some loaded political issue):
“I can see we’ve got different takes on this one, which is fine, and it
would probably be fun to thrash it out at length over a couple of pints.
But for the sake of the timetable and the rest of the class, I’m going to
have to just skip ahead and move on.”
If they still try to get in the last word, just give a sort of helpless shrug—
as if to imply that you’ve already said all there is to say—and then continue
with your teaching. Trying to explicitly acknowledge their ongoing
objections (or to “win” the debate) is a trap which only succeeds in
empowering them to prevent you from continuing.
Refusing to answer questions is an important tool for staying on
schedule. You shouldn’t refuse to answer every question, obviously, but
you’ll always need to draw the line somewhere if you intend to hit your
timings.

QUESTIONS YOU ARE UNABLE TO ANSWER

When asked something you simply don’t know the answer to, it’s
usually better to admit your ignorance than to try bluffing your way through
it. Audiences are impeccable bullshit detectors and trying to sneak one past
them is a surefire way of burning your goodwill and credibility.
If it’s simply a difficult question with no clear “best” answer, then you
can return to your story archive:
“To be honest, I’ve never found a satisfying and convincing best
answer here. One way I’ve seen a few smart people approach it is to…
[Switch into story-telling mode to give them an example even if it isn’t a
definitive answer.]”
If you’re asked to answer something that you really should know, then
you can fess up to it while also promising to find out for them:
“You know what, I actually have no idea, and I really should. Let me
research that during the next break and report back on what I
discover.”
 If the question is important to a large percentage of the audience, but
can’t be quickly researched, then you can assign it to yourself as homework:
“I don’t know, but I think I know someone who will. Let me ask around
a bit after the workshop and try to dig up an answer, and I’ll send what
I learn to you all along with the workshop materials and slides. Sound
good?”
Or if it’s something which is wildly specific, obscure, and not something
anybody would expect you to know:
“I truly don’t have even the foggiest idea. Does anyone else happen to
have any experience with that one?”
The attendees probably already understand that a) you’re not omniscient
and 2) the workshop’s duration is finite. As such, they tend not to be overly
intransigent about expecting you to answer every single question.

Lessons learned:
Eloquent answers come from preparing a list of potentially relevant
stories
You don’t have to answer every question
 HOW TO RECOVER THE
CROWD AFTER AN
EXERCISE

The class has just finished a fun, high-energy exercise, and you now need to
recover their attention and get them listening to you again. But they’re still
engaged in the exercise, and they’re talking, and some of them are either
unwilling or unable to hear you. What to do?
As a bit of warning: I’m going to ask you to do something which will
feel very strange and counterintuitive. It turns out that the best way to recover
a rowdy crowd is to get going before everyone is paying attention. This
means you’re going to have to talk over people, and they’re potentially going
to keep ignoring you. At least for a bit. But I promise that these approaches
work and—once you’ve gotten over the awkward feeling—they’re the
easiest, most widely applicable solution to the issue.
Before we look at the solutions, I want to highlight the wrong approach,
which is to use your authority as a crutch, standing at the front of the room
and demanding that people be quiet before you continue. This is a bad fit for
workshops where you’re dealing with (mostly) adults who (mostly) want to
be there. The issue is that most of the class will immediately give you their
attention as soon as you call for it. Using your authority to strongarm the
entire audience makes you seem hostile toward the ones who have already
done what you asked.
A better solution—assuming you can’t just go individual—is to use a bit
of facilitation judo to turn the crowd’s momentum against itself. Let’s look at
two ways to make that happen: talking in circles and borrowing goodwill.
TALKING IN CIRCLES
Imagine that you’ve called the end of an exercise. Four of the six groups
are now paying attention, whereas the other two groups remain distracted.
My favorite solution is to “talk in circles”, which means that you begin
lecturing at normal volume, in your normal position, but without saying
anything important. It’s like being a lawyer or politician: lots of words, no
content.
Before long, people will realize they’re missing out and start tuning in,
without you ever needing to demand it. And if they don’t, the rest of the class
will soon become annoyed at the chatter, bringing them into line through a bit
of gentle shushing.
Your attention-gathering monologue might sound something like this:
“As I’m sure you found, there are a lot of interesting points to discuss
about this stuff, and lots of different opinions. And some of you
probably felt that it was a little bit weird to talk about. The mistake
people normally make is to get too stuck in the details and worry too
much about doing everything perfectly instead of just getting it done.
My first experience with this was a few years ago when [on-topic but
largely unimportant anecdote]...”
This example is so incredibly vacuous that it’s painful to write. Which is
sort of the point. Perhaps it reminds you of some recent presidential speeches.
It is totally devoid of any actual information, but it is just going in circles
around the topic.
Within a minute or so, you’ve got the whole crowd’s attention without
ever needing to pick a fight or cause a scene.

BORROWING GOODWILL
The second strategy works similarly, but instead of expecting distracted
participants to pay attention to you, you’re setting them up to pay attention to
one of their peers. It works by recognizing that although some of the class is
distracted, others are paying attention. And by asking someone who is paying
attention to do a “stand and share”, you gain the moral authority to firmly cut
off anyone still talking over them. After all, they’re now being rude to one of
their peers.
Using your own authority to bring attention back to yourself is a
dangerous gambit; people will obey, but they aren’t happy to be made to feel
like a child while doing so. But interestingly, using your authority to demand
attention for someone else has all the same benefits, with none of the
downsides. “Please be quiet, you’re being rude to me,” carries a totally
different emotional payload from, “Please be quiet, you’re being rude to
Jessica.”
To put it into practice, start by picking a “volunteer” who is both paying
attention and sitting near to you.
If you don’t already know their name, ask them to remind you. You can
do this in a normal speaking voice, since this exchange feels more like a “side
conversation” than a part of the core lecture.
Once you’ve got their name, ask them an extremely directed question,
just like at the end of any small group exercise. “Jessica, would you mind
standing up and sharing how you were thinking about X, and what result you
got?” Your volunteer will stand up, and then likely stumble since people
aren’t used to speaking to a group who aren’t fully attentive. That’s fine.
This next bit is the crux of the facilitation. Tell Jessica not to worry. Tell
her to just ignore the other folks and start talking anyway. The pieces are now
all in play, and this is your moment to (benevolently) seize control.
From the instant your volunteer stands up and attempts to speak—even
if they only manage a single word—you gain the moral permission to strong-
arm everyone else into listening to them, loudly saying something like, “Hey,
everyone, Jessica has the stage, pay attention for a minute please.” And
they’ll glance up, see that she’s already standing (and looking slightly
uncomfortable), and immediately pay attention.
Even if you need to yell it rather loudly and directly, the situation
you’ve constructed means that the other students will feel like your behavior
is completely justified. In fact they’ll feel that they themselves have made the
blunder by talking over one of their peers. They’ll give their attention to the
speaker, and you can easily reclaim it afterwards now that everyone is calm.
This sounds fairly elaborate, but in practice it only takes 10 seconds.
Call the end of the exercise, get a volunteer, learn their name, prompt them to
stand up and start talking, and then cut off the rest of the crowd, allow the
volunteer to finish, and continue from there.
THE POST-COFFEE BATTLEGROUND
Amusingly, the mundane task of recovering your audience from a coffee
break is one of the most complicated facilitation challenges you’ll ever face.
And it’s important; if you regularly require an extra 5 or 10 minutes to
recover your crowd from breaks, then your full-day workshops will reliably
run 15 or 30 minutes late, which is no good at all. In an ideal world, helper
staff would corral the crowd on your behalf. But in practice, you’ll rarely get
so lucky.
Let’s say that your audience is on a well-deserved coffee break. They’re
having fun and mingling. In some ways, it’s what they came for! You’ve
given them 15 minutes and it’s time to get going again.
The way it typically works it that you yell a three-minute warning, and
nobody moves. And then you give them the one-minute warning. And the
zero-minute deadline. But they’re still having a grand old chat and you’re
starting to look like the wild-haired old man in the square, yelling at pigeons.
The solution is a combination of setting expectations, going individual,
talking in circles, and borrowing goodwill. Yep, we’re using all of it.
Before the break, set expectations. I like to say:
“We’ve got 15 minutes for coffee. It’s [wherever]. I’ll come by to give
you guys a 3-minute warning, and then when [start time] arrives, I’m
going to start talking, even if nobody is in the room. All right, go for it.”
Before the time hits, I make the three-minute warning to the group, and
then also spend the next two minutes wandering through and going
individual. Yelling at pigeons never works. But you can get them to move by
walking up and individually asking them to take the conversation back to
their seats. As long as some portion are in the room when you begin talking,
it’s enough.
At the very moment that the break time has finished, begin talking in
circles. Not saying anything critical, but standing on stage and looking for all
the world like you don’t give a damn that half the audience is missing.
Proceed as if you’re completely indifferent that those seats are empty. Just
get going.
After a minute, if the missing folks still haven’t rushed in due to their
fear of missing out, borrow someone’s credibility by singling someone out
who is near to the break area and saying:
 “Hey, would you mind popping into the other room (or wherever the
break area is) and letting them know we’ve started?”
They’ll rush off, worried that they’re about to miss some crucial nugget
of wisdom, and their urgency will spread to the folks who they’re asking to
come join the group. It works quickly.
Having done all this, if a few people still don’t come through, I just
assume they’re doing something important like falling in love or securing a
business partner, and I leave them to it.
Never single people out or harass them for being late; that’s treating
them like children and doesn’t help. Just keep to the schedule, charge on with
your material, and let them decide for themselves that they don’t want to risk
missing anything again.
For full-day events, expect to repeat the above steps after every break
(so usually three times in a day, twice for coffee and once for lunch). On the
bright side, it does get significantly easier each time as the audience learns
what to expect.
Once you’ve honored your schedule in this way on the first break, you’ll
have trained the attendees that if they aren’t in their seats on time, you’re
starting without them. They won’t realize that you were talking in circles, so
loss aversion will get them to show up on time in the future.
Yeah, that sounds like a lot of work. And to be honest, it is. It’s a task
outside of teaching which requires a fair amount of energy and attention. It
means your breaks are always five minutes shorter than they should be, since
you’re spending those final minutes wrangling folks back into their seats. But
it’s a crucial endeavor if you want any hope of keeping to the schedule and
finishing on time.

Lessons learned:
To quickly recover distracted participants, you can “talk in circles”
by speaking at a normal volume without saying anything important
Alternately, you can “borrow goodwill” by prompting a student to
stand and share, and then asking everyone else to pay attention to
them
To be able to start on time after a break, expect to spend the last 5
minutes of your break getting folks back into their seats
 OVERCOMING HOSTILITY,
SKEPTICISM, AND
TROUBLEMAKERS

One of the toughest gigs I ever taught was an executive education workshop
for a multi-billion euro German company which had just suffered a hostile
takeover at the hands of a private equity firm. The new owners wanted to
“shake things up”, so they’d hired me (through a middleman) to run a day-
long session on how modern startups innovate. Hoo boy. My audience
consisted of thirty C-level executives who had been pulled away from their
departments and forced (by their new, unwelcome boss) to sit in a conference
room all day listening to some American kid talk about companies so small
that the revenue wouldn’t even be a blip on their radar. Needless to say, they
were not pleased.
By 10am I was hearing some grumbling, and by noon I was facing a
full-blown mutiny: they refused to speak in English, ignored my existence,
took out their computers, and got back to work on their day jobs. I was saved
by the bell when lunch began, which gave us all some breathing room. And
even more fortunately, I happened to be co-teaching alongside a native
German speaker, Andreas, who used the lunch break to masterfully
demonstrate how to disarm both a hostile crowd and hostile individuals. And
while I wouldn’t claim that it ended up being my best workshop ever, I can
claim that it at least succeeded, despite impossible odds. Following the
emergency intervention, everyone returned after lunch (which was a miracle
on its own), they participated, and they left satisfied.
Sometimes the whole room is against you before you even start talking.
Other times, one particularly irksome individual makes it his or her mission
to ruin your day. But as scary as it might seem, you can almost always find a
way to calm a hostile attendee, so long as you’re able to identify what’s gone
wrong.
Here’s a handy reference, and then we’ll get into the details:

What’s the trouble? How to handle it

The context: The whole audience Explicitly acknowledge their
doesn’t want to be there (usually concerns with a minimal intro, and
because someone forced them), or then skip straight to delivering
they’re frustrated by bad logistics major value
earlier in the day
The bore: One person has an Suggest that you need to spend
endless stream of incredibly specific some time talking 1‑on‑1 to solve
questions that are irrelevant to the those issues and ask them to come
bulk of your audience find you after the workshop or
during a break; use this future
conversation as an excuse to deflect
all their further questions
The isolationist: Someone is Figure out whether they’re just a
refusing to engage in the exercises spectator, or whether they’re shy
and just seems zoned out and afraid of engaging with the
other attendees, and then help
appropriately
The expert: One person knows it all Put them on a pedestal by including
already, feels like the material is them in the teaching as an expert
beneath them, and is either quietly and asking for their opinion and
hostile or actively undermining you experiences whenever possible
The trouble-maker: One person is Call an early coffee break and talk
being enormously disruptive and you to them 1-on-1 to understand (and
can’t find a way to calm them hopefully solve) their concerns. If
needed, suggest that the workshop
isn’t for them, offer a full refund,
and politely ask them to leave
 The mystery: You aren’t sure Work the crowd during the next
what’s gone wrong, but the group break, where you can talk to them
just doesn’t seem to be happy with human-to-human instead of teacher-
something to-student, and try to understand
their concerns and objections

Exciting, right? All the fun of being a hostage negotiator, but without
the risk of getting shot.

HOSTILE CROWDS WHO DON’T WANT TO BE THERE

(ACKNOWLEDGE IT)
The most common reason for initial grumpiness among participants is
that someone else (their boss, their spouse, their parents, a judge) has forced
them to attend. And doubly so if they feel your workshop is beneath them.
Plus, everyone is busy. This all combines to make them skeptical about the
value of spending time in the workshop. So they show up grumbling and with
their phones in hand, ready to distract themselves with email.
Just like when giving a good intro, the general strategy for a hostile
crowd is to explicitly acknowledge their top concern and then find the fastest
way possible to start delivering major value.
For example, if they’re extremely busy and have been forced to be there,
you might acknowledge it by saying:
“I know you’re all are super busy. If you need to step out to answer an
email or take a call or anything else, please feel free to do so. I won’t
be offended. We all understand that stuff can come up suddenly
sometimes.”
Almost nobody will take you up on this offer unless there’s an actual
emergency, in which case they would have stepped out anyway. But by
saying it (and meaning it), you’ve shown that you understand and respect
their concerns, which suggests that you value their time as highly as they do.
It also gives them an escape hatch, so they’re able to stop stressing about the
possibility of being trapped if something comes up.
Let’s pick up the narrative of my near-disastrous German workshop.
After doing some lunchtime reconnaissance to figure out the nature of the
problem, Andreas disarmed most of the hostility by saying something like
this:
“Look, we certainly can’t understand your businesses as well as you
already do, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to figure out—in
one day—how to solve the problems that you’ve been wrestling with for
ages. But startups keep popping out of nowhere and messing with your
market, right? And we do understand how they think and how they
work. So our hope is that if you’ll let us share that with you, then maybe
it will lead you to some helpful thoughts and ideas further down the
line.”
Simply saying out loud what they were already thinking (that we
couldn’t possibly understand and solve their problems) got maybe 25 out of
the 30 back onto our side. But there were still five hostile individuals. Fear
not: we’ll return to them in a moment. So that’s the first step of
acknowledging their concerns. Once you’ve done that, follow it up by
immediately delivering some major value.
Incidentally, this is also how I position myself when I’m brought in to
teach a crowd of experts who are more successful, powerful, rich, and
generally better at life than me. The general pattern is to acknowledge,
reframe, and scope down:
1. Acknowledge: “You guys are obviously miles ahead of me in
your lives/careers/businesses and have a ton of stuff going on
that I wouldn’t even know where to start with…”

2. Reframe: “...So I’m not here to try to solve all your problems
or to tell you what to do.”
3. Scope down to an area where you can add clear value: “But
I’ve been obsessing over the question of X, and I’m hoping
that if you’ll let me share the
theory/skills/thinking/examples/etc., that you’ll be able to find
a couple useful tools to bring back to your own worlds.”
Once you’ve finished this brief acknowledgement of their concerns, skip
ahead to delivering real value as quickly as possible.
OBLIVIOUS INDIVIDUALS (SIDELINE THEM)
Counter-intuitively, dealing with a single difficult individual can be
considerably tougher than dealing with a whole crowd.
The most common type of disruptive individual isn’t actively hostile but
is just a bit oblivious to social cues. As such, they’re asking an unending
stream of questions which are irrelevant for the bulk of your attendees.
Whether they’re hogging attention with self-promotional “questions” or are
just a bit long-winded and off-topic, your response can be the same. Interrupt
them and say:
“Let me jump in here for a second. This sounds like a pretty specific
issue. Let’s find some time to chat 1-on-1 about that during the next
break so I can properly help you. Cool? (Then, speaking to the class)
“Okay, does anyone have any other questions?”
And then move on to the next person. If they ask more questions, you
can just deflect it to your future 1‑on‑1.
Now, I want to clarify that sidelining someone in this way does not
involve attacking them, belittling them, being rude to them, or in any way
making them feel bad. And you don’t need to raise your voice. (Yelling over
one person feels extremely aggressive.) They often care a lot about what
you’re teaching, which is why they keep trying to ask these bizarre questions.
So you aren’t forgetting about them or ignoring them—you’re just moving
their questions from the workshop itself (where the questions don’t fit) to a
1‑on‑1 conversation (where their questions fit brilliantly). And of course, if
you use this tactic during your session, be sure to track them down and help
them out during the next available break.

DISENGAGED AND NON-PARTICIPATING ATTENDEES

(IGNORE OR WINGMAN)
You’ll sometimes have one or two people sitting off to the side who are
refusing to participate in exercises and who basically seem emotionally
clocked out. They’ll pay quiet attention during lectures and then, when it’s
time for any sort of exercise, will retreat into their phone or computer.
This tends to drive new facilitators crazy. They’ll blame either the
student (“Why won’t they just participate!?”) or themselves (“Why couldn’t I
make it more interesting!?”) and will sometimes make a scene of pushing the
outsider to get involved (which can backfire horribly for reasons that will
soon become apparent).
There are two very legitimate reasons why individuals might choose to
isolate themselves:
1. They’re actually a spectator rather than a participant, so they’re
politely staying quiet and out of the way

2. They feel confused, overwhelmed, shy, or intimidated, and

find it emotionally difficult to engage with the other attendees
who all seem more capable and confident
When you see someone who is disengaged, your first task is to figure
out if one of these two causes is behind it. I like to wander over and say hello
during the next exercise or break.
“Hey, how’s it going? Just wanted to check in on how you’re doing.
Seems like this workshop isn’t for you… would you mind sharing what
you were hoping to get out of attending?”
And sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been doing this stuff for 20
years and don’t want to meddle with the folks you’re teaching, but I was
curious to see how you run the session. Is that okay?” In which case, great,
they’re just not a participant and you can sort of leave them in the corner and
ignore them. Or they might say, “Oh, I just started working for the venue and
they asked me to come sit in on an event to get a better sense of how
everything works.” Again, they’re just a spectator, not a participant, and you
can happily ignore them. Or maybe they say, “We’re in the middle of a crisis
at work and I really wanted to attend, but I also need to keep sending
emergency emails and didn’t want to be a distraction to the other attendees.”
Neat, that’s thoughtful of them.
In these cases, just let them be. After all, they’re adults. However, I do
generally ask them to move to a seat which is physically separate from the
other attendees (if they haven’t already done so). Otherwise, their non-
participation can mess with the groupwork of whoever they’re sitting with.
However, you need to take a totally different approach when someone
has isolated themselves due to shyness, fear, or confusion. They’ll often have
taken a solitary seat, away from the other attendees, physically separating
themselves to avoid whatever awkwardness they fear.
As the facilitator, you are the wingman for your shy and overwhelmed
attendees. When someone is alone—but still secretly wants to be involved—
you need to (very gently) overrule their comfort zone and do as much as
humanly possible to clear the air of awkwardness and place them into an
accepting group. If they’re physically isolated, this will involve saying hello,
learning their name, chatting with them until they’re comfortable, having
them stand up with you, walking with them to a new group, and telling the
new group that they’re lucky to have a new member named Wilbur (or
whatever). And then stay with them until you see that the dynamic is working
and that your lost sheep has been fully included.
If the group is excluding their new member (which can happen simply
because they’ve already got momentum), interrupt them by saying something
like, “Hey guys, Wilbur is on your team, don’t throw away the advantage of
an extra brain! Catch him up with what you’re working on and get him
involved!” It’s your job to make the space.
(This is also, incidentally, how you find a place for attendees who have
arrived late, in the middle of an exercise.)
I sometimes see facilitators try to wingman, but they don’t take it far
enough. Encouraging a shy individual to get involved will not be sufficient.
The job isn’t finished yet! The scary part is in approaching a group of
strangers and breaching the conversation. That’s the bit you need to help
with, and it’s why you need to get their name, physically travel with them to
the new group, ensure they have a chair, introduce them in both directions,
and stick around until they’ve been fully accepted. But remember that you
need to chat to them and figure out what’s going on first; marching someone
around the room before understanding their motivation for being alone is a
recipe for embarrassing yourself.
So, when you see someone failing to engage, first work to figure out
whether they’re a spectator (in which case you can just leave them be) or
whether they’re shy/overwhelmed/scared (in which case you wingman them
into a welcoming group).

HOSTILE INDIVIDUALS (PUT THEM ON A PEDESTAL)

 Actively hostile individuals are the toughest nut to crack, since they
require a combination of networking (to figure out what they’re unhappy
about) plus delicate facilitation. But solving this problem is still very doable
and is vastly preferred over letting a hostile agent tear apart your workshop
from the inside out.
The crucial realization is that individuals are almost always hostile
because they already have a bunch of experience with what you’re teaching
and think you’re talking down to them or undermining their position as the
expert. You solve this by putting them on a pedestal, highlighting their
expertise, and repeatedly asking for their opinion.
At the German workshop, the CTO was hugely hostile, and was
speaking up to contradict and undermine basically everything we said. We
were claiming that startups succeed, at least in part, due to their ability to
quickly iterate, whereas the company in attendance took six months to make
even small changes. But that’s understandable! After all, they had billions in
revenue and couldn’t afford even a tiny security breach. Still, the CTO
worried he would be fired for being too “slow” compared to the examples we
were sharing. During lunch, Andreas sat individually with each of the hostile
individuals to learn their names, ask about their concerns, and show them that
we were listening. For the CTO, we used the standard solution of putting him
on a pedestal. We set him up like this:
“Startups have this massive advantage of being able to iterate quickly
on their product, tech, and marketing. But of course, they can afford to
be fast and loose since they don’t have an existing customer base,
brand, or revenue to worry about.
“This obviously changes as you get bigger. [Mr. CTO], would you mind
taking a couple minutes to tell us about the places where this sort of
approach would and wouldn’t work for your company, and whether
there are any ways to get some of the benefits without compromising
security and reputation? I know there’s a ton to say about this, but
you’ve only got three minutes, so be quick!”
Boom. Just like that, he’s our biggest fan. From then on, instead of
slapping down everything we said, he was actively participating and looking
for ways to adapt our message to their context. He even went so far as to
jump to our defense later in the day when someone else raised an objection.
After all, we’d put him in a place of honor in front of his entire executive
team.
In general, the disarmament process is:
1. Discover that a hostile participant is lurking (this often requires
talking to people before the event and during breaks)

2. Talk with them 1-on-1 during to learn their name and expertise
(or whatever other objections they have)
3. Put them on a pedestal and bring them to your side by
including them as an authority in your teaching
The expert’s whole issue is that they feel like they have as much (or
more) right to be teaching this material as you do. Disarm them by putting
them on a pedestal and including them in your teaching as someone the rest
of the class should look up to.
Although pre-event chit-chat can be draining, I always try to show up
early and partake, since it’s the best way to spot potential hostiles. The
standard line of questioning is to simply try and get a sense of their
expectations and goals:
“Hey, good to meet you. Mind if I ask why you showed up today? What
are you hoping to get out of it?”
This is an easy conversation starter for anyone at the workshop, and it
also helps scan for a wide range of potential problems. Most folks will
respond happily, and you can move on to say hello to someone else. But if
you notice some skepticism, you can ask a bit more to check for expertise and
other potential objections:
“Have you done this sort of stuff before...? Interesting, tell me more
about that… Sounds like you’re pretty expert at all this, may I ask how
you ended up here today?”
It should sound like you’re making small talk, even though you’re really
trying to identify the experts (and anyone else who doesn’t want to be there).
Then, later in your session, you can do this bit of facilitation judo to instantly
transform a detractor into a supporter:
 “You all know this stuff, of course. I was talking to Jamie earlier and it
sounded like their team is pretty much nailing it. Jamie, do you mind
sharing your approach real quick?”
Or when someone from the room asks you a question, you can redirect it
to your (formerly) hostile friend:
“Hmm, great question. Abigail, how does your team deal with that
one?”
People find it extremely difficult to continue being hostile after you’ve
put them on a pedestal. If you’ve got multiple experts in the room, you can
start running whole lecture sections as a facilitated conversation and/or
interview. After one of your newfound experts has offered their perspective,
you can follow up by checking in from anyone else who might also have their
own experience, like this:
“Nice, that’s a perfect approach for that situation. Does anyone handle
it differently? Or has anyone seen cases where this approach doesn’t
apply?”
Sometimes your attendees will disagree with each other, or you’ll
disagree with all of them. But that’s not so much of a powder keg as you
might suspect. Consider the expert panelists on a talk show or conference
stage: they’re all happy to have their voices heard, even if the other panelists
(or the host) disagree on the matter at hand. Although you shouldn’t make
them feel a fool, you can certainly contradict or disagree with them,
springboarding off their answer with your own perspective:
“The approach Jake just shared has been industry standard for years.
A ton of great companies have become hugely successful with it and
still use it to this day. But some of the fastest-growing recent startups
have chosen to shake it up and do things very differently, largely due to
running into problems when X happens. What they’re doing now is
super interesting, and completely backwards from the conventional
wisdom…”
Or even more bluntly:
 “So that’s obviously a solid approach since it’s been working, and
Famous Person X has said that they do it the same way. But I prefer to
do, well, pretty much exactly the opposite. Let me talk through how I’ve
been thinking about it recently, and maybe you’ll find it useful to have
both options in your toolkit.”
Often the expert is giving a correct answer, but for a different (or more
specific) scenario than the workshop is actually about. In this case, you can
simply clarify the scope:
“Yes, that’s absolutely the right financial advice for someone in
situation X, and it sounds like Laura is an expert on that, so if anyone
has questions, I’d encourage you to find her during the break to chat or
grab her email. But today we’re talking mainly about situation Y, which
behaves rather differently.”
Yes, the wordplay is a bit delicate. But it’s handled successfully every
day by talk show hosts and panel moderators. In fact, if you’ve ever presided
over an ego-heavy meeting, then this is something you already know how to
do. And, if not, it’s a very learnable skill.
The hostiles won’t always make themselves known during pre-event
networking. If you see someone looking skeptical or grumpy about what
you’re saying while teaching, it’s a sign that they might be a lurking hostile.
In this case, you can try to pull the objection out of them so you can deal with
it:
“You look a bit suspicious about what I just said. Have you had
different experiences, or maybe come across situations where this
doesn’t work so well?”
You certainly aren’t required to draw out their concerns like this and
might prefer to just let them quietly simmer. But if you like getting the
objections out in the open, a line like the above will generally start the
discussion, and you can then put them on a pedestal, include them as an
expert, and continue from there.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION

 If someone is being hugely disruptive and can’t be placated in any of the
ways already discussed, it can be worth calling an early coffee break just to
talk to them 1‑on‑1. This is obviously problematic for your schedule but is
still sometimes better than letting them continue to run amok. In other cases,
you can ride out the problem until the next scheduled break and deal with
them then.
Sometimes you’ll identify a solution to the unruly attendee’s problem
and can successfully appease them. In other cases, they’re just going to make
more trouble no matter what you do. If folks bought tickets from you directly,
you can pull the troublemaker aside to somewhere private, observe that
workshop doesn’t seem to be a good fit, offer your apologies, give a full
refund, and see them out. (If you’re teaching a corporate or client gig you
won’t always have this option and may just have to deal with them.)
Now, I know you’d like to be “peaceful” and “patient” and hope that it
“works itself out”. But in this situation, you can’t. By being “kind” to one
troublemaker, you’re favoring their disruptions over the legitimate needs of
everyone else in the room. A bunch of people have shown up to try and learn
something, and it’s your obligation to obliterate anything that stands in their
way.
Of course, you still need to be polite while doing so. That’s what the
apology and the refund are for. In one extreme case, I actually paid for a cab
to take an especially toxic person all the way home, in addition to a full
refund. Despite the fact that they were the bane of my existence on that
particular day, I humbled myself before them:
“I’m so sorry that I promoted this workshop so sloppily and made it
sound like something it’s not. I really hate to have dragged you all the
way across town for nothing. Here, let me refund the ticket and give you
money for a cab. No, please, I insist. It’s the least I can do after
inconveniencing you so terribly. I’m really sorry. Let me walk you out.
Sounds a bit over the top, but they left without causing a scene. And my
other students deserved it.
As a final reminder, I’d like to emphasize that most attendees are lovely,
and they want you to succeed. This stuff doesn’t come up too often, but it’s
good to know how to handle it when it does.
Lessons learned:
For hostile crowds, acknowledge their top concern then skip ahead
to delivering value
For oblivious individuals with irrelevant or overly specific
questions, sideline them and then chat 1-on-1 with them later
For disengaged individuals, figure out if they’re a spectator or are
marginalized, and then either ignore them or wingman them
For hostile experts, put them on a pedestal and include them as an
authority in your teaching
For implacable and highly disruptive individuals, talk to them 1-on-
1, give them a full refund, and ask them to leave
 STAYING ON SCHEDULE
AND DEALING WITH
DELAYS

It’s amazing how rarely facilitators keep to their schedule. Running a slipped
schedule is a massive and unnecessary drain on both goodwill and energy.
There are a few pieces to handle properly:
1. Keeping your own time by using two clocks
2. Starting late without frustrating the folks who are already
there
3. Recovering lost time
4. Running late without frustrating the folks who need to leave

KEEP TIME BY USING TWO CLOCKS

To stay on schedule, you’ll need two clocks: a section timer and an
exercise timer.
The section timer offers an at-a-glance reminder of how much time is
remaining until the next break or big switch in topic. It’s ideally a countdown
(i.e. “22 minutes remaining”) instead of an actual clock (i.e. “it’s currently
4:13 and this section ends at 4:45, which means I’ve got…”), since the latter
slows you down and allows for errors. Any timer is fine, so long as it’s quick
to read and quick to set. I use a €5 kitchen timer which looks like this:
 Importantly, this timer is not allowed to be your phone. Consider the
negative impact of having dinner with someone who keeps glancing at their
phone… Holding and checking your phone projects massive disinterest in
your audience, even if it was for a workshop-relevant reason. (If you’re
caught unprepared and must use your phone, keep it flat on the podium with
the settings modified to never turn off the screen or lock itself, which allows
you to quickly glance at it without touching it and without the phone being
seen by the audience.)
As a section starts, check the finishing time on your Skeleton, do your
mental math once about how much time you have available, set your
countdown timer, and leave it somewhere on a table or floor where you can
keep an eye on it.
The purpose is to warn you, as soon as is possible, that you’re starting to
run behind. The earlier you catch it, the easier it is to get back on track. If
you’re caught with only a wristwatch, you can create a makeshift countdown
timer by putting a small mark (with either a whiteboard marker or a bit of a
sticky note’s sticky strip) where the minute-hand will end up after this section
is over. Some slide clickers have a built-in section timer, although they
generally require some extra software. Most slide software will offer a timer
while you’re in presenter mode, but since it’s not always easy to see your
own screen, it’s wise to bring a standalone solution.
The other clock, your exercise timer, is used to track the minutes of an
exercise (e.g. five-minutes of small group discussion). Some facilitators put a
timer up for everyone to see on the projector screen, but I believe it’s more
important to continue showing the exercise’s prompt and instructions.
Attendees have the memory of goldfish when it comes to task instructions.
Using your phone as a timer here is less of a problem, because the
students are busy working while you’re interacting with it. (If you’re using
the phone, start the exercise first, and then start the timer on your phone. This
prevents you from looking at your phone while the students are looking at
you.) A cheap stopwatch also works nicely. It doesn’t matter whether the
timer counts up or down, and it doesn’t matter whether it has an alarm.
Because often, you’re going to choose to ignore it.
In most cases, exercise timings are more of a guideline than a strict rule.
You might tell everyone that they have three minutes, but then, while
walking the room and listening to them work, you realize that it’s actually a
hugely valuable and engaging task for everyone in attendance. Great! Let
them have a couple extra minutes. You don’t need to alert them about the
change; just overrule the timer and roll with it. Once you start to hear groups
drifting into silence or getting off-topic, then you know it’s time to wrap up
and move on. (I’d never let a conversation drag on for 10 minutes, but adding
or removing one or two minutes is extremely common.)
As such, the audience doesn’t necessarily need to see the timer. Instead,
give them verbal reminders about how close they are to the end:
“Alright, you have five minutes, get to work… This is the half-way
mark, two and a half minutes remaining… One minute to go, get those
final thoughts down… Thirty seconds left… Ten seconds… Five, four,
three, two, one, time!!!”
A verbal countdown lets you creatively adjust the precise timings
without anyone noticing the difference. Everyone confused? Allow yourself
some time to go individual with each group and answer questions by
lengthening the exercise. Folks starting to take out their phones or talk about
weekend plans? Maybe this discussion topic isn’t as riveting as you had
hoped, and you should call the end of the exercise immediately instead of
waiting for the timer to run down.
Of course, just because no matter how well you keep your own time,
things can still slip out of control for reasons largely beyond your control.
And the correct reaction to that common conundrum can make a world of
difference.
ANNOUNCE LATE STARTS AS SOON AS YOU KNOW
ABOUT THEM
Nobody minds waiting. But everybody hates waiting if they don’t know
how long they’re waiting for. So as soon as you know you’re going to be
starting late, you should let folks know:
“Hey everyone, welcome. Looks like a fair number of people are stuck
in traffic, so we’re going to push back the start time by 15 minutes to
9:15, at which point we’ll start promptly. We had a bit of flex in the
schedule, so we’ll still aim to finish at the scheduled time. There’s
plenty of coffee and snacks in the back, so please grab some
refreshments, make yourself at home, and say hello to each other. Let
me know if you have any questions.”
Be specific about the new start time. Don’t just say you’ll be “starting
soon” or in “about five minutes”. Set clear expectations.
If more folks are wandering in, just walk over and tell them the new plan
as they arrive. If it’s too big of a crowd to go individual, just re-make the
announcement every few minutes.
Once you’ve announced a new start time, honor it. Even if the crowd is
smaller than you’d like, your hands are now tied and you’ve got to make the
best of whoever happens to be in the room. You’re allowed to delay the start
time exactly once. Doing so repeatedly will obliterate your credibility.

RECOVER TIME BY CUTTING CONTENT

Instead of running late, it’s generally preferred to get back on track by
cutting content. These cuts can be difficult, but it’s best to make them
decisively as soon as you notice you’ve fallen behind. Otherwise you end up
talking too fast (bad for learning), compromising your breaks (bad for
energy), and still ending late (bad for everything).
The best case is to have already included flexible spring sections which
are easy to delete or reduce (such as Q&A). In this case, you can simply use
them for their intended purpose of getting you back on schedule. This is a
perfect option and should be your go-to whenever possible. It’s seamless,
painless, and leaves your schedule and energy levels intact.
 If you don’t have springs (or are further behind than your springs can
handle), then you’ll need to start deleting important stuff. This is painful. To
recover five minutes, you can delete an anecdote or example or the discussion
section after an exercise. To recover 10-15 minutes, you can delete a whole
exercise. To recover 20-30 minutes, you can delete an entire Learning
Outcome.
It’s tempting to try to “get through everything” by leaving the lectures in
place and just deleting all the exercises. This sounds good on paper, but
essentially undoes all your hard work of designing a high-energy and
engaging workshop, degrading it into a long, dry lecture. Better, in my
experience, to cut a whole section and do a good job teaching what’s left
instead of a bad job teaching everything.

RUN LONG BY ASKING FOR PERMISSION AND

CREATING A SAFETY NET
The main benefit of finishing on time is that almost no facilitators
manage to do it. So when you do, the audience is delighted. It’s an easy way
to end on a high note, dramatically improving the perception (and feedback
score) of your entire session.
That being said, sometimes you’re going to run long. It’s not a big deal.
But also, sometimes your attendees won’t be able to stay. And since running
long is ultimately your responsibility, you need to make them feel like
they’ve gotten everything they showed up for. You do that by reassuring
them, in advance, that they aren’t going to miss anything, since you’re going
to do the extra work to provide it to them remotely. This is called “creating a
safety net”.
The announcement sounds like this:
Telling them: “Hey everyone, it looks like we’re about 45 minutes
behind, which puts us on track to end at 1645 instead of 1600.”
Checking for impact: “I know some of you have stuff you need to get
to. Can I get a quick raise of hands of who needs to run off at 1600?
Okay… And who would be able to stick around a bit longer?”
Telling them (continued): “Alright, so if it’s okay, we’re going to run
 long. If you need to leave early, don’t worry about it at all, I
understand. You can just step out whenever you need to.”
Creating a safety net: “But I know you don’t want to miss anything, so
what I’m going to do is send everyone an email with a full write-up of
all the stuff we talked about in the section you missed, which is going to
be about [topic]. I’ll also send you the slides, some recommended
reading, and a couple exercises you can do to practice. And if you have
any questions, please email or call me and I’ll walk you through it.”
Asking permission: “Does that sound okay for everyone?”
The most important thing is to tell them, in advance, about the change in
plans. People get extremely jittery if you’re still in the middle of teaching as
the clock is approaching the end of the workshop. And as you silently run
over time, they’ll be sitting there having an internal crisis, wondering if it’s
rude to sneak out or if you’ll be done soon enough that they can stay and not
miss anything.

Lessons learned:
Keep track of time by using a countdown section timer (not your
phone), plus a separate exercise timer (your phone is okay)
If you’re planning to start late you should proactively tell folks the
new start time and then honor it
Include some flexible Spring Sections to make it easier to recover
time and finish on schedule
If you do need to run late, create a safety net for folks who can’t stay
 CHARISMA CAN BE
MANUFACTURED WITH A
CLICKER, A WATCH, AND
SOME SMALL BEHAVIORS

Charisma acts as a multiplier to your skills by causing people to pay better

attention and to give you more benefit of the doubt. In a workshop context, a
bit of charisma causes goodwill and attention to stay higher for longer. So
although it’s not strictly necessary, it’s certainly handy. Fortunately, it’s
fairly easy to boost your teaching charisma by changing a handful of small
(but crucial) charisma-impacting behaviors.
To borrow the framework and language of Olivia Fox, author of The
Charisma Myth,[17] coming across as “charismatic” is the result of projecting
three qualities:
Power (authority, credibility)
Warmth (friendliness, openness)
Presence (the audience feels like you are undistracted and paying
full attention to them)
You need all three. Having lots of power but a shortage of either warmth
or presence, for example, will cause you to seem hostile or aloof,
respectively.
Power is the easiest to get and maintain. In fact, you get it for free
simply because you happen to be the person who is currently standing on
stage and whose name is on the event blurb. Of course, it’s possible to throw
it away (for example by being far too self-deprecating in your intro, letting a
hostile participant run all over you, or allowing the schedule to slip too far),
but you always start with plenty. And by following the design and facilitation
guidelines throughout this book, you’ll hold on to what you started with.
Warmth and presence, on the other hand, must be actively fostered. It’s
easy though; all it takes is a clicker and a watch.
The single biggest improvement you can make is to get a clicker and
stop standing in the stage’s “charisma dead-zone”, which is anywhere behind
your laptop. Standing in the dead-zone an immediate and infallible way to
obliterate both warmth and presence. This is partly due to your eyes being
drawn to your screen instead of your audience, and partly due to the physical
wall you’ve placed between yourself and your students.
To escape the dead zone, you just need to get a clicker and then stand in
front of your computer instead of behind it. Don’t rely on venues to provide a
clicker—it’s too important.

Another big improvement is to stop using your phone as a clock and

timer. We’ve already covered this in the previous section.
Thirdly, you should be walking the room during exercises, getting
yourself away from the stage and among the audience. We’ve already
discussed the educational benefits of this (earlier in Part 2, Walking the
Room), but it also breaks down any barriers between you and the audience
and makes you seem vastly more friendly and accessible.
Lastly, you want to limit behaviors which come across as defensive or
jumpy. The biggest one is to rush to answer student questions before the
student has finished asking them. Or alternately, to nod and gesture quickly
and repeatedly throughout their entire question as if you just can’t wait to
answer with something oh so brilliant. Better, instead, to let them finish
saying whatever they are going to say, pause for an additional moment or two
(this beat of silence is powerful), and then respond.
Less critical, but also worth doing, is to work toward reducing your
verbal and physical fidgets. The most common physical fidgets are pacing,
crossing and uncrossing your arms or legs, and readjusting clothing that has
ridden up or down. (I’m personally also terrible about playing with—and
inevitably dropping—whatever I happen to be holding.) If you aren’t sure
about your fidgets, mix yourself a strong drink and then sit down to watch a
video of yourself on stage. It’s slightly horrifying to see all the things you’re
doing wrong but is invaluable for spotting (and then fixing) these sorts of
behaviors.
As mentioned, charisma isn’t strictly necessary, and you shouldn’t
worry too much if you’ve got a fidget (or whatever else) that you just can’t
seem to kick. But if you can change a couple small behaviors to get a little bit
more charisma, I think you’ll find yourself enjoying your new ability to
engage a crowd. At the very least, buy yourself a clicker and stop standing in
the dead-zone.

Lessons learned:
Charisma is not a fundamental personality trait, but can be
manufactured through behaviors which project and maintain
warmth, attention, and power
Buy a clicker and free yourself from the “charisma dead-zone”
behind the podium
Stop relying on your smartphone as a timer, and get an analog timer
instead
Walk the room during exercises and be fully present for your
attendees
 PROTECT YOUR OWN
ENERGY BY HIDING
DURING BREAKS

For events longer than a half-day, the facilitator’s energy needs to be

managed as carefully as the audience’s. New facilitators always ignore this
advice and run themselves ragged, especially if they’re naturally outgoing
and get a high from being on stage.
Teaching all day is exhausting. And this fatigue is not something to
ignore and endure. Even if you feel okay, it’s like staying up all night and
then drinking 20 coffees: you’re alert but stupid. And while you can’t notice
the difference, everyone else certainly can. Although most folks can credibly
deliver a lecture while fatigued (albeit in a rambling fashion with a few too
many tangents), they’ll get significantly worse at empathizing and engaging
with the audience, performing sophisticated facilitation, and responding to
unexpected problems. Tired facilitators will also stop doing the “optional”
(but important) tasks like walking the room and scanning for problems during
exercises.
Breaks should theoretically help you as much as they help your
audience. But as a friend once told me after teaching his first full-day
workshop: “As soon as a break began, the attendees would immediately
queue up to talk to me, and they just had so many questions. I didn’t even get
to eat.”
Before and after the event, you’re expected to be sociable. But the coffee
and lunch breaks are yours and should be defended. Defending your breaks
usually means hiding somewhere private; if the students can see you, they
will find you. If the venue doesn’t have a good hideaway room, just head
outside.
You’ll almost never get your entire break to yourself, but you should
always get some of it. For example, you might need to spend the first five
minutes helping a student whose questions you sidelined earlier. And you’ll
probably need to spend the final five minutes getting everyone back into their
seats. But that still leaves a precious five minutes for you to put up your feet,
close your eyes, take a few breaths, and ensure that you’re at your best when
the teaching resumes.
Lunch deserves special mention. If the food is obstructed by a queue, the
students will surround you and bombard you with questions, turning your
break into quite the opposite. As such, I typically try to get hold of a plate of
food and then flee, like a seagull with a french-fry. I also keep a packed lunch
in my workshop bag for situations where the catering looks like an
inescapable trap.
Clients sometimes want to talk about business-y things at lunch. This is
tricky since you’ll usually want to be there for the networking and client
relationship. Fortunately, a 60-minute lunch provides ample time for both
eating and resting if you set good boundaries ahead of time:
“I’d love to join for lunch. But I’m going to need to leave 20 minutes
early to give myself time to prepare for the next section. Will that be
alright with everyone?”
And remember, taking time for yourself isn’t greedy. Your students
deserve you at your best.

Lessons learned:
Protecting your own energy is neither weak nor self-indulgent, but is
required to continue doing a good job
Ensure you have at least a few minutes of each break to yourself by
hiding out of sight, even if that means leaving the building
 USING CO-TEACHERS,
EXPERT GUESTS, AND
HELPERS

An extra person on your teaching team can sometimes be the difference

between a flop and a triumph. You’ve got four main options of who to bring
(and some individuals will be able to fill multiple roles, of course):
Full co-teachers with similar levels of teaching (and topic)
expertise to yourself who are in charge of running a significant
portion of the workshop
Expert guests who can answer questions, tell stories, and deliver
focused lecture segments, but who doesn’t necessarily have any
teaching or facilitation expertise
Facilitation helpers who walk the room during exercises to help
explain instructions and allow you to deal with larger crowds
Operational helpers who can run off to deal with all the random
things that can go wrong during a workshop (like missing coffee or a
broken projector)

CO-TEACHERS
Full co-teachers are obviously the most flexible (they can do
everything), but they also tend to be expensive. Their role is self-explanatory.
One facilitation caveat is to be careful not to undermine each other with too
many interruptions, corrections, and addendums to what the other has said.
Instead, decide who is leading each section, and then let them do so
uninterrupted, even if you feel you have something clever or important to
contribute. If the lead teacher wants help, they can explicitly ask the non-lead
teacher to contribute.
A hidden benefit of a co-teacher is that they help you get better, faster.
They can take notes on your performance (and you on theirs), and then you
can swap notes and discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what to try doing
differently for next time. And if you’re able to help at their gigs also, then
you’ll benefit from simply having more chances to practice, as well as more
exposure to rare problems and unlikely edge cases. (And if you’ve got more
time than money, swapping help like this is a viable alternative to paying
each other.)

EXPERT GUESTS
Expert guests are mainly used to lend extra credibility in an area where
you feel a little weak. And since they’ll usually enjoy dropping in for a guest
lecture and to answer a few questions, they’re often happy to do so for free.
While they’re always a nice bonus, these types of guests can be an
absolute godsend if you find yourself suffering from imposter syndrome. The
worst imposter syndrome I ever felt was about seven years ago, when one of
my self-organized workshops first passed £10,000 in ticket sales. I was going
crazy, imagining that everyone was going to storm out once they showed up
and saw me. At the suggestion of my wonderful co-organizer, Adele, we
invited four expert guests (one for each morning and afternoon of the two-
day workshop) to give a short lecture and do a bit of Q&A—about 30
minutes total. As a nice bonus, they each ended up staying through the break
after their segment, giving the students a chance to chat and mingle. The
guests added a level of credibility which I never could have achieved on my
own, and all it “cost” was a little bit of organizing.
The downside of expert guests is that you can’t really guarantee the
quality or relevance of what they’re going to say. Having learned this
particular lesson the hard way, I now avoid asking guests to deliver core
Learning Outcomes. Instead, I have them complement the Learning
Outcomes by adding a fresh and credible perspective, a personal story, or
some additional examples and exercises. The guests then become massively
beneficial while also being less of a liability. So if they end up delivering a
standup comedy routine instead of an educational lecture, the workshop can
still achieve its goal.
You also need to know what to do when they go fully off the
reservation. I once had an expert guest show up very late and very drunk, and
then proceed to yell at my audience about how they would never be
successful like him. This was unfortunate because he actually had been
successful in the notoriously difficult niche of independent journalism, which
the audience was razor-keen to learn about. I didn’t know how to handle it at
the time, so I just gritted my teeth while allowing him to destroy my event.
But I’ve since learned the correct solution, and it doesn’t even require any
confrontation.
If a guest is going wildly off-track, you’re going to need to interrupt
them in the middle of whatever they’re saying by grabbing two chairs and
carrying them onto the stage with a flourish and a big grin. You’re going to
put down the chairs, sit down in one while gesturing toward the other, and
say:
“Hope you don’t mind me jumping in here. You were saying some super
interesting stuff earlier that I wanted to dig into a bit more. Would you
mind if we switch into a bit of an interview so I can explore some of it
with you?”
Or:
“I hope you’ll forgive my interruption, but there’s some fascinating
stuff in your history that I know everyone here would love to hear more
about. Would you mind if I jump in here with some questions so I can
get your take on a few of the big moments in your life and career?”
And then run the rest of their session as a moderated conversation,
optionally shifting into an open Q&A once you’re ready. Most speakers in
this situation will be glad for your intervention; they’re aware they’ve been
rambling and are feeling uncomfortable, but don’t know how to fix it. By
jumping in, you’re handing them a non-awkward lifeline. And if a guest does
perceive it as a slap on the wrist, they’ll at least appreciate that you did so in a
way which kept up appearances.

FACILITATION HELPERS
 Facilitation helpers are volunteers who you’ve lightly trained ahead of
time to help attendees understand and complete complex exercises. You
explain the situation in detail to your helper and then, during the exercise
itself, they can run around the room with to help unstick attendees. If I know
I’ll need someone for this, I typically just grab an over-eager student or venue
employee before starting and ask them to help me out for the section in
question. But if it’s critical (and/or you require several helpers), then you’ll
likely need to organize and train them in advance.
I used to regularly co-teach a fun workshop on business model
innovation. It worked brilliantly but required enough 1‑on‑1 help that it could
only handle audiences of up to about 30. So when my team was asked to
teach it in Bulgaria to an audience of 300, we recruited ten volunteers from
the local startup community, spent half an hour training them, and then put
each of them in charge of a tenth of the audience while we kept an eye on the
bigger picture.
In an ideal world, your exercise prompts would be perfectly clear and
your workshop would be scalable enough to handle arbitrarily large
audiences. But since that’s almost never fully attainable, a facilitation helper
is a great way to fill in the gaps.

OPERATIONAL HELPERS
Operational helpers spend most of their time just sitting idle, and then
occasionally leap into action to deal with anything that goes wrong with the
venue, catering, operations, logistics, equipment, or anything else. They don’t
require any special skills beyond being good with people and willing to solve
unexpected problems. Small and simple events don’t require a helper and
bigger events will often include a helper provided by the venue or client. But
in cases where you can’t count on that, hiring a good helper (on a freelance,
hourly basis) can be very worthwhile.
My best-ever helper was Lucy, who I poached from her job as a bar
manager after seeing her perform repeatedly (and brilliantly) as a host and
problem-solver.[18] The number of times she saved my bacon are too
numerous to list, but I’ll share the most memorable. I had been informed, the
evening before a full-day event, that my venue had somehow become
unavailable. I spent a minute or two cursing cruel fate and then started
looking for solutions. After calling half a dozen venues, I found a viable
replacement. Great! But it was near London Bridge, a 20-minute drive from
the original Shoreditch location. I couldn’t expect attendees to receive an
alert about the change of address before morning, and I didn’t want to
abandon anyone who happened to miss it. I called Lucy to strategize and we
agreed on a plan.
The next morning, I arrived early at the original, cancelled venue to find
her already waiting, along with a half dozen taxis and a pile of cheap
umbrellas (it was a drizzly London morning). Once enough folks had arrived,
I traveled with the first car to get the new venue set up while she stood guard
at the original venue to shuttle over any late arrivals. We ended up having a
great day and every single person made it over to the new location
(eventually including Lucy, who arrived about two hours later along with the
final participant).
Operational hiccups are rarely this dramatic, but they’re always
important. Even if it isn’t a showstopper, something like missing coffee or a
faulty projector can be a real thorn in your side and is extremely difficult to
solve on your own without creating a big interruption in the event.

Lessons learned:
Co-teachers help deliver the core material and allow you to improve
faster
Expert guests provide a credibility boost, and can be included (via
lecture, interviews, Q&A) as a complement to your core teaching
material
Facilitation helpers support larger audiences by walking the room
and unsticking confused attendees during key exercises
Operational helpers can deal with anything else which comes up
during the day
 WHAT TO DO WHEN
EVERYTHING GOES WRONG

Sometimes, stuff will go wrong which is really not your fault. The projector
will break, the venue will catch fire, and someone will bring along a baby
who throws up all over you and your computer. That’s fine. It’s not a big
deal.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

The golden rule of workshop disasters is this: the audience mirrors
your panic. If you’re cool with it, they’re cool with it. Shrug it off, adjust
the plan, and keep on keeping on.
I recently ran a session in Copenhagen where a fire alarm forced us to
evacuate. It was unscheduled, so we needed to wait for the fire department to
show up. Once we got outside, I faced a decision. On the one hand, I could
take the easy option of claiming it wasn’t my fault (which was true) and that
there was nothing I could do (which wasn’t). Or, alternately, I could create a
path forward.
I glanced around to locate the event organizer, walked over, and told
him that—assuming he was okay with it—I would like to gather everyone
around and continue teaching outside. There was a nearby wall I could stand
on, surrounded by plenty of flat, empty space for the audience. I normally
would have moved them over there myself, but the organizer took the
initiative and did a great job of announcing the new plan with a wink and a
smile:
“Hello everyone, welcome to Copenhagen’s wonderful outdoors. We
 will continue the event from that wall over there, so if you’d like to
follow me and find a spot, we will get going again. A lovely and
pleasant surprise, wouldn’t you say?”
Meanwhile, I climbed up on the wall and started talking in circles.
Everyone soon wandered over and we ended up having a great event.

Inexperienced facilitators tend to dread this sort of situation, expecting

an audience to resist—or even rebel against—the sudden change in plan. But
the attendees are aware that the whims of the universe are not within your
control. So although it’s true that they don’t especially want to hear excuses
or apologies, they will gladly support you in any plausible plan to continue
moving forward, no matter how strange or unlikely. That’s why everyone
was willing to accept a cab ride after my unexpected venue switch. And it’s
why everyone in Copenhagen walked happily over to the wall.
If something happens which is impossible to roll with, then keep calm
and call a coffee break:
“Hey folks, this is obviously a bit unexpected and I’m going to need a
couple minutes to sort it out so we can continue with the learning. The
good news is, that means you get a bonus coffee break. Hold tight, grab
 some refreshments, and I’ll update you as soon as possible.”[19]
You now have 5-15 minutes to find a path forward. And remember, that
does not mean you need to find a way to do exactly what you originally
intended. Depending on what went wrong, “Plan A” might be well and truly
over. If the projector is broken, then the projector is broken, and you’re going
to need to find a way to succeed without it. But remember, folks didn’t show
up for Plan A… they showed up to receive a set of Learning Outcomes. Your
workshop is a success so long as you can succeed in that one task, no matter
how different it ends up looking from the original plan.
In the case of equipment failure, you can usually ask to borrow anything
that your students have brought with them, which includes anything hidden
away in their bags. As ridiculous as it sounds, I’ve had to borrow a computer
from the audience no fewer than five times. Once due to the theft of my
power cable while walking to the venue, once when an excited attendee
dropped a pint of cider onto my laptop, and once when a super high-
resolution projector somehow overwhelmed my computer’s humble brain.
The others were just normal, mundane tech problems. Although most of these
were at fairly casual events, two were during well-paid, high-profile
corporate gigs. I made it into a little joke, everyone had a laugh, and
somebody in the front row handed me a fresh computer. I grabbed the backup
of my slides from the cloud (you do have a backup of your slides in the
cloud, right?) and kept on teaching. Easy breezy.[20]

REDUCE YOUR EXPOSURE TO BAD LUCK

It’s also worth noting that you can control your own exposure to bad
luck, taking steps—in advance—to prevent many types of bad luck from ever
being able to strike.
The first 80% of reliability is trivial, and you can start doing it right
now, simply by choosing to make the effort. It includes stuff like
Basic logistics, like flying to an event one day early so you have
time to book another flight if yours gets delayed or cancelled, and
showing up to the venue early enough to look at your room
Simple professionalism, like good client communication and having
your workshop designed and refined in advance
 Mundane preparedness, like bringing your own
adaptors/plugs/cables and having a backup of your slides on a USB
key and online
We’ve already covered these basics, but I’m repeating them here as a
reminder, and to encourage you to actually do them. Folks tend not to take
the basics seriously enough, and you’re leaving money on the table if you
don’t.
The rest of your exposure to bad luck comes from the complexity of the
workshop design itself and the number of external dependencies like supplies
or equipment. As a general rule, you can reduce your workshop’s fragility
(i.e. its vulnerability to bad luck) in four ways:
1. If you can simplify your facilitation/storytelling requirements
without compromising the quality of the education, then
simplify it

2. If you depend on something which you can carry, then bring it

yourself instead of expecting the venue to provide it
3. If you can’t bring it yourself, then you must be extremely
proactive about ensuring that the venue/client has gotten it
there
4. If you can’t guarantee you’ll get what you need, then be
prepared to delete the vulnerable section and replace it with
something else
Do you rely on wifi and a sound system? Then bring your own mobile
hotspot and bluetooth speaker system. Nobody cares as much about your
workshop as you do, so don’t trust the venue (or whoever else) to solve your
problems. Or if you rely on playing a YouTube video, then find a way to
download it ahead of time and bring it with you.
Supplies like printouts, paper, pens, and sticky notes deserve special
mention. Venues always claim to be able to provide these basics, and they are
(almost) always lying. If it’s too much for you to carry, then ship it ahead of
time in a big box, early enough that you can send another one if the first gets
lost or held in customs.
A lot of “bad luck” can be prevented by being more proactive in your
client/venue communications. I was once asked to teach a session in Romania
about creative entrepreneurship and designed it with frequent switching and
rearranging of groups to keep the energy high and the discussions fresh. I had
told the client that I would need cabaret seating, or at least rearrangeable
seating, and they had promised that I would have it. But since the seating
really mattered, I sent them an email a few days before the event to verify,
asking for some photos of the actual room I would be in. And then, when
they didn’t send the photos, I called them on the phone and asked (nicely) if
they could turn on video and walk through the venue right then to show me
how it looked.
As it happened, my requirements had gotten lost in the shuffle, and they
had put me in a very beautiful—and equally non-viable—theatre with fixed-
row seating. Thanks to my proactive check-in, they were able to switch my
room with a smaller, but more flexible one, and my session went smoothly.
(If they hadn’t been able to switch my room, I would have had to redesign
my whole workshop to fit the new room constraints. That would have been
annoying, but still far better than being blindsided once I got there.)
It’s theoretically the venue or client’s job to remember and adhere to
your requirements, and to update you if anything changes. But they’ve got a
million priorities which are higher on the list than your workshop. If you
depend on something which is being provided by someone else, then it’s
worth going above and beyond to guarantee that it’s there.

RUN A RETROSPECTIVE AFTER EVERY WORKSHOP

In UK schools, teachers are tasked with self-improvement through
“reflective practice”. The idea is to sit down with a notebook after each day’s
teaching and list out everything that went wrong, everything that went
unusually well, why those things might have happened, and what you might
try doing differently to get less of the former and more of the latter. The idea
is to turn yourself into a learning machine, gobbling up your classroom
experiences and transmuting them into your own personal lessons learned.
I agree and have been doing retros after every workshop since the very
beginning. It usually only takes 10 or 20 minutes. If you have a co-teacher (or
trusted spectator), then do it with them. Otherwise, do it yourself. The end
result should be a small number of clearly defined, high-impact changes that
you’ll make for next time. You won’t be able to solve every problem (or
replicate every win) every time, but you should always attempt a couple of
them.
A feedback form isn’t required to figure out what went wrong. Feedback
forms certainly have their place and are crucial for proving to clients that you
did a good job, and also for collecting attendee testimonials. But most
workshop problems are fairly self-evident (sloppy operations, low energy,
bad venue, confusing exercises, ineffective lecture, slipped schedule, slow
crowd control, confused attendees, hostile or distracting individual, etc.).
Once you start looking for—and taking note of—these issues, you’ll be able
to find most of what matters with a quick retrospective.
This isn’t about beating yourself up, but rather about finding ways to
improve. Over time, these improvements compound, and one day you’ll
finish a session and think to yourself, “Wow, that actually went pretty damn
well.”

Lessons learned:
The audience mirrors your panic; if you’re cool with it, they’re cool
with it
Bad luck can be reduced by bringing your own supplies and through
extremely proactive client/venue communication
After each workshop, run a short retrospective
 SERVE THE PEOPLE IN THE
ROOM, EVEN IF THERE
AREN’T SO MANY OF THEM

What if you design a great workshop, but only a couple people buy tickets or
show up? What should you do? Perhaps you can already guess at my advice:
you should proceed. No matter how many of them there are, the people in the
room are the right people. If there are fewer than you had hoped, then you
can carve out some time in the future—the next day, perhaps—to reflect on
why, and to rethink your marketing and messaging. But for the time being,
right now, while you’re facing a sea of empty seats, you are going to clear
your mind of all such thoughts, and you will proceed.
If folks are spread out, as they are likely to be, then ask everyone to grab
a new seat, closer to you, at the front. You might choose to push aside most
of the chairs, arranging the few required into a small circle or around a single
table. Instead of trying to shout into a big space which will always feel
empty, create a small space which seems full. Resist the urge to repeatedly
delay your starting time in the vain hope that dozens more people will
suddenly appear. Focus on those who are there, not those who aren’t. Remind
your attendees—and yourself, if needed—that this is great news, because
you’ll really be able to get into it together.
Treat the small group as a rare opportunity to gather deep insight into
what your audience cares about, which will pay dividends for all future
workshops. You can hear about their hopes (of what they want to learn and
achieve), their fears (of why they haven’t already), and their frustrations
(about where they’ve gotten stuck before). These small sessions are a
goldmine of learning, and you can really set the standard of how well you
intend to educate the people who have put their faith in you.

Lessons learned:
Instead of worrying about under-attended workshops, just gather
everyone toward the front and do a great job for them
 SUMMARY OF PART 2 (AND
A FACILITATION
CHECKLIST):

The week before:

Confirm audience profile and numbers with event organizer
Confirm the room setup with the organizer or venue
Confirm that stationary, supplies, and printouts are ordered and
accounted for
Your workshop bag:
Clicker (and batteries)
Backup slides (on a USB stick and in the cloud)
Projector adaptors (for both VGA and HDMI)
Power adaptors
Classroom timer and exercise timer
Fresh whiteboard markers (just in case)
Bluetooth speaker (if using videos or music)
Stationary and supplies (if you’re the one bringing it)
The morning of:
Put a physical copy of your Workshop Skeleton in your pocket
(including Learning Outcomes, section timings, and key exercises)
Upon arrival:
Visually confirm the room setup (and make any emergency
 improvements)
Test the projector, clicker, wifi, power, and any other required
equipment
Close any extraneous computer programs (especially those with
unpredictable notifications like chat, email, and file-synching)
Mute your phone and, if using it as an exercise timer, change the
settings so you won’t have to keep unlocking it to check the time
Confirm that coffee and/or food will be available when expected
During your workshop:
If you’re going to start late, tell people
Intros should be short; the value is in your content, not you
Stop standing behind the podium (use a clicker and stand at the front
of the stage)
Stop glancing at your phone (use a watch or classroom timer)
Finish group formation before assigning a task; manually fix uneven
groups and stranded individuals
During an exercise, walk the room to listen in on students working
When asking a student to share, have them stand and speak toward
the crowd
You can control a crowd by going individual
To silence a distracted crowd, just start talking (in circles) or ask a
student volunteer to share (borrowing goodwill)
Nobody in the audience wants to be hostile or disengaged, so there’s
usually a good reason which you can discover (and resolve) if you
search for it
Protect your breaks by hiding out of sight
Finishing on time is extremely valuable, and often worth cutting
content to achieve
Most “bad luck” can be solved via either better preparation or by
bringing along a co-teacher, expert guest, or helper
When bad luck strikes anyway, shrug it off and find a way to
continue teaching
 CONCLUSION AND FINAL
THOUGHTS

Rob here. I used to be a terrible (and terrified) public speaker. After my first
international talk, I was so desperate to flee that I accidentally rushed out
through the fire escape. In an early guest lecture at a university, I misjudged
the distance to the whiteboard (it stood out from the wall by half a meter) and
ran into it when I turned around, knocking myself flat on my back in front of
500 grad students (who somehow all seemed to have their phones out and
filming). When I needed to start making video tutorials for one of my
businesses, I was too nervous to show my face, so I recorded them as
voiceovers of my screen. And even that would keep me up at night.
What I’m trying to say is that this stuff didn’t come naturally to me.
But then, several years later, I was back at that same university (the one
where I fell over), giving a short session about some of my startup
experiences. Afterwards, a guy named John walked up and said:
“Wow, you got good at this. I mean, it was so much better. You used to
be terrible!”
I said thanks (sort of), and he ended up hiring me for my first set of paid
teaching gigs at the unbelievable rate (or so I thought at the time) of £800 per
day. This was a super exciting milestone, since it proved to me that I was
actually improving. Since then, I’ve seen my rates creep slowly upward to the
point where I was earning more in an afternoon than I used to in a month.
I never figured out any big “trick” or “secret” to getting better rates.
Rather, I found that my pay stayed more or less in lockstep with my skills. As
I put in the work and figured out how to succeed more deeply and more
reliably with my students, my pay increased to match. The other stuff—sales,
proposals, client communications, etc.—is obviously something you’ll need
to be able to deal with, but it isn’t what you get paid for. So the “trick”,
insofar as one exists, is to get really good at the craft of teaching.
With this in mind, I humbly suggest you take the long view on
developing your skills.
You don’t learn to play guitar by trying really hard for one week. You
learn it by loving the craft (and occasionally hating it) and continuing to
practice regardless for several years. And then, one day, you find yourself
capturing the full attention of a crowd with your music. And people in the
audience are like, “Man, I wish I could do that.” Mastering a craft is about
staying in the game. Keep trying, forgive yourself your mistakes, and get
better every day.
One of the reasons I find education so fascinating is that there’s always a
fresh challenge to solve. Some of the students aren’t learning… But why?
And what can I change to fix it? Can I adjust the energy levels? The Learning
Outcomes? The social dynamics within the groups? The facilitation? Can I
use a different metaphor, a different Teaching Format, or a clearer exercise
prompt? Can I invent something else entirely?
I’ve been trying to learn how to teach for some time now, and there’s
still so much more to do. I love it, and I hope you will too. Even in the cases
where there’s no clear right answer, and it’s hard, and it’s scary, and all we
can do is our best.
Thanks for reading. Hope it was helpful. If you have any comments or
questions, you can reach us at:
Rob Fitzpatrick: ​[email protected]
Devin Hunt: ​ ​[email protected]
More resources:​http://workshopsurvival.com
If you feel inclined to help us out, the best way to do so is by posting an
Amazon review, sending us feedback and suggestions, or recommending this
book to a friend or colleague.
We wish the very best to both you and your students.
 APPENDIX:

Advanced Teaching Formats

The Appendix contains a collection of advanced Teaching Formats, plus an

example of testing and refining a new exercise design.
These new Formats aren’t exactly “better” but are certainly more
specific. They’ll help you succeed at unusual educational challenges and to
teach difficult Learning Outcomes which are normally hard to make stick.
I’d suggest skimming through the overview below, and then skipping to
the Formats which seem most relevant to your particular topics and interests.
Here’s a summary of the advanced Formats:

Specialty Teaching Formats

Trigger Questions Helps generate ideas and reveal alternative solutions
(rapid-fire via a series of quick prompts to keep redoing the same
scenarios and idea situation in different ways
generation)
Card Games For introducing lots of tools, options, or resources
using a variety of playful and engaging games and
activities
 Putting on the For teaching skills where success is determined by an
judging hat external third party whose judgement is neither “fair”
nor transparent (e.g. applying for a job or raising
funding)
Lab time For letting attendees spend large blocks of time
working on their own projects, with expert help
available if they run into problems

Plenty of fun options. Let’s get into how to use them.

FORMAT: TRIGGER QUESTIONS FOR ESCAPING

TUNNEL-VISION
Trigger Questions are a series of prompts to force the attendees to
repeatedly solve the same problem in different ways, usually under very
tight time restrictions (i.e. 2-5 minutes per prompt). The quick timing leads to
fun, frantic energy and is often a high point for the workshop. Alternately,
you can allow more time per prompt and run a slower, more thoughtful
exercise.
Apart from the fun, what’s the benefit of this Format? The main issue is
that learners tend to get tunnel-vision, fixating on the first solution they can
think of, and then refining it to the exclusion of seeing other options. As such,
if you give people an hour to work on something, most will spend the whole
time “perfecting” their first idea, even if that idea is fundamentally flawed.
But by using Trigger Questions to force them to restart several times, and to
use a different—and potentially unnatural—approach each time, you can
carry them safely past this trap. And as a happy side effect, they’ll often end
up with a pile of ideas.
In his wonderful book, Anything You Want, Derek Sivers shares the
following story of learning to sing from a great coach named Warren
Senders:
For each lesson, I’d bring in one song I was trying to improve.
First, I’d sing it for him as written.
 Then he’d say, “OK—now do it up an octave.”
“Uh... up an octave? But I can’t sing that high!”
“I don’t care! Do it anyway! Go! 1… 2… 3… 4…”
I’d sing the whole song again, in screeching squeaking falsetto,
sounding like a choking mouse. But by the second half of the song, it
was almost charming.
Then he’d say, “OK—now do it down an octave.”
“Down an octave? But I don’t think I can!”
“Doesn’t matter! Go! 1… 2… 3… 4…”
I sounded like a garbage disposal or lawn mower, but he made me sing
the whole song that way.
Then he’d make me sing it twice as fast. Then twice as slow. Then like
Bob Dylan. Then like Tom Waits. Then he’d tell me to sing it like it’s 4
a.m. and a friend woke me up. Then he’d give me many other scenarios.
After all of this, he’d say, “Now… how did that song go again?”
What an amazing way to break someone out of a mental rut! And while
Derek’s example is obviously from a 1‑on‑1 scenario, you can easily adapt it
to work with larger audiences by just planning your triggers ahead of time
and putting each of them on a slide.
For example, if you were helping youths figure out how to introduce
themselves for their upcoming job interview (or public talk), you might run
them through a series of Trigger Questions like this:
Okay, we’re going to try out a bunch of different ways of introducing
ourselves. First, you’re going to give your introduction like you
normally would, if you were meeting a new friend. I want you to take 2
minutes to write down the most important points you’d like to share,
and then you’ll each have 1 minute to introduce yourself to your group.
Okay, start writing.
 Alright, now you’ve got 2 minutes to write a new intro, but this time I
want you write it as if it was your supportive granny giving the intro,
who thinks you’re just the greatest. This might feel a little strange to
talk about how great you are like she would, but just give it a try. Two
minutes to write, and then afterwards you’ll each have 1 minute to
share. Ready? Go!
Okay, now do it totally neutrally, like it was a newspaper reporter
describing the facts about your life in as few words as possible. Same
as before, 2 minutes to write, 1 minute to share.
Okay, now this time…
You can generalize this approach to any number of topics. If you were
teaching pottery, you could have them throw a bowl as if they were already
famous and could get away with being impossibly minimalistic. And then as
if they lived in the developing world and were simply making something for
their family to eat from. And then as if they were exploring new shapes and
planning to discard the experiment as soon as it was done.
If you were working with aspiring restaurateurs, you could ask them to
redesign their dream restaurant if they only had 10m (100ft ) of floor space,
2 2

and then with only two employees (one chef, one server), and then as a
catering service for weddings and events, and then as a takeaway joint, and
then in a location with no on-site kitchen, or in partnership with a nearby
farm. Having spent a couple minutes apiece on these silly little “make-
believe” exercises, they’re now starting to think:
Wait a minute… If I go for something much smaller than I was
originally thinking, and have a more limited menu, then I might be able
to skip paying for a proper kitchen and instead just get licensed to
prepare the food off-site. That would mean I wouldn’t even need the
bank loan, so I could get started immediately!
This is how folks escape from tunnel-vision and start seeing fresh
approaches. Telling someone to pause their dreams to “start small and grow
from there” is a platitude which they will ignore 100% of the time. Even if
it’s the correct approach, imploring them to follow your hard-won advice is
an example of telling vs. teaching. Instead, allow them to experience that
revelation for themselves—before losing their money—by having them work
through a wide variety of rapid-fire scenarios.
By using the Trigger Questions to constrain folks into narrow (but
fruitful) areas of thought, they’ll end up with a larger number of more
interesting ideas than they would have been able to invent on their own. They
also get to walk away with a big list of their own ideas, which everyone
loves.
Trigger Questions are fast, fun, and can be super high energy. They’re
great for either idea generation or for rapid-fire scenarios to build skills and
escape tunnel-vision. Of course, if you want it to run smoothly, you’ll need to
pay extra attention to having good prompts and crowd control. But the payoff
is huge.

Lessons learned:
Trigger Questions are a series of quick, rapid-fire prompts to get
folks attacking the same problem multiple times, in multiple ways
Use Trigger Questions to help students escape tunnel-vision and
generate ideas

FORMAT: PUTTING ON THE JUDGING HAT

Imagine you’re running a workshop to help disadvantaged youths
prepare for their upcoming job interviews. The Learning Outcomes for this
topic include a whole cluster of wisdom/skill hybrids: how to introduce
yourself while walking the line between bravado and timidity, what to
highlight (and what to skip) on your CV, how to answer tough questions that
you really don’t have an answer to, and plenty more.
As a teacher trying to convey this sort of material, you’ve got three big
challenges. The first is that you can’t possibly prepare them for every
permutation and obstacle, so you need to give them a functional mental
model for the thoughts of the recruiter or interviewer (i.e. the “judge”). The
second is that some of the stuff which matters—like spending the time to
write a bespoke cover letter and proofread it—won’t seem important, so it
falls victim to the teaching-vs-telling trap and then gets ignored. And lastly,
even if an attendee learns all the skills and does everything perfectly, there’s
still a high chance that they don’t get the job for reasons completely beyond
their own control.
Lots of topics carry this “external judge” dynamic: fundraising, dating,
getting a job, applying to university, getting a publisher/label/agent, finding
freelance work, getting a bank loan, and countless others.
I struggled for years to crack this challenge before finally stumbling
across the solution of “putting on the judging hat”. It’s based around a simple
idea: before teaching people how to do something that will be judged by
someone else, first have them spend some time acting as the judge.
If you’re teaching folks to write a killer CV, first have them act as
recruiters, where they’ll review 12 CVs and decide which three to interview.
Have them do it in groups, and to discuss and document their reasons for
eliminating (or shortlisting) certain candidates. Ensure that there are too
many good candidates, so some will be eliminated on a coin flip. Others will
be almost perfect, but with some sloppy typos or bad design. Allow these
young people to experience how, as an employer (or any sort of judge), a
seemingly harmless mistake can act as an easy reason to eliminate an
otherwise promising applicant.
Before I teach fundraising, I like to start with a simple, 3-minute (plus
discussion) Judging Hat exercise to get the attendees to better understand the
investor’s perspective. Here’s the prompt:
Imagine you’re an investor interested in high-risk, high-returns tech
businesses. I’m going to show you four businesses. In your groups,
you’re going to rank them from most investable to least investable.
 Now, here’s the thing: all four of these businesses are doing great, in
their own way, and all of them are worth continuing to work on. But only one
of them is “good” in the particular way that appeals to most tech investors.
Which means that although the other three can still grow into great
businesses, they’re unlikely to be able to raise early-stage funding. This is a
powerful insight for aspiring entrepreneurs, because it shows that a business
can be a good without being investable. And conversely, that an investor’s
disinterest does not necessarily mean that a business is doomed. And also,
that if they want early-stage investment, then they need to select their idea
and build their business in a certain way. These are subtle, sophisticated
takeaways that I’ve only been able to teach with the help of the Judging Hat.
In terms of energy levels, putting on the judging hat is fun. People enjoy
both the exercise itself and also its insight about how the world works. It can
be facilitated under tight time constraints with high energy, or it can be done
as a slower, more thoughtful exercise.
Remember the three goals of this format:
1. Give students a reasonable mental model of the “judge”, so
they can start to reason about what matters and what’s correct,
even if they haven’t been drilled on every permutation
 2. Allow them to experience, from the judge’s perspective, why
certain tiny mistakes and best practices can have a
disproportionately large impact on your results
3. Show them that sometimes, even perfect applicants get
rejected, and that doesn’t necessarily mean the applicant failed
or is in any way unworthy
The Judging Hat succeeds brilliantly at all three goals. Facilitation is
identical to running any other Scenario Challenge. The important difference
is the shift in perspective (from “doer” to “judge") during the task.

Lessons learned:
Certain topics exist where “success” is dependent on the judgement
of some external, opaque, and sometimes arbitrary evaluator (i.e.
college applications, jobs, dating, and many creative fields)
Simply teaching these skills isn’t enough—you also need to have
folks “Put on the Judging Hat” so they can wrap their head around
the evaluation and decision-making process they’ll be subjected to

Format: Card games

Card games are brilliantly high-energy and are surprisingly applicable in
educational workshops. Creating the materials requires a bit of preparation,
but the upside is worth it.
Cards are uniquely good at introducing and explaining a long list of
tools, options, or resources. They’re also a fun, fast way to facilitate Scenario
Challenges. Throughout this section, we’ll look at a variety of games and
activities, each with its own educational specialty.
One of the business books I love to teach is Traction, by Weinberg and
Mares. Beyond offering a helpful theoretical framework for how to grow a
business, it also provides a clear set of 20 options for how successful
businesses managed to start getting noticed. Of course, 20 options would be a
lot to talk through, requiring the better part of an hour and liable to become
punishingly dull. This is a perfect situation for cards.
The design for these cards can be simple. All it needs is a name for each
option, plus a short description of what it’s all about:

By putting each of the 20 options on its own card, you can then facilitate
a number of fun and frantic exercises while simultaneously introducing the
class to all the options. For example:
“Shuffle the cards and deal out 3 to each person. Now, you’ve got 2
minutes. Pick your favorite from the 3 you’ve been given and come up
with an idea (or a way to use that option) based on what it tells you.”
“Spread the cards on the table. Pick the craziest or most difficult one
 you can find, and hand it to the person to your right. Work on whatever
you’ve been given. You’ve got three minutes to come up with as many
plausible ways to use it as you can.”
“Leave the cards in the center, face down. Pick one up at random,
come up with an idea as quickly as possible, and then put it back and
pick up another card. Try to get through as many of the cards as
possible. If you find a card you really hate, just come up with a dumb
idea for it and then move on. You’ve got five minutes. Try to get
through all 20. Go!”
The above isn’t exactly a “game”, but rather a playful variant of either
Scenario Challenges or Trigger Questions. You can repeat these sorts of
prompts (with a bit of variation) near endlessly to expose attendees to as
many of the options as you like, in a fun and engaging fashion.
Of course, there are loads of playful uses for cards, and some of them
certainly become more game-like. Here are a couple options:
Best at X: This game works like Top Trumps. In addition to the name and
description, each card is ranked on a scale of 1-5 on several criteria. For
example, cards of marketing tools might include ratings for “audience size”,
“analytics”, and “creative freedom”.
 Sitting in groups of 3-5, each player has a hand of three cards. The
winner of the previous hand plays a card, while also choosing one of its
criteria to compete on, and simultaneously explaining to the rest of their
group why their card is great for that particular purpose:
“I play the card ‘Facebook Ads’ to compete on ‘Audience Size’ with a
score of 5/5 because it has a bazillion users and includes all types of
people.”
 Everyone else then plays a card to “compete” on the same criteria, and
the player with the highest rating (in the chosen dimension) wins the hand.
The winner collects the played cards, leaving them on the table in front of
them as a “point”. In the case of a draw, the tied players each make a short
argument about why their option is superior for the chosen criteria, and then
the group votes on who has won. All players draw a new card and play
repeats until the deck and hands are empty.
The gameplay itself isn’t terribly deep or interesting. But the arguments
in favor of one card or another certainly can be. The main point is to ensure
that everyone in each group has at least some passing exposure to the relative
strengths and weaknesses of each option.
Card Sort: Like “best at X”, Card Sorts also allow for comparisons between
the options’ strengths and similarities. It’s one of the easiest to facilitate: each
person takes a card from the deck, and then places it somewhere on the table.
After they place one, they draw another and continue until the whole pile is
sorted to their satisfaction. You can arrange the sorting in two ways: as either
open clusters or on a 2x2 grid.

In an unstructured “open” Card Sort, you simply ask attendees to put

similar cards near to each other in clusters, until they’ve found a place for the
whole deck. This exercise can lead to powerful discussions about what the
categories and comparisons should even be. For example, in a career
planning workshop, you might ask high schoolers to Card Sort a number of
job options. And while the options listed on the cards might be useful, a
bigger lesson is in the debate over whether to think of jobs as “part time vs.
full-time” or “remote vs. local” or “boring vs. fun” or “profit vs. passion”.
The categories they create will be shifting and uncertain, but the debate
leading up to those categories holds clear value for certain topics.
In a 2x2 Card Sort, you modify the above by telling the participants
which metrics they should consider when ranking and placing each card. For
example, you might ask them to sort careers on a 2x2 where one axis is
“high-earning vs. low-earning” and another axis is “excites me vs. bores me”.
And then, a few minutes later, you could throw them for a loop by asking
them to resort the same cards along a different set of criteria, which would
cause new options to bubble to the top. (e.g. axes of “I’d learn a lot vs. I’d be
stagnant” and “Growing industry vs. declining industry”). The choice of
criteria will dictate the type of conversation they have, and can also provide a
meta-lesson in how to evaluate options.
Answer the question / Fill in the blank: This game works like Cards
Against Humanity. In addition to the resource cards, you also create a
separate set of cards which each contain a short prompt, question, challenge,
or fill-in-the-blank. For example, some “challenge cards” for a marketing
exercise might include:
“How can we most cost-effectively reach our market of rebellious
teenagers? Why?”
“As a small company targeting larger enterprises, we should begin by
using _______.”
“We’re doing an exploratory campaign where analytics and insight
matter more than actual sales. What do you suggest and why?”
“_______ is better than _______ because…”
“I would never use _______ because…”
Each player holds a hand of a few “answer cards”, which are the same
resources or options used in the previous exercises. The new deck of
“challenge cards” are on the table, face-down, in a stack. The active player
draws the next prompt card and reads it out.
Everyone else responds to the prompt by playing a card from their hand,
while also giving a short explanation of why it works for this scenario. The
active player (who has drawn and read the challenge card, but not played a
solution) then picks their favorite answer, and the winning player takes the
stack of used cards (placed on the table) to represent a point. Everyone refills
their hand (assuming more resource cards still exist), and the next “active”
player (going clockwise) draws the next prompt.
In the original game, Cards Against Humanity, the answers are provided
anonymously (to avoid biased judgement) by placing them face-down on the
table and shuffling them. But in the workshop version, the discussion is more
important than the card itself, so anonymity is sacrificed in favor of allowing
each player to explain the virtues of their solution.
Building a narrative: This game works like Rory’s Story Cubes, but with
less randomization. This is a slower, more thoughtful exercise where
attendees combine multiple cards, in a certain order, to create a “narrative”
about how they might solve a given scenario. For example, in a wedding
planning workshop, you might have cards with different types of venues,
activities and entertainments, plus any other ways to fill the time. Participants
could then grab a selection of cards to quickly draft out the schedule of their
own potential wedding, or to create an event in response to a specific
challenge scenario.
Or if you were teaching a workshop about what you’ve learned from this
particular book, then you might create cards representing various Teaching
Formats, and ask attendees to combine the cards to create and evaluate a
quick Skeleton in response to various constraints or goals. (If you’d like to
use those cards, either personally or while teaching, we’ve made a free,
downloadable set at: workshopsurvival.com/workshop-tools).
In terms of physically creating the cards, I usually start by just designing
them in my slide software, and then printing them four-to-a-page on my
printer and cutting them up. This takes forever and leads to cards which can’t
be easily shuffled, and which can only be used once before they’re destroyed.
But it’s quick and easy to iterate, which is important for the first version of
new teaching materials. After you’ve used them once or twice and are happy
with how they work, you can invest the time in a polished design and send
them off to a print shop to have them done on card stock (i.e. heavier weight
paper). You can optionally spend a fortune on lamination and rounded
corners and full-color double-sided cards, but it isn’t really necessary. Unless
I’m teaching a super-premium workshop, I typically just stick with single-
sided, black and white, square corners, unlaminated. As long as it’s on
relatively rigid cardstock, it will still accomplish everything you need.
If you’ve trying to teach a list of things, consider delivering it as a deck
of cards. Almost nobody uses cards in educational workshops, which is a real
shame since they have so much potential. Cards are great!

Lessons learned:
If you need to teach a “list of things”, you can turn those things into
a deck of cards for use in a number of fun exercises and games

FORMAT: LAB TIME FOR WORKING ON THEIR OWN

PROJECTS
Lab Time is a large, unstructured block of time where attendees work at
their own pace on their own projects, with you on hand to help if they get
stuck. You can either provide them with a clear assignment or simply leave
them to their own pursuits.
Lab Time is common in multi-day workshops where you’ve covered all
the theory and need to start spending an increasing amount of time on actual
practice. It’s less common in shorter workshops (i.e. one day or less) where
time is at a premium. If you ever took a university course in programming,
architecture, design, art, fashion, ceramics, or any other hands-on discipline,
you’ll likely remember spending some portion of your class time in the lab,
working on your own stuff.
The advantages are fairly obvious (folks enjoy working on their own
projects and practice is helpful), so I’ll focus on the limitations.
First, the energy level is difficult to control. It’s a large, unstructured
block of time. Attendees for whom the task is relevant will be fully engaged,
whereas others will drift off and feel like it’s a waste of an hour (or however
much time). Second, students will progress at massively different paces. This
is partly due to differences in understanding, and partly because some of their
projects and ideas will be “easy” to move forwards, whereas others will be
“difficult”. This fragments the class and limits your ability to give class-wide
instruction. Another issue is that lab time is highly help-dependent, and you’ll
only be able to handle a relatively small group by yourself before you need to
start hiring additional teaching assistants. This makes lab time viable for
high-priced premium courses but less so for low-priced and free ones.
There are a few ways to mitigate these problems. One is to force
everyone to work on an example project instead of allowing them to work on
their own. This means everyone will be able to make similar progress and
makes it easier for you to help them (since they’re all struggling with the
same stuff). But it comes at a slight cost since people love the idea of moving
forward with their own project during the workshop itself.
Another solution is to put a small piece of Lab Time immediately before
a break. Folks who are engaged with the task will stay seated and happily
working, whereas the less engaged can drift off and chat with each other over
coffee, enjoying an extended break.
A related option is to finish the educational section of the workshop,
wrap things up, and then continue with optional Lab Time for the participants
who choose to continue working largely on their own, with a bit of help
available if they need it. I sometimes use this structure in full-day workshops,
where the hours up until lunch are tightly structured and educational, and the
hours after lunch are an optional stretch of Lab Time. (This structure needs to
be communicated to attendees in advance, of course, so they can plan their
day and bring their computers if necessary.) If you have the space and time,
you can also schedule the Lab Time for a separate day and mention it as a
“free bonus” when you announce your workshop.
One common trap with Lab Time is to depend too much on its output for
the rest of the workshop. For example, when teaching web programming, you
might first give them an hour to make the scaffolding for a simple portfolio
website. And then you want them to spend the next hour doing design and
layout. But because attendees diverge so much in their progress, many won’t
have finished the first step, which will then prevent them from beginning on
the second. And others will have raced through both steps and then be
twiddling their thumbs. The more of these steps you put in a row, the more
fragmented and dissatisfied your audience will become. You can solve this
by having loads of teaching assistants, or by providing a fresh start at each
step for folks who got too far behind, or by treating Lab Time as a final,
optional task instead of as a prerequisite for doing whatever’s next.
Another trap, specifically for tasks which use a computer, is to expect
folks to succeed in quickly downloading, installing, and getting comfortable
with new software. People are somehow terrible at this, and the task will take
at least an hour of your valuable time unless you’re able to find a way to
either massively simplify setup or to provide an already-equipped set of
computers.
If you’re teaching a lengthy course about hands-on skills, you can fill a
surprising percentage of your schedule with relatively unstructured Lab Time.
And your students will benefit from it, provided that you can work around the
challenges listed above. After all, you can’t learn pottery without getting your
hands in the clay.

Lessons learned:
Lab Time allows folks to apply what you’ve taught to their own
projects, and is a great fit for long-form, skills-heavy topics
If lab time is a core part of your event, you may need to bring extra
facilitators to properly help everyone through their individual
problems
If the lab time is less crucial, consider making it optional by
attaching it to an extended break, or by running it as a separate opt-
in event
 APPENDIX:

An example of inventing, testing, and

perfecting a new exercise

In this section, we’ll walk through an example of designing an exercise which

doesn’t fit any of the “standard” Formats. As this sort of invention is a bit
more open-ended than the rest of the book, I won’t be able to tell you exactly
what to do. But I can help you peek behind the curtain and see the choices I
made along the way, and perhaps that’s helpful too.
More than anything, I want you to remember that going backwards is
part of the process. Although it would be great to be able to invent a perfect
exercise on your first attempt, you typically won’t even discover all the
problems until after you’ve run it with a live audience. That’s not failure;
that’s progress. Once you know about the problems, you go back and fix
them for the next time. Design is iterative, and good design requires testing
and refinement in front of real people.
If the workshop is high-stakes, and you need it to be perfect, then you
can arrange some “practice sessions” with safe test audiences before the main
event. Use your friends, your colleagues, a local meetup group, or whoever
else you can get hold of. They don’t need to sit through the whole workshop,
but only the new exercises you’re still trying to debug.
In this particular example, I wanted to run folks through a process for
generating small, reliable business ideas. Instead of starting by picking an
idea out of thin air, this process begins by first coming up with lists of
“resources” that you already have access to, which can include things like:
Your skills (e.g. design, programming, sales, cooking, recruitment,
or whatever else)
Potential partners (both individuals and businesses) who might help
you out, plus whatever skills or other benefits they could offer
The types of customers and industries which you understand and can
find some way to get in touch with
Attendees then mix-and-match resources from these lists to get a whole
assortment of little business ideas. Most of them are terrible, but some can be
interesting, and it’s a different way of thinking about business opportunities.
Plus, I suspected that it would end up being a fun exercise and a nice energy
boost.
So, the basic exercise structure is:
1. Generate lists of resources

2. Combine resources into ideas

Sounds simple enough. But there are still plenty of open questions:
Group size: Should attendees brainstorm their resources
individually or in groups? What about when they’re combining
ideas? Individually, in pairs, or in groups?
Where to write it down: On worksheets, scrap paper, or sticky
notes? Will folks want to save their ideas, or are the ideas just
throwaways for the sake of the exercise?
Facilitation basics: How should the groups be formed and how
should the exercise be broken up and explained? How many
intermediary steps are required to avoid any students getting lost or
confused?
Variation: How often (if at all) should groups be rearranged, and
the rules be changed, to reduce Format Fatigue?
Timing and pacing: Should this exercise feel “fast and frantic” or
“slow and thoughtful”? How long do attendees spend brainstorming
resources vs. combining them into possible business ideas? How
 much lecture do they need beforehand to understand the point of the
exercise? How much time do we spend at the end to review what
they’ve learned?
Repetition: Do we repeat the exercise several times? If so, how
many? What do we change (if anything) each time it repeats? Is the
timing rigid, or can later repetitions be cut to use it as a Schedule
Spring?
I got started by making a fairly arbitrary set of initial guesses. Here’s
what I came up with as my first attempt:
1. Individually, spend five minutes writing down all the resources
you can think of from these three categories, on sticky notes.

2. Get into pairs.

3. From your combined lists: pick a customer, a skill, and a
business partner. Write down a possible business idea which
uses those ingredients, and then repeat. See how many ideas
you can get in 2 minutes.
4. As a pair, mark your favorite ideas, and then “stand and share”
about why you liked it.
5. Repeat the idea generation two more times, switching to a new
partner each time (but keeping your list of resources the same).
Can you spot some of the problems? I didn’t, so I ran it for the first time
as written above. It wasn’t a total failure, but it did have low energy, and lots
of people got lost and confused. Here’s are the problems I noticed after that
first attempt:
1. Drawing the owl: In the very first step of list-writing, I had
given them a long block of time to generate three different lists
of resources. This was super confusing, since it combined three
different tasks into a single exercise.

2. Long, boring list-writing: To make matters worse, the long

stretch of individual work was a big drag on energy, which
caused some folks to get off-track, stop working, and look at
their phones.
3. Repetitive idea generation: Although switching partners was
 helpful for exposing everyone to fresh ideas and resources, the
exact repetition three times in a row felt really bad.
4. Physically moving the resource lists: I had asked folks write
their resources on sticky notes. But I was also asking folks to
move around to find new partners, and it’s not easy to
physically transport a bunch of stickies.
Okay, so those are some big problems. (Incidentally, this is the sort of
analysis you should do after every workshop, about every exercise and every
section which ended up feeling less than perfect. This is the sort of stuff a
workshop post-mortem should dredge up.) But don’t despair! Now that I was
aware of what was wrong, I was able to iterate the exercise to fix it
The first problem (drawing the owl) was solved by simply separating the
list-writing task into three separate steps, each with a tighter timer and
prompt.
Problems 2 and 3 (boring and repetitive tasks) were addressed with the
same sort of reordering and variation that you’d use to fix a workshop’s
overall energy levels. First, I also interleaved the resource writing (R) with
the idea generation (I). So instead of doing R‑R‑R‑I‑I‑I, the new order
became R‑R‑I‑R‑I‑I. Beyond the obvious variation between R and I, this also
made the first idea generation feel different from subsequent two repetitions,
since the latter attempts had access to an extra list of resources. I also
changed the facilitation of the third idea generation, asking folks to work in
triplets instead of pairs and giving them five minutes instead of three,
allowing them to go deeper now that they were more experienced with the
task.
To solve the sticky note problem, I simply asked them to write their lists
on a piece of paper divided into four columns (three for their resources, one
for the resulting ideas). This also had the bonus of creating a high-value
artefact that they could take home with them.
There were a few other minor points of friction with room setup and
group formation which I eventually ironed out. By the third iteration, the
exercise worked brilliantly: zero confusion, tight timings, and top-tier energy.
(As pleasant surprise, the ideas weren’t as silly as I had expected, and some
of the attendees actually ended up forming businesses to pursue them.) Now
that everybody could get through the exercise without getting confused,
distracted, or lost, I no longer needed to spend my time running around doing
1-on-1 clarifications and interventions. And that, in turn, meant that the
exercise could scale to support an arbitrarily large audience. Neat.
Exercise design is easier if you’re willing to embarrass yourself a little
bit. Sometimes the first crack at a bold new exercise is such a debacle that all
you can do is to laugh it off and throw the whole thing in the bin. No biggie,
it happens. And if that sort of result isn’t an option, remember that you can
eliminate the risk by either starting with a safe test audience, or by simply
sticking to the tried and true Teaching Formats.
The biggest improvements in the example above came from simple stuff
that we’ve already talked discussed: splitting a big prompt into pieces;
interleaving different Formats to boost variation; varying and simplifying
group formation. There’s no mystical secret here… Just testing, observation,
and iteration. The standard Teaching Formats are pretty much “off the shelf”.
But if you want to create brand new exercises and Formats, then you’re going
to have to put on your inventor hat and keep testing and iterating until it’s
brilliant.

Lessons learned:
To invent an exercise from scratch, take a best guess at the
facilitation details and then try it with a safe audience
Identify spots with high facilitation friction, where folks get
confused, or where the energy dips, and find a way to resolve them
(e.g. with clearer prompts, alternating formats, or subdividing a
large exercise into pieces)
The next time you run it, look for problem areas yet again, and try
more improvements
Good job :)

[1]
The agency was called Founder Centric. The other two partners were Salim Virani (who went
on to found Source Institute, which designs hard-to-teach and peer-to-peer education) and Jordan
Schlipf.
[2]
That’s not to say we’ve never screwed up a workshop. We have. But in each case, it was
because we had messed up or misunderstood some part of the process, and, once we’d figured it out,
that particular problem stopped being such a problem. By reading this book, you’ll hopefully be able to
avoid many of the obstacles that we ran into.
[3]
https://www.cdl.org/attention/
 [4] You almost certainly don’t need (or want) an icebreaker. If the icebreaker’s goal is for
attendees to meet and get comfortable with each other, then why not allow them to do so during an
exercise which also carries an educational payload?
[5]
I was teaching at the same event later that day. After finishing my session and walking away,
I realised I’d forgotten my bag on the refreshments table up on stage. The next speaker had already
begun, but the strap of my bag was hanging forwards and I figured I could retrieve it from below
without causing undue interruption. But when I gave it a tug, I took down the whole table, showering
the stage and front-row audience with bubbly water and broken glass. Not my slickest moment, but
apparently a memorable one for the audience.
[6]
He was actually really great and I feel a bit bad for picking on a single example of his work.
(I’ve certainly given far worse performances, as YouTube can confirm.) Plus, he was constrained by a
bad room setup (fixed-row auditorium) which made exercises hard to run. But that doesn’t mean we
can’t learn from the result.
[7]
As a sort of playful vengeance for my less-than-stellar performance, my hosts later took me
out to a bar and ordered me a dinner of lightly-fried brain with a side of brain pâté (and some bread,
thankfully).
[8]
This was the plot twist of Devin’s wedding, leading to an all-night recovery mission and a
sleep-deprived groom. But all ended well, with much jubilation and peacocks everywhere.
[9]
Or she arguably had the one Learning Outcome of “strategy is like a dance” but failed to build
up to it with a coherent set of supporting arguments and exercises. Even if that was her Learning
Outcome, it still might have benefitted from being sharpened into a more concrete takeaway.
[10]
Excerpted from the TED podcast, with minor edits to word ordering for clarity. The full
interview is at:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_sir_ken_robinson_still_wants_an_education_revolution
[11]
You may have noticed that the voting boards in the photo have a total of 12 options, rather
than the six mentioned in the text. This is because it was a train-the-trainer workshop, so each major
topic could be approached from the direction of both “how to do it” and also “how to teach it”.
[12]
In education theory, this “sweet spot” is called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
[13]
Again, if you’re interested in reading more about the theory, this concept of temporary
educational support—reduced over time to keep students in the ZPD—is called Scaffolding.
[14]
YCombinator is a prestigious startup program which I’ll name-drop for certain audiences
who require a stamp of credibility. It’s the startup version of “casually” mentioning you went to
Harvard.
[15]
With very large audiences, the only folks who will actually interrupt you are self-promoting
sociopaths intent on stealing your audience to do some off-topic showboating.
[16]
Think of attendees as energetic puppies, incapable of disrespecting anyone and only getting
off-track due to excitement and glee. You don’t need to take their distraction personally or try to
“establish your authority”. Instead, just scoot them back on track in the least disruptive way possible
(which sometimes means allowing them to remain distracted while you sort out everyone else).
[17]
As an introvert, I found The Charisma Myth both interesting and helpful. For our purposes
here, it provides a helpful framework which leads to the set of actionable tips provided in this section.
Her book is much more about charisma in day-to-day life, so I’ve tested and adapted it to get a
workshop version.
[18]
I think lots of folks in service jobs share this quality, and that they’re widely under-utilized
as a talent pool to hire from. They’re easy to find, and you can accurately judge their skills by simply
becoming a regular. They can also get started on part-time projects without quitting their day job. Lucy
is now a university teacher.
[19]
This is one of the (many) reasons that refreshments should be available all day instead of
being brought out just for breaks.
[20]
I’m not sure there’s an exact prescription for fostering this sort of mental state, but I believe
it involves a) being well-rested, b) understanding that your audience wants you to succeed rather than
fail, and c) setting aside your sense of self (and self-judgement) for the duration of the workshop. If a
wolf gets into a shepherd’s herd, the shepherd doesn’t take time to indulge in a pity party. Instead, he
deals with the wolf problem, and then finishes getting his sheep to wherever they’re going, and then has
a beer, and then takes time to reflect on what went wrong. It’s the same thing with your students.