Whether you’re a facilitator designing bespoke client workshops or an L&D lead creating training programs at scale, it can be a lot to manage.

Below, we’ll explore how SessionLab’s new features combine to help you organize your end-to-end planning process in one place and streamline your workflow.

Organizing everything involved in planning and running a session can be complex and time-consuming. 

Trainers need to connect needs assessment and training needs to their agenda design. Stakeholders need to be consulted and give their approval. Feedback needs to be collected, impact determined and reports created. 

All of this while trying to project manage and create repeatable processes to save your team time and effort in the future. It’s a lot of work and mental load that can get in the way of designing exceptional participant experiences and creating lasting impact. 

Whether you’re leading a training team or a solo consultant, SessionLab’s industry leading agenda planner has always been about saving you time and effort when creating your agenda. 

Now, SessionLab makes it easy to streamline the entire planning workflow in one place and automate tedious tasks with AI assistance. You and your team can remove complexity and busywork from your process and improve the quality of work across the board.

Let’s dive in.

1. Capture key information in a session brief

Agendas need context and background information in order to be fit-for-purpose. What expectations does your client have? What outcomes are expected? Who will be there and when is your session going to be held? 

Collecting this information —and ensuring it is accessible to everyone who needs it—can make for a much smoother design process. Nothing is missed, key context is captured and stakeholders can get aligned in minutes. 

With Pages, you can collect all this supporting information in SessionLab, right where you need it most. Collect your brief, map out logistics, and create to-do lists that support your project with a flexible document that lives alongside your agenda.

Examples of how SessionLab users are using Pages

• Brief for stakeholders and facilitators 
• Notes from client discovery calls and rough ideas
• Problem framing, session objectives and desired outcomes
• To-do lists, project timelines and key dates
• Participant list containing contact details, requirements and key context
• Client handovers and facilitator guides

2. Transform planning materials into a structured agenda

Designing the flow of your agenda is where sessions start to come to life. In SessionLab, you can start with a blank agenda or use the AI assistant to instantly turn a brief into a first draft, ready to refine. 

You can even start with a file upload. Turn a PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text file, image, and more into a SessionLab agenda, complete with blocks, instructions and timings. 

In SessionLab’s industry-leading agenda planner, drag, drop and rearrange blocks to easily rearrange your flow. Whenever you make changes, your timing will automatically recalculate, helping your stay organized and saving you heaps of busywork. 

Speed up your design process further by making agenda-wide changes with conversational prompts and AI-powered actions. Add breaks and icebreakers, summarize the goals and outcomes for a stakeholder or create a feedback form. 

The AI Assistant produces results based on your context. The more information included in your brief or your workspace-wide context folder, the better the output. 

3. Collaborate efficiently with co-facilitators and stakeholders

With SessionLab, sending document versions back and forth over email is a thing of the past. Organze your agenda and planning materials in one place where collaborators can co-create, edit and leave comments. Whether you work together asynchronously or in real-time, it’s easy to keep track of changes and ensure a smooth collaborative workflow.

Stay in control with simple editing and viewer controls. Get collaborators up to speed with a simple briefing document, facilitator guide or project timeline attached to your agenda.

Don’t want clients to get lost in the details? Share a simple online overview or create a custom view containing only what they need to know with flexible columns.

In SessionLab, collaboration is simple and efficient. You and your team can focus on designing, and not on chasing documents and digging up emails. 

4. Prepare for delivery with professional materials 

Once your session is finalized, SessionLab makes it easy to create and share professional materials in a beautiful, easy-to-understand format.

Quickly get stakeholder approval by sharing a simple, visual overview of your session. Export your session to Word, PDF, PPT and customize to your needs.

Hide columns, adjust the layout, and include Pages without the hassle of manual design work. Add a facilitator guide with detailed instructions to the agenda so every facilitator can deliver the session with confidence. 

SessionLab also makes it easy to collect all the materials your facilitators need on the day of the session. Attach slide decks, printouts and additional materials to your agenda for easy referral and sharing. 

Add a pre-flight checklist with logistics, contact numbers and key links to support session delivery on the day. With all your planning and delivery materials attached to the session, facilitation is smooth and organized. 

5. Collect and Analyse Feedback

Feedback is one of the most valuable tools in facilitation. Input from stakeholders and participants provides insight that can improve the quality of sessions and is essential for long-term improvement.

However, facilitators often lack an easy, systematic way of collecting and analysing feedback. It’s one more thing on a long to-do list and it can be hard to find the time and space.

With SessionLab Forms, it’s easy to consistently collect feedback without additional mental load or busy-work.

Instantly generate a feedback form based on your agenda with the AI assistant. Tweak your questions easily with the dynamic form builder and share a QR code or direct link with participants. Responses are collected in your session alongside your agenda. No more switching tools or losing insights. 

Export responses as a .CSV or ask AI to summarize key findings and suggest improvements to your agenda based on feedback.

Never miss the opportunity to gain insights and improve the quality of your sessions again. Demonstrate value to your stakeholders and create key deliverables with ease. 

6. Document outcomes and produce reports

So the session is over. Now is the time to close the loop, follow up with participants and produce post-session reports.

With tight turnaround times and more workshops to design and facilitate, this can be a lot to handle. But with SessionLab, it’s easy to organize your post-session process and follow best practices, every time. 

Ask AI to summarize feedback and collate your findings into a client report, ready for you to enrich with your own insights. Because your briefing, agenda, feedback responses and notes are all in one place, it’s easy to stay organized and contextualize your findings.

Export the materials you want to share with your client and stakeholders as a PDF, Word or PPT and easily produce key deliverables and reports.

7. Reuse what works and optimize your design process 

Experienced facilitators and L&D teams rarely design completely from scratch. Every agenda you design and activity you run can serve as the basis for future sessions, but only if they’re easy to find, reuse and adapt.

In SessionLab, you can turn successful sessions into reusable templates and keep them organized in one-place. 

Save your agenda, planning documents and forms in a single template and kickstart future designs. Ensure every session follows a proven process, maintains best practices and stays consistent across your team. 

Examples of complete end-to-end design processes include:

• Proven workshop and meeting formats with a brief and feedback form as standard.
• Recurring training programs, complete with a facilitator guide and training materials for easy rollout and delivery. 
• Multi-day events with stakeholder lists, timelines and key actions attached.

With your end-to-end design workflows organized in SessionLab, facilitators and trainers never need to start with a blank canvas and can easily find a proven structure for their needs.

With templates, teams can reduce preparation time while ensuring a proven, consistent structure is followed by every facilitator and designer. Quality standards are maintained and the feedback and improvement loop is kept in place, even at scale. 

How a connected workflow strengthens facilitation practices 

Bringing the entire design workflow into SessionLab is all about making the complex art of designing and delivering sessions simpler.

Rather than getting lost with multiple tools and repetitive busywork, SessionLab now helps you organize your workflow in a single place and streamline your process. Here’s how:

• Consistent alignment with stakeholder goals. By ensuring all important context is collected together, it’s easier to make design decisions based on learning objectives and desired outcomes. Everyone involved can get aligned easily and find everything they need in a single source of truth.
• Faster preparation cycles. Reusing existing materials and workflows helps speed up the design process and keep things running smoothly. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, your team can kickstart your design process with a proven structure.
• Easier reporting and continuous improvement cycles. With Forms connected to sessions, it’s easier to connect outcomes to objectives and collate feedback when it comes in. Track impact over time, ask AI to help with reports and insights and improve your facilitation practice.
• Systematize your process and ensure your proven workflow is followed, every time. When teams need to redesign from scratch, it’s easy for something to be missed or for inconsistencies to creep in. With a proven playbook to follow, standards are maintained and facilitators are supported at every stage of the design journey.
• Context-aware AI built on your content and instructions. Set workspace-wide AI context to get consistent results tailored to your preferred frameworks. AI-powered actions can help make smart changes to your session or generate materials instantly. Use AI to do busywork and help with sensemaking, not to replace creativity.  
• Present professionally. Whether you’re sharing a brief with a client or a report with stakeholders, everything looks polished and cohesive. With a simple visual overview and connected documents, it’s easy to guide stakeholders through a plan and get approval and tell the story of what happened afterwards.

SessionLab users like Luisia at Vlerick Business School are already seeing the benefits of  uniting their team’s workflow in a single, connected environment. 

SessionLab is helpful with alignments and processes. As our team has grown, it’s now easier to adapt the process, because it’s all there in SessionLab.

Christian Valentiner at Norconsult is also finding a lot of value in using SessionLab to create reusable training programs at scale and encourage a culture of continuous improvement.   

“We have a project manager’s course and a leadership initiation course that are set in SessionLab. We use these as templates, and as we learn things from evaluations and running those courses, we tweak things.”

Whether you’re a freelance facilitator wanting to deliver more value to clients or an L&D team designing programs at scale, SessionLab can help you maintain clarity, consistency, and professional standards throughout the entire lifecycle of a session. 

Check out this example template, complete with a brief, feedback form and client report to see how a connected workflow can work for you.

In conclusion

Designing workshops and training programs can amount to a lot of complex busywork. From organizing background information and chasing stakeholders to crafting an agenda and analyzing feedback: it all adds up.

But it can be made simpler.

With a connected workflow that supports your end-to-end planning process, SessionLab can help you focus on what matters most and facilitate with confidence.

Want to learn more? Check out our 3-minute video to see a connected workflow in action or get started by signing up for free.

In these complex, uncertain, and frankly scary times, facilitators are increasingly being asked to help teams think long-term, make sense of the uncertainty, and plan for the unknown. Whether you’re guiding a group through climate resilience strategies, preparing a nonprofit for demographic shifts, or helping a company imagine the impact of AI, future scenario planning can be a powerful tool for navigating future challenges.

This article is a practical introduction to how to run a scenario planning process. We’ll look at what futures thinking actually means (no crystal balls here), how scenario planning works, and why it’s so valuable for facilitators and teams. You’ll also find example use cases, other facilitation methods for working with futures, and a full workshop structure you can adapt to your needs.

For more methods and inspiration, download SessionLab’s Facilitating Futures playbook, created in collaboration with futurist Suzanne Whitby of Futures Fit. It’s packed with 15 practical techniques, facilitation tips, and real-world stories to support your work.

What is futures and foresight?

Futures thinking is a structured approach to imagining what might happen, why it could happen, and what we can do about it. It invites us to explore future conditions and the driving forces shaping tomorrow’s world. 

Foresight is the practice of using specific tools and methods to support that process, such as horizon scanning, market trend analysis, or scenario planning. While the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, futures is the broader mindset, and foresight is the toolbox.

Futures work is about discussing possible, plausible futures: spotting early signals of change, considering critical uncertainties, and helping groups navigate complexity with clarity and imagination.

Whenever life becomes more hectic and uncertain, scenario planning becomes more popular.

Kees van der Heijden, author of The Sixth Sense – Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios

What is scenario planning?

Scenario planning is a structured method for developing multiple scenarios. Scenarios, in this context, are plausible versions of the future, designed with the purpose of helping people, and teams, make better decisions in the present.

Instead of aiming for a single forecast, scenario planning helps teams explore a range of different future outcomes, generally based on uncertainties like regulation, interest rates, emerging technologies, climate impact, or cultural shifts. You can think of each scenario as a story, a narrative that reflects different variables and strategic possibilities.

This process is especially useful in strategic planning, innovation, risk management, and operational scenarios. The task of creating plausible narratives together, in teams or multidisciplinary groups, leads to deeper understanding among participants. As is often the case with facilitated workshops, the journey (process) is what really counts, more than the destination (outcome).

How facilitators can benefit from futures work

For a long time, I relied on just two tools when helping groups think about the future: backcasting and guided visualisation.

Guided visualisation is something I’ve used to open the door to imagination and hope. It is about guiding participants into a relaxed state and inviting them to time travel to a future world where things turned out ok (whatever that means for them).

After sharing what those imagined futures have in common, I’ve often used backcasting to encourage participants to define the practical steps to get there. These tools have helped me guide people in accessing both the practical and emotional layers of change.

I’ve used these techniques with everyone from university students to community leaders, mostly in the context of climate change and social justice work. I’ve been struck often by how powerful they can be, and how coherent our visions of the future often are.

The level of technology present in these future scenarios varied, but there was reliably more greenery. Cleaner air, quiet, and birdsong were frequent answers to my question What is the first thing you notice, what tells you that you are in a different world from today’s? These insights told the group something about what people truly value.

For years, these two tools were enough. But after joining the International Association of Facilitators’ SIG (Special Interest Group) on Futures, I’ve been amazed to learn just how many methodologies facilitators can use to help groups navigate rapidly changing environments.

In a world that’s changing rapidly, we need more than goals and plans. We need futures literacy: the capacity to think ahead, imagine alternatives, and act with intention. 

5 ways futures work supports facilitators and their groups

1. Brings clarity to uncertainty
   Futures methods help make sense of key drivers and emerging trends. You won’t predict the future, but you’ll be better equipped to face it.
   
2. Expands imagination and creativity
   We often plan based on what we already know. Futures work invites play, narrative, and curiosity.
   
3. Surfaces assumptions and values
   Scenario planning and speculative tools help people uncover what they believe, fear, or desire, helping to bring hidden perspectives into the open. Ultimately, this can lead to better decision making.
   
4. Supports resilience and readiness
   Exploring multiple scenarios allows teams to stress-test ideas, challenge blind spots, and prepare for unexpected events.
   
5. Strengthens group alignment
   A shared look at the future environment brings people together and supports more purposeful, values-driven strategic thinking.

One thing I notice is that often participants are rebuilding atrophied muscles of deciding what they want. We give up the power to design futures before we even know we’ve done it. Unlearning that habit, and asking hard questions often is frictionful but fruitful!

Ben Mosior, Leadership Development & Strategy Consultant, co-author of the Strategy Tactics Pip Deck

Real-world examples of future scenario planning in action

Facilitators are already using futures thinking in a wide range of contexts, from corporate strategy to environmental justice. Here are three examples from the Facilitating Futures playbook that show what this work can look like in practice.

Lighting the way: immersive futures for strategic change

Corporate foresight and participatory workshops

Suzanne Whitby, foresight facilitator and founder of Futures Fit, was invited to work with a European lighting company ready to move from reactive to proactive strategy. This is how she describes the reason her team was called in: “Their challenge: they were tired of being reactive. Their new generation of leaders were keen to embrace sustainability as a real strategic lever. They wanted to start shaping the future of their industry.”

The team co-created four future scenarios and guided every employee, from engineers to the C-suite, through participatory workshops. “Using the scenarios as provocations, teams explored how they might respond. Conversations were open, critical, and hopeful.”

Insights were harvested and turned into visual posters for all company sites. Leadership used this input to develop strategic pathways.

Real futures thinking isn’t just top-down. It lives in the everyday imagination of the whole organization.

Suzanne Whitby, founder of Futures Fit

Just energy transitions and collective sense-making

Multistakeholder facilitation in Brazil

Christel Scholten, managing director at Reos Partners Brazil, has used scenario processes for over a decade, focusing on justice, systems change, and inclusion.

In one case, her team facilitated a scenario project on Brazil’s just energy transition in 2040. It involved 30–45 participants over several in-person workshops, grounded in systems mapping and collective sense-making.

In Christel’s words: “We often facilitated a collective systems mapping exercise of the current state of the system… They would write these on hexagon sticky notes which we clustered on the wall. The next day these would be used as input to define the key uncertainties.”

Importantly, her team ensured inclusion of diverse perspectives:

Each scenarios process I facilitated involved Indigenous and Black people in the scenario team to integrate the diverse voices of the Brazilian population.

Christel Scholten, managing director at Reos Partners Brazil

Exploring the future of AI in facilitation

Workshop facilitation at a professional gathering

At the annual Facilita conference in Milan, Sara Tremi Proietti and Barbara Bellucci co-led a workshop asking how AI might reshape the future of facilitation.

Using the Futures Wheel method, they guided small groups through reflection, scenario building, and used live AI interaction via WhatsApp prompts they had pre-prepared for participants to use.

I was actually in one of those groups and really enjoyed how the structured approach guided our small group of five facilitators into sharing and discussing different visions of the future. There was room for utopia and dystopia, for airing hopes and fears as well as data-driven realism. Ultimately, those varied perspectives came together into a shortlist of possible directions, as well as initial ideas on how to future-proof our businesses.

Our goal was to guide participants into the future through small-group discussions and hands-on experimentation with AI… to explore potential blind spots in their thinking.

Sara Tremi Proietti, International Association of Facilitators, Italy chapter co-chair

Futures methods to try in your next workshop

You don’t need to be a foresight expert to guide meaningful futures conversations. With the right structure and a few adaptable methods, facilitators can help teams open up their thinking, explore change, and plan for what’s next.

Here are five versatile methods you can start using today, each linked to a different stage of a future scenario planning workshop.

To guide participants through a futures process, it helps to have a clear structure. The Facilitating Futures framework breaks a workshop into six distinct stages: Opening, Mapping, Anticipating, Envisioning, Embodying, and Acting.

This flow mirrors how many groups naturally explore complex issues. You begin by opening the space and shifting into a more expansive mindset. Then, you map the present to understand the forces already in motion. Anticipating helps participants explore what could happen next, while envisioning builds fuller pictures of different possible futures. Embodying brings these futures to life, not just as abstract ideas, but as something participants can feel, design, or express. Finally, in acting, the group returns to the present, identifying strategies and next steps with clarity and purpose.

It’s not a rigid sequence, but it’s a helpful arc for designing workshops that move from imagination to insight to action.

A note of caution: tools alone won’t make you a skilled facilitator of futures conversations. Futures thinking is a well-established discipline with roots in academia, and we strongly recommend getting to know its core concepts and ethics before jumping in. Sharing just a little of that background with your participants can go a long way too; it helps avoid the common traps of drifting into fantasy, fear, or vagueness that lead nowhere. 

Opening: Headlines from the Future

Headlines for the future is playful way to begin. Ask participants to imagine a future event or breakthrough, and then write a newspaper headline about it. This activity sparks creative thinking, surfaces hidden hopes or concerns, and sets a tone of exploration.

Use this early in your session to warm up the group and introduce the idea that multiple futures are possible. I’ve used it in workshops with local citizens to raise motivation around environmental conservation: will future headlines hail our good work, or condemn us for inaction?

Mapping: Future Trends

Once your group is thinking more broadly, it’s time to map the present. This method invites participants to brainstorm the trends shaping their industry or context across categories like technology, behaviour, business, or policy.

After identifying and prioritising trends, participants explore what opportunities or risks they might bring. This step creates a grounded foundation for imagining what could come next.

Anticipating: The Thing from the Future

This speculative game asks participants to imagine an object, service, or artefact from a future world. It’s simple, surprising, and works particularly well to stretch the imagination and loosen assumptions.

You can use this method to expand a group’s sense of possibility before moving into more structured scenario building.

Envisioning: Scenario Planning

The heart of many futures workshops, this method helps participants explore different plausible futures by creating a set of distinct scenarios. Typically, the group starts with two uncertainties (such as “policy: restrictive or supportive” and “tech adoption: fast or slow”) and maps them onto a 2×2 grid.

From there, small groups develop scenario narratives for each future quadrant. What’s happening in this future world? Who is affected? What does it mean for our strategy?

The scenario development process is an excellent tool to expand awareness and prepare for complexity.

Acting: Risks, Opportunities and Resilience

Virtually every futurist I’ve spoken to has offered some version of the following advice: never let a group leave a futures workshop without some action planning. Futures scenario design and all the other futures and foresight activities we’ve been looking it ultimately lead into making changes in the present. Therefore, it’s important to include an action-planning activity at the end, or risk leaving participants with a feeling of futility.

There are many action planning methods you might use, including Backcasting or, for a fun twist, Triz (a Liberating Structure in which you’ll be asking people to brainstorm actions they might take to obtain the opposite outcome to the one they desire).

If the group has identified a scenario they aspire to contribute to realizing, Risks, Opportunites and Resilience is a great method to apply.

In small groups, ask participants to discuss and record:

• Risks: What could go wrong? What might be disrupted, lost, or destabilised?
• Opportunities: What new possibilities might open up? Who could benefit?
• Resilience: How well prepared are we? What capabilities, resources, or relationships would help us respond or adapt?

This method works well at the end of a futures process, as a bridge into strategic planning. It supports balanced, practical conversations that go beyond excitement or fear, focusing instead on preparation and adaptability.

You can find these and many other methods in SessionLab’s Library. Just look for the keyword “Future”. 

Scenario planning: a closer look

Among the many tools in the futures facilitator’s toolkit, scenario planning stands out as one of the most structured and widely used. It has a long history, first formalised at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and later popularised by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s, where it helped the company anticipate and respond to the 1973 oil crisis. Since then, it’s been used by governments, businesses, nonprofits, and communities to build strategic capacity in times of uncertainty.

Rather than trying to predict the future, scenario planning explores what might happen if key uncertainties unfold in different directions. The typical approach involves identifying two critical variables (such as “regulation: tight or loose” and “tech adoption: fast or slow”) and using them to create a 2×2 matrix. Each quadrant becomes a distinct scenario: a plausible world with its own risks, opportunities, and dynamics.

Scenario planning is especially valuable when working with finance teams, corporate strategists, or communities tackling future growth and uncertainty. It’s a method that connects historical data and expert knowledge with structured imagination.

This method invites groups to:

• Engage deeply with uncertainty
  
• Stretch their thinking beyond business-as-usual
  
• See challenges and opportunities in new ways
  
• Uncover shared values and assumptions
  
• Prepare for a range of futures, not just one forecast
  

Scenarios are useful when they meet four criteria: they must be relevant, illuminating current circumstances and concerns, and connected to current thinking; challenging, making important dynamics that are invisible visible and raising questions about current thinking; plausible, logical and fact-based; and clear, accessible, memorable, and distinct from one another.

Adam Kahane, from his book Trasformative Scenario Planning – Working Together to Change the Future.

Once participants have imagined these worlds, they reflect on what each scenario would require. What new capabilities would they need? What strategies would still make sense? Where do their current assumptions hold up—and where might they fail?

Scenario planning can stand alone or form the centrepiece of a longer workshop, as we’ll see below.

From methods to flow: how to design a futures workshop

I often point out that workshops aren’t just an assembly of random methods. The real value lies in the flow: how one activity sets up the next, and how the whole session builds toward reflection, insight, and action.

This is especially true when working with uncertainty. Futures methods are powerful, but only when they’re placed with intention. If you’re wondering how to weave multiple futures tools into a coherent session, and what that might look like, check out this
Futures Workshop Template.

The template guides a group through a complete futures conversation, moving from warm-up to mapping trends, building scenarios, and planning action. It includes methods including Postcards from the Future, Futures Triangle, Scenario Planning, and Backcasting, all timed and sequenced in a practical agenda you can adapt to your own context.

Designing a scenario planning exercise doesn’t need to be overwhelming. With a collaborative approach, clear purpose, and practical tools, you can guide groups toward alignment and actionable outcomes. Using SessionLab can help by providing a simple scaffolding for selecting and arranging methods that supports creativity as well as avoiding having to start from scratch. We’ve recently added many futures-focused tools to the SessionLab method library, so you’ll find plenty to work with, whether you’re running a strategic foresight session, a creative exploration, or something in between.

5 tips for facilitating futures workshops

Futures methods are great, but they don’t run themselves. How you guide the process makes all the difference. Working with uncertainty, multiple perspectives, and long time horizons can surface hope, discomfort, even grief. It can also unlock imagination and bring people into deeper alignment.

Here are a few principles and tips to help you facilitate futures workshops with care and clarity, based on practical experience shared in the Facilitating Futures playbook.

1. Do your research

Doing some research about the group you are going to be working with is due diligence and common sense. Don’t push a timid group of new staffers to embody a utopian future, theatricals and all, in front of their boss.

Conversely, quiet, focused writing on sticky notes might not be the thing for energetic NGO volunteers. Interviews with your clients and, ideally, a few participants, will inform your thinking and enable you to create the right program for that specific group.

2. Stress that this is about action, not prediction

The idea that futures thinking is akin to having a magic ball or doing some sort of astrology is where most of the resistance to this work stems from. Clarify that we work with the future to build capacity in the present, and keep it practical.

Use concrete prompts, sensory language, and examples. Encourage groups to describe what people see, feel, say, or do in a future scenario. This helps shift conversations from abstract ideas to something more embodied and relatable.

3. Leverage diversity of opinions

Challenge the group if their views are too hopeful or too bleak. Futures work is at its most valuable when it skirts speculative fiction yet stays close to possibilities and realities. Full-fledged utopias and dystopias might be useful thought experiments, but for influencing our groups and organizations, it’s more useful to remember that all plausible futures will always be a mix of good and bad. Encourage the group to look at different possible angles.

4. Give it space

Some people readily jump into using their imagination but that is not all people. Rushing into these activities is likely to make your futures flat, unimaginative and yield little that is of use. Ease the group into these activities. The opening activities will help with this, as will some good examples: think of those ahead of time.

Imagination is like a muscle, it needs to be used. While participants found it strange to imagine positive futures by the third month we were reaching over 100 years into the future and found lots to celebrate.
Sophia Cheng, founder of With Many Roots

5. Always include action planning

Even when the focus is long-term, always return to the present. What insights will shape today’s decisions? What small steps can move us toward a better future? The real power of futures work lies not in prediction, but in preparation.

Don’t leave the group hanging and wondering: “so what was that for?” If you don’t have time for a longer closing activity, at least host a round of “What is one thing you’ll do/change as a consequence of this exercise?”

Want to go deeper?

Here are some well-regarded resources on the history and practice of scenario planning:

• Book: Transformative Scenario Planning by Adam Kahane
  An inspiring introduction to how scenario planning can be used for large, whole-system work.
• Book: The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwarz.
  A business-oriented classic on scenario planning and its strategic use.
• Website: Institute for the Future
  Workshops, training and lots of resources for deep dives into futures and foresight.
• Toolkit: Facilitating Futures
  
  Whether you’re running your first scenario planning workshop or expanding your future practice, having the right tools makes a difference. The Facilitating Futures playbook is designed to support you with practical methods, case studies, and real-world tips to use in any setting.
  
  Download your free copy and start shaping more thoughtful, courageous, and forward-looking conversations.

When working in Excel, I found myself frustrated with endless copy and pasting, manually calculating timings and struggling to stay on top of my learning flow.

Whether it was presenting a messy spreadsheet to clients or struggling to maintain formulas, the task of finalizing my agenda always filled me with dread. There has to be a better way, right?

Back when I had to use Excel, I would always end up with a completed agenda and the work got done. But the amount of mental load and busywork meant a lot of wasted time that I’d have rather spent on perfecting my facilitation design.

This is where SessionLab comes in.

In this post, we’ll unpack why SessionLab is such a game changer for anyone still using Excel for agenda planning or session design.

Why Excel falls short

Let’s start with the obvious: spreadsheets are not built for session design.

Excel and Google Sheets are great for tracking metrics or project timelines, but they fall apart when it comes to designing an agenda. Sure, you can do it. But should you?

Here are the usual pain points we hear from users who’ve used Excel to design their sessions.

• Manual time calculations: Shift one activity and you’re recalculating all the timings.
• Formatting nightmares: Ever tried to make a last-minute update on a spreadsheet and ruined the whole layout?
• No collaboration flow: Comments get lost in email threads or clunky file shares.
• Inconsistent style: Facilitators using spreadsheets often have their own system which makes knowledge sharing and consistency difficult. 
• Poor quality printouts: Exports are ugly, difficult to format and don’t make a great impression with clients.
• Knowledge gets lost: Agendas and supporting materials aren’t centralized, making it hard to find content. 

We get it. Learning new tools has a time cost. But here’s the way I think about cost when it comes to using Excel. What is my hourly rate? What else could I be doing with that time? What additional mental load do I take on by using this tool?

Yes, I can use a free spreadsheet tool to create my session, but when I spend a day creating and manually adjusting the agenda, the cost is actually quite high. 

Here’s a real example of a Team Dynamics Workshop agenda in Excel. 

Making changes becomes a chore

On one hand, Excel does the job. Each activity has a row and in the columns I have timing for each activity. I could absolutely run this current session and have a decent sense of what comes when. So I feel pretty organized, right? Kind of. 

As soon as something needs to change, the busy work begins. I need to manually copy and paste the row containing an activity. Then, I need to adjust the timing manually and update all affected entries. And if I colour-coding or timing formulas get broken? More manual updates that take me out of the creative flow.

For a single item, this is tedious, but going back and forth with a client can turn this into a nightmare. Working on V4 of your spreadsheet when a client sends back a revision of V2 can result in a lot of headaches and additional busywork.

“We designed a core one-day agenda with all the modules. But because each event is in a different location, the timing always shifts—starting early or late, changing breaks, or accommodating local logistics.

Without SessionLab, updating all those versions in Word or Excel would have doubled the amount of time we spent.”

Christian Valentiner from Norconsult

Difficult to overview, too unpolished to share

Understanding the learning flow of a session in Excel is hard. It’s near-impossible to see the entire agenda in one-screen without manually adjusting cell properties and then switching back. Want a simple visual breakdown? Again, this means manually hiding columns and rows or creating additional charts and formulas. 

When my agenda gets longer than a single page, I’m endlessly scrolling back and forth to try and get a handle on how the day flows together and what the experience is like for my participants. 

How about collaboration? Frankly, a spreadsheet with all the information I need to run the session doesn’t feel great to share with clients or stakeholders. It doesn’t look professional and there’s so much information on the screen, it’s easy for people to get lost. 

Excel can get the job done but there’s so much tedious manual work along the way that gets in the way of designing the best possible session. 

Now, here’s the same Team Dynamics Workshop agenda in SessionLab. 

The first thing you’ll notice is a cleaner interface that helps make the work of agenda design easier, but SessionLab goes way further.

Underneath the hood, you’ll find many features designed to make the agenda planning process smooth and intuitive.

Let’s explore how SessionLab improves over the Excel design experience below.

What makes SessionLab different

SessionLab isn’t a general-purpose tool. It’s designed specifically for designing workshops, training sessions, and facilitated meetings. Every feature exists because we’ve been there and felt the frustration.

We’ve designed training sessions in documents and spreadsheets and thought, “There has to be a way to do this without pulling my hair out!” 

In SessionLab, you don’t have to “hack” a document or spreadsheet to make it work. Let’s break down what this looks like in practice.

Automatic time calculations

Let’s say you’ve set up your agenda timing in your Excel spreadsheet. You’ve added a row for duration, overall timing and even what time it’ll be on the clock for each activity. Then something changes. Not only do you need to move around your rows, but you also need to recalculate and update timing.

Of course, you can work out a timing formula for my Excel agenda but in my experience, this is prone to human error, particularly when iterating on a session. There’s nothing worse than realizing you messed up your time calculation formula mid-session and having to amend in front of your participants. 

With SessionLab, timing is recalculated automatically, which means you don’t need to come up with formulas or make constant manual adjustments. Facilitators have peace of mind and can free-up mental space to focus on what’s important.

Intuitive drag and drop 

Anyone who has designed a workshop, event or training session knows how much can change and shift during the process.

In Excel, this means wearing out the CMD X and CMD V on my keyboard, reformatting the table and having difficulties seeing how small changes affect the agenda as a whole.

In SessionLab, you can easily drag and drop blocks to change the order of your session. Formatting is preserved, everything stays organized and I can quickly iterate without the hassle.

I can instantly minimize all blocks too, making it easier to see my session flow and move blocks into new positions, even if they have heaps of information attached.

Colour-coding and visual overview

As an agenda develops, it can quickly become loaded with details and become difficult to parse. Adding colour to rows and columns in Excel is possible, but inefficient. With SessionLab, a single click allows you to visualize your agenda and iterate efficiently.

Colour-coding is present on the minimap and your session overview. This means you can quickly zoom out and see a simple visual representation of your agenda.

Colour categories are also helpful when it comes to presenting to clients and stakeholders. It is so much easier to follow and present an agenda with a simple visual breakdown rather than with a busy spreadsheet. 

Want to see more examples? Check out this post with 10 example meeting agendas built in SessionLab.

Rich-text editing and flexible columns

It’s no secret that Excel is not designed for long-form text, but even adding simple instructions in an easy-to-read format is hard. I would regularly run into issues formatting text (basically, you can’t) and find it difficult to present instructions in a way that made it simple to actually run the activity on the day.

In SessionLab, you can easily style your text to make it simple to follow and add bulletpoints, checklists, notes and more to enrich your material. Instantly add in-line images, attachments and materials to create a usable agenda that everyone can understand.

With flexible, collapsible columns, it’s easy to go from seeing all the details to getting a simple overview with one-click. Rather than struggling to get the information you need, SessionLab makes it easy to work with your agenda and provide beautiful facilitator guides to your colleagues.

Professional outputs in a click

Excel is not a client-friendly format for presenting information. Getting approval on your design and giving stakeholders confidence in the session you’ve designed is an important part of the process.

Whether you’re creating a facilitator guide or sharing a finished draft, SessionLab creates professional quality outputs that make it easy to share your vision and get approval on your design. 

Export a beautiful, polished agenda in Word, PDF, PPT, QR code and more. Customize the printout to your needs and provide the right level of detail to your chosen audience.

Reusable content & templates

In Excel, agendas and supporting materials need to live separately. When teams start collaborating and reusing agendas, it’s so easy for agendas and handouts to go missing. In SessionLab, you can attach materials directly to a block or agenda so they’re never lost and everything is mastered in one-place. 

SessionLab also serves as a knowledge base for all your best content. Every activity and agenda you make can be added to your personal and team library for quick and easy reuse. Everything is organized and teams are able to improve efficiency and session quality at the same time.

Consistency across teams

Teams using SessionLab tell us time and time again that SessionLab enables them to work more consistently and efficiently. In practice, this means creating a repeatable session design process with shared templates, clear access rights, and a single place to find past agendas. For many, this is a huge upgrade from the mess of scattered files and inconsistent formats. 

The benefits go further than a faster workflow. When everyone has their own agenda format in Excel, ensuring high quality design and optimizing your workflow is hard. In SessionLab, teams can align on best practices and repeat what works. Learning is shared, standards are raised and the quality of what is delivered is improved. 

SessionLab vs Excel feature comparison

While it’s possible to design an agenda in Excel, the process is painful, frustrating and time-consuming.

When I think back to having to working in Excel, my lasting impression is not of creative agenda design or thinking about leaning objectives: instead, it’s all the work I had to redo after breaking formulas. It’s the manual edits I had to make and the frustration of getting everything to look good when presenting to others.

For facilitators like Tucker Wannamaker, there is no going back to Excel after using SessionLab. 

“Excel is not a great tool for professional workshoppers. SessionLab is the agenda tool.
We use it every day.”

Tucker Wannamaker, Facilitator & Inclusive Change Leader at Thrive Impact

Don’t settle for redoing work manually after breaking formulas and layouts, even the thought of designing an agenda in Excel gives me flashbacks.

SessionLab gives you the structure, speed, and flexibility you need to easily design engaging sessions and make you look while good doing it.

Combined in an opening or reflection activity, card decks feel like an invitation: to pause, to imagine, to engage with the work a little differently. Many card decks include inspiring illustrations, designed to awaken the imagination and introduce some wonder into your workday.

Here’s why facilitation card decks are such trusted tools:

• They help spark creativity when the blank page feels daunting.
• They’re quick to grab when you need a new idea, fast.
• They encourage hands-on engagement.
• They offer just enough structure, without being overly prescriptive.
• They can be playful or profound—or both.
• They’re a great way to learn and teach facilitation methods.

In this article, we’ve collected our favorite 10 card decks for facilitators, together with a few ideas for how to use them in your workshops.

Top tip: these also make excellent gifts for the facilitator in your life. Looking for the perfect birthday or holiday present for a workshop designer? Or for a great idea on how to thank a co-facilitator for the great work done? You’re in the right place. (Of course, that doesn’t mean you cannot gift them to yourself. Please do.)

Why use facilitation cards

At their core, facilitation card decks are collections of prompts, activities, methods, or visuals designed to support group work and collaboration. They might offer exercises, reflective questions, method ideas, or evocative images: anything that helps guide or enrich a process.

Facilitators generally use them in one of two ways:

1. For yourself

• As a design aid: think of them like a physical version of the SessionLab library and drag & drop agenda planner. You can lay out methods on a table, shuffle the order, explore what fits best.
• As a creative spark: draw a card when you’re stuck and let it guide your next move.
• As a learning tool: get familiar with new methods and build your toolkit.

As a craft, facilitation is made of many interconnected parts (tools, methods, mindset…) that compose an articulate system. I’ve often thought that cards lend themselves better than a (linear) manual to explaining what facilitation is and how it works, because of the possibilities of reorganizing and rearranging all the different parts. More like creating a model than like telling a story.

2. With participants

• As an interactive activity: let participants draw cards randomly, or choose ones they are drawn to, and share some thoughts.
• To support dialogue: use cards to surface insights, structure group work, or create shared understanding.
• To bring in beauty: well-designed cards are visually appealing, and just fun to use. Surprise and awe are solid pathways to making learning experiences more memorable.

I also like to leave a deck of illustrated cards (usually Dixit cards) on the table for anyone to look through or fidget with. In my experience, this can support focus and comfort, especially for those of us who are neurodivergent, or who find it easier to engage when there’s something to interact with beyond just the trainer.

Digital vs physical facilitation cards 

There’s a special magic to physical cards. A beautifully printed deck you can shuffle, hand around, or spread across a table brings joy in the room, and there is a benefit in having participants focus on a physical object while they talk. This is a similar principle to Lego Serious Play ® workshops, and in fact any workshop introducing physical artifacts: it helps us to “think with our hands”. 

Most of the card decks listed below are available for purchase, but if you are on a budget, many creators also offer print-your-own versions. I’d recommend bringing the files to a professional printing place to get them nicely printed and, most importantly, professionally cut!

Many decks are also available digitally. Some can be used directly in tools like Miro or MURAL (check out SessionLab’s own Workshops & Wizards on Miroverse). If you plan to integrate facilitation cards in an online workshop, it’s worth checking on the cards’ main website for any dedicated apps and web tools to use on the go. Whatever you do, make sure to test online tools before any virtual sessions! 

Now, onto our favorites. There are dozens of beautiful decks out there: this selection only includes cards we’ve used ourselves here at SessionLab (and, in one case, even designed).

1. Facilitator Cards 

Created by Meg Bolger and Sam Killermann of FacilitatingXYZ fame, this 60-card deck is like a Swiss Army knife for facilitators. Each card represents an activity or method, grouped by purpose (e.g., opening, exploring, closing).

You can design an entire session by laying out a sequence of cards, or pull one mid-workshop when you need to adapt. They’re great for in-the-moment pivots.

And they’re beautifully designed: simple, intuitive, and focused on what matters most. The white space on the front is erasable, allowing you to use it to jot down your own notes, reflections, observations or, perhaps, the timing you need for each activity. 

The same team also set up Virtual Facilitator Cards that include principles and activities for online facilitation. 

Best for: Session design
Available at: facilitator.cards

2. Workshop Tactics PIP deck

Yes, it’s pricey. But you’re essentially getting a facilitation masterclass in a box. Each card outlines a practical workshop tactic with clear steps, when to use it, and why it works.

It’s structured enough for beginners, yet expansive enough for pros. Great for those leading strategy, design, or innovation sessions, for team leads, and for anyone who wants to learn a lot about creating better workshops, in quick, digestible chunks. Like all other PIP decks, you can get a physical deck or an online version, which comes with a video class on how to use them, an associated Miro template, and more resources. 

Not sure if it’s worth it? Try a tester PDF, for free.

Best for: Deep diving into learning, alone or in a team
Available at: pipdecks.com

3. Workshops & Wizards

Okay, we had to include our own! Workshops & Wizards is a gamified card deck designed to help teams build facilitation and soft skills. Think Dungeons & Dragons meets team learning.

It’s especially useful for L&D teams, internal facilitators, and those who want to make facilitation skills training more engaging. SessionLab’s Head of Content, James Smart, created the Workshops & Wizard cards custom, as a support for our own internal training on facilitation skills (what can I say, we lean nerdish over here!). We enjoyed them so much we decided to follow-up with a public version. 

In this article, you’ll find all the information you need to start sharing some facilitation magic with your groups, including ideas for activities you might want to run. 

The Workshops & Wizards cards are currently available in digital format and print-to-play, but if there is enough interest, we’ll print some real-world decks as well, so let us know if that is something you’d like to see.

Register your interest in a physical copy of Workshops & Wizards using the link below. 

For online workshops, you can explore and play directly in this Miro template. Do let us know how it goes! 

Best for: Training in facilitation and soft skills
Available at: SessionLab, print-to-play

4. Liberating Structures Cards

Liberating Structures are often quoted as the most used methods in facilitation, and for good reason. These microstructures bring clarity, engagement, and inclusion into group processes. Each Liberating Structure is essentially a replicable, modular facilitation method, and they work well combined in “strings”.

These cards are a great way to learn more about Liberating Structures, keep a handy reminder of all the different possibilities, and make designing the right flow for your next workshop simple and fun.

A deck of Liberating Structures Design Cards has 57 cards: 

• A set of cards with the 33 Liberating Structures;
• 6 cards that explain how to use the deck;
• 8 extra cards providing extra guidance for some of the most commonly used structures (such as 1-2-4-all, Impromptu Networking, and Open Space Technology);
• 11 bonus cards with tips and variations;
• Plus, the deck comes with poster illustrations and three ready-to-use workshop templates.

Each card consists of three elements: space (how the space is arranged and what materials are needed), invitation (a question to ask for ideas or proposals), and the sequence of steps (the order of actions and time allocation). And yes, you can also find all the Liberating Structures in the SessionLab library.

Best for: Designing participatory sessions
Available at: TheLiberators.com

5. IDEO Method Cards

This deck from IDEO shares 51 design methods used in their human-centered design process. Each card is a mini-lesson in how to understand users, generate ideas, and prototype solutions.

Great for design thinking workshops, brainstorming ideas, user research planning, or adding a spark of curiosity to a team meeting. You can sort them by four color coded categories (Learn, Look, Ask, Try) and combine them to build your own process. 

Having said that, I personally love the IDEO cards for their architectural, urban-cool design, and have used just the illustration part in various workshops with such prompts as:

• Pick three cards that describe this project and tell us why.
• Choose a card that symbolizes what you are taking home from the workshop and share it in your small group.
• Pick three cards at random and combine them into a story.

Best for: Sparking creative thinking
Available at: IDEO

6. metaFox coaching cards

As there are a lot of different metaFox decks, and many different possibly ways of using them. I recommend starting out with a ready-made template, Peer Coaching with Pictures. As part of this starter package, you can download, for free, a print-to-play set, and see if the coaching cards are for you. The template will guide you step-by-step to invite participants to choose an image that reflects their current challenge or opportunity, then explore the story behind it. It’s ideal for beginners who want to hone their coaching skills!

These cards use metaphorical images to support coaching conversations and stimulate emotional intelligence. They are meant to stimulate reflection in peer learning, team coaching, or helping participants access their intuition. Simple and powerful.

metaFox coaching cards are also available as online icebreaker questions with a bespoke tool.

Best for: Peer coaching and reflection
Available at: metafox.eu

7. Dixit

Though originally a party game, Dixit cards are commonly used by facilitators for a reason: they’re rich in imagery, and completely language-independent.

Each card is a surreal, dreamlike illustration, ideal for opening up conversations and bringing imagination and wonder into the room. I often use them as icebreakers/connectors at the start of a workshop. When participants walk in, they find them all scattered prettily on a table (or if I have enough time for that, displayed in neat concentric circles!) as I ask them to select one, which questions such as:

• Which card represents your team right now?
• What does this project’s ideal future look like?
• Choose a card that sais something about how you are feeling right now.

Depending on how large the group is, the stories can be told in a full circle, or in small groups. This simple activity never fails to yield insight, surprises, exciting moments in which similar ideas or metaphors are shared (“yes we are like a boat on a storm! I picked the another image with water…”) and concepts to refer back to (“we’ll work on alignment on your vision next, like in the card Alan picked with the telescope..”) 

Great for multilingual groups, visual learners, or any time you want to lower the barrier to deep conversation. Facilitators reading this, go to the comments section and confess: how many Dixit card sets do you have? (I have 5, which is a few more than I need, and I usually use the Visions or the Anniversary sets.)

Best for: Storytelling and metaphors, working in languages other-than-English
Available at: Game stores everywhere

8. We! Connect Cards

You might have heard Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, discuss the importance of what she calls magical questions.

A magical question is a question posed to a group that everybody in that group would be interested in answering, and everyone is interested in hearing each other’s answers.
Priya Parker

You can of course come up with your own magical questions, but the We! Connect Cards are a way to have a selection in your pocket at any time. Designed by Chad Littlefield, these 60 square cards offer prompts that range from light-hearted to thought-provoking. The different “levels” are easy to sort, with clearly color coded categories. They’re sturdy, practical, and perfect for warm ups at project kickoffs, retreats, or easing into a deeper workshop.

Besides the facilitation cards, this online shop is a treasure trove of useful gadgets for facilitation. I recently bought a pack of We! Connect sticker nametags to bring an extra boost of creativity to a large networking conference. Each sticker has space for attendees to write their name, as well as an interesting, no-nonsense conversation starter such as “I am trying to solve the challenge of..” and “I would love to know more about..”

Best for: Kickstarting authentic conversations
Available at: weand.me

9. GroupWorks Card Deck

A bit older, but still a gem. GroupWorks offers 91 cards representing patterns of excellent group process, from simple things like “Circle” to complex patterns like “Whole System in the Room”. 

The cards were created by more than fifty volunteers (the Group Pattern Language Project) from diverse organizational backgrounds who collaborated over three years to express the core wisdom at the heart of successful group sessions.

You can use them to reflect on a meeting, plan a workshop, or develop your own facilitation practice. They’re not tied to specific activities but help you think about how groups function best. I’ve had these since the beginning of my facilitation career and they’ve been a precious reminder to deepen my thinking and intention around how to best support group gatherings. 

Also available as a free PDF, for the virtual space as an iPhone app, as well as in Spanish, German and French translations. 

Best for: Understanding group process
Available at: groupworksdeck.org

10. AI Tinkerer’s Cards

This niche but timely deck helps teams explore Generative AI: what it is, how it works, and how to put it to use. Useful to open up that particular can of worms with your team and figure out how to leverage AI tools in a way that works for you. The cards were designed by Alexandre Eisenchteter, with input from the AI Tinkerer’s Club as training tools. Besides the deck itself, you’ll find resources, templates and activities all aimed to familiarize small teams with the potential of AI. 

We’ve used these cards at one of our recent SessionLab team retreats to share knowledge on how AI assistants work and discuss both how to best use AI tools to make our work more effective, and how to support facilitators through AI. Later in the year, we launched a revamped AI Assistant that can help speed up and improve design work, automatically translate your sessions, add relevant context, tweak text based on the intended audience and more. That is to say, these cards worked for us!

Best for: Training on AI with teams
Available at: AI Tinkerer’s Cards, print-to-play 

Bonus: Make your own cards

Turns out print-to-play is not the only low-cost way of getting some brand-new facilitation cards. You can also have participants create their very own, bespoke deck! Creating their own set of workshop flashcards is a brilliant way to encourage reflection, debrief a training session, and give everyone a gift to bring home. 

Want to make it happen?

Just prep some blank cards and provide:

• Markers and pens
• Magazines
• Scissors and glue
• Time

Invite your group to reflect and capture:

• Tools they’ve learned
• Insights from the session
• Ideas they want to try

Find more details in SessionLab’s Library of facilitation methods.

Which facilitation cards do you love?

Facilitators tend to geek out over cards (guilty as charged). If I am not entirely sure what activities to run at a certain event, I’ll certainly slip a pack of Dixit cards in my bag, just in case. On my library shelf, there are even more, including a couple of decks in Italian only (my own version of facilitation training cards that come with the book Facilitiamoci, and this fun set of group archetypes from a book called The Village). 

How about you? What decks do you love? Which ones do you reach for again and again? Drop your recommendations in the comments, or come share in our friendly facilitator community!

Send participants on a learning quest, discuss what equipment perfect* facilitators might use or give kudos for positive examples of facilitation in action. 

Learn more about how to use Workshops & Wizards to support your session below. Download the free print-at-home version, try out the digital deck and register your interest in a physical edition. 

What is the Workshops & Wizards deck? 

Workshops & Wizards is a deck of cards that helps teach key facilitation skills, improve collaboration and help you run better workshops and meetings. Each card is a magical item that represents a core skill that helps facilitators, leaders and anyone working in a team to improve how they work together.

Below, you’ll find suggestions for how to use the deck for standalone activities, to support team building and as an entire training flow. 

The deck is designed for play and for experimentation and we know that creative facilitators like you will come up with your own wonderful ways to use the cards.

We’re still testing Workshops & Wizards and would love to get your feedback, suggestions and thoughts before moving towards a physical deck you can hold in your hands. 

If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know here!

You can also register your interest in a physical copy of Workshops & Wizards using the link below. 

How do I use the Workshops & Wizards deck?

I created the first prototype of the Workshops & Wizards to support internal facilitation training at SessionLab. 

We introduced the cards at the start of the session and encouraged folks to “give” the cards to other members of the team as they demonstrated the core facilitation skill on the card.

Throughout the session, the team gave one another kudos, had conversations about what they might improve and the cards they hoped to get, and even created their own cards during their session. They were great fun to use and helped engage the group in the training material.

This updated and expanded version of Workshops & Wizards can be used in a variety of ways, but here’s what we think it’s best at:

• Supporting facilitation and leadership training, particularly when you touch on the skills covered by the cards.
• Sparking conversations about facilitation skills and group dynamics. You might use the cards at the opening of a session to set intentions for how we want to show up or during a team building workshop to understand how your group might improve how they collaborate. 
• Giving participants an opportunity to give kudos when they see others demonstrate great collaboration or positive group behaviour. You might bring them to your regular workshops and meetings to bring attention to positive behaviours and celebrate one another during the session. 
• Exploring areas of personal development and facilitating self reflection. Facilitation skills = leadership skills = collaboration skills. These cards can be used to support personal development, whether individually or in a group. 

Of course, these are all just suggestions. We encourage you to play, experiment and let us know how you like to use them!

The cards 

Workshops & Wizards is a set of 22 cards separated into 3 levels and 3 suits – hand, heart and head. Every card represents a facilitation skill or aspect of a facilitator’s mindset. Let’s explore them now!

Level 1 cards

The seven Level 1 cards represent core facilitation skills and aspects of successful collaboration.

Level 1 cards are a great way to start having conversations about group dynamics, teach some of the most fundamental aspects of facilitation and to celebrate positive group behaviours!

Level 2 cards

The eight Level 2 cards go a little deeper, asking participants to pay greater attention to group dynamics and what might make others feel safe and valued.

Level 2 cards create an opportunity to bring some of that “invisible” facilitation work into the light and discuss softer aspects of great collaboration.

Level 3 cards

The eight Level 3 cards include facilitation skills and techniques that help move groups past obstacles and towards action.

Level 3 cards are an opportunity to talk about concrete techniques that participants can bring to future collaborations and group settings.

When using the cards with a new group, I recommend you start with the level 1 cards only. These seven cards create plenty of scope for learning and conversation without potentially overloading participants. In most of our suggested exercises, you’ll introduce level 2 and 3 cards later in the process.

It’s worth noting that none of these skills are “better” than any others and instead, they correlate more with a learning journey from the general fundamentals of facilitation through to some specific actions and outputs that may be beneficial for a facilitator to learn. 

The suits 

The Workshops & Wizards deck is organized into three suits: Head, Hand and Heart. 

Head cards represent ways of thinking and perspectives you might hold or encourage in others. 

Hand cards represent more practical facilitation tools and techniques you might call on during a session.

Heart cards represent qualities you may embody as a facilitator and softer ways of being that can impact group dynamics. 

In my experience, facilitation is fluid. Different faciltiators often have completely different ways of thinking about facilitation and the skills used while facilitating. 

These suits are just one possible categorization of core facilitation skills. Use them to create discussions, organize the deck and help participants consider what kinds of skills they naturally gravitate towards and which may need development.  

Downloads & resources

Here, you’ll find a PDFs for the print-at-home version of Wizards and Workshops.

Print at home deck

• Updated version of the full deck including 2 copies of each card, activity flashcards and wildcards (PDF)
• Updated Level 1 cards only (PDF)
• Updated Level 2 cards only (PDF)
• Updated Level 3 cards only (PDF)

Generally, you’ll need as many cards as you have participants and as such, you’ll likely need to print out multiple copies of the appropriate PDF (minus the cover page.) To make this easier, use the level specific PDF to get the extra cards you need easily.

You can also find links to the previous version of the deck here:

• Full deck including 2 copies of each card and wildcards (PDF)
• Level 1 cards only (PDF)
• Level 2 cards only (PDF)
• Level 3 cards only (PDF)
• Full deck in Spanish, kindly translated by Marta Porta. (PDF)

Miro template

The Miro template includes the full Workshops & Wizards deck plus additional assets for virtual workshops. You’ll find everything you need to bring the deck to your next online session.

Workshops & Wizards activities

Below, you’ll find a set of activities we’ve designed to help teach groups facilitation skills using the cards, support your meetings and give kudos.

Magical Kudos

Using a set of 3 cards, participants spot examples of effective facilitation in answer and give one another kudos during a session. We found this particularly effective during a facilitation training session we ran at a recent team retreat.

For me, good facilitation looks a lot like good collaboration and so you can use this exercise to support any kind of workshop or collaborative session and give your team the opportunity to reflect and celebrate healthy group dynamics.

Wizard Mingle

This activity is a simple networking activity which uses the cards to kickstart conversations about facilitation and group dynamics. After giving each person a card, participants must mingle, greet each other in a manner befitting a witch or wizard and then discuss the skills noted on their cards.

You can use this activity at the beginning of skills development sessions and facilitation training, regardless of whether you want to use the cards later in the session.

Wizard’s Boon

Wizard’s Boon is an icebreaker/check-in activity where participants select a card to embody during the session. Begin with a quick question about how the party in Lord of the Rings might have used the items to peacefully resolve Middle Earth’s challenges before inviting the group to choose a card they’ll keep for the rest of the meeting.

If using the digital version, try giving everyone a backpack and have them keep their item there for an added sense of ownership.

Facilitation Market

In this more involved training game, participants will first select their favourite items from the market and then work together in pairs to explore how a facilitation witch or wizard might use those items to lead an effective session. Pairs will then present learnings and ideas to the group, leaving everyone with a heap of crowd-sourced insights they can bring to their facilitation practice.

Personal Development Quest

Best used as a closing reflection, this activity asks participants to choose a card representing a skill they’d like to work on. Next, the present their quest to develop that skill to a small group who gives support and advice on how they might develop. Go round the circle until everyone has received support and then send everyone on their respective quests!

License and credits

Workshops & Wizards work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You’re free to use, adapt and remix this material so long as you give clear attribution, indicate if changes were made, do not use the material for commercial purposes and distribute materials under the same license.

Workshops & Wizards is designed by James Smart for SessionLab.
Testing and development by Deborah Rim Moiso.
Visual design and illustrations by Laura Vidal.

Feedback

As mentioned above, we’re working on a physical edition of Workshops & Wizards and welcome all feedback. If you have any feedback, suggestions or would like to collaborate, please let us know with this short feedback form.

If you’d like to register your interest in a physical copy and get updates on the project, you can also leave your email address below.

In this article we’ll look into all the ways SessionLab helps facilitators and trainers collaborate effectively while working on a workshop or event.

We’ll cover every stage of the process, from initial design all the way to delivery and share how you can streamline your process and creating engaging experiences with the help of SessionLab.

The first part of a facilitator’s job is often quite a solitary affair: me, at my desk, sometimes with some help from AI, working on an agenda to get to a sense of what a certain workshop or event will be like. If you want to learn more about how to use SessionLab’s features such as colour-coding, a methods library, time calculation and more, to go from an initial idea all the way to a complete agenda design, take a look at this article.

Once a session plan is ready, a different part of the work begins: the next steps are going to be all about collaboration, co-design, and information sharing, 

Numerous stakeholders must be brought in before the workshop begins. This includes, depending on the specific situation, co-facilitators, assistants, staff, clients, and participants. All these parties have different needs and requirements in terms of how to view and interact with the session plan.

Larger events and conferences are among the most technically challenging for facilitators to run. They usually require a lot of coordination among staff, with different types of plans and instructions being shared depending on the various roles involved. I’ll therefore be using a large (150 people) in-person networking event as an example. 

Here is what we will cover:

Designing a large event or conference using SessionLab

The quantity of information exchanged during the organization of a large-scale event can be quite daunting. In the next paragraphs, I’ll break it down step by step. Let’s start with the basic agenda for the event. 

In this example, I’ve been called in to design and facilitate a 150-people conference for professionals working in the same business field. People will be joining from all over the world: some will know one another, but most will not. Everyone will want to make the most of their time together.

Of course, it’s not enough to just put workshop participants in the same room to get a magical spark of connection. Carefully designed activities will help them meet, build professional relationships, learn together and, hopefully, even kick-start future projects.

The draft agenda I’ve designed includes various opportunities to meet and mingle, long breaks, and many different rounds of small-group work, giving people the chance to interact with as many participants as possible, without it getting too overwhelming.

Now that my basic plan is ready, as main facilitator for the event I have 3 key needs:

1. Intuitive ways to collaborate on the agenda with my co-facilitator and with clients;
2. Flexible options for sharing my plan differently with different stakeholders;
3. Easy-to-retrieve lists of materials and tasks.
   

Luckly, all of that (and a few more useful bits and bobs) has been thought out in the SessionLab Planner. Let’s see how.

Sharing the plan with my co-facilitator

Let’s say I’ve created a draft plan on my own and am now calling in a co-facilitator, James, to discuss and fine-tune it together. 

Note that if you are using the free or individual plans, getting a gig for a large event might be a good trigger to switch to the Pro plan.

The individual plan is designed for (unsurprisingly) individual use. On the individual plan, you can still enable people to view your session, but switching to the Pro plan might be a good call once you find yourself needing more advanced collaboration options, such as real-time editing of the same document from multiple accounts, and exchanging back-and-forth comments.

To learn more about the differences between plans and whether upgrading is for you, check out SessionLab’s pricing options.

Here is how SessionLab helps me stay on the same page (literally) with my co-facilitator:

1. Giving editing rights

I can easily add another person to the session with editing rights. This gives James the power to change the session directly. Co-facilitation takes a lot of mutual trust! Using different colours to identify who made what edits, or to draw attention to a certain point, is very helpful at this stage.

2. Commenting

I, James, and in fact anyone I give viewer or editor rights to the session can start an asynchronous conversation using comments. This is where I am most likely to ask a question, such as “Do you think 20 minutes is enough for this activity?”, for example.

3. Assigning people to a section

When sharing the stage, it is absolutely essential to know who will be doing what. Alternating taking the lead is helpful for everyone: it preserves my and James’ energy, and it’s easier to keep the attention high as well, as we have two different voices, paces, and styles.

When we are ready to decide who will do what, we’ll simply add the Assigned To column to our session plan and fill it in, so we can clearly, at a glance, envision who will be leading which section or activity.

Reviewing the plan with clients

Client meetings punctuate the various stages of the planning process. During these meetings, it’s common to:

• go through the entire agenda, from high-level to details;
• decide the order of speakers;
• fine-tune the questions that will frame conversations;
• agree on matters of logistics, such as the timing of lunch breaks;
• and more.

Here are five actions I’ll commonly take, using SessionLab to support collaboration with clients and organizers:

1. Using comments to solve open questions

A client can be an individual, but is more often a small team of people deeply involved in the event’s organization, such as a project manager, a communication officer, someone looking at the logistics side, and more. Typically, I’ll introduce the plan during a call, and give everybody involved viewing rights.

Giving everyone the right to edit directly could get too confusing, but comments are a great way to have asynchronous conversations, draw people in by mentioning them, and keep track of who said what about which part of the agenda. 

As session owner, I receive an email alert anytime new comments are added, helping me keep track of what is going on. There is usually a point in time when comments multiply, then die down as issues are resolved, one by one. 

2. Getting some help from AI

In my experience, what clients most need as we fine-tune the plan is clarity. SessionLab’s AI Assistant helps by reformulating, simplifying, or translating in another language (or in a different style or jargon) explanations for a certain activity I might have hastily written. 

When aligning with my co-facilitator, for example, there is no need to explain what Impromptu Networking means. We both know and practice this method. With the AI Assistant, I can add some explanations and context for my client in one click. 

3. Directing attention by color-coding text

SessionLab has a simple text editor that allows you to do all the obvious things, such as bold or underline text. I like to use different colours to draw attention to things: for example, red is for issues or questions that need to be solved as soon as possible.

Colors assigned to the Category bar are also useful to help clients orient themselves in the session. In this case, I’ve coded them for different types of activities, but they would also be adapted, for example, to show at a glance how the different sections relate to learning objectives. 

4. Adapting the session view to the audience

Before going through the agenda with clients, I find it helpful to ask myself what it is that they most need to know at a certain point in time. It’s really easy to get bogged down by details. To counteract this, hide all columns except for the Time, Title and Description, or start meetings and run-throughs by showing the simple Overview, which shows the entire session flow at a glance. 

5. Exporting plans in PDF & Word

If at any time someone needs a downloaded version of the plan, even if it’s not definitive (e.g. to print out and bring to a visit at the caterers’), it can be done, in PDF or Word format. It’s easy to customize the columns to that only relevant information is printed out. The style of these printouts really helps clients understand the flow, read through it quickly, and looks professional to boot!

Preparing materials lists for smooth logistics

Speaking of print-outs, let’s talk about materials and logistics. As the date of the conference gets closer, another important task for the facilitation team is to prepare detailed lists of materials we’ll need. This includes posters, printouts, participant kits and, of course, markers, papers, and sticky notes. 

To do this, I’ll just add the Materials column to the plan. All columns are flexible, meaning it’s possible to add them or hide them depending on the need of the moment.

I think that effective collaboration with the people who are working behind the scene, getting everything ready, is key to a successful workshop. Because of this, it’s important to fill out the Materials column carefully and share it with the logistics team. The rest of the time, it can stay hidden. If I am procuring materials myself, I’ll probably also print a version, on paper or PDF, to have handy when I go to the stationery shop or make an online order.

Sometimes, materials are not physical items but digital ones. Slidedecks come to mind as a common use case: in this networking event, for example, the keynote speaker has sent her slides over a few days in advance. By adding them as attachments to the relevant block, I can make sure nothing gets lost and everything is easy to retrieve, being all in the same place.

Another SessionLab feature that really helps with logistics are To-Do notes. I personally am a great fan of the feeling of ticking through a to-do list, and add them in various places of my plan to check we are on track with preparations. 

A brightly colored note at the start of each day, for example, is a good place to detail requirements for how the room should be set up, making communications with conference room staff a breeze.

Save time when briefing facilitation assistants and speakers

In a large event such as this one, it’s common to bring in some extra help. In this case, the client has assigned a few facilitation assistants who will sit at each table to support the conversation and take notes. These are often, including for this conference, junior staff, and/or folk whose main job is not facilitation, and who are not deeply involved in the planning process from the start. 

To quickly get them up to speed and give them all the information they need to successfully fulfill their role, I usually add an extra column, such as the Instructions column. To be extra clear, I can rename it Instructions For Assistants. This is where I add details on needs and expectations from supporting staff.

Last but not least, speakers will also need to get a sense of the plan for the day. In many cases, these are busy people with many engagements who are not interested in knowing all the ins and outs of the plan. What do speakers need to know to perform their role successfully? Probably all they need is a general sense of the plan for the day, what time they will start and end, and what happens just before and after. 

Sending them a QR code with a general overview of the session is probably the best option here.

Exporting session plans and sharing with workshop participants

Plans change all the time. Because of this, I much prefer to share links to the SessionLab Planner rather than download a plan that might soon be changed. Needs related to logistics, such as last-minute changes from the caterer, can impact timing and quickly render a printed plan not only obsolete, but likely to provoke chains of misunderstandings or errors.

Having said that, there can still be various reasons to download session plans and send them in PDF or Word format. Recently I worked for a EU agency where this was a requirement: any major change to the plan had to be recorded in their system by sending an email with an updated, Word, version. Whatever my qualms about this (I am very wary of the “Version 4_May_FINAL-FINAL” effect, if you know what I mean), it’s something as a contractor I had to adhere to. Fortunately, it’s very easy to download a new version from SessionLab any time that is needed.

The Overview button in SessionLab is a handy way of sharing updated information with participants. Using a link or QR code, it allows me to send participants a brief, legible overview of the session, and it’s synched with the session plan, so it will always reflect the latest changes!

Pro tip: write catchy, participant-friendly titles from the start. The Online Agenda automatically displays an overview with only the Time and Title and Description columns (plus the color-coded Category). If you are going to share it with participants, make sure those titles are legible to a general audience. Crafting attractive titles and avoiding jargon will help with setting expectations and getting everyone excited for the event!

Getting ready to deliver

So here we finally are. It’s the day of the event. Participants have received the program, my co-facilitator and I have had a pre-workshop chat (if you’d like to learn more about those, I highly recommend getting your free copy of the Cofacilitation Playbook by Romy Alexandra and Maria Niederwieser). Assistants and staff are briefed, it’s time to get this conference started!

What are my last-minute checks and rituals?

• Room arrangements. It’s a cliche to say that the facilitator will show up and start moving chairs around, but it’s often true for me! In this case, we are working in a professional conference venue and moving chairs will not be required, but I’ll still take a look if any posters need to be hung up. Are materials readily available where we need them? 
• Connecting with my co-facilitator and team. In the rush and moderate chaos of participants arriving, it’s still important to find a moment, even if it’s only 5 minutes over coffee, to connect with the team on a personal level. I’ll ask for a quick round of how everyone is feeling, check if there are any last-minute communications, perhaps set an intention for the day.
• Tech checks. Whether working online or in real life, showing up early to check the technology is always important. And because there is so much going on at large events, I’ve made myself a to-do list of what to check on the morning of the event.

Timing is of utmost importance for this type of large event. In order to keep track of it myself, I’ll generally wait until the last possible minute to download and print a PDF version. Yes, I try to save paper, but I also want to be prepared in case something goes wrong with the tech. I personally am a bit old-school and take notes on the plan as we go along. I’ll often also have a simplified version of the program up on posters in the room, so everyone (me included) can quickly see where we are and what happens next. 

More technically proficient people will certainly prefer viewing the session plan on a tablet and use the Time Tracker feature to keep track of time as the session proceeds, instead of my paltry pencilled-in notes.  The Time Tracker function is a great way to quickly communicate changes to the session made on the fly. The session timing automatically updates, so as long as everyone involved in running the session keeps the SessionLab agenda open on their devices, they can refer to it as a single source of truth for the plan, as it evolves.

In closing

As we’ve seen throughout the article, all these collaboration features in SessionLab’s Planner were specifically designed with facilitation and training needs in mind. To me, using these collaborative features means:

• Balancing control and collaboration: my co-facilitator and I retain editing rights, and can visualize the entire situation at a glance, while at the same time sharing information openly and enabling various stakeholders to comment, thereby encouraging a collegial, transparent approach to work.
• Keeping it all together. Information is not scattered in a bunch of different email threads but is compactly kept on the same page, easy to access at any time.
• Ultimately, by sharing information this way, everyone involved in planning, designing and bringing the session to life is set up for success.

Extra bonus: all this information is saved for me to refer to next time. It will be easy to duplicate, edit, copy and paste bits of this massive work, to facilitate creating the next great event. By turning the session into a template, I can make it available to the rest of my team in our shared workspace.

I hope I’ve managed to convey how useful these tools are for any professional facilitator, trainer, event and workshop designer. Are you ready to give them a try? Sign up (for free) from this link.

Within AVIATAR, Agile coaches play a central role in supporting teams and leaders with structured collaboration, continuous improvement, and change initiatives. To design and deliver effective workshops that support these goals, Alexander Simon and the Agile coaching team relies on SessionLab.

From Excel to a smarter, more visual way to plan workshops

Before adopting SessionLab, workshop planning often happened in Excel, which was time-consuming and didn’t support efficient collaboration. Once the team was introduced to SessionLab, things changed quickly.

“When I first started using SessionLab, I realized how much time I could save—and how much better it was as a knowledge management tool for our workshop designs.”

Now, workshops are planned in a flexible, visual format that encourages smooth collaboration from the start. Agile coaches are able to plan effectively and support their teams across a variety of uses cases and business functions:

“I use SessionLab for designing diverse workshops: for example Management Workshops for drafting OKRs, Sales Workshop, Project Kick-Offs, Creative Sessions, Welcome Days for new personnel, Retros etc.”

With the drag-and-drop agenda builder and colour categorization, SessionLab has helped the team streamline the design process and clarify what needs to be done, whatever the goal of the session.

SessionLab has also helped when it comes to staying mindful and in control of time. By assigning every block a duration, it’s easy to plan for the time you actually have for the session.

When something changes, SessionLab will automatically recalculate session timing, meaning Alexander and his team can focus on designing high-quality sessions, rather than adjusting formulas.

“SessionLab’s visualisation helps to clarify the assignment for a workshop. It also helps with good time planning, especially if you have a workshop where time is very tight.”

A structured, repeatable workflow

SessionLab is now part of the Agile team’s end-to-end workflow. From the moment a workshop assignment begins, it provides a central space for planning, refining, and sharing.

• Initial planning: “I open a SessionLab file as soon as I begin clarifying the assignment with the client.”
  
• Concept development: “I use it to sketch out the structure and approach.”
  
• Client alignment: “We review the workshop together in SessionLab during follow-up meetings.”
  
• Finalizing and delivery: “Once finalized, I often print the agenda or use the live version during delivery.”
  

This repeatable process helps coaches stay aligned with stakeholders while keeping the design process organized and transparent. When it comes to sharing the agenda and getting approval, Alexander has options too. 

In SessionLab, you can share your agenda with editors and viewers directly, so they can leave comments or make edits directly based on your needs. Or like Alexander, you can bring SessionLab to your client meetings and make changes to the agenda based on the conversation in real time. 

Managing workshop designs and centralizing knowledge for the Agile team was also important to Alexander. In SessionLab now, they have a record of all the workshops they’ve designed, ready to re-use, adapt and run again whenever the team needs. 

“We maintain knowledge in SessionLab: i.e. we can quickly fall back on old workshops and reuse methods.”

Handling complexity without the stress

Whether it’s a creative session with tight time constraints or a multi-stakeholder event with dozens of participants, SessionLab makes it easier to manage even the most complex workshops and multi-day events.

“It’s a big help when working with co-facilitators or multiple stakeholders. And for large events, where the process needs to be mapped out in detail, it really makes coordination easier.”

SessionLab gives Alexander and his team the power to plan their sessions down to the minute and stay in control. With support for multiple days, breakout sessions and time locks, the team is able to design complex sessions with confidence.

With many people working on the same agenda, clarity is key. In SessionLab, Alexander can assign blocks and activities to specific collaborators for a smooth workflow.

By working together in one space, nothing is lost and all stakeholders know exactly what is needed. The result? Smoother, more organized events and happier participants. 

From faster planning to better results

For the Agile Coaches at AVIATAR, SessionLab has become more than a planning tool. It’s an essential part of how they work, bringing structure, clarity, and consistency to every workshop. And with a growing library of reusable content, the team is able to move faster without reinventing the wheel.

In a fast-paced, global organization like Lufthansa Technik, this kind of support makes a real difference. SessionLab helps the team deliver workshops that are not only well-designed, but also drive real alignment and impact across the business.

“With SessionLab, we are better at clarifying objectives, quicker with planning, and we can coordinate better with each other. That leads to more effective workshops—and better results overall.”

Leadership activities are a great way of developing the skills and competencies needed to be an effective leader. It’s not easy to learn these skills, especially when so many leaders don’t receive effective training or support. In this article, we’ll explore the leadership activities you should master in order to lead a high-performing team and become a better leader!

Learning the why and how of being a great leader alongside practical techniques and frameworks is one of the easiest ways to become a better leader.

Anyone in a leadership role has both a big influence and responsibility for their team. Some of the aspects they need to pay attention to in order to be a good leader are:

• Setting the climate of a workplace
• Making decisions
• Inspiring team members
• Setting values for their team
• Improving team spirit and cohesion
• Being responsible for their team’s communication and wellbeing
• Developing leadership skills in other team members

There are a number of tools to help you with leadership development. Coaching, peer support circles, and leadership development workshops can all help one to become a better leader.

Leadership activities such as those featured here are also effective at introducing leadership concepts and learning how to solve common leadership challenges. You might run these leadership training activities during a workshop, add them to an ongoing learning program or simply introduce them to managers as needed.

Want more ideas? Check out this collection of leadership training topics to get an understand of want you might focus on when working with your leadership team.

In this guide, we’ve grouped leadership activities by these core competencies, so you can choose the right activity to help yourself or others develop their leadership skills. Let’s dive in!

What are leadership activities?

Leadership activities are exercises designed to help develop leadership skills and enable leaders to be more effective in their roles. They can include activities that help train new leaders and improve core leadership skills like problem-solving, active listening, or effective group management.

You’ll also find that the best leadership development activities give leaders tools and techniques they can use on the job. It’s one thing to know that leaders need to be good listeners, but quite another to be given a framework and toolkit that means you are a great listener who always helps their team feel heard and understood.

The exercises below are not only great to use when training leaders, but they are practical techniques leaders can use with every team member immediately, whatever their leadership style.

What are leadership activities used for?

While managers might approach tasks differently based on their leadership style, there are skills and competencies that all leaders should learn in order to best service their team. Learning how to be a good leader can be difficult, so using exercises and activities to improve leadership skills in a safe, experiential environment can help leaders be more effective in their role.

If you’re running a leadership development program, you might use these activities during the training program. For example, after conducting a self-assessment and deciding how they want to develop as a leader, participants might work on improving their leadership skills with these activities.

Whether you’re running such a program and developing managers internally with workshops or simply want to brush up on your own leadership skills, these exercises are a great place to begin.

A bespoke leadership development workshop (like the one featured in this leadership template!) is also a natural place to include these activities.

In SessionLab, it’s quick and easy to design a leadership workshop fit for your needs. Start by dragging and dropping blocks to design your outline. Add minute-perfect timing and instructions to each activity to refine your agenda.

When you’re ready to share with collaborators or participants, export your workshop agenda in PDF, Word, Powerpoint or invite them directly to the session.

Leadership training activities for building a positive work climate

Leaders are role models to their colleagues and organization. Their leadership styles, principles, and values determine the culture that drives their organization’s behavior.

That is why a competitive, paranoid leader can easily create an organization where team members are similarly competitive and less open to collaboration. While a leader who is open and inclusive will create a climate of openness and inclusiveness. How they behave, and what they consider the norm, also affects which kinds of behaviors are enforced and celebrated and which behaviors are punished.

The following leadership activities can help you in recognising important leadership behaviors that result in a productive workplace. They can also be used by leaders to set the stage for team bonding and a great workplace environment with their team. A must for all leaders!

• Leadership Envelopes
• Your Favourite Manager
• Leadership Pizza
• Playing with Status
• Heard Seen Respected

Leadership Envelopes

Best for: Translating leadership principles into real-world actions
Participants: 6–30
Activity length: 30–90 minutes

Leadership Envelopes is an effective training game that helps groups translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviors. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life applications of different leadership principles.

During Leadership Envelopes, groups conduct multiple rounds of discussion to build upon each others’ ideas, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviors. This is also a great activity to run with all your team members. Seeing how they consider and respond to different leadership styles can help you focus on the right approach as a leader!

Your Favourite Manager

Best for: Reflecting on effective and ineffective leadership styles
Participants: 6–50
Activity length: 20–45 minutes

In Your Favourite Manager, participants take on three different employee personas and list the behaviors of a positive leader or manager and a negative one from the perspectives of those employees. After some individual reflection, participants compare their lists, first in pairs and then in groups. Finally, they collect the ultimate do’s and don’ts for managers and leaders.

Your Favourite Manager encourages deep reflection on your own leadership style and those of your role models. I’ve been especially inspired by how some of my old bosses approach problem solving while I was a team member working beneath them.

Leadership Pizza

Best for: Self-assessing leadership skills and setting development goals
Participants: 2–20
Activity length: 30+ minutes

Leadership Pizza offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify the skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development in these areas. This framework is also a great tool to set individual leadership development goals in a coaching process.

We love activities that allow team members to reflect on different leadership styles and assess their own skills and preferences. The visual format and approachability of Leadership Pizza makes it easy to share and reflect on leadership styles again in the future too!

Playing with Status

Best for: Exploring power dynamics and communication styles
Participants: 6–30
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

The best leadership training activities allow managers to work on their leadership skills while also providing an opportunity to reflect on how their leadership style might affect the people they work with too.

Playing with Status is a role playing game where pairs enact a job interview or coaching session and enact different versions of the conversation based on whether each person has high or low status. By experiencing the effect of status on the relationship, would-be leaders can consider how they interact with other members of their team and create a more positive workplace culture.

Heard Seen Respected

Best for: Practicing empathy and inclusive leadership
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 35–45 minutes

Standing in the shoes of others, practicing empathy and ensuring that everyone on a team is able to be heard is a necessity for great leaders and your team in general. In this activity, participants shift between telling stories where they were not heard, seen or respected and then being listeners who do not pass judgment. 

Remember that leadership training should often start with the fundamentals of respect and empathy. If you can’t respect and empathize with your team members, how can you expect them to do the same for you? Keeping things simple with an activity like Heard Seen Respected can be an especially effective option whether you’re working online or offline. 

Team building leadership activities

Every leader has an integral role in the formation of the teams they work with. Whether you are consciously working on it or not, your attitude and actions as a leader will significantly influence team cohesion, communication and the team spirit of the people you work with.

This comes through in small everyday actions, the way you share responsibilities, the way you empower colleagues, and the way you foster a cooperative work environment as opposed to a competitive one.

Sometimes, it can also be effective to run team building activities with your company that are expressly focused on helping teams come together and bond. Try using the following leadership team building activities with new teams, or groups that need to spend a little time getting to know each other better.

• Marshmallow challenge
• Blind Square Rope Game
• Tower of Power
• Minefield
• Crocodile River
• Human knot
• Who are you? The pirate ship exercise

Marshmallow challenge

Best for: Enhancing collaboration, identifying leaders and iterative problem-solving skills.
Participants: 6–100
Activity length: 45–60 minutes

The Marshmallow Challenge is a team-building activity in which teams compete to build the tallest free-standing structure out of spaghetti sticks, tape, string, and the marshmallow that needs to be on the top. This leadership activity emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, collaboration, and innovation and problem-solving.

It’s a wonderful game that allows participants’s natural leadership qualities to shine through, and it helps teams have a lot of fun too!

Blind Square Rope Game

Best for: Developing communication and leadership in uncertain conditions.
Participants: 4–20
Activity length: 40–45 minutes

This activity is a tried and tested game that asks teams to communicate well and solve a problem as a team. Not only is this a fun team building activity, but it’s a great way for potential leaders to step up and help their team win!

Start by tying a length of rope into a circle and then instruct participants they will have 20 minutes to turn it into a square, with fifteen minutes to plan their actions and five minutes to implement. Here’s the catch – no one may touch the rope until you begin, and every team member is blindfolded during implementation. This is an effective leadership game that is great with both small groups and larger teams separated into breakouts.

Tower of Power

Best for: Building coordination, planning, and shared leadership.
Participants: 6–24
Activity length: 20–60 minutes

All leaders need to work closely with other members of their organization in order to succeed. This leadership game encourages groups to work together in order to build a tower with specific (and sometimes tricky!) rules before than reflecting on what worked, what didn’t and what they would do next time.

Tower of Power wonderful activity for leadership training, as it provides an experiential way to explore leadership concepts, all wrapped in a fun game!

Minefield

Best for: Building trust and honing communication under pressure.
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

When teams work together well, something magic happens. But what elements constitute a high performing team? As a leader, how can you help ensure those conditions are met? In this leadership game, participants must work together to get every team member across an obstacle while blindfolded.

It’s a simple concept that creates a perfect space for exploring how teams operate and the role leaders have within them. Bring plenty of fun obstacles (squeaky toys are best) and encourage groups to think strategically for best results!

Crocodile River

Best for: Encouraging strategic thinking and team support.
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

The Crocodile River is a team-building activity in which group members need to support each other in a task to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

Human knot

Best for: Illustrating self-organization and collaborative problem-solving.
Participants: 7–20
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

This is a simple game to help team members learn how to work together (better). It can also focus on the group’s understanding of communication, leadership, problem-solving, trust or persistence. Participants stand in a circle, close their eyes and put their hands into the circle to find two other hands to hold. Then they open their eyes and the group has to try to get back into a circle without letting go, though they can change their grip, of course.

Who are you? The pirate ship exercise

Best for: Facilitating reflection on team roles and self-awareness.
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 10+ minutes

Every member of a group occupies a different position in the team. An effective team leader is one who considers their role and is aware of where employees also stand.

This leadership training activity is an effective method of getting a group to consider their roles with the metaphor of a pirate ship. Start by sharing the image and invite each person to consider which person on the deck they most identify with. Is it the captain, or perhaps is it the person repairing damage to the hull? What follows is an effective conversation on roles within a team.

Collaborative leadership activities

Whether you’re leading a small group or working across a massive organization, part of your role of a leader is to help their team work together more effectively. Removing obstacles to effective collaboration and creating frameworks for better teamwork is something you’ll be doing as a leader.

Use the activities below to develop the skills necessary to facilitate better collaboration and working habits between team members.

• Circles of Influence
• Team of Two
• What I Need From You
• Generative Relationships STAR
• Team Canvas

Circles of Influence

Best for: Prioritizing efforts and enhancing team ownership
Participants: 2–40
Length: 30–120 minutes

Effective teamwork is often about identifying where each member of a team can have the most impact and use their skills best. Leaders often need to find ways to identify where to direct their team and consider how different skills and working styles fit together to make a cohesive team. This activity makes it easy to facilitate this process and encourage employees to reflect and be proactive too!

We love that this leadership exercise encourages every team member to take responsibility and action. When looking for leadership qualities in a group and considering who you might want to develop into a future leader, this is also a great place to start!

Team of Two

Best for: Strengthening one-on-one professional relationships
Participants: 2+
Length: 20+ minutes

Whether you’re leading a team of just a few people or hundreds, the reality is that many of your discussions and interactions with the people you will lead will be interpersonal and one-on-one in nature. Developing the skillset you need to solve issues in your team when they arise and finding ways to ensure these conversations are productive is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.

Use Team of Two whether working online or as part of an in-person session to help your working pairs and interpersonal relationships go from strength to strength. By articulating needs and consequences clearly, this leadership exercise helps people communicate efficiently and see the results they need – a must for anyone in a leadership role! 

What I Need From You

Best for: Clarifying interdepartmental needs and responsibilities, conflict resolution
Participants: 10+
Length: 55–70 minutes

One of the most important leadership skills to cultivate is clarity: being clear in what you expect and need from others in your organisation or group is an integral component of high-functioning teams. With What I Need From You, each team member involved in the exchange is given the chance to articulate their core needs to others and respond in a structured way.

This kind of clear, direct action is great at unblocking conversational roadblocks in both large and small groups, and is something all leaders should have in their toolkit.

Generative Relationships STAR

Best for: Assessing and improving team dynamics
Participants: 5+
Length: 20–25 minutes

The relationships between the members of a team can make or break the work you do together. In this leadership training activity, leaders learn how to help a group understand their current working patterns and identify possible changes.

Each participant will individually rate the current performance of the group on the 4 points of the STAR compass tool included. Next, small groups will discuss their choices and find points of alignment and disagreement. Finally, the whole team will discuss the first steps they can take to improve relationships and performance for the group.

Team Canvas

Best for: Aligning team goals, roles, and values
Participants: 2–8
Length: 90–150 minutes

When it comes to enabling true collaboration throughout your organization, it pays to involve your team members in helping shape the way you want to work together. Different leadership styles may call for a different approach to this process, but it’s always helpful to see a complete example of how you might define your team culture and working processes.

In this workshop template, you can see a complete agenda for a team canvas workshop. This will take a team through a process of co-creating and defining everything from your goals, values, assets, and rules. Effective leadership often means tapping into group intelligence and enabling your team to take shared ownership of their success. Team Canvas great way of achieving this!

Inspirational leadership activities

Great leaders inspire others. However, there are many different reasons why someone will find a leader inspirational. Developing the skills to inspire team members and lead with this energy is important, whatever your leadership style.

In order to grasp what facilitates inspiring leadership, try the following exercises. You’ll be surprised at how thinking more deeply about your own role models or what your values can help you in all of your leadership interactions!

• Leadership Advice from your Role Model
• Living Core Values
• Campfire
• Letter from the Future

Leadership Advice from your Role Model

Best for: Reflecting on leadership values and exploring different styles
Participants: 5–30
Activity length: 20–45 minutes

For this leadership activity, everyone in the room is asked to think of a role model they look up to and ask themselves: If a young person would ask these role models for leadership advice and what kind of advice that would be.

Facilitate a group conversation where these pieces of advice are shared and contradicting points are discussed and reconciled. Given diverse enough responses, this structured sharing activity might be a good introduction to the concept of situational leadership or as a simple point of reflection and goal setting.

Living Core Values

Best for: Connecting everyday behaviors with core leadership values
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 30+ minutes

The core values of your organization are a great place to look when you want to inspire your team members. Leaders should be involved in defining and exemplifying their core values and also helping create space for the team to share how they’re living those values. The result is an inspiring leadership exercise that allows a leader to help the group celebrate their wins and also suggest places for improvement.

Start by choosing one of your core values and asking activity participants to share a story of how they have been practicing this core value. After sharing, ask the team to reflect on what inspired them from the story. As with any leadership development game, be the first one to share a story to help guide the discussion. Running this exercise will not only help inspire a team to greater heights but also surface any areas that need improvement – it’s a great method to have in your leadership toolbox!

Campfire

Best for: Sharing leadership lessons through storytelling and building trust
Participants: 8–20
Activity length: 30–45 minutes

Throughout human history, stories have been a consistent source of inspiration. Whatever your leadership style, finding time to share more about your own story and create space for others to share theirs can be massively useful as a leader.

In Campfire, start by creating a selection of 10-20 sticky notes relating to a concept you wish to explore with the group. Put these on the wall and then invite your group to review them and consider stories they might tell related to one of those words. Start the storytelling session yourself and think about how you might inspire and elicit further stories from the rest of the team before passing the torch to the next person around the campfire!

This is a great activity to run during leadership training or when team building. Creating safe spaces for people to share their experiences is a leadership skill you absolutely want to cultivate and practice!

Letter from the Future

Best for: Vision-setting and aligning leadership intentions with future goals
Participants: 6–30
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Leaders are often called upon to inspire their team members about the future of their product or organization. Employees who are excited about where you’re going are more likely to work together well and be energized to see results. This activity is useful for helping inspire a team, or even just to inspire yourself as a leader and get your vision for the future down on paper!

Begin by asking your team to speculate on what the world will look like in five years. Next, ask them to write a letter from the future detailing what the group has accomplished in that time and how they overcame any challenges.

Share the results to inspire the group for what you might accomplish and also start creating plans for how you’ll create your desired future. You might even find that running this activity solo is effective when thinking about how you want to develop as a team leader!

Leadership activities for personal development

A good leader is one who helps uplift and upskill the members of their team. These leadership activities are designed to help you encourage participants to be more autonomous, take initiative and work on their personal development.

If you’re new to a leadership role or trying on various leadership styles, these can also be great activities to practice on the road to leading a team. Growth and development is a vital aspect of employee happiness and fulfilment – be sure to bring ideas for enabling others to your leadership role.

• Roles in a meeting
• Alignment & Autonomy
• 15% Solutions
• The GROW Coaching Model

Roles in a meeting

Best for: Encouraging ownership during meetings, develop facilitation skills
Participants: 4–30
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Learning by doing is an important aspect of effective leadership. Sometimes, you have to try something new and approach the task with an open mind while working to the best of your ability. This simple method is a great way of encouraging participants to take an important role during a meeting and also take part in developing and refining those roles.

If you’re running a leadership development program and want to start upskilling participants, this is a great way of delegating some simple leadership roles. Plus, it helps encourage the group to contribute and engage with how a successful meeting is put together too!

Alignment & Autonomy

Best for: Balancing team alignment with individual accountability
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

One of the most impactful things a leader can do is get out of a team’s way and allow them to perform more autonomously. Doing so effectively means people can take ownership of their work, be more invested, and develop their skills too. But how can you do this without creating chaos or misalignment?

In this activity, you first help every team member align on your goals and then reflect on where they can take more ownership and be more autonomous in their work while still contributing to the goals of the team. Not only is this a great way to help your team develop, but it also takes work off your plate as a leader and can enable you to get out of the trenches if necessary.

15% Solutions

Best for: Taking immediate action on what’s within your control
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 20–30 minutes

One of the biggest barriers to personal development is being overwhelmed by what you need to do to achieve your goals. As a leader, you can help your team by enabling them to take the small, important actions that are within their control.

Start by asking participants to reflect on where they have the discretion and freedom to act and how they might make a small step towards a goal without needing outside help. By flipping the conversation to what 15% of a solution looks like, rather than 100%, employees can begin to make changes without fear of being overwhelmed.

The GROW Coaching Model

Best for: Structuring coaching conversations and goal-setting
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

The best leaders are often great coaches, helping individual team members achieve their potential and grow. This tried and test method is a wonderful way to help activate the development of everyone from a new start to an established leader.

Begin by teaching your mentee or group the GROW acronym (Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, and Will.) and guide them through a process of defining each section and collectively agreeing on how you’ll make progress. This is an effective leadership activity that is great for leadership training and is equally useful when it comes to help any team member grow.

Decision-making leadership activities

An important aspect of leadership development is learning how to make informed and intelligent decisions while also ensuring you listen to your team. A leader who bulldozes their team into a decision without first listening to their expertise is not going to make their team feel valued.

The outcomes of uninformed decisions are often poor or frustrating for those involved too. While leaders are justifiably responsible for making final decisions, it’s integral to find methods to do so in a well-reasoned way.

These leadership activities are useful when it comes to making good decisions while involving your team members in the process and developing a leadership style that creates space for others.

• Dotmocracy
• Impact and Effort Matrix
• Level of influence
• Fishbone Analysis

Dotmocracy

Best for: Prioritizing ideas through group consensus
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

When solving problems as a team, it’s common to have various options for moving forward. As a leader, it often falls to you to make the decision for which solution or direction to pursue. But how can you do that while also creating space for the opinions of your team to be heard?

Dotmocracy is a tried and tested facilitation method for making informed decisions with the help of your team. After presenting the available options, give everyone on your team a number of dots to indicate which option they prefer. You’ll want to adjust the number of votes based on the number of options there are to choose from. A good rule of thumb is to have fewer dots than there are options, giving just a few for every team member.

Leaders want to be on hand to break any ties and to facilitate discussion around what is chosen, but when it comes to making decisions with your team, this method is hard to beat.

Impact and Effort Matrix

Best for: Making strategic decisions based on value and effort
Participants: 3–15
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

The hallmark of a good decision making process is transparency. Leaders should know why a decision is made and should be able to clearly explain their thinking to team members. As such, the best decision making activities make the process open and easy to understand.

Start this activity by creating a 2×2 matrix and then place possible options on the matrix based on the expected impact and effort it would take to achieve them. This makes it easy to prioritize and compare possible decisions while also including team members in the process.

An inclusive leadership style means bringing your own knowledge to the table while also listening to the opinions of the team. When running this activity, be sure to combine these aspects to ensure items are placed in the appropriate place on the matrix.

Level of influence

Best for: Exploring personal and team influence on outcomes
Participants: 12–30
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

Making the right decision is often a process of weighing up various factors and prioritizing accordingly. While there are many methods for doing this, being an effective leader often means making this as simple as possible.

We love this decision making activity because it asks the group (and its leader!) some simple questions to narrow down possible options and makes it easy to prioritize too. Start by asking the level of influence a team has to make possible actions happen and ranking them accordingly.

Next, choose those items that you have the most influence on and then prioritize the ones you really want to happen. This simple, two-step process is a great activity for leadership development as it is something any leader can use with ease!

Fishbone Analysis

Best for: Identifying root causes of complex problems
Participants: 6–15
Activity length: 180+ minutes

Making good decisions requires a complete knowledge of the problem at hand. For leaders who may no longer be on the frontlines of their department, it’s important to surface insights from their team and understand the root cause of any problem before making a decision.

In this leadership activity, start by choosing a problem area and adding it to the head of the fish. Next, brainstorm ideas that might cause the problem and add these as categories to the skeleton. Brainstorm on each of these categories and ask why is this happening in order to dive deeper and fully understand the issue at hand before making an informed decision as a group.

Leadership exercises for setting team values

Usually, the values of a leader are mirrored in the organization. If shortcuts are common practice for the leader, then she will see shortcuts made by her team members all across their projects. But if learning and self-improvement are important to the leader, then this will be a good foundation for these values in the whole organization, too.

To be more aware of your own values as a leader and then bring these ideas to your team, try these leadership exercises!

• Explore Your Values
• Your Leadership Coat of Arms
• Team Purpose & Culture

Explore Your Values

Best for: Clarifying personal and team values for aligned leadership
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Explore your Values is a group exercise for thinking on what your own and your team’s most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitions rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values.

It’s a good leadership game to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values and consider how various leadership styles might chime with some values more than others.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms

Best for: Reflecting on leadership identity and strengths
Participants: 1+
Activity length: 25+ minutes

In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms works well with equally well with leadership and participants not in your management team. Creating a visual representation of what you stand for in the form of a coat of arms can help create a memorable asset you can refer to and rally behind in the future.

Team Purpose & Culture

Best for: Defining shared goals and shaping team culture
Participants: 2–10
Activity length: 60–240 minutes

Ensuring all group participants are aligned when it comes to purpose and cultural values is one of the jobs of a leader. Teams and organizations that have a shared and cohesive vision are often happier and more productive and by helping a group arrive at these conclusions, a good leader can help empower everyone to succeed.

Even with multi-discipline teams and organizations with different leadership styles, this method is an effective way of getting everyone on the same page. This is a framework you’ll likely use again and again with different teams throughout your career.

Leadership communication activities

Leaders are usually viewed as the parents of the organization. It is expected from them that they take care of their people and make sure that proper norms and rules are followed. One of the key areas where a leader has a large influence is the style and amount of communication between people.

Active Listening and giving effective feedback are critical skills to have as a leader but are also crucial for your team members. In fact, the issue that leaders rank as one of the biggest barriers to successful leadership is avoiding tough conversations, including giving honest, constructive feedback.

Develop good communication practices with the following leadership games and activities.

• Active Listening
• Trust battery
• Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue
• Reflection: Team

Active Listening

Best for: Practicing deep listening to improve communication and empathy
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

This activity supports participants in reflecting on a question and generating their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with this activity. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being “the subject” who will explore a question, “the listener” who is supposed to be totally focused on the subject, and “the observer” who will watch the dynamic between the other two.

Trust battery

Best for: Reflecting on mutual trust within a team
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 15–45 minutes

Every time you work together with someone, your trust battery – the trust you have towards a certain person, or the ‘emotional credit’ that person has in your eyes – either charges or depletes based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise and the social interaction you exhibit. A low trust battery is the core of many personal issues at the workplace.

This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.  It also works great when promoting virtual leadership and working with online teams!

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Best for: Giving and receiving actionable peer feedback
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Regular and constructive feedback is one of the most important ingredients for effective teams. Openness creates trust, and trust creates more openness. This is an activity for teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. The objective of Start, Stop, Continue is to examine aspects of a situation or develop next steps by polling people on what to start, what to stop and what to continue doing.

For those in charge of online leadership, it’s vital to find ways of having difficult conversations in constructive ways virtually – try this method when working to resolve issues with your distributed team!

Reflection: Team

Best for: Reviewing team dynamics and strengthening collaboration
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

All leaders know the value of structured and considered reflection. Teams that take the time to reflect and improve are those that can grow and by creating an environment of reflection, team leaders and managers can help their group move forward together.

This method is effective for both offline and virtual leadership development. It helps a group progress from individual reflection through to full group discussion in a way that encourages constructive thought and minimizes potential frustration or antagonistic conversation. 

Leadership conflict resolution activities

One of the most important leadership skills you’ll want to develop is the ability to mediate and resolve team conflicts. Even the most connected and effective teams can run into conflict and it will fall to managers and team leaders to help get things back on track.

Even for established leaders, navigating conflict can be difficult! These leadership development activities are designed to help groups manage and resolve conflicts more effectively.

Giving leaders a framework they can trust and use with their team right away is always a good use of time, and we’d recommend teaching these methods to all new leaders!

• What, So What, Now What?
• Conflict Responses
• Bright Blurry Blind

What, So What, Now What?

Best for: Reflecting on experiences to generate insights and actions
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

It’s easy to get lost in the woods when it comes to managing conflict. Helping a group see what happened objectively and without judgment is an important leadership skill, and this framework helps make this process easy.

Start by working with the group to collect facts about what happened before moving towards making sense of them. Once everywhere has been heard and given space to process these facts, you can then move towards suggesting practical actions. By following this kind of framework, you can manage a conflict in a pragmatic way that also ensures everyone in a group can contribute.

Conflict Responses

Best for: Exploring personal conflict styles and improving team dynamics
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

All of us can be guilty of handling conflicts in a less than ideal manner. Part of developing as a leader is identifying when something didn’t go well before finding ways to do things better next time.

In this leadership activity, ask the group to provide examples of previous conflicts and then reflect on how they handled them. Next, ask everyone to reflect on how they might change their behavior for a better outcome in the future. As a leader, use this opportunity to lead the way and be honest and vulnerable. It’s your role to provide a model for interaction and its always worthwhile to see how you can do better as a people manager dealing with conflict too!

Bright Blurry Blind

Best for: Identifying strengths, uncertainties, and blind spots in leadership
Participants: 5–100
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Finding opportunities to reframe conflict as an opportunity to solve problems and create clarity is a very useful leadership quality. Often, conflict is a signifier of a deeper problem and so finding ways to surface and work on these issues as a team is a great way to move forward and bring a group together too.

In this leadership activity, start by asking the group to reflect on the central metaphor of bright to blind issues or topics, based on whether the problem is out in the open or unknown. Next, invite small groups to ideate on what issues facing the team are bright, blurry, or blind and then discuss them as a group. By working together to illuminate what is blurry or blind, you can create a one-team mentality and start resolving problems that can lead to conflict too.

The Art of Effective Feedback Workshop

All leaders will need to give effective feedback in order to help their team develop and do great work. The best leaders also solicit feedback from their direct reports and use this is an opportunity to grow. But how can you teach these feedback skills and help leaders develop this important skill?

Check out our Effective Feedback Workshop template for a complete agenda you can use to develop this leadership skill. You’ll find a ready-to-go workshop with a guide and PowerPoint presentation you can use to help anyone in a leadership role give and receive better feedback.

Workshop design made easy

Designing and running effective workshops and meetings is an important leadership skill; whether it’s staying organized and on time during your daily stand-ups or planning more involved sessions.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create engaging workshops that create impact while engaging every member of your team. Drag, drop and reorder blocks to build your agenda. When you make changes or update your agenda, your session timing adjusts automatically, saving you time on manual adjustments.

Collaborating with stakeholders or clients? Share your agenda with a single click and collaborate in real-time. No more sending documents back and forth over email.

Explore how you and your team might use SessionLab to design more effective sessions or watch this five minute video to see the planner in action!

Now over to you…

I hope you have found some useful tips for leadership development workshops above. Now we’d love to hear from you!

What are your favorite leadership workshop ideas and training exercises for leadership development? Did you incorporate any of them into your facilitation practice?

Have you tried any of the activities above? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.

Our improved AI Assistant, now accessible via the prominently placed “Ask AI” button, enables users to generate, modify, and improve session content with greater flexibility. Crucially, it is now able to read and understand the context of your session, making it a collaborative tool that adjusts to your goals and supports your workflow.

Let’s explore what this update brings, how it supports your facilitation practice, and what to keep in mind as you start experimenting.

5 things you can do with SessionLab’s improved AI Assistant 

1. Generate or adapt an agenda based on your prompt

Whether you’re starting from scratch or working with one of our essential templates, the AI is now even better at generating a complete workshop structure based on your goals. You might ask it to:

• “Generate a four-hour workshop to align on design principles.”
  
• “Adjust this agenda to focus on stakeholder collaboration.”
  
• “Transform this template into a session on creative problem-solving.”
  

SessionLab’s AI Assistant is able to understand the broader context of your prompt and any content you provide, allowing it to produce coherent, structured agendas tailored to your needs. It won’t just fill space with empty blocks: it will prioritize outcomes and create a logical flow based on your prompt and materials. 

Another great place to start when working with the AI Assistant is with a template. We’ve had great results using a structure like this essential workshop template and asking the AI to tailor the skeleton agenda into something right for our needs. 

2. Make context-aware edits to your session

Previously, AI support was limited to generating new sessions from scratch. Now, you can make targeted changes to an agenda by prompting the AI to make refinements and edits. These actions take into account both the instructions in your prompt and the content already available in your session, leading to much better outputs and instant changes in your agenda. For example:

• “Add instructions and a goal to all blocks that are missing them.”
• “Can you translate this agenda into German?”
• “Revise this session to suit a skeptical client who needs clear rationale for every activity.”
  

The AI Assistant will engage with your session information directly, meaning it can edit multiple blocks, maintain internal consistency, and expand content when needed. You can now easily enrich your block descriptions, adjust tone or timing and even translate your agenda into another language without needing to leave the session. 

The Ask AI menu can also speed up some of the tasks involved with agenda creation. The suggested actions toolbar has some great examples, such as adding colour categories to your existing blocks or adding some additional breaks or energizers. In these cases, you don’t even need to write a prompt: one click and you’re away! 

3. Work with attachments to create agendas from existing materials

One of the most exciting developments is the ability to upload files directly to the AI in SessionLab. This includes:

• Word documents containing training plans or agendas.
• PowerPoint presentations or slides. 
• Screenshots of Miro boards with session outlines.

The AI Assistant is able to parse this material and use it as the foundation for a structured SessionLab agenda. While still experimental in this beta release, this feature opens the door to easily import your existing content into SessionLab or enrich an agenda from notes, screenshots and online whiteboards quickly. 

Top tip: formatted documents currently deliver better results than copy/pasting text into the prompt. In my experience, docs that have clear headings are easier for the AI Assistant to structure into a SessionLab agenda. 

4. Get smart suggestions on what to improve 

Not sure where to go from your first draft? The AI can review your agenda and suggest improvements based on your objectives or facilitation best practices. Simply click the What can be improved? button to start a chat and get instant suggestions tailored to your session. Alternatively you can start with a custom question or create a prompt for your use case , for example:

• “How could I improve this workshop plan for an online audience?”
  
• “How can I make this session more interactive?”
  
• “Which parts of this session might need improved instructions?”

Depending on the prompt, the AI may offer general advice or tailored feedback, helping you spot gaps you might have missed or improve overall session flow. You can then ask the AI to implement the suggestions and update your session accordingly.

As the AI Assistant is in beta, suggestions can vary in detail and precision though even now, this feature can offer a valuable second opinion or reflection point when refining your agenda.

5. Use Ask AI on specific blocks for quick, controlled adjustments

Using the primary Ask AI button will make adjustments to the entire session. But sometimes, you’ll want to update or refine a single part of your session. With the new block-level Ask AI button, you can apply prompts to individual blocks and adjust your agenda with greater control. 

For example:

• Suggest a specific activity for a block, such as an effective brainstorming or decision making activity.
  
• Expand a brief description with more detail or simplify one to make it easier for co-facilitators to understand.
  
• Add missing instructions or adapt existing ones to a specific use case.

Block level prompting gives you precision control on what AI will adjust and refine. This is ideal for fine-tuning or experimenting without disrupting the broader structure or flow of your session.  

How the AI Assistant can help you speed up your design process 

Facilitators often need to balance creativity with time pressure. Our new AI tools are designed to support the most common (and time-consuming) parts of the session design process. Now, you can focus even more on creating the perfect learning flow, rather than getting bogged down in busywork. 

• Jumpstart ideation: Get a structured starting point based on just a few lines of input. With improved contextual prompting, your initial results and refinements can get you even closer to the final product.
  
• Save time on editing: Let SessionLab’s AI Assistant handle bulk updates like adding missing instructions, colour categories or aligning tone across a session.
  
• Tailor existing content: Modify templates or previous sessions you’ve run to suit a specific topic, audience, or client need. No need to start over from scratch.
  
• Quickly import agendas from other sources: Convert docs, PPTs and other materials into digital, editable workshop plans without needing to endlessly copy and paste content. 

Ultimately, this means facilitators can spend more time thoughtfully refining content and less time wrestling with formatting or structural tasks. 

Whether you’re running leadership training, design sprints, or brainstorming sessions, Ask AI is designed to help you work faster and with more confidence.

Best practices and tips for using the AI Assistant in SessionLab

While the new capabilities are powerful, they work best with thoughtful interaction and prompting best practices. Here are some things to keep in mind while using the new Ask AI feature in SessionLab:

🧠 Give clear, contextual prompts

The more specific your prompt, the better the results. Instead of “Make this better,” try:

“Adjust this agenda to include interactive activities suitable for a group of 15 product managers.”

The more information you give the AI Assistant about your session goals, desired outcomes and audience, the better the output will be. 

🔄 Expect some trial and error

AI outputs aren’t always predictable. Occasionally, the assistant may generate more content than expected, overlook timing constraints, or misinterpret instructions. Use version snapshots and small iterations to stay in control.

See additional tips from our support team here.

📅 Use versions to review and roll back changes

Every time AI makes changes to your session, SessionLab creates a version snapshot. This ensures that:

• You can review what was changed.
• You can roll back to the previous version at any time.

Even when you’re experimenting or iterating rapidly with Ask AI, you’ll never lose your original content. See more about using versions here.

🧰 This is a beta release

There are currently some limitations and occasional bugs with the beta release of this feature. We’re actively improving Ask AI and welcome your feedback as we continue development.

👍 Account owners must opt-in

To enable the new Ask AI feature for your workspace, account owners must opt-in from the workspace settings screen. This ensures that account owners remain in control of when and how AI is able to read content and make suggestions as a result. 

With all of SessionLab’s AI features, session data is used solely for the purpose of generating relevant suggestions and improvements. This data is not used for model training or refinement. 

Curious about security and privacy? You can read more about how our AI features work and what data they access here. 

The future of AI in SessionLab

Our vision is for AI in SessionLab to become more than an ideation tool. We want the AI Assistant to become a collaborator that understands your facilitation style and adapts to your process.

In the coming months, we’ll continue refining the interface, enhancing performance, and expanding the feature set based on your feedback. 

For now, we encourage you to explore. Play with prompts. Upload your materials. Tweak templates. Let us know what you’d like to see next and how AI might help you design your next session. 

If you haven’t yet explored AI in your session design workflow, now’s the perfect time to start. 

To support the design and delivery of these sessions, Lea Flytkjær and the consulting team at Implement are using SessionLab to bring structure, clarity, and collaboration to their process, making it easier to deliver high-quality workshops at scale.

Workshops as a foundation for change

Implement is a consulting firm with 1800 employees worldwide. They support organizations in achieving their strategic goals with tailored, people-centered solutions. Their mission is to empower businesses to realize their full potential by combining deep expertise in change management, organizational development, and transformation strategy.

Workshops are a cornerstone of this approach. Whether working with executive leaders, team managers, or internal teams, Implement uses facilitated sessions to create space for learning, reflection, and experimentation.

“Workshops are a key component of how we work. They provide hands-on experiences that allow participants to apply new concepts and strategies directly to their work environments—ensuring sustainable and measurable improvements.”

For Implement, the importance of workshops to their ongoing work required a platform that could keep up and which made adjusting, updating and running sessions a breeze. Enter SessionLab. 

Designing with structure, speed, and adaptability

At Implement, many consultants design and deliver both client-facing and internal workshops. For Lea and the rest of the team, SessionLab has become the go-to platform for building sessions quickly and clearly:

“I use SessionLab for developing workshops, meetings, and training sessions. It’s especially helpful when repurposing sessions we’ve used before.”

Drag-and-drop functionality, color-coded blocks and automatic timing calculation has helped improve the design process across the consultancy.

Instead of wrestling with manual formatting or static documents, consultants at Implement can iterate and adapt fluidly with an easy-to-use agenda planner. 

“I appreciate SessionLab’s functionality, which allows me to easily color-code various elements and adjust timings seamlessly.”

From individual use to a shared solution

SessionLab has added a layer of flexibility and collaboration that was hard to achieve with previous tools like PowerPoint and Word. Instead of working in silos and losing track of materials, Implement are able to work together in a single, unified workspace. 

“As we expanded use across our team, the sharing features and ability to adjust timings really stood out. The built-in AI bot has also become a helpful companion in designing engaging sessions.”

As more team members got on board, it became clear that SessionLab filled an important gap: helping consultants not just plan workshops, but iterate on them, collaborate easily, and save time along the way.

What’s more, SessionLab’s AI Assistant has helped the team speed up their design process and focus on what matters most to them and their clients. 

Meeting the real-time demands of facilitation

A common challenge facing facilitators and consultants at Implement? Making timing adjustments on the fly during a workshop and ensuring the agenda stays in sync. 

“During workshops and trainings, we often need to tweak the timings in real-time. That function in SessionLab is great—it makes adjusting and rebalancing the agenda smooth and stress-free.”

Instead of halting a session to re-calculate activity timing or manually rework a Word doc, facilitators using SessionLab can tweak activities and timings seamlessly to stay in the flow and on track.

With SessionLab, consultants at Implement an adjust their session with confidence and participants can enjoy a high-quality session.     

Conclusion

For the consulting team at Implement, creating transformative change for their clients means designing and running workshops that encourage engagement and create lasting impact. Lea and her team needed a tool that helped them collaborate effectively, repurpose their best session materials at speed and deliver value to their clients.

With SessionLab, Implement has been able to supercharge their internal and external workshops and improve their collaborative processes too. The feedback from consultants and workshop designers using SessionLab has been overwhelmingly positive:

“The users I know are thrilled about SessionLab. They find it very user-friendly and helpful in their daily work.”

With SessionLab, consultants at Implement have found a workshop planning platform that matches their needs: flexible, intuitive, and built for the realities of facilitation.