SessionLab is my facilitation back office: it’s the virtual desk where I do all the preparation work for each workshop, session, and event. It allows me to keep my notes in one place, design efficiently, and easily collaborate with clients, co-facilitators, and other people with a stake in the success of my next workshop. Let’s see how.

Facilitation is often compared to an iceberg: what you see above the surface are those great learning experiences: engaging workshops with lots of markers, sticky notes and activities. But a lot more happens, particularly before the session, that meets the eye. A lot of thinking and back-and-forth exchanges led to participants having that engaging experience they’ll remember. 

In this article, we’ll be looking step-by-step at what I do to organize a workshop agenda using SessionLab. Besides showing the tool, my aim is to share tips and shine some light on the “black box” of what happens at my desk between the initial “let’s do this workshop” idea and actual delivery. 

This might help you if you are a newcomer to facilitation, if you are curious to know how the Session Planner works and, of course, if you are an expert user and facilitator looking for insider tips and some new ideas.

Ready to go? Here is what we’ll cover!

From blank canvas to initial design

The work that goes into taking a session from a blank canvas to an early design is usually quite a solitary stage: I probably have a bit of input from the client, but most of the discussing and collaborating comes later, once we have a basic draft to work from. This is really where I get to put my mark on the session by advising what type of framework to use, and recommending specific activities that will form the core of the work.

What I need at this point is a combination of:

• structure: to make sure I work efficiently, I need a structured approach to organizing my thoughts and defining a timeline;
• flexibility: this early in the process there is not much about the session that is fixed. I need to be able to play around with ideas until things are better defined (a low-tech way of doing this is with sticky notes on a sheet of large paper);
• inspiration: to keep my sessions fresh and creative, I need space for new ideas, and ways to explore different types of activities to suit the session requirements.

In the next few paragraphs I’ll show you how I go from a vague idea to a completed outline for a session, keeping flexibility, structure and inspiration in mind.

Starting the design process from a blank session

What are we usually starting with when designing a new workshop or session? In my experience, I often begin with very little information. I work as a freelancer, so the very start of a new job might be an email or call with a potential client: at this stage, what’s important for me is to clarify what information about the workshop is known, and what is still to be uncovered. 

Known constraints might include things like the venue, date, or participants in the workshop. There might be a title, or there might just be a vague need that needs to be drawn out in later meetings and conversations.

In the example I’ll be using throughout this article, a client has asked me for a one-day workshop to get their team aligned on their values. I know the group consists of about 25 people, and I understood from an early conversation with their CEO that they don’t want the workshop to aim for decision-making. They want great conversations and insights, and enough material for their management team to then make a solid, well-informed decision.

In our initial conversation, it was clear that the whole management team is keen to have the workshop to be dynamic and experiential. At the end, they’d like to have a shortlist of possible values to pick from, as well as have the whole team interested, engaged, and clear on why this process is important for the company.

In terms of my back office, what is important to me at this stage is that I have a place to capture such information. If there is a lot of background information, such as lengthy project briefs in PDF format, I’ll create a dedicated Google Drive folder to dump all the documents in.

In this case, though, the information is simple enough that it can be summarized in a couple of notes. I write those down on a couple of notes: experience has taught me this will come in handy later. Here are a couple of reasons why:

• When working on my own: I have a deplorable tendency to fill workshops with too many activities, and having basic information clearly noted at the top of my session helps me make better decisions about what to keep and what to ditch.
• In later meetings with my clients: being able to quickly refer back to the original brief can be helpful for clarity, simplicity, and coherence. “I see we are uncertain about how exactly to frame the question for this activity.” I might say, “There are a lot of different ways this could go. But if we look back at where we started, we were looking to align on company values, right? So how about we ask what values are already present, and what values are missing?” 

Starting from scratch, I’ll add a short description of the session, a title, and a date. At this early stage of design, I make use of the Notes function a lot.

In this example, I’ve added a note for myself with an initial to-do list, and a second one with information on what is known about potential workshop participants, needs, and stated workshop goals. I use yellow for notes to myself and then add red ones for messages I’ll need my co-facilitators to pay extra attention to (more on this later). 

Anchoring the session: adding a start and end time (and breaks)

The next thing I’ll do when organizing my workshop in SessionLab is give it clear boundaries in time. I make sure the starting time is correct, then immediately go to the ending time and set that as well. The default setting for a block (the individual bits a session is made of) is to last 10 minutes, but I set the very last one to zero minutes, lock the time, and call it “End of session”. This helps me see how much time is actually allocated to the workshop. 

In this case, it looks like I have about 8 hours to work with. But is that really true? Of course not: people need to eat! Therefore, the next thing I do is factor in lunch breaks, plus some other breaks scattered during the day.

For this teams values workshop, I’ve added an hour for a lunch break and two 15-minute coffee breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I know I’ll probably change the exact timing of those later, but at first, I am looking to find out how much time I can count on for my content and activities. 

The color-coding is quite helpful here: breaks are by default bright yellow, which I appreciate for extra visibility. The workshop now starts to reveal itself as a series of four modules, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, each somewhere between one hour and two hours long. Again, I’ll be settling on the exact timing later, but having some boundaries helps me start thinking about the next part: finding a framework or storyline for my session. 

Creating the framework for a successful workshop

The basic scaffolding for the day is done, and now comes the fun, creative part most facilitators relish: creating a storyline, a narrative framework for the session, and populating it with activities. 

The best workshops and training courses are not a random collection of disjointed parts: they create a flow. In the space of a day, I aim to guide the group from confusion, or just not-knowing, to moments of insight, all the way to action planning; from ideating to choosing a way to move forward. At this stage of the planning process, I am thinking in terms of which framework will best help me create a flow for the group.

When designing training courses, I usually go for Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (which you can learn more about in this template), but in this case I’ll be designing a facilitated session, not a training course. As the facilitator, I’ll be accompanying the group through content they will provide themselves.

The stated objective of this workshop is to go from ideation to having a shortlist of values for management to pick from. It thereby makes a lot of sense to apply the “diamond of facilitation”. There will be activities for divergence (ideation, brainstorming), emergence (discussion, deeper understanding) and convergence (choosing, selecting).

To clearly show this distinction in my session, I could use colour-coding; when the session is complex and, in particular, for training courses that include many different learning objectives, I’ll often do that. In this case, I prefer to create “groups” which I will then populate with activities.

As you can see in the screenshot, I’ve created different groups for each section of the framewor. I’ll populate them later, and probably change the titles at well, but this helps structure my thinking and keep the flow consistent.

I notice that the lunch break corresponds to the “emergence” stage of work, which I’m glad to see, because facilitating the emergent stage is often best done by adding some unstructured space and time for ideas to be freely discussed. This gives me an idea to add a playful activity over lunch, something I often do by putting on the lunch tables some bowls full of generative questions, related to the topic at hand but also bringing more personal or emotional aspects into the conversations.

I recently facilitated a networking workshop for 80 researchers involved in forestry activity in the EU context, I filled bowls with questions such as “what was a forest or tree you’d visit as a child?” and “have you ever found yourself witness to a forest fire? How was it?”. I left the bowls on the lunch tables with a small card instructing people to simply “Pick a card; Share your answers”. Not everyone did this activity (I am against “enforced fun” during breaks), but among those who did, some came back to me to tell me it led to deep and touching conversation. 

Picking facilitation methods using SessionLab’s library

I now have an outline for the team values workshop, but it’s very empty! Time to consider what activities I’ll want to propose. I generally start with one or two activities that will form the core of the experience, around which I’ll then plan the rest of the session. Typically, I first think about what those could be, then go look for them in SessionLab’s library. This library of methods is seamlessly integrated into the Session Planner: by clicking on the book icon, I can access both the public library of over 1400 methods, and the private library of methods I’ve used before. 

The workshop I’m designing here is about defining team values. I’ve recently held an exercise about our team’s values for the SessionLab team and would like to repurpose it.

I find it in the library and drag-and-drop it to the emergence phase. It’s a participatory activity, so I also color-code it in green as “exercise”. This will help me later to check that I have a nice mix of exercises and group discussions for the workshop.

What I am looking for in the completed workshop structure is to make sure there is going to be space for active participation and to co-create meaning. With color-coding, I can see at a glance if the entire workshop has enough variety, keeping energy levels high, and combining any presentations with hands-on activities. If you’d like to learn more tips and tricks about how to create engaging training activities, you can read an article about it here.

In my experience, the activities I pick for sessions fall into four broad categories:

1) Activities I’ve created myself and am re-purposing, like the example above. I love the creative part of facilitation, so there will likely be for any given workshop at least one activity that is my own concoction. For this, I go to my private library in SessionLab. This forms my personal knowledge base, growing in time to contain all the tools I use most. If I were working as part of a team, company or agency, I could see all my team’s methods here.

2) Well-known, established activities. My go-to favorites are 1-2-4-all from Liberating Structures, and the World Café (which is also a Liberating Structure, although I’ve learnt it from the World Café community and Juanita Brown and David Isaacs’ book). These exist in the SessionLab public library, so I can drag-and-drop them from there. The actual work to be done on these activities will be about crafting engaging questions that fit the target audience.

3) New activities I’ll create for this specific group. If I have some time, I try to add many details and information to these in SessionLab, so I can then refer back to them as library cards and even, if I think they are good enough, contribute to building a collective knowledge base by adding them to the public library. If you’d like to contribute, it’s easy to do: read how to in this article.

4) Energizers, icebreakers, check-in questions, debrief questions, opening and closing group activities that frame or complete the workshop design. These are usually quicker things, taking 10 to 15 minutes maximum. When designing a small-group workshop like this one, I usually just put a placeholder block for “energizer” in my draft schedule. I will then pick one off the top of my head in the moment, depending on the mood of the group.

In other cases, I might be working with a client who wants a clearer sense of what we will do in advance, or maybe with a larger event or conference where, typically, things need to be tightly scheduled. If that is the case, I’ll pick something from collections like these icebreaker activities or these ideas for check-in questions.

Some of these activities will form the opening and closing sections of my workshop, which I like to delineate quite early so I can make sure to protect time for them. An introduction part is needed to orient people, give them information on the workshop and start creating connections (with me, with the topic of the workshop, and with one another) before we jump into the main content and activity.

The closing part is essential in order to consolidate learning, set action points, collect participant feedback, and end the experience on a positive note, rather than risk rushing through the end. I like to create a dedicated color category for these activities, in this case pink, that I call intro/outro. 

By adding the activities I think best fit this session to my plan, I now have a high-level draft. A lot of details are still missing at this stage, and the timing is tentative, with plenty of “TBD – To Be Discussed” notations. But it’s good enough for me to go into an initial meeting with. 

A few things have crystallized in my mind: I know I want to do the “values tour” activity towards the end. It’s a memorable activity that gets people moving and engaged in a multi-sensory way, and by the end of the workshop, we should have a short enough list of company values to work with. I also know there should be a long phase of divergence, lasting most of the morning, and I have tentative ideas of how to make it happen. 

How to save time (and avoid mistakes) with automatic time adjustments

My favorite feature in SessionLab is automated time adjustment.

If you’ve ever tried to plan a workshop, you know there is a lot of fine-tuning and fidgeting with the timeline.

Upon second thought, that activity will take 45 minutes, not 30. Information comes in from the catering company that the lunch needs to be moved by half an hour. A local official decides to come in and give a welcome introduction, adding 5 minutes to the first section. In SessionLab you can just drag-and-drop activities, or change the timing, and it will get re-adjusted by what to me (not a programmer!) seems like magic.

For example, in the values workshop I am working on, I’ll probably keep the emergence phase quite short and move to an activity that is more about converging. As we’ve seen, I’m hoping spontaneous conversations over lunch will be enough to give people time to air their thoughts. This means the break is now much too close to lunch. I’ll need to move it to after another exercise. 

Before discovering SessionLab, I was organizing workshops in generic text tools like GoogleDocs, or in Microsoft Excel. While these can work for very simple plans, they are certainly not designed with the interests of a workshop leader in mind!

Adjusting timings was always a particular headache, and I can remember various instances where I made timing mistakes that resulted in last-minute panic scambles to re-adjust timings and activities. I much prefer to dedicate my attention to shaping a collaborative environment and delivering impactful workshops than to triple-checking that I’ve counted minutes correctly!

Parking activity ideas for future use

The parking lot is another feature I use quite a lot in these early stages of design. It’s a place where to “park” any activity, method, or other block that I don’t currently need but might find a place for in the future.

If I’ve filled my potential agenda with too many activities, I might decide to set one aside in this space. It’s also a place to list possible energizers and games that I’ve found in the library and might want to use, I’m just not sure about it yet. 

Completing the initial design for my next workshop

So far, my work has been a solitary one, working from memory, past notes and the library of methods. In recent times, I’ve started opening the AI assistant tab when I feel stuck: I find it helps me explore ideas and reenergize my thinking.

I do find this helpful to get unblocked if I am stuck, although personally, I can easily fall into a rabbit-hole of curiosity for more and more ideas, so I have to be careful both with ideating with AI and with perusing the Library!

Let’s say I’ve managed to not get too lost: the rest of my work now is about refining timings and fine-tuning the order of my activities. It’s usually a good idea to leave the desk for a while at some point, maybe go for a walk, and return to workshop planning again later, or the next day, with fresh eyes. 

If you want to take a look at what the completed session for a day of teamwork on company values turned out to be like, check out this completed template. It gives time for workshop participants to discuss their existing situation, brainstorm possible values that fit their current company and reflect their aspirations for the future. They then have the opportunity to choose a set of potential values and take part in an experiential activity to clarify what they mean to them.

This particular workshop will happen in person. Based on what I know about the target audience, I am not planning on using digital tools for workshop delivery. If it were an online, virtual workshop, I’d add a column for links and a checklist of things I need to do on external tools. This might include, for example, preparing a Zoom link or a Mentimeter interactive questionnaire, or whiteboard collaboration tools like Mural and Miro.

What happens next: how to gather feedback from clients and prepare for delivery

As you’ve seen above, it’s been quite a smooth (and fun) process to go from a blank canvas to a detailed session plan. My work is not over, though!

In the next phases of workshop preparation work, collaboration becomes the focus. I’ll be sharing the plan with clients and co-facilitators, in order to get the client’s buy in and make sure we are all on the same page. SessionLab helps with this by giving me various options to show the plan to other stakeholders, and I can use comments for real time collaboration.

As workshop planning progresses, I’ll be adding columns and notes that help me make sure I have the right tools to sort out practicalities and technical aspects, so me and my co-facilitator can make sure to stay aligned and arrive on the day of the workshop fully prepared. 

To learn more about how I use SessionLab to collaborate with stakeholders and prepare for delivery, read the second part of this article here. In it, I discuss different ways of sharing information and keeping everyone aligned and on the same page, using a large (150+ people) networking conference as an example.

As with any professional software, I’m sure everyone uses it their own way. If you use SessionLab differently or have something else to add, do pop extra advice and any questions in the comments.

It’s my hope this has given you useful tips and, perhaps, some new ideas on how to approach your next facilitation challenge. If that is the case, give the Planner a try, for free, from here. And drop a note in the comments to let me know how it’s going!

We’ve all sat through sessions that feel like (and in fact, are) a slow march through a PowerPoint deck. The information might be useful, but it is not memorable. In an era of distractions and short attention spans, what can help us design training that actually sticks? 

In this article, we will look at 8 essential tips to make in-person or virtual training more engaging, with plenty of real-life stories and examples from my own experience training newbies in facilitation and group dynamics.

Think back at any training course you’ve taken part in that you’d say was a success, in whole or in part. What made it such? It may have been particularly relevant to your needs in life and work at the time. Perhaps you got a lot of energy from sharing with other participants. Real-life applications may have helped you get a feel of efficacy. And there was probably some fun involved, as well as moments of insight and reflection.

Let’s talk about that “fun” aspect for a moment. Yes, a good training is often fun, but this should not be limited to bells and whistles, or games and quizzes. Training engagement is not just about keeping people entertained. Especially when training professionals, effective employee training is about creating meaningful learning experiences: ones that lead to action, behavior change, and real-world application.

Here is what we will explore in this article:

Why engagement matters in training

When participants are actively engaged, the impact of training increases significantly. I’ve recently run a quick pre-training survey with a cohort of 30 professionals working for a development agency; one of the questions I asked was about previous training experiences they’d had. Which were good, and effective, in their view? What made the bad ones bad?

Their answers are probably unsurprising, yet always worth repeating. Content overload, and hour-long PowerPoint presentations, make for terrible learning experiences. The subject matter is soon forgotten, and all that’s remembered is the headache. Engaging with other participants, a balanced mix of content and practice, and practical applications were the top answers as to what makes a training good.

Here are three key benefits of truly engaging training:

• Better knowledge retention and memory. When adult learners are involved in the learning process, they’re far more likely to remember and apply what they’ve learned.
• Higher likelihood of application. The more people connect with and engage in the training, the more they’ll take away lessons that translate into action.
• Increased motivation. Engagement fuels curiosity, connection, and enthusiasm: making learning an active rather than passive experience.

So how do we go beyond surface-level engagement and create training sessions that truly connect with learners?

Interaction vs. engagement: what’s the difference?

It’s easy to assume that more interaction = more engagement. But that’s not always true. Online training expert and author of The Quest newsletter Gwyn Wansbrough recently illuminated the difference. 

The problem is that interactive tools alone aren’t enough.

⚡️Interaction invites participation

Think of interaction as the way participants interface with your session. Polls, chats, and word clouds make it easier for people to contribute ideas and experiences. And that gives you and your group valuable “raw material” to work with.

💡 Engagement makes it meaningful

Engagement is about the depth and quality of the experience. How your participants connect with you, the content, and each other. It’s what transforms that raw material into lasting insights.

Gwyn Wansbrough, author of The Quest newsletter

Interaction can be thought of as the way participants interface with your session. Engagement is about depth. It’s what transforms interaction into lasting insights.

• It’s about the social interaction: how participants connect with the content, with each other, and with you as the trainer.
• It’s what makes learning feel personal, relevant, and applicable.

How do we turn interaction into engagement? 

Let’s take a classic example. At the start of a workshop, a trainer might ask participants a simple question, such as “In one word, what do you expect from this training?”. This is a fairly standard way to ask people to check in and start interacting. It’s easy to set up (I usually use Mentimeter) and responses are quick to collect.

One click later, you are displaying a wordcloud of responses on a shared (online) or projected (IRL, that is, in real life) screen. This is a good example of interaction. How can we turn it into engagement? 

It just takes one extra step, a step steeped in meaning. Instead of simply collecting word cloud responses, take a moment to narrate what you see, draw connections between ideas, and invite a few people to elaborate and contribute. That small shift turns a basic interaction into a deeper engagement moment.

While planning your training, consider the importance of engagement throughout. How can you turn each moment of interaction into something deeper? Often it’s about asking a follow-up question, or inviting a few voices to reflect out loud on what happened so far.

8 practical tips to make your training more engaging

There is no single formula for engagement, but there are strategies that consistently make learning more dynamic, memorable, and impactful.

In the next paragraphs we’ll go through 8 tips for deepening engagement in training experiences, whether you are running training courses online or in person, in a one-off workshop or a longer online learning course.

To each step, I’ve added examples and stories from recent trainings I’ve held to upskill students and professionals in facilitation skills. My hope is that these personal stories might help make these tips practical and bring them to life for you. If you want to read more about how I work with beginners to upskill them in facilitation, here is the full story!

1. Set (and communicate) clear learning objectives. 

Start with the end in mind. What should participants be able to do, know, or explain by the end of the session? You probably have based your training design on some clear objectives, but now it’s a matter of framing and communicating them to participants. What are some effective ways of doing this? 

Every year, I train a new group of international students in facilitation and group dynamics. A challenge I face at the onset is that they find this mysterious topic, facilitation, in their syllabus, but in most cases they have never heard of it before. While some may have work experience, most are in the middle of their undergraduate degrees. Although I am confident they will need collaboration and facilitation skills in their future jobs, they do not know that yet. How can I frame the training program in such a way as to make the learning objectives clear for them?

Personally, I often begin with an active listening activity. I pair students up and ask them to take turns completing open sentences such as:

• When I have worked on projects together with other people I’ve enjoyed it because…
• When I have worked on projects together with other people it’s been very hard because…
• I think working with other people is…

Discussing learning objectives in this way shifts training from being something that is delivered to something that invites active exploration. Adult learners need clear objectives that can connect the activities at hand with their overall professional development. Other engaging ways of sharing learning objectives include:

• Writing them up in a poster and opening a discussion: what do these learning objectives mean to you?
• Asking participants to journal, or draw, their intentions for the session;
• Collecting sticky notes that answer the question “how do you think you might apply learnings on this session’s topic to your daily work?”

Even in virtual training or self-paced online learning, this step can be vital in ensuring participants truly enrol in their own learning journey. I usually ask participants to reflect on their personal goals before diving into any online courses in full.

2. Start with a check-in

At the beginning of a training session, I used to jump straight into the agenda. After all, time is limited, and there’s always a lot to cover. But over the years, I’ve realized that taking even a few minutes for a check-in makes a huge difference in how engaged people are throughout the session.

These days, I keep it simple: I ask participants to share how they’re doing. Not a clever icebreaker, not a carefully crafted question: just a straightforward invitation to say a few words about their current state.

While this might seem like a small thing, it gives me valuable information. If someone says, “I’m exhausted; it’s been a long week,” or “I’m feeling a little lost on this topic,” that tells me how I might need to adjust my approach. If the energy in the room is low, I know I might need to incorporate more movement or discussion early on. If people come in feeling overwhelmed, I can acknowledge that and create space for focus rather than adding more cognitive overload.

Beyond giving me insight into the group, a check-in also serves another important function: it gets people speaking early. The earlier someone speaks in a session, the more likely they are to contribute again later. When people have the opportunity to express themselves in the first few minutes, it reduces the social barrier to speaking up again. I usually invite a round if the group is small, and use the chat function or a Mentimeter poll if we are working online or the group is too large for a full tour de table.

A check-in doesn’t have to take long, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s simply an opportunity to meet learners where they are and invite them into the space as active participants. When working with the same group repeatedly, you’ll need a reservoir of different check-in questions. For some inspiration, here is a list of 221 to get inspired by! 

3. Connect new knowledge to existing knowledge

People learn best when they relate new ideas to what they already know. Training that helps learners build bridges between past experiences and new concepts leads to deeper understanding.

One way to do this is to begin a topic by asking participants what they already know about it. This approach helps surface prior knowledge and makes learning feel more relevant and connected.

For example, when I introduce a session on facilitation or group dynamics, I often start by asking participants to describe their past experiences working in groups: what worked well, what was challenging, and what made those experiences either productive or frustrating. As they share, I take mental notes (or sometimes jot key words down on a poster), paying attention to the language and examples they use. If they talk about “group vibe” rather than “dynamics,” for example, I’ll try to reflect that back in my explanations instead of relying on my usual jargon and terminology.

4. Structure your session logically

Training should feel like a logical progression, not a collection of unrelated activities. A well-structured session guides learners through a sequence of ideas, ensuring that each part builds upon the last. When learning feels disjointed or rushed, engagement drops. On the other hand, a well-planned structure creates a flow, making it easier for participants to absorb and apply new knowledge.

One reliable approach is Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, a model that highlights how people learn best through a continuous process of experience, reflection, conceptualization, and active experimentation. According to Kolb:

• Start each module of your training with a concrete experience. This can be a game or activity, something tangible or relatable that connects them to the topic.
• Next, invite participants to engage in reflective observation, analyzing and making sense of that experience. “What did you notice? What happened? How did it feel? Why do you think things went as they did?”
• Next comes abstract conceptualization, where new ideas, frameworks, or theories are introduced. This is the part most closely associated with the idea of a “training”, where you as trainer will provide theories and mental models to make sense of the experience.
• Finally, learners move into active experimentation, applying what they’ve learned in a practical exercise. If there is not enough time for case studies or role play, asking people to make their own action plans and reflect on how they might apply learning in real life is a valid way to complete this step.

As facilitators or trainers with a slant towards facilitation, we might fall into the trap of leading a great activity without connecting it to the flow of the day or (cardinal sin!) without giving time for reflective observation, that is, a debrief. 

I generally structure a lot of reflection time around each activity, both for the whole group and with journaling time for each participant to reflect individually on their learning. 

To start designing a training session founded upon the structure of Kolb’s learning cycle, look no further than this training session template. In it you will find different sections for each part of the cycle, and you can easily duplicate it in SessionLab’s planner to customize it to your needs.

5. Keep it practical. Use real-world examples and case studies

Theory is important, but practical application is what makes learning stick. Providing concrete examples, case studies, and real-world scenarios helps participants see how they can apply what they’re learning in their own contexts. The more relevant and actionable the content, the better.

One way I ensure practicality in my sessions is by designing activities that serve a dual purpose: allowing participants to both practice facilitation tools and engage with real-world challenges at the same time. For example, I often include a World Café exercise where participants generate discussion topics based on real situations they have encountered in their work. The topics are not pre-selected: they emerge from the group’s experiences, making the conversation immediately relevant.

This approach achieves two things at once: first, it allows participants to practice the World Café method itself, experiencing what it’s like to facilitate and take part in the process. Second, it provides a structured way for them to discuss and problem-solve around real-life challenges. Rather than practicing facilitation with hypothetical examples, they apply it to topics that matter to them right now. This is a key strategy for making training more engaging. 

6. Switch modes to keep energy high and cater to different learning styles

Avoiding long stretches of passive listening is essential for keeping participants engaged. By varying training methods you create opportunities for different kinds of learners to connect with the material. A good mix of listening, speaking, writing, and movement helps reinforce learning, prevent fatigue, and sustain energy throughout the session.

One way I remind myself to do this is by recognizing my own biases as a trainer. Left to my own devices, I tend to create training courses that are engaging for people who think like me. I learn best through dialogue and discussion, so I naturally design sessions filled with conversations and verbal exchanges.

But I know that if I don’t make a conscious effort, I risk leaving out those who process information differently, including those who need quiet reflection, movement, or visual expression to fully engage with the content. Thinking about those people who may need training materials on paper or in a visual style can help ensure no learner is left behind.

For that reason, I intentionally incorporate moments of silent journaling, energetic movement-based activities, and even drawing, which is far from my own comfort zone. And yet, these are often the moments that surprise and delight me the most.

Recently, in a facilitation training, I asked participants to draw their own metaphors for the role of a facilitator. One participant sketched a can of WD-40 lubricant, explaining that a facilitator helps things move smoothly, reduces friction, and gets teams unstuck. I could never have come up with such a metaphor myself, but it perfectly captured an essential aspect of facilitation.

If you are looking for a few ideas of activities and games you might want to include in your next training session to shift the energy or making your training fun, here is a collection of 24 of our favorite engaging training games.

7. Incorporate regular breaks

Giving participants time to pause and process information is one of the simplest and most effective ways to keep engagement high. Even a quick two-minute stretch, a short walk, or a moment of silence can reset focus and improve retention.

When I plan a training session, one of the first things I do in SessionLab’s planner is add a start time, an end time, and some bright-yellow blocks for structured breaks. If I don’t plan for them upfront, it’s too easy to push through and assume energy levels will hold. But they won’t: without breaks, even the most interactive session starts to feel exhausting.

A simple trick I’ve learned is to start with shorter breaks and make them longer as the day goes on. The first break might be just five minutes: a quick reset. By mid-afternoon, when energy naturally dips, a longer break helps keep engagement up rather than letting fatigue set in.

Research into participatory activities suggests that a 15-minute break every 90 minutes is ideal for maintaining focus and energy levels. This aligns with research on biological rhythms, particularly something called the ultradian rhythm, which describes the body’s natural cycles of activity and rest. After about 90 minutes of sustained effort, cognitive performance starts to decline, making structured breaks not just beneficial but biologically necessary.

Breaks also create space for informal discussion and reflection. Some of the best insights don’t happen during training activities, but over coffee, when participants have time to process what they’ve learned. I often notice that after a break, someone who had been quiet in the first half of a session will suddenly speak up with a new idea or connection they’ve made.

And a small but effective trick: take a group picture at the end of a break. It’s a lighthearted way to bring people back together, and it subtly signals that the session is resuming. When the group sees others gathering, they naturally follow suit, making transitions smoother.

8. The best trainers listen to the group and adapt

No matter how well you design a training session, real engagement happens when participants feel that the session is for them: that it reflects their needs, interests, and learning styles. And the only way to do that effectively? Ask, listen, and adapt.

I aim to collect feedback mid-session, not just at the end, usually right before lunch. I ask three simple questions:

• What’s going well that you’d like more of?
• What’s not working as well, and what could we adjust?
• Any other suggestions or ideas for me?

This quick check-in allows me to course-correct in real time. If participants are deeply engaged in discussions, I might create more space for reflection and dialogue. If they’re feeling restless, I might introduce a movement-based activity or switch things up with a game.

This flexibility is possible because I design training with clear learning objectives, but without rigid adherence to every planned activity. The goal is to ensure that learning happens in a way that resonates with the group, not to complete a “perfect” checklist of activities. Over the past few years, I’ve seen just how much variation there can be between groups, even when delivering the same core training:

• One group thrived on deep discussions and critical reflection.
• Another preferred gamified activities: the more interactive and playful, the better.
• A third, just this year, engaged most when given time for individual journaling and quiet processing.

There’s no way to predict these preferences in advance. As a trainer, you can come in with your best guesses, but ultimately, the group will tell you what works for them: if you ask.

And while adapting mid-session improves engagement in the moment, gathering feedback at the end of a session helps refine the training for next time. It’s where I collect ideas I might not have thought of, discover which methods landed best, and notice what could be streamlined or improved.

Pro tip: I keep some notes on what worked best and what I’d like to change in a note at the end of my session plan in SessionLab, so that next time I open it to copy and create a new session, my precious feedback is right there.

How to make online, self-paced training courses more engaging too!

While the eight tips previously discussed are tailored for live training environments, whether online or in-person, many can be adapted to improve self-paced courses as well. Online, self-paced courses and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have many benefits for learners: with no set dates or times, they are accessible to people from any timezone, and especially well-suited for those balancing family responsibilities or demanding work schedules. While there are natural limitations to the level of interactivity in a fully asynchronous format, that doesn’t mean course designers are out of options; it’s totally possible to be creative in this format as well.

Here are six practical ideas for making self-paced courses more engaging. Do you have more? Add them in the comments or join discussions in our friendly community.

• Invite participants to keep a learning journal. Self-reflection is a powerful part of the learning process. From the very beginning of the course, prompt participants with reflection questions and encourage them to keep a personal journal of their thoughts, reactions, and takeaways. Start by inviting learners to articulate why they joined the course and what they hope to gain. As the course progresses, use reflective prompts to deepen learning, reinforce key ideas, and help participants make personal connections to the material.
• Incorporate videos. Videos are a staple of online learning, because they work to bring learning to life. It’s important to keep them short, purposeful, and human. Rather than long, lecture-style recordings, consider using brief explainer videos, animated walkthroughs, or informal selfie-style clips from instructors. These can break up the reading load and help maintain a sense of personal connection in an otherwise solo learning journey.
• Pepper the course with quizzes (and make them fun!). Quizzes don’t have to feel like school tests. Use them as opportunities for learners to check their understanding and reinforce key concepts in a light, interactive way. Include playful elements like badges, instant feedback, or a “did you know?” fact alongside correct answers. This not only aids retention but also builds confidence and keeps energy levels up.
• Design exercises with real-world scenarios. Help learners bridge theory and practice by including activities based on real-life challenges they might face. Whether it’s a case study, a role-play prompt, or a problem-solving exercise, context-rich scenarios give learners a chance to apply knowledge meaningfully, making the course content feel more relevant and memorable.
• Provide opportunities for peer interaction, even asynchronously. Self-paced doesn’t have to mean isolated. Consider building in optional discussion forums, reflection boards, or shared project spaces where participants can exchange ideas, ask questions, or share insights. Even if learners aren’t online at the same time, knowing there’s a space to connect with others can increase motivation and create a more communal learning experience.
• Use progress tracking and gentle nudges. A visible sense of progress can be motivating in itself. Use progress bars, milestone markers, or completion checklists to help learners track how far they’ve come. Combine these with automated nudges—friendly reminders, encouragement messages, or timely prompts to resume the course. Aim to make participants supported without feeling pressured (remember the death of Duo?)

With thoughtful design choices, even asynchronous courses can become memorable, engaging learning experiences. The key is to think beyond content delivery and consider how you can support motivation, connection, and reflection throughout the learners’ journey.

How SessionLab can help make your training more engaging

As we’ve seen in these 8 tips, engaging training isn’t just about great facilitation in the moment: it also comes down to careful planning and clever structuring. That’s where SessionLab can help. Whether you’re designing a short workshop or a multi-day training, SessionLab provides the tools to make planning easier, more flexible, and—most importantly—more engaging for participants.

1. Structure your session with variety, at a glance

One of the keys to engagement is switching modes throughout a session to keep energy high and cater to different learning styles. SessionLab’s color-coded blocks make it easy to visualize the flow of activities, ensuring that you’re not relying too heavily on one type of learning method. You can quickly see if you have too much presentation time, too few interactive elements, or if reflective exercises are missing, and adjust accordingly.

And of course, SessionLab helps keep track of timing and breaks. With an intuitive planner that adjusts in real-time, you can make sure that breaks are well-placed and that activities don’t run over, helping maintain the right balance of focus and rest.

2. Enrich your session with a library of activities

Even the best training plans need a fresh spark of inspiration from time to time. With SessionLab’s facilitation library of over 1400 methods, you can always find an energizer, a game, or an interactive activity to enhance your session. To start exploring, check out this collection of active learning activities and strategies.

3. Start with a high-quality training agenda

Rather than building from scratch, why not start with a proven training agenda? SessionLab offers a range of training templates, including this Essential Training Session Plan, a structured yet flexible starting point for designing a high-impact session based on Kolb’s learning cycle.

4. Learn and connect with a community of trainers

Trainers, facilitators, and educators also need a space to learn, experiment, and grow. On the SessionLab blog, you’ll find a wealth of articles on facilitation, training, and learning design, offering both practical strategies and deeper insights into how to make training more engaging.

And if you’re looking for new ideas or want to share your experiences, join our community of trainers and facilitators! Learning from others is one of the best ways to keep improving your own sessions.

And if you’ve applied any of the tips from this article to make your training sessions more engaging, I’d love to hear from you: drop a note in the comments!

Below, we explore the most essential leadership training topics, explaining why they matter, how they contribute to business success, and what to consider when facilitating these sessions.

What is leadership training?

Leadership training is a structured learning process designed to develop and refine the skills necessary for effective leadership. Leadership training can come in formats ranging from bespoke workshops and training sessions focusing on a single skill all the way through to mentorship programs and ongoing courses.

But what does it look like in practice? Where you’re looking at a single 2-hour training session or a complete leadership development program, leadership training will broadly follow this general structure:

• introducing the training topic, setting goals and expected outcomes
  • in many learning and development programs, participants will work on a combination of personal goals (e.g. “I want to better understand my leadership style”, or “I’d like to feel less stressed”) and broader training goals (e.g. “after the training, participants will be able to demonstrate they understand how to coach their team and deliver performance reviews in line with our company policies”).
• presentation of training materials, often with a combination of theory, visual presentations, case studies, and real-world examples. Most often, this is presented by a subject matter expert or skilled trainer or facilitator.
• group discussions on the training topic, allowing participants to share their thoughts and engage with the material more deeply. These discussions often follow a 1-2-4 all structure, giving participants the opportunity to reflect individually before sharing with the wider group.
• practical instruction and experiential learning activities relating to the training topic where participants get to use the training topic skill in action. Often, an expert trainer will demonstrate, give feedback and encourage participants to participate in real-time.
• personal and group reflection where participants reflect on what they’ve learned and how they might apply it in practice. This is a key part of any training program, ensuring that learnings stick by way of reflection and integration.
• Ongoing and continuous learning, where participants are encouraged to use their newly developed leadership skills and techniques, do further reading and learning while reflecting on their development.
• Assessment. This can be a strong pass/fail style assessment at the end of a single training session, or an ongoing mentorship where a mentor will continually give feedback and assess how leadership development is progressing.

Depending on the format of leadership development, all of these things can happen in a single training session or they might be repeated throughout a longer leadership development program.

Whichever way you go, expect to explore a topic relating to leadership skills, give participants an opportunity to discuss and practice before assessing their abilities and encouraging them to proceed with real-life applications of those skills.

Leadership training can include a wide range of topics, many of which we’ve collected below. These include everything from communication, decision-making and emotional intelligence to conflict resolution and strategic thinking.

It’s not an entirely exhaustive list, but it should give you plenty of ideas for topics you can bring to your training programs when you want to boost team performance, help people step into leadership roles or otherwise build a productive work environment.

Top leadership training topics to transform your leaders

In this section, we’ll explore the top leadership training topics you’ll want to consider bringing to your team. We’ve curated this list by researching many of the best leadership development programs in the market and by listening to facilitators and trainers in the space. Whether you’re running an internal program for developing current and future leaders or looking for a one-off training topic that will have lasting business impact, you’ll find something useful here.

Where applicable, we’ve also included relevant leadership development activities that you can use in your own training sessions. You’ll also find some workshop templates that you might wish to use as the basis of your program.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict is an inevitable aspect of bringing people together to work on a shared project. The danger for any team is letting that conflict escalate or go untended. The key for adept leaders is to understand how to manage and resolve disputes effectively, turning those ALL CAPS conflicts into moments of learning and growth.

Training in conflict resolution equips leaders with the ability to identify underlying causes of disagreements, communicate transparently, and mediate disputes with fairness and confidence.

Typically, conflict resolution training will combine a group discussion, an exploration of emotional awareness and empathic skills while also developing a toolkit of strategies — such as active listening, reframing, and negotiation. Expect to incorporate problem analysis strategies like What, So What, Now What? to enable better navigation of future conflicts and give plenty of opportunity for reflection.

Role-playing exercises and live examples of conflict resolution are especially effective in this kind of training environment. Using an exercise like conflict responses is a great opportunity for leaders discuss prior conflict and understand how they might guide their team through better in the future.

One important note: if your group is in the middle of an active conflict that has triggered a need for training, I’d recommend using an external facilitator or third party to facilitate the training session. The neutrality of the trainer can be an essential part of helping this learning be accepted and integrated by the group.

Find some more you might bring to your training session in this collection of conflict management techniques.

Communication Skills

Effective communication is the cornerstone of everything we do when we collaborate with others. For leaders who sit at the nexus of everyone on their team, the need for good communication is even stronger.

Leaders must articulate ideas clearly, create space for safe, open dialogue, listen to their team, provide constructive feedback, and inspire their teams. On one hand, this can feel like a lot, but the truth is that improving a small number of core communication skills can have a profound effect on every interaction we have as leaders.

Communication training is extremely practical in nature, so expect to see lots of exploratory training activities and communication games where leaders practice communication, reflect on what happened and then incorporate learnings into their practice.

Activities like “silent meetings,” where communication occurs solely through writing, can highlight the importance of clarity while a simple pair activity like Team of Two can radically improve the important interpersonal relationships we have with those we work with.

Communication training for leaders tends to have a lot of overlap with other topics like feedback and group facilitation. Depending on the training needs identified, you might also create opportunities for practicing the delivery and reception of constructive feedback or have a section of key facilitation skills that might help them facilitate productive discussions with an emphasis on asking the right questions, listening deeply and being aware of group dynamics.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Emotional intelligence is a pivotal skill for leaders aiming to build robust relationships and cultivate a positive work environment. Leaders with high EQ can regulate their emotions, empathize with others, and make decisions that consider both logical analysis and emotional impact.

In a recent study, Karla De Luna found that school leaders would benefit from more training in social and emotional intelligence skills such as self-awareness and self management, and called for “the advancement of professional development programs aimed at enhancing social-emotional competencies”.

In this regard, emotional intelligence training should focus on developing self-awareness, recognizing emotional triggers, and managing stress effectively. Utilizing self-assessment tools allows leaders to gain deeper insights into their emotional responses and identify areas for growth. Interactive group discussions, where leaders share experiences of emotionally charged situations and their handling of them is also an integral part of these kinds of training sessions.

As noted in our blog post on emotional intelligence activities, EQ is a composite of many different sub-skills and focusing on a single one of these – such as self awareness or empathy – might be your chosen approach.

Whatever your focus, EQ training is arguably one of the most impactful skills you can teach your leaders. Not only does this allow them to navigate their own emotional landscape, but it means they can also impart further lessons to their team and create a safer, more supportive work environment.

See this self awareness workshop template for a practical example of how to improve self awareness and EQ with a group.

Coaching

Great leaders are also great coaches. Rather than simply directing their teams, they guide employees toward growth and success by fostering a culture of continuous development and open dialogue. Leaders who excel in coaching empower their team to take ownership of their learning and career progression rather than simply handing down instructions.

Leadership coaching training should teach managers how to ask powerful questions, provide constructive feedback, and create meaningful development plans for their teams. The GROW coaching model (Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward) is an excellent framework to structure coaching conversations. Training sessions should include real-time coaching practice, where leaders take turns coaching each other and receive feedback on their approach.

Most of the topics in this list are deeply interconnected. Leaders who master effective communication, emotional intelligence and facilitation tend to make better coaches. When working to develop coaching skills internally, be sure to identify the correct skills gaps to ensure you give your leaders everything they need to effectively coach their teams.

As with therapists benefiting from receiving their own therapy, one great approach is to give coaches their own coaching opportunities so they can continue to grow while also receiving valuable experience they can bring to their own practice.

Delegation

Delegation is an essential leadership skill that ensures work is distributed effectively while empowering team members to develop new skills. That said, many leaders struggle with delegation, either holding onto tasks too tightly or offloading responsibilities without clear guidance.

Leadership training in delegation typically addresses the soft and hard parts of delegation: engaging the emotional parts of us that can find it difficult to trust things can be done by others, as well as providing very practical frameworks for delegating tasks and organizing work. As such, you’ll find a combination of discussion, reflection and sharing learnings at the heart of this kind of training.

For example, a project management and delegation tool like RAACI can provide a framework leaders will use time and time again. Teaching leaders how to explore alignment and autonomy can also help them discuss the topic with their teams and delegate from a place of trust and shared understanding.

In my experience, delegation dovetails with many other leadership skills on this list and as such, it’s often a topic that comes up as a challenge when exploring everything from communication to coaching.

By practicing this skill and discussing common challenges, leaders can start to develop strategies for assigning tasks in a way that speaks to their own needs and those of the team, making the learning stick.

Facilitation

Effective facilitation is a crucial leadership skill that enables effective collaboration and makes everything we do as groups easier and more productive. Leaders who excel in facilitation can create an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed, ideas are explored, and teams feel empowered to contribute.

While facilitation skills are most noticeably deployed when leading projects and designing workshops and meetings, anytime you work with others is an opportunity for facilitation skills to shine.

Leadership training in facilitation should cover techniques for designing effective processes (often in the form of an agenda), managing group dynamics, and keeping discussions focused and results-oriented.

Practical exercises where leaders will actively learn and practice core facilitation techniques are order of the day here. You’ll also find that being a part of a well-facilitated training session is a powerful first step: experiencing how facilitation can lead to better outcomes first hand can be incredibly instructive and inspiring.

See this collection of the best facilitation training courses if you want to get external guidance. Alternatively, explore this facilitation training template to see how you might teach core facilitation skills to your team.

Team Building

Strong teams don’t form by accident; they require intentional leadership and effort. Training in team building helps leaders understand group dynamics, build trust among team members, and create an inclusive work environment. A cohesive and high-performing team is built on mutual respect, clear communication, and shared goals.

Leadership training in team building should focus on learning methods that enable good collaboration, enhance psychological safety, and give leaders the skills needed to build team morale and navigate group dynamics.

Leaders undergoing this kind of training may explore various team development frameworks and provide opportunties to explore what makes effective teams, covering topics like alignment, cohesion and working styles too.

Often, this training can look like learning a collection of methods and team building activities that leaders can deploy with their own teams. These can include everything from techniques to create team rituals, such as weekly recognition meetings or collaborative brainstorming sessions, which help establish a culture of trust and cooperation.

Leaders can also expect to understand their role in team dynamics, perhaps discussing what it means to be in a position of power and how to navigate this while effectively coaching and supporting their teams. High-functioning teams perform better when they feel connected and valued, making team-building training an essential part of leadership development.

Feedback

Delivering and receiving feedback is a crucial aspect of leadership. Effective leaders create a culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and geared toward growth. Feedback should not only focus on addressing performance issues but also reinforce positive behaviors and recognize achievements.

Training in this area might focus on models like the SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) feedback framework or other proven feedback techniques which help leaders provide clear and actionable feedback to their team.

In addition to giving feedback, leaders should also be trained on how to solicit feedback from their teams. Creating an open feedback loop allows for continuous improvement and strengthens trust within the organization. Training should encourage leaders to ask reflective questions like, “How can I better support your success?” and “What feedback do you have for me as your leader?” This ensures that feedback is a two-way street and that employees feel their voices are heard.

They might even learn a technique like principles of effective feedback, which will enable them to work with their team to set expectations and agreements for how feedback should be handled.

Explore this complete feedback workshop agenda for an example of how to practically instruct leaders in giving and receiving better feedback.

Decision Making

Leaders are constantly faced with decisions that impact their teams and organizations. Decision-making training should equip leaders with tools for assessing risks, analyzing data, and making informed choices under pressure. The ability to make sound decisions, especially in high-stakes situations, is a defining trait of great leaders.

Training should introduce leaders to structured decision-making techniques such as the Eisenhower Matrix for prioritization, SWOT analysis for evaluating options, and the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) for agile decision-making. By understanding these frameworks, leaders can develop a systematic approach to making choices that align with organizational goals.

Scenario-based exercises are a highly effective way to train leaders in decision-making. Presenting leaders with complex business dilemmas and guiding them through the decision-making process in real-time helps them build confidence and critical thinking skills. Training should also address cognitive biases that can cloud judgment, such as confirmation bias or the sunk cost fallacy, and provide strategies for overcoming them.

The softer, human part of decision making is also something you should expect to touch on. Making good decisions with many stakeholders and strong opinions is hard, and can sometimes weigh on your leaders. Open dialogue and group discussion is a powerful part of what makes this kind of training work and truly help your leaders grow.

Encourage leaders to reflect on past decisions — successes and mistakes — to help develop resilience and learn how to make decisions in less than ideal circumstances as well as those in which they have complete control.

Change management

Change of some form is inevitable in any organization, and leaders play a key role in guiding their teams through transitions. Whether it’s a company restructuring, the adoption of new technology, or shifts in market demands, leaders must be equipped to navigate uncertainty and foster resilience among their employees.

Training in change management should focus on frameworks such as the ADKAR model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement), which outlines the key stages of successful change adoption. Leaders should learn strategies for effectively communicating change, addressing resistance, and maintaining team morale during periods of uncertainty.

One effective training exercise is the “change simulation,” where leaders work through a real-life scenario that requires them to implement and manage organizational change.

Case studies of successful and unsuccessful change initiatives can provide valuable lessons on what works and what doesn’t when leading through change. Leaders should also be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences with change and identify areas where they can improve their ability to guide teams through transitions with confidence and clarity.

Leadership styles

There is no one-size-fits-all leadership approach, and great leaders often adapt their style to different situations too. Understanding various leadership styles helps leaders become more flexible and responsive to the needs of their teams while also figuring out what’s expected of them and how best to service their own needs too.

In my experience, it can be painful or unproductive for leaders to try working in a style that doesn’t match their values or personality, and a big part of working authentically and sustainably is figuring this out.

Training in leadership styles will likely explore models such as transformational leadership, servant leadership, and situational leadership.

As noted by leadership expert James MacGregor Burns as referenced in this paper, working on something like transformational or servant leadership can help “leaders and followers make each other advance to a higher level of moral and motivation.”

By understanding the strengths and challenges of each style, leaders can develop greater flexibility in their approach and see how they might best leverage their skills and style.

Self-assessment tools that help leaders identify their natural style and activities like Your Leadership Coat of Arms can also help leaders think about their approach and articulate how they want to show up as a leader. Combining this theory alongside group discussion on when to apply different leadership methods can make this training particularly valuable and engaging.

Time management

Effective time management is essential for leaders to fulfill their responsibilities, maximize productivity, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Leaders who manage their time well can focus on high-impact activities, delegate effectively, and avoid burnout, setting a strong example for their teams.

Leadership training in time management should introduce strategies such as time-blocking, prioritization frameworks, and goal-setting techniques. One widely used approach is the Impact and Effort Matrix, which helps leaders categorize tasks based on urgency and importance. One valuable concept is the Pareto Principle, which suggests that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts, guiding leaders to focus on tasks that yield the most significant outcomes.

Training should also address common time management challenges, such as handling interruptions, overcoming procrastination, and managing competing priorities. Leaders should be encouraged to assess their current time management habits and identify areas for improvement. Interactive exercises, such as time-audit activities and boundary setting activities, can help leaders develop more effective and sustainable habits.

Strategic thinking

Strategic thinking is an essential skill for leaders who want to align their teams with the organization’s long-term vision and goals. Leaders who think strategically can anticipate future challenges, evaluate different courses of action, and make informed decisions that drive success. Developing this skill enables leaders to transition from managing daily tasks to shaping the direction of their teams and organizations.

Leadership training in strategic thinking will typically focus on developing foresight, critical analysis, and decision-making skills. One effective approach is to introduce frameworks such as SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), or 3 Action Steps, which helps leaders evaluate their options and prepare for multiple possible futures.

In my experience, the best strategic thinking training will likely incorporate simulations or examples where groups will approach a problem or challenge with a strategic mindset. Through a combination of instruction, trial and error and success, leaders can gain practical experience and reflect on what made the project work on a strategic level. Case studies and examples are also very powerful here. Seeing real world success and then going backwards to understand how it was achieved can make things really click.

Problem solving

Leaders are constantly faced with complex challenges that require creative problem-solving. The ability to identify root causes, think critically, and develop innovative solutions is crucial for driving organizational success.

Training in this area should introduce structured methods such as root cause analysis (perhaps using the 5 Whys method) and lateral thinking techniques to find creative and effective solutions. Leaders might also be trained in specific frameworks like design thinking, which encourages iterative problem-solving and user-centric solutions.

Interactive problem-solving exercises are essential for reinforcing these skills. One effective approach is to present leaders with real-world business problems and have them collaborate on solutions in a timed setting. Encouraging reflection on past problem-solving successes and failures can also help leaders refine their approach and get a sense of what truly works when it comes to aligning teams around a shared goal.

In a continuous learning environment, setting up a peer group where leaders can discuss problems, solutions and impact over longer periods of time can be especially effective. Mastermind groups and committees can be a great setup you might use between shorter training workshops.

Why is Leadership training important?

There’s an old saying about whether good leaders are made or born. In my experience, it’s a little of both.

Good leaders tend to gravitate towards leadership because of skills or competencies they’ve developed from birth. That said, these skills alone are rarely enough to help leaders work at their best in a sustainable way.

I’ve seen a lot of leaders get burnt out or find that while they’re great at rallying a team behind a project, they’re not great at navigating conflict or helping everyone on their team feel supported.

Leadership training is that secret sauce that can nurture already great leaders into being better and happier in their work, while also helping future leaders emerge and be able to step into leadership roles with confidence.

Remember that the overall success of your organization is driven by your leaders. They help shape company culture, push teams to better performance, and influence the engagement of your entire team.

Without proper training, managers may struggle with key responsibilities leading to decreased productivity and lower team morale. Leadership training is a safe, supportive container that helps individuals develop the critical skills needed to navigate workplace challenges and make informed decisions.

In this report, nearly one-third of workers cite a lack of career advancement as the main factor influencing their decision to change employers. Giving folks scope to advance and grow is a key part of retaining these people. What’s more, finding and retaining good leaders is hard! Investing in training your people can ensure your company keeps these vital pillars who regularly hold up your company and enable strong team performance.

What next for leadership training?

Developing strong leadership skills requires ongoing learning and practice. By focusing on these essential training topics, organizations can empower their leaders to navigate challenges, drive business success, and lead with empathy.

Effective leadership training programs not only improve individual performance but they can also creates a ripple effect throughout the organization, promoting a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous growth.

So what’s next?

• To make leadership training truly impactful, organizations should start with a leadership skills audit or training needs assessment to identify gaps and begin to explore how to fill them.

• Choosing suitable training activities can ensure your program is dynamic and engaging for all your participants. See our collection of training games for effective activities you can easily add to your programs, whether you’re breaking the ice or seeking to engage team members in active learning.
• For exercises specifically designed for leadership training courses and workshop, this collection of leadership development activities will help you find something that suits your chosen leadership topics.
• When it comes to designing your session, our guide on planning an effective training session agenda will help you go from idea to a completed plan.
• For facilitation best practices and practical advice, see our post on how to run an impactful leadership workshop for more solid takeaways that will help inform your training design.

Demonstrating the qualities of a good trainer can transform workshops and training courses into experiences. This helps learning retention, making it much more likely that new learnings will be applied in practice.

In professional development and instructor-led workplace training, a good trainer can make the difference between delivering a boring and ineffective course that leaves participants disinterested and disengaged, and a successful learning experience. 

Some of the qualities typically listed as essential for great trainers include the ability to listen and adapt to the audience, to use learning materials creatively, to capture attention, and design training sessions in ways consistent with the science of adult learning (aka andragogy).

Trainers must be content matter experts, knowing their material inside out, but also have some of the skills of good facilitators, accompanying the group in a learning journey.

Good trainers aren’t necessarily charismatic extroverts, but they all have their own, signature ways of holding attention and communicating effectively with learners. 

Think back to a memorable training experience. Maybe it was a teacher from your school years: what made them stand out?

My thoughts go to a substitute teacher in high school who gave us a creative writing workshop using games and colors. Thinking of professional training, I have great memories of a session where trainers taught us using online games, creativity and breakout rooms. In both cases, creativity and playfulness made learning stick.

In this article, we’ll explore what makes a great trainer, from mindset to key skills like curiosity and creativity, plus tips on how to develop them.

This is what we will cover:

5 qualities of a good trainer

Whatever your life experiences, you probably have something in your background that can help you become an effective trainer. Whether it’s coaching sports or being a parent, everyone has had some form of experience with how rewarding—and how hard—it is to share knowledge and skills with others.

So before we look into five of the qualities of a good trainer, take a moment to think about your life and what you already know. This could become the core of your unique training style!

We each carry a unique backpack of experiences that shape how we connect with and guide others.

Jenny Theolin – Head of Learning at Abracademy

Participants in my own training courses have often told me that what they most enjoy in my style is a friendly, informal approach that makes them feel welcome. I think I can trace that back to my dad’s side of the family: restaurant owners who are experts in creating spaces where everyone feels at ease. On the other side of the family, my mom’s is a clan of polyglots and diplomats, which is probably where I picked up a penchant for mediation and active listening!

How about you? What early experiences or later jobs have shaped your training style and signature? How could you leverage them to make your courses unique, and what other aspects may you be missing?

Let’s go through five of the most commonly mentioned qualities and skills that make great trainers. Which do you see yourself in? Which could you cultivate some more?

1. A good trainer is always curious

Working in the field of learning and being a lifelong learner go hand in hand. Personally, some of my favorite moments from training sessions are when participants surprise me with a piece of knowledge or an unexpected connection I could never have come up with myself!

Some of the ways curiosity can help improve a training experience include:

• Curiosity makes it easier to put oneself into a beginner’s shoes, delivering information with clarity so that each new piece of learning builds upon the rest.
• A curious trainer is first and foremost curious about their participants. What brings them here? How can I best help them? This mindset, combined with active listening, counteracts the risk of rote, repetitive, or stale delivery.
  
  In many ways, this kind of curious engagement is what separates active learning from more passive forms of training. A successful trainer will often deploy training games that encourage curiosity from everyone in the room in order to help training stick,
• Whatever you are training about, curiosity will help you stay abreast of changes in the field, keeping you open to new things to learn and teach, and new ways to train.

2. Creativity is essential to great training

Innovation and surprise are key to keeping training sessions engaging and memorable. A great trainer finds ways to present their material in unexpected, interactive ways that make learning stick.

Some ways creativity enhances training:

• It helps break up long or complex topics into digestible, engaging formats.
• It encourages participants to actively engage through storytelling, exercises, and real-world examples. A sense of humor definitely helps!
• It allows trainers to adapt on the fly when something isn’t working—switching up activities, adjusting approaches, or responding to group energy.

You can start surprising and involving participants long before the training starts, for example by sending videos, welcome kits or giving thought and care as to how to make those pre-course questionnaires interesting to fill.

How you arrange the room and the objects inside it is a key element of creativity and surprise. What can you do to make the training environment more welcoming and congruent to your training objectives?

One of my favorite memories of working as a trainer is when I was invited to host a session to discuss post-earthquake community support, for first response trainees. When the trainees arrived in the room for the first time, I had re-arranged it to look like, well, perfect caos. Everything was jumbled around, tables were overturned, all my supplies were on the floor. Participants’ immediate responses (some were completely confused, some looked at me, the authority in charge, for solutions, others just gamely started to pick up and reorganize everything) gave us plenty of material to start the session with!

Are you interested in shaking your next training up with an unusual room setup? If so, you might want to take a look at our in-depth guide about how different seating arrangements influence engagement.

3. A good trainer is respectful and responsible

A great trainer recognizes that learning happens best in an environment where participants feel valued and respected. Being responsible means being mindful of different learning needs, managing time effectively, and ensuring that training remains a supportive space.

What does this look like in practice?

• Respecting different learning styles, backgrounds, and perspectives in the room.
• Being responsible with time: balancing structure with flexibility while ensuring that key learning goals are met.
• Handling challenges gracefully, whether it’s a difficult participant, a tough question, or an unexpected technical issue.

Another way of embodying the important qualities of respect and responsibility has to do with respecting the value of the content itself. This includes ensuring that information is accurate, properly attributed, and presented with integrity.

A responsible trainer credits sources, acknowledges the work of others, knows how to answer questions both confidently and honestly, and models good practice in knowledge sharing.

A trainer is a subject matter expert in the topic they are sharing.
They are humble with the group in that they don’t put themselves in the spotlight, they have the light on the learners. They encourage the learners who are adults to own the learning for themselves, they encourage the learners to do their own learning and they do not disable the adults in the room by minimising their responses, removing space for thought and reflection.

Kirsty Lewis – Founder of the School of Facilitation

4. Good trainers come well prepared

Great training doesn’t happen by accident. The best trainers take the time to design thoughtful sessions, anticipate challenges, and have a plan.

You’ve certainly heard it said that great facilitators and trainers adapt on the fly, and that is true: but you need to have a course set before you can course-correct!

Preparation involves:

• Having a clear structure and flow for the session.
• Designing engaging activities and making sure materials are ready.
• Building in flexibility, making it easier to self correct based on participant needs (and sometimes, on organizational needs, such as changes in the timing of lunch breaks!)

When I am working on a new training, I generally start by setting out a general outline of time, including breaks. Then I set aside a nice big block of time for opening activities, such as introductions and icebreakers. Next, I add a section at the very end for closing and feedback. From here, I go into picking some main, core activities or lectures that will form the main body of the workshop. In most cases, I’ll use a pre-existing model or flow (such as these examples of instructional learning models) to scaffold my thinking.

Planning workshops and sessions is really one of my favorite subjects. You can read more ideas on what makes a great training plan in this article, full of practical tips and how-tos for beginner and expert trainers alike.

SessionLab’s planner was designed for facilitation and instructor-led training: it can help you speed up the design process and keep track of everything you need. You can add a tab for lists of resources, or draw in your colleagues to collaborate on the plan. It also keeps all your previous sessions in memory, helping streamline work by allowing you to easily reuse session plans, start from ready-made templates, and iterate on what works best.

A good trainer is coherent, empathetic and flexible. Coherence is curating their body of topic understanding into the most informative sequence of ideas that teach the material the most effective way.

To that end a good trainer is less concerned with whether their learners will like the training, and more concerned with unearthing the most reputable path to competence. Then acknowledge in advance the unpleasant aspects of that path and invite the learner to choose.

Trainers need to not only know their topic, but also know adult learning, and know the skill acquisition literature to do this consistently well.

Empathy is the capacity to put themselves in the seat of the learner to acquaint themselves with the frustrations of the experience of learning. Be alert to confusion, boredom, disagreement, frustration, disinterest and recognise them as valid and familiar emotional experiences for learners.

Finally, flexibility is the capacity to have more than one way to teach the material. If the globe breaks in the projector can you revert to a whiteboard and get the learning done?

Marcus Crow – Co-founder at 10.000 hours

5. A good trainer knows how to hold attention

A great trainer understands that attention isn’t something you demand: it’s something you earn. This doesn’t mean you need to be a charismatic extrovert or the loudest voice in the room. Quiet confidence, presence, and a deep connection with your material can be just as powerful as a high-energy delivery style.

Some ways trainers hold attention:

• Varied delivery: a mix of storytelling, interactive discussions, and structured moments of reflection.
• Reading the room: picking up on energy levels and adjusting the pace or approach accordingly.
• Engagement over performance: it’s not about being the star of the show, but about keeping participants actively involved.

I’d also add relatability. Some of the best trainers I’ve learned with are ones who show me that they relate to what I’m going through as a learner— this can be through stories focused on empathy and similar experiences, or examples of how content is applied to my context/work.

Caitlin Smith – Director of Human Resources at L’Arche Greater Washington

At its core, an effective trainer doesn’t just talk, they create an environment where people want to listen, learn, and engage.

To make sure you hold participants’ attention, communication skills are essential. Even the most engaging exercises or discussions will fall flat if instructions are vague or confusing. A good trainer knows how to break down complex ideas, explain them in simple terms, and provide clear instructions that set participants up for success.

But what if you’re looking to improve your training delivery? The good news is that great trainers aren’t just born: they’re made. In the next section, we’ll explore practical ways to become a more effective trainer, no matter where you’re starting from.

If, for example, you find the public speaking aspect of being a professional trainer challenging, you might consider taking some public speaking courses, where you’ll learn more about pacing, timing and body language. In the section below we’ll look at some ways you might consider for your self improvement and professional development.

What makes a good training? 

How do we know if a training session or course has been truly successful? And what role do trainer skills and qualities play in making that happen?

An effective training session isn’t just about delivering content: it’s about making sure people walk away with knowledge, confidence, and the ability to apply what they’ve learned. I like to think of it in three key dimensions: the head, the heart, and the hands.

The head. Have participants learned something new? Can they confidently explain and articulate their new knowledge? Content delivery is often the primary focus of training, but it’s only part of the equation. As the trainer in the room, the expectation is that you know your content inside out and are an expert in the topic.

The heart. How do participants feel about the experience? Even if the training was challenging, do they leave feeling accomplished, engaged, and confident in their new skills? Do they walk away energized and inspired?

The hands. Have participants had a chance to put their new abilities into practice through discussions, case studies, or role plays? Are they ready to apply what they’ve learned, or is it still a blur of theory and concepts?

Great trainers design sessions that engage all three, because learning isn’t just about knowing, it’s about feeling and doing, too. Content matter expertise is fundamental, but it only really works when paired with interpersonal skills and a deep understanding of the learning process. When training meets the head, heart, and hands, it sticks.

How to improve your training skills

Great trainers they develop their skills over time through experience, reflection, and intentional learning. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your approach, here are some key ways to grow as a trainer and improving your training skills.

Take part in other people’s training sessions

One of the best ways to improve as a trainer is to experience training from a participant’s perspective. Pay attention to what works, what keeps you engaged, and what makes learning stick. Are there techniques or activities that resonate with you? How does the trainer handle questions, energy levels, or engagement?

Taking part in a variety of training styles (workshops, online courses, or even informal learning sessions) can expose you to new approaches and help you refine your own. Training conferences and events are often organized in “unconference” or skill-sharing styles and can be great places to pick up new tools, techniques and inspiration. 

If you’re an experienced trainer, it’s important to constantly challenge yourself to try something new. Taking part in other people’s training can easily lead into experimenting with a fresh technique, or delivering a session in a different format next time.

For me, a great trainer is also aware of their own limitations so as to be capable to work with the collective wisdom in the room and address the power dynamic.

A trainer who is humble and self-aware knows the role of a trainer is transferable from moment to moment from person to person. The participants might be able to contribute something from a fresh or different perspective; by enabling this, the group may gain new insights on the topic, and the trainer also learns something new.

Sara Huang – Chief Architect of Engaging Conversations at Bureau Tw!st

Collect and integrate feedback

Feedback is essential for growth. No matter how rushed the end of a session might feel (and ideally, it shouldn’t be rushed!), always include a way to collect feedback from participants.

There are many ways you can collect feedback. I like to have a poster up at the exit of the training room with three spaces: what did you like best? What would you change? Any other ideas or messages for me? I invite people to take a few minutes at the end of the training to write their reflections on sticky notes or, if we are working virtually, I do the same thing in Mentimeter. 

In SessionLab’s library you can find dozens of methods for collecting feedback that real trainers actually use. One-breath feedback, for example, is a good way to make sure you get a sense of how the training went, even when you are short on time.

If you have a bit more time, you could also prepare a canvas like this one for the Starfish retrospective and collect information on specific aspects of your training work.

If possible, I recommend you combine live, in-the-moment feedback, with a more structured questionnaire offered some time after the event is over, to get a more balanced perspective.

It is also important to take time after each training to integrate that feedback and learn from it. Block some time in your diary to reflect and log ideas of what you might want to change next time. Not everything participants say will be constructive feedback, and some might only apply to the specific case, but you will probably notice some recurring themes coming up.

In my case, for example “Too much content, too little time” kept coming up over and over until I made it a practice to limit myself and stop cramming too many activities and topics in the same session. I now write my learning objectives at the very top of each agenda page and make sure all the practical exercises I include remain focused on the actual training needs. Training is a life of continuous learning! Keep a training journal to log your progress, track recurring themes, and note what you want to adjust next time.

Since I am often asked to repeat the same training program year after year, I’ve been making it a practice to add a note to my agenda in SessionLab after the training is over with ideas on what I might want to change next year. That way, when months later I duplicate or re-open the session, I have my notes handy.

Attend a Train-the-Trainer program

Even if you have years of experience, there’s always something to gain from structured learning. Train-the-Trainer programs provide insights into adult learning principles, facilitation techniques, and the psychology of engagement. They also allow you to practice in a supportive environment and get feedback from fellow trainers.

Training programs are also a great place to really delve into the nerdy details of training. They are spaces to discuss the ins and outs of time management, or do some collaborative problem-solving about what has been working less well in your training delivery.

Just the other day, in one such training, I got into an intricate conversation with participants about the best ways to divide people into smaller groups. When is it better to let people self-select their teammates for an exercise? When is it best for the trainer to do so? When should we assign people to small groups in advance, based on participant lists, and when is it best to do it on the spot?

This kind of in-depth discussion over the fine details can really improve your training game and I cannot think of a better place to do it that Train-the-Trainer program (other than, perhaps, Reddit). 

Work with another trainer

If you have the opportunity to co-train, take it! Partnering with another trainer allows you to:

• Complement each other’s core qualities and weaknesses.
• Observe and learn from someone else’s approach in real time.
• Share responsibilities and manage group dynamics more effectively.

Having another trainer in the room can also help keep sessions dynamic, allowing you to switch roles, provide different perspectives, and adapt on the fly. It’s a luxury, but if you can make it happen, it’s one of the best ways to grow.

Practice, practice, practice

Like any skill, training improves with practice. Practice is extremely important! The more you test and refine your delivery, the more comfortable and effective you’ll become.

• Record yourself trying out material. Not just during a live session, but even when practicing alone. Run through explanations, introductions, or activity instructions as if you were delivering them to a group. Listening back can reveal unclear phrasing, filler words, or sections that need better pacing.
• Try using AI-powered tools to analyze the tone, clarity, and structure of your presentations: this might help you identify blind spots in your delivery.
• Practice in front of a colleague or friend to get real-time feedback before delivering to a full group.

Even a few short practice runs can make a big difference in how smoothly your training flows when it counts.

If you’re a beginner, lean on pre-existing structures and templates to guide you. In SessionLab’s template collection, you’ll find plenty of ready-made training sessions you can adapt to your own needs.

How SessionLab’s resources can help you design effective training experiences

Here at SessionLab we are passionate about improving learning and training design. In our blog, library and newsletter you’ll find plenty of support to improve your training game. As a trainer, you are probably extremely knowledgeable about the content, but might need some new ideas and inspiration when it comes to how to deliver it. Does that sound like you?

Here are three places you can go next to find more support in designing and delivering excellent learning experiences.

1. Download our Training Design Handbook. You’ll find a proven process and practical tips from learning design all the way to collecting feedback.
2. Find the perfect template to base your next session upon. In our template collection you will find ready-made guidance to, among others, a basic training session modeled around Kolb’s experiential learning cycle and a template for an online learning experience designed by experiential learning expert Romy Alexandra.
3. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive tips and ideas for learning activities, carefully selected among the thousands of training methods in SessionLab’s library.

Ultimately, becoming a great trainer is about staying curious, experimenting with new approaches, and always keeping the learner’s experience at the heart of what you do.

Whether you’re just starting out or refining your craft, the best trainers are those who embrace lifelong learning themselves. So, what’s one small change you’ll make in your next training session? Join our friendly Community to keep the conversation going!

A great workshop can create innovation, connection and transformation for both companies and individuals. In this article, we’ll explore what workshops are, what benefits you can expect, and also show you some workshop examples that you can use for inspiration when working with your team.

What is a workshop?

A workshop is a structured and interactive session designed to create an environment for meaningful work and to guide a group through a process that will lead to great outcomes.

Workshops are designed to engage participants and foster their active involvement in the process. They are not training sessions where one person teaches everyone else in the room. Nor are they meetings where people give one another updates but rarely collaborate on a task with a structured approach.

Workshops typically involve hands-on activities, facilitation techniques, group discussions, simulations, and collaborative exercises, which allow participants to explore, ideate, and participate in achieving their desired outcomes. Whether that’s aligning on a perfect solution to a tricky problem or improving their skills experientially.

Workshops can cover almost any topic you can think of – whether it be a creative word workshop for school kids or a strategic planning session for company executives.

The key elements of these workshops are the same: they seek to create a dynamic environment that encourages participants to learn from each other, consider their own solutions, and apply the gained knowledge both inside the workshop and in the wider world.

What is the purpose of a workshop?

While the objectives or goal of a workshop can vary based on the setting or specific topic – a design sprint and a retrospective workshop have very different goals – but the purpose is roughly the same.

The purpose of a workshop is to create a space where participants can think together in a place of safety and mutual trust, engage in collaborative work and arrive at your outcomes in an organized and structured manner.

Whether it’s defining how to achieve a complex project, building skills or working on personal development, the purpose of the workshop is to create an interactive, participatory environment for people to engage fully, collaboratively and creatively and arrive at your chosen outcomes.

The purpose behind that purpose is what makes workshops a special and effective tool. When you create a safe space that empowers your team to find their own solutions, creativity is unleashed.

Your team finds solutions they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, they build meaningful and lasting connections with other participants and they’re especially engaged and able to focus on making those things happen.

What happens in a workshop?

All workshops follow a structured agenda designed to achieve the goals of the session. To give you an idea, here is a high level overview of what to expect in a workshop.

1. Welcome and introductions.
2. Presenting the agenda, goals of the session and setting intentions for how the session should proceed. This is often a great place to set workshop ground rules and discuss logistics too.
3. Icebreakers and opening activities to engage participants in the process and create the ideal space for collaboration.
4. Presentation of key materials to support the goals of the workshop.
5. Divergence: discussions and group activities centred on exploration, learning and ideation – the output being insights and collaborative work that speaks to the goal of the session.
6. Breaks. If you’re working for more than an hour, take breaks to allow the group to replenish energy and let ideas sit and develop independently.
7. Convergence: discussions and group activities centred on reinforcing learnings from previous work and making decisions and refining solutions as a result.
8. Reflections and feedback on the work done and the facilitation of the workshop itself.
9. Closing and setting next steps.

Specific workshops will contain variations and deeper versions of this flow though broadly speaking, you can expect all of these things to happen during a workshop, whatever your goal.

Check out this guide to dive deeper into how to plan and structure your workshop.

If you want to see a workshop example that includes key timings and deeper information, the essential workshop template below is an effective skeleton you can use to create your session.

When should you run a workshop?

As we’ve explored, running a workshop can be one of the most effective ways to bring a group together to innovate, solve problems and connect.

This isn’t to say that every session you do should be a workshop. Far from it! There are times when a meeting is the right way to come together, such as doing a daily update or company all hands where people on your team have information to share.

You want to consider running a workshop whenever you want a group of people to do collaborative work effectively, often in a time-boxed or outcome focused manner.

Workshops are great at delivering results in a way that creates space for many voices and perspectives and if you know your group would benefit from this approach, that’s a fine time to consider planning a workshop.

Some of the common triggers for running a workshop include:

• having a complex problem without a clear solution
• a need for genuine innovation and new ideas
• team building or team development
• teaching new skills in an experiential manner
• community building
• working on a project in a deeply collaborative and emergent way
• opening or closing a project

Another great tip for running a workshop is to use a relatively small group (often 8-15 people) in order to create space for discussion, divergent thinking and ideation. When running workshops with larger numbers, you’ll want to add additional facilitators and perhaps run sessions in parallel.

Wanting to simply teach your group how to use new technology or share information from the executive team with the rest of the company? That’s probably not a workshop, and that’s fine! Use the right format for the results you want to achieve and the objectives of your session.

Workshop best practices

The art of designing and leading a workshop is something facilitators and leaders need to practice. While the best way to improve is often a combination of facilitation training and hands-on experience, here are some simple best practices to help you start getting the most out of your workshops.

Plan carefully and create an agenda

The agenda is the foundation of everything you do in your workshop. It is designed to expressly meet the goals of the session, whether that’s coming up with innovative solutions, building team culture or developing skills.

Typically, a facilitator or team lead will create the agenda by planning a sequence of activities to reach a goal and which fit in the time available. They’ll balance those activities to create engagement and support collaboration.

Good agendas are combination of art and science, though good tools and best practices also go a long way.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create a structured agenda and optimize your workflow. You can drag, drop and reorder blocks to quickly design your session and export professional agendas in the format of your choice when done.

Need help understanding how to create an effective agenda? Check out this post on agenda design for specific advice on this topic.

Bring a facilitator

The best workshops are those in which collaboration is smooth and the group is able move effectively towards their goals. But this so often doesn’t happen. Conversations can break down, time can be used poorly or groups simply find themselves unsure of how to proceed.

A dedicated workshop facilitator will not only design an effective agenda, but they’ll help guide the group through the process and unleash collective intelligence.

Working internally and leading the session yourself? Bringing a facilitative mindset and deploying key facilitation skills will help you embody this role and improve the outcomes of your session with ease.

Keen to learn more? Check out our facilitator guide to explore what to expect from facilitators and what they can bring to your session or team.

Design for interactivity

Remember that workshops are not just long meetings or seminars in small rooms. They are interactive and collaborative by nature. Soliciting input from the group and using directly interactive games is a hallmark of an effective workshop.

Start early in the session with icebreaker activities that help set things off on an interactive note before moving towards more involving activities.

These kinds of interactive activities can include everything from brainstorming games where participants come up with ideas together or team building games designed to get folks collaborating and building bonds.

Whatever the goal or subject of your session, you’ll find effective workshop activities in the SessionLab library.

Get the right people in the room

Workshops tend to work best with small groups of people (8-15) who are invested in the topic of the session and have insights that can help with the collaborative work needed to reach your goals.

During a design sprint, for example, you may want to bring a cross-functional team together to solve an issue that effects your users. That doesn’t mean you need everyone in the affected teams to attend. Bring together major stakeholders and those people who will likely be responsible for the outcomes of the session for best results.

Workshop examples

Workshops come in all shapes and sizes, but you might be wondering what they look like in practice and how they are put together. Especially if you’re new to facilitation, seeing an agenda example can help show the value of a workshop before you try running one yourself!

Below, we’ll explore a few example workshops and detail when and why you might run them with your team. You’ll also find an agenda template for each, so you can see the workshop process in more detail.

Ideation Workshop

Workshops are a perfect space for creating innovation and coming up with ideas that you can actually move towards implementing. When you have a complex problem without an obvious solution or many stakeholders and perspectives, gathering your best minds and bringing them to a workshop is an ideal way to move forward.

In this ideation workshop template, a team first generates a heap of new ideas around a particular topic and then works through a process of analysing and selecting the best ideas by pitching them to one another. By the end of the workshop, you and your group will have discussed ideas thoroughly and used tools to develop the best ones into something you could implement quickly.

Companies that encourage this kind of creative ideation and invest time in enabling their employees are often more resilient and innovative. Try bringing such a workshop to your company the next time you need a new perspective or looking for your next great idea.

You may also find this post on how to run an engaging ideation workshop helpful when it comes to designing and facilitating your session.

Decision Making Workshop

Whatever your particular field, there comes a time when you need to make a decision as a team. A decision making workshop is a method of exploring various options, aligning on objectives and moving forward as a team. It’s a space for employees to discuss their thoughts, share how they feel and then converge on a final decision that is the best one for the company.

In this template, you’ll use consent based decision making to move from discussion to action and allow everyone from management to front-line employees to contribute. It’s an effective session for building a sense of community and making progress effectively.

If you’ve found that you’ve tried to include more people in your decision making processes and found it ineffective or messy, this workshop is a perfect antidote that creates space for all voices while also arriving at your intended outcome.

Retrospective

For complex projects that require innovative problem solving, workshops can be an essential part of both opening and closing the process. I’ve even found that groups working in university or training settings with an intensive educational program can benefit from using a workshop approach to closing the program.

In this retrospective template, you and your team will find space to reflect together and discuss what went well and what went better before choosing some actions everyone will take in the future to develop their skills and improve the next project.

After a week long event or a longer project, coming together in a retrospective workshop can both help you symbolically close and celebrate proceedings while also creating space for reflection and growth.

Looking for more workshop ideas? Check out our collection of the best workshop ideas to see examples of the different types of workshop you might run. You’ll find templates, advice and more.

In conclusion

Understanding how a workshop differs from a meeting or training courses is often the first step towards bringing them into your organization.

For next steps, you can explore our step-by-step guide to planning a workshop to learn how to put an effective workshop together.

Want to improve your facilitation skills? This article will help you see the key skills for effective facilitation you can use in workshops, meetings and in your general practice when working with groups.

We hope this blog post has helped you understand the what and why of running a workshop and has perhaps inspired you to facilitate one the next time you need to solve problems or create innovation in your organization!

But why are workshop rules so essential? They create a framework for how groups work together, increasing clarity, preventing misunderstandings, and keeping discussions focused. Whether you’re leading a brainstorming session, a team alignment meeting, or a training workshop, ground rules set the stage for meaningful collaboration.

In this article, we’ll explore what workshop rules are, why they matter, and how to use them effectively. You’ll find plenty of examples, practical methods for co-creating them with participants, and tips for handling common challenges. Read on to learn everything you need to confidently guide a group in establishing how to work together for productive and engaging workshops!

What are workshop ground rules?

Ground rules are agreements established at the start of a meeting, session, or workshop to guide participant behavior and contributions. These rules often cover etiquette, such as whether smartphones should be silenced or turned off, and encourage active participation from everyone involved.

Ground rules can be set by a facilitator or co-created by the group, making them adaptable to the session’s needs. Essentially, ground rules serve as the do’s and don’ts that help create a productive and respectful workshop environment. 

You might have heard ground rules referred to by other names. Some leaders and facilitators prefer terms such as ‘group agreements’. While essentially referring to the same thing, ‘group agreement’ is a softer terminology that empathizes the collective nature of the agreements reached, and the fact that they exist as a guideline rather than as norms that might be enforced with a penalty! 

In groups that work together more continuously, I have also seen the term ‘group contract’ used. Referring to a group contract, or to ‘group norms’ often indicates that the rules established will be used throughout a group’s work and life, rather than for a single workshop, session or event. 

Whatever you choose to call your agreements, they represent a solid foundation for groupwork, and are especially important in the collaborative, participatory atmosphere of a workshop. This is why most expert facilitators will dedicate some time at the start of any workshop to defining, discussing and approving them. Below we will see some practical tools and methods for doing this with the support of the entire group.

10 (real-world) examples of ground rules for workshops 

Every year, I run introductory workshops to facilitation and group dynamics to first-year students in a peace and conflict transformation program. Every year, we start by creating ground rules. 

In this particular case, it makes sense for us to spend a fair amount of time, generally around 45 minutes, just to establish how we will work together. This is because:

• Participants are learning by doing: by co-creating ground rules they are having their first experience of facilitation in action;
• The extremely multicultural nature of this group, and the language barrier, means that nothing can be taken for granted and many nuances (e.g. “what does ‘punctuality’ mean to you?”) must be explored before we can have a meaningful agreement;
• Ground rules therefore become an opportunity to investigate and understand the nature of the group better. Although they are only ‘offical’ during my workshops, they inform how the group will work together going forward and, ultimately, for two entire years. 

While every group is unique, these are some examples, in no particular order, of the typical ground rules my students come up with:

Punctuality

What does punctuality mean for this group? This varies vastly among different groups, cultures, and situations. Avoid miscommunication by clarifying the specific, particular meaning of ‘punctuality’ we will be using for the duration of this workshop clear.

For me, this often means: we will start and end on time. If you join later, you don’t need to provide justification, just join quietly. I’ve recently seen a great picture of a training room where a large poster on the door says “You are late! You can only come in with sweets for everyone or a big smile”. 

Maintain confidentiality

Depending on the nature of the workshop, it might be a good idea to establish a rule around confidentiality. If we are discussing team dynamics in the office, for example, we might be ok with sharing with people present, but not with others. It is common to have a ground rule around confidentiality expressed in terms such as “It’s ok to share stories from the workshop, but only in anonymized form”. 

Phones should be silent

I deeply enjoy the conversations we have with students around rules related to cell phones, as they are often revelatory and surprising. By openly discussing phone use, I’ll often find out that participants tend to multitask, but don’t like to do it; a rule discouraging multitasking can help them self-regulate. At the same time, I have found that cell phones are support for, among others, speakers of other languages who use them to translate or look up definitions and information in real-time. What we usually land on is an agreement to keep phones silent. 

Active participation 

Participation in a workshop means more than just showing up; it involves actively contributing ideas, asking questions, and listening attentively. This rule encourages everyone to bring their best energy to the session and be present both mentally and physically.

All questions are welcome

By making it clear that all questions are valid, this great rule creates a safe and supportive atmosphere where participants feel comfortable seeking clarification or exploring new ideas without fear of being dismissed or judged.

The space we are in is everyone’s responsibility

This is about taking care of the space around us. When things get hectic in workshops, people can easily forget to pick up after themselves, resulting in strewn coffee cups and sticky notes everywhere. Including a ground rule about taking care of the space is a useful reminder to pay attention to how our work impacts the environment we are in.

Use clear language and avoid jargon 

Workshops often include people from diverse backgrounds or roles. Using simple, clear language helps avoid misunderstandings. Avoiding technical terms or remembering to always explain industry-specific jargon ensures inclusivity and keeps communication accessible. Sometimes we will add a dedicated hand gesture participants should make when anyone (facilitator included) is speaking too quickly or using mysterious words. 

Hand signs, by the way, can be a very useful addition to ground rules. This can include gestures to ask for a break, make a direct point, express enthusiasm and more. 

Be supportive

Lift each other up and respect different perspectives. A supportive ground rule reminds participants to approach conversations with kindness, patience, and understanding. By creating a culture of encouragement, the group can collaborate more effectively and build trust.

Be open and curious

Approach the workshop with a willingness to learn. This ground rule encourages participants to set aside preconceived notions and embrace new ideas or viewpoints. Being open and curious helps foster innovation and productive dialogue. Critical comments can be reframed as questions that help the whole group progress. 

Use “I” statements

Speak from your own experience to avoid assumptions. This ground rule helps participants have more constructive discussions by taking ownership of their opinions and feelings. Phrasing comments as “I think” or “I feel” rather than “you should” or “people tend to” reduces defensiveness and promotes constructive conversation.

Ground rules for brainstorming and ideation

Brainstorming and innovation workshops thrive on creativity, open-mindedness, and the willingness to explore new possibilities. Establishing clear ground rules ensures that participants feel empowered to contribute without fear of judgment or rejection, creating an atmosphere where fresh ideas can emerge. These rules are particularly important in brainstorming sessions, where the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how unconventional they may seem at first glance.

Ground rules for these sessions should emphasize creative freedom, and a commitment to collaboration. By setting expectations around behaviors like suspending judgment and encouraging bold thinking, facilitators can help participants move beyond their comfort zones and into the realm of innovation. 

Below are five examples of ground rules tailored to brainstorming and innovation workshops.

No bad ideas

Encourage participants to share every idea, no matter how incomplete or unconventional it may seem. This rule reinforces the notion that creativity often emerges from unexpected places and that even “bad” ideas can spark meaningful conversations or inspire others. By setting aside the fear of being wrong, participants are more likely to contribute freely.

Blue sky ideas

Think big ideas, go beyond the constraints of what’s currently possible. Blue sky ideas are about imagining what could be, without worrying about limitations like budget, time, or resources. This ground rule invites participants to dream without restriction, often leading to innovative solutions that can later be refined or adapted.

Postpone judgment 

Encourage the group to suspend criticism or evaluation during the ideation phase. To get the most out of a brainstorming session flow, it should be fine whether participants are coming up with feasible ideas or unlikely solutions. This ground rule is critical in maintaining the flow of creative energy, as premature judgment can stifle the process.

Participants should be reminded that evaluation will come later, during the refinement stage, at which point it makes sense to consider practical constraints and exclude some ideas. It just should not be done when ideas are first shared. This is not about not using our critical thinking and judgment at all: it’s about being clear about when to encourage wild creativity and defer judgment to a later point. 

“Yes, and..”

Build on each other’s creative ideas. Inspire collaboration by encouraging participants to use one another’s ideas as a springboard for new thoughts. This rule fosters a sense of teamwork and amplifies creativity by combining perspectives. For example, someone’s initial idea might evolve into a breakthrough when others add their insights.

Use of AI for ideation

In the brave new world of generative AI being at most people’s fingertips, ideation and brainstorming workshops in particular will benefit from establishing an agreed-upon guardrail for AI use. It’s super-easy to flood the workshop with AI-generated ideas, and then ask for even more ideas, which can be overwhelming, confusing and counterproductive. 

Discuss with participants how to put AI to good use for example by turning drafts into more tangible ideas, critiquing and judging ideas, or adding a small batch of new ideas at a time, which participants can use a springboard for their own thinking. For more on how to use AI in brainstorming, check out resources from the AI Tinkerer’s Club!

Adapting ground rules for workshop types

As should be clear by now, there is no unique and universally valid set of ground rules that will work for any group or workshop type. You can start with a standard set of generic principles, such as “active participation” and “respect”, and see where the conversation with your participants leads. 

When facilitating a conversation around such agreements, you should also give some thought to having lists of rules to specific workshop types. We have seen above a list of ideas that help participants get into the right frame of mind for an ideation or brainstorming session, for example.

To adapt a starting list of ground rules to the specific workshop type, ask yourself, and the group: what do we want to achieve in this session, specifically? What sorts of guidelines or mindset would help us get there?  

If you are working on strategy or decision making, you might want to encourage the group to explore rules that help clarify, direct and focus thinking, such as having a parking lot. 

A parking lot refers to having a space, usually a poster or a section of a shared whiteboard, where to park off topic ideas, questions or comments that fall outside of the focus of a specific time or activity. Ideas and notes in a parking lot are usually addressed at a later time, perhaps towards the end of the workshop. This allows participants to free mindspace and restore focus when conversations are getting off-track. 

So far we have seen various reasons in support of having a strong container for your workshop, co-creating ground rules with participants to land on a list that reflect the group’s intentions and aspirations and enables everyone to participate at their best. 

But are ground rules always a good idea? As with most things in facilitation, the answer is “it depends”. There is quite a spirited discussion among professional facilitators as to how and why caution should be taken in considering them an all-purpose tool. Can ground rules actually hurt, or hinder, your group? 

Suppose the main purpose of your workshop has to do with personal development, authenticity and self-expression. In that case, you should approach the idea of regulating behavior with much more caution. 

I have worked alongside practitioners of restorative justice, for example, for whom it was very important not to censor behaviors that might be generally viewed as “loud” or “overly emotional”.

A rule such as “Do not interrupt” can enforce a certain communication style over another and end up being accidentally repressive. Reasons for choosing such rules must make sense for the specific situation, at a specific time. And in some cases, you may not want ground rules at all, but rather accompany the group to solve clashes and disagreements as they appear, allowing for a more emergent approach to group regulation. 

Workshop rules and culture creation: aligning group agreements, goals and values

As you can tell, ground rules can be a mixture of elements such as:

• Etiquette. How will we behave in practice? Examples of this include discussions on punctuality and timing, or on use of phones and laptops;
• Communication styles. How do we speak with one another? This includes things like using ‘I’ statements or avoiding jargon;
• Behavioral agreements. Who do we want to be? These are harder to define as proper ‘rules’ as it’s hard to tell whether they have been adhered to, but are more akin to intentions, values and aspirations. We know we might fail at being constantly supportive, open and curious, but we agree to try.

The latter type of ground rule offers every group an opportunity to shape their group culture not only in terms of the present (how things currently are) but of an ideal future (how do we want to be).

Group agreements can, in fact, be viewed as a practical, concrete application of team values. What does it mean for us to be kind, or to have a growth mindset, or to be present? How do we manifest these ideals into practical behaviors?

Many groups I have worked with in the nonprofit space have a ground rule meant to encourage presence and focus attention: if at any point anyone feels their attention wavering, they can ring a bell to ask for two minutes of silence and concentration. This is a great example of how a group can use ground rules to co-create cultural norms and ways of being. 

The Thiagi Group has an activity to select and discuss training workshop rules with participants, based on using pre-existing lists of 70 different ground rules and inviting people to choose among them. Their list is full of great ideas for culture-shaping rules such as “Expect to be surprised” or “Don’t lose your sense of humor”. 

5 methods to encourage participants to co-create group agreements

Throughout the article I’ve been stressing the importance of co-creating agreements with your participants, rather than imposing them yourself. Co-creating agreements with participants has many advantages, including:

• Ownership. Participants are more likely to adhere to codes of conduct they have created themselves;
• Fit-to-purpose. You might be surprised by what participants come up with! I’ve had group agreements that included tips on where to park cars to make it to the workshop on time, or on when and how to take screenshots in video calls. No facilitator can possibly predict everyone’s needs, and the only way to find out what fits a specific group is by asking;
• Improved trust and alignment. Co-creating agreements doubles as a team-building experience that will leave the group more cohesive, and establish shared awareness around needs and boundaries, ultimately helping people deepen bonds by learning more about one another.

If you’d like to try your hand at guiding a group conversation around meeting rules, here are 5 methods from SessionLab’s library of facilitation techniques that can help you do just that.

Let’s start with a write-up on how to establish a group contract, taken from The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy Edmondson. Besides the useful, detailed questions to use for workshop discussions, what I love about it is that it starts by inviting participants to visualize themselves at the end of the workshop session if everything has gone spectacularly well. How do they feel? What happened? What behaviors enabled such success? This is great anchor point to start off discussions. 

When short for time, you can still create good meeting guidelines by looking at the deceptively simple question “What do you expect from today?” In this method from the International Association of Facilitators’ library, divide a flipchart into four quadrants and ask for suggestions on what people expect from themselves, from other participants, from the trainer and the training. 

Gamestorming’s recommendation on how to create a code of conduct includes useful tips for the facilitator. Using as a guiding question “What would make this workshop meaningful and pleasant?”, create visual mindmaps that synthesize emergent ideas. 

Last but not least, my personal go-to method for group agreement creation, which I learned early in my career and have stuck to because, from my personal viewpoint, (1) it works and (2) it’s easy to remember, being based on the mnemonic of 4G: ask participants to think of Gains (expectations, what they want to take from the workshop), Gifts (what are they bringing, what can they contribute) and Groans (worries, concerns, anxieties). Then turn those into potential Guidelines for the day. 

How workshop ground rules help create a constructive and positive atmosphere

Ground rules are part of the process of ‘container-building’. This refers to setting in place the conditions for positive, collaborative work. A meeting or workshop is, after all, an artificial environment, where behavior is not as spontaneous as in day to day life, but responds to a specific set of criteria to create a productive, collaborative space. Inside the workshop ‘container’ specific modes of behavior apply. 

Many actions facilitators and team leaders take at the start of a workshop have the overall intention of creating and strengthening this container, in order to help participants understand their role, and +make the space psychologically safer. I am saying ‘safer’ and not ‘safe’ as we can never truly establish a ‘safe space’ for everyone. But we can do our best to make it safer for attendees to express themselves and raise any questions or concerns. 

Some of the actions of creating a container include:

• sharing the objectives and agenda of the workshop;
• pointing out any logistical needs, such as times for breaks;
• clarifying intentions and desired outcomes.

Setting and discussing ground rules is arguably the most powerful lever a facilitator can pull to create a solid container for a workshop. This is especially true in diverse, multicultural settings, where the same word can mean wildly different things to different people. A typical example is “punctuality”. Punctuality is probably implied in any professional setting, but what does it mean, exactly?

When setting ground rules, a group might unveil different cultural expectations and sensitivities around punctuality. Does it mean we start on the dot? Or, as common in many academic settings, that a session will begin 15 minutes late? What is expected from people who arrive later? Will we wait for everyone or begin without them?

It is interesting to note that any group convening to work together will, in fact, create ground rules for itself regardless of whether this is an explicit process or not. When a group of people gathers, they will automatically establish some do’s and don’ts. What dress code and attire is acceptable, and what is not? How do we refer to one another? Who gets to speak more, or less? 

At the beginning of my career as a professional facilitator, I worked a lot with non-profit groups and grassroots community organizations, introducing them to effective meeting models and facilitation concepts. One of the things I would ask at the beginning is: “What is your group contract? What are your agreements?” 

Often, the initial response was “We do not have any”. But was that true? A bit of digging would uncover the existence of unwritten, unspoken rules all members in fact adhered to without even noticing. Some could be good, effective, and functional, such as “We always begin on time, and people joining later enter quietly”, but others often needed rediscussion, such as a pervasive “It is ok to interrupt newcomers, but senior members can completely dominate the conversation for as long as they want”. 

In the absence of explicit ground rules, in other words, the group will revert to whatever is considered “normal” in the general context. This may be functional or dysfunctional and, in any case, will remain unspoken and hidden. Hidden norms can be the source of much conflict, as different people will interpret them differently.

Suppose I think it’s perfectly ok to use my phone to multitask during a workshop, while someone else may find it rude and even feel hurt by such behavior, deeming it disrespectful. This can give rise to secret resentments and grumpy judgments that we will carry with us throughout the day, negatively affecting our collaboration. 

Setting ground rules at the start of a workshop allows the group to have clear expectations and even set aspirational goals for how they hope to behave together and towards one another. 

When I worked as a tutor for summer schools, I generally dedicated about an hour at the start of the program to craft a group contract together with students. We would write it up on a sheet of poster paper and carry it with us from classroom to classroom, from site visit to lecture, hanging it up as a reminder wherever we went. Working with university students, the hot topic of asking questions often came up. 

Someone would timidly raise the idea of having a ground rule around asking questions: “Can we write that it’s ok to admit not to know something?” Having an open, honest discussion in which many participants revealed their fears of being judged if they asked so-called “stupid questions” led to a lot of relief.

We would generally include an agreement along the lines of “All questions are welcome and are a gift to advance our collective learning.” This generally led to lecturers and professors being enthusiastic about working with our group, as we would reliably have great discussions rather than stone-faced silence during Q&A sessions. 

The key takeaways here are that ground rules can help groups build a collaborative atmosphere by:

• Reducing participant stress by clarifying expectations for contribution;
• Preventing conflicts that might arise from misunderstanding the intentions behind one another’s behavior;
• Creating a more cohesive and aligned group by making implicit norms explicit;
• Ensuring the session stays focused and productive by setting shared expectations;
• Giving team leaders, facilitators, and participants a convenient reference point that can be useful later in the workshop to resolve discussions and disagreements.

Common challenges when setting ground rules (and how to overcome them)

Having come this far, you should feel equipped to establish a strong foundation for your next workshop, with a clear understanding of why a meeting guideline matters, and how to create one. But as with any aspect of facilitation, things don’t always go smoothly. Here are four common challenges you might face when setting and using ground rules, along with tips to help you navigate them.

1. Time is tight

This is probably the most common issue with dedicating time at the start of a workshop to co-create ground rules. If you’re only working together for a couple of hours or half a day, is it really worth it?

In my experience, even with limited time, it’s important to establish at least a basic code of conduct. When time is short, you might need to sacrifice the discussion phase. Instead, prepare a pre-established set of standard rules and present them to the group, asking for quick agreement (a thumbs-up or brief verbal acknowledgment can suffice). While this doesn’t allow for full alignment, it sets a baseline for behavior.

When I’m designing shorter sessions, I’ll always dedicate at least 5-10 minutes to “housekeeping.” This includes presenting the agenda (what are we doing?), reminding participants of our objectives (where do we want to be by the end?), and introducing the agreements I hope they can commit to (what’s expected of us during this time?). Even brief alignment makes a big difference.

I DO ARRT is the perfect structure to use if you are short on time but still want to make sure you have a strong enough container to start the workshop. The title is a mnemonic device to help you remember to start any meeting or workshop by introducing Intention, Desired Outcomes, your Agenda, Roles, Rules and Timing. 

2. Ideas are too vague

Sometimes participants will suggest broad rules like “respect everyone” or “stay positive.” While well-intentioned, vague ideas can lack the specificity needed to guide behavior in practice.

When this happens, it’s often a sign that participants don’t feel comfortable sharing what truly helps them stay focused, productive, or comfortable. To address this, consider using a facilitation activity like 1-2-4-All to help participants articulate their ideas more clearly. 

Another helpful strategy is to ask, “How will be able to tell if this rule has been followed or not?” This invites concrete examples and helps the group develop actionable, pragmatic agreements.

3. Perfectionism 

Senior facilitators and trainers are righteously wary of using the precious time at the start of a workshop, when energy and attention are high, to define group agreements together. Is this the best possible use of that time? 

The question is particularly important if people get mired in perfectionism, attempting to craft the ideal set of rules and find the perfect answer to every possible future problem. This can lead to haggling over details such as wording; energy will diminish rapidly, with some people starting to disengage.

In some cases, there might be a real and interesting conflict behind the search for a “perfect” rule. In this case, naming it and parking it for later discussion might be the best course of action. 

In most cases, though, the group is trying to complete a task at its very best. To shift that helpful attitude to the actual purpose of the workshop, rather than losing momentum by fixating on a perfect set of rules, here are two useful reminders you can mention as facilitator:

• The agreements we create should be “good enough for now and safe enough to try”, a useful framing I’ve picked up from Sociocracy to remind everyone that we are not writing a national constitution, just a set of guidelines that will dissipate at the end of the day, or weekend, or training course. Can we live with it, knowing it’s not perfect? This usually gives some relaxation and respite and allows you to move on more quickly;
• We can revisit our agreements later. Especially if the group will be working together for a length of time, it’s useful to remind everyone that the set of agreements you start with can be checked and revisited, for example at the start of Day 2, to verify if they work well and add what may be missing. 

Ultimately, the process of creating ground rules should be engaging and should not take away too much time and energy from the rest of the workshop. 

4. Participants don’t take the rules seriously (and nobody enforces them) 

To address this, involve participants in co-creating the ground rules whenever possible. When people participate in establishing the agreements, they are more likely to take ownership and respect them. You can also explain the purpose behind each rule, linking it directly to the workshop’s objectives (e.g., “This rule helps us stay focused so we can achieve our goal of generating actionable ideas.”). 

Ground rules are only effective if they’re followed, and it’s often the facilitator’s responsibility to ensure they’re respected. Without visible reminders or active enforcement, they can quickly be forgotten.

To prevent this, write the ground rules on a visible surface—such as a flip chart, slide, or whiteboard—and refer back to them as needed. If you notice behavior veering off track, gently remind the group by pointing to the agreements and asking, “Does this align with what we agreed on? Are we okay with this, or should we adjust?”

Balancing firmness and flexibility will depend on your facilitation style and the cultural context, but showing accountability is key to maintaining a constructive environment. Finally, model the behavior you want to see: your own commitment to the ground rules can inspire others to follow suit.

Setting ground rules may seem like a small step in workshop design, but it can have a transformative impact on your sessions. These agreements create a foundation of trust, clarity, and mutual respect that helps participants feel safe to contribute, collaborate, and thrive. While challenges may arise, each offers an opportunity to fine-tune your approach and learn what works best for your group.

What’s next

If you came looking for ideas and recommendations on how, and why, to establish a code of conduct for a group, chances are you a planning a workshop, session or event.

To learn more about tips and tricks on how to run successful, engaging workshops, we’ve created a quick how-to guide with some foolproof ideas and techniques on how to run a workshop.

For a more detailed and thorough overview of everything that goes into planning a workshop, from initial concept notes all the way to feedback and reporting, read our complete guide to planning a workshop.

Perhaps you are interested in the idea of hosting a workshop, but not so clear on what kind of topic and activity is right for your group? In this article, we’ve listed 20 workshop ideas for all sorts of teams.

Have you tried out any tips or methods listed here? Or perhaps you have different ideas on what works to set basic rules for a workshop? Let us know in the comments, or join SessionLab’s free, friendly community to discuss with other facilitators and trainers! 

In this guide, we’ll share an effective ideation workshop structure and a heap of tips for running an effective ideation process, whether you’re trying to solve problems for users or simply need to create innovation in any context.

What is an ideation workshop?

An ideation workshop is a structured process for brainstorming innovative ideas and refining them into effective solutions.

For me, an ideation workshop is one of the best ways to go from zero ideas to great ideas that you can actually implement.

Typically, an ideation session will follow a process that begins with defining the problem and brainstorming potential solutions.

After initial ideation, groups will then refine those ideas and begin turning them into well-defined solutions. Once those solutions have been presented and explored, groups will tend to end a session by choosing one to move forward with or committing to further research and exploration.

While the exact make-up of the ideation workshop will differ based on the problem statement, team and solution space, they will generally follow a similar structure to the one detailed below. Here, we’ll explain each stage in a typical ideation session and offer a little advice for each step. Let’s dig in!

User research and data gathering

Generating ideas without a good understanding of the problem you are trying to solve is a surefire way of creating an ineffective solution. The most effective creative processes often start with research and gathering data to inform the innovation process before the date of the workshop.

You might conduct user interviews designed to surface problems and understand core needs – the user interview method below is a great source of advice for this.

You might also gather and collate quantitative data, explore the wider competitive landscape and more. We’ll explore this more below, but the key takeaway here is that you should always do some research before approaching any ideation process.

In some cases, you might even invite experts to your session so participants can ask questions before they generate ideas or supplement your research during the workshop.

In the Design Sprint 2.0 workshop, for example, the first day starts with a section on expert interviews that helps inform the rest of the session and provide a foundation for new ideas. These experts might be users, members of your target audience or simply those people in your team most familiar with the problem space.

Try and provide as much supporting information as you can to help define and contextualize the problem you’re solving while also providing valuable insights for creating solutions that will actually solve that issue.

Problem analysis and discovery

Once you’ve gathered all this raw data to inform your understanding of the problem, you need to make sense of it and set a direction for the rest of the ideation session. This can be as simple as creating a problem statement based on the findings, or opening up further avenues of discovery with the group.

The key here is that you and your team have a strong understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, even if the specific root cause is still elusive.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a fitness tracking app and your users aren’t renewing their subscriptions. What should you do? It’s likely that some initial ideas will spring to mind, but without first gathering insights from users, those ideas may not actually solve the issue and you’ll end up wasting time pursuing them.

Then, let’s say you’re running a cross-functional ideation workshop to help explore new ideas and create a solution. If you’re not aligned on the actual problem you’re trying to solve, it’s possible your teams diverge completely and again start ideating in the wrong place.

In my experience, a successful ideation workshop is one that moves between convergence and divergence at the right moments – get aligned on the problem you’re solving, but absolutely encourage your workshop participants to diverge in how to solve it, at least at the start of the session.

Ideation and brainstorming

This is the stage many people get excited about when attending an ideation workshop: the moment where everyone is encouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible in a free flow of creativity.

Typically, the facilitator leading the session will use their favored ideation techniques or brainstorming activities alongside principles like “no bad ideas”, “yes, and..” idea mash-ups and more to aid the free flow of possible solutions.

As discussed above, it’s imperative to have a proper grounding and alignment before you ask a group to generate ideas. I find it helpful to frame this as less of a (brain)storm raging in all directions and more as a way of directing the group’s collective energy to drive a wind turbine. Focus and a general direction are your friends here!

Once that’s in place, let the creative juices flow but ensure you have thought about how those ideas will then be shared, discussed and refined. If in doubt, try a technique like The Six Thinking Hats to build this kind of feedback loop into your session with ease.

For example, participants will brainstorm freely while wearing the green hat before changing to the grey hat to look at things critically or the yellow hat to consider the values and benefits of various ideas.

Clustering

This part of the ideation workshop is about making sense of the ideas generated so far, to begin noticing patterns and help set the stage for idea refinement. Typically, workshop participants will add their ideas to a shared space, perhaps briefly framing their idea and then together, the group will begin to cluster ideas and make sense of where they’re at.

In some settings, it’s common for a facilitator to use ideation techniques like mash up innovation or a form of brainwriting to have a stage of early refinement before clustering.

Personally, the decision comes down to our understanding of the problem, the level of divergence in the group, and the time available. If the group requires a bit more warm-up, I might have them create 10-20 ideas in a first round and then ask them to do a second round.

On the other hand, if the group I’m working with already has a strong understanding of the problem and have perhaps ideated before the session, we might move straight to clustering after a silent brainstorm.

In any case, I’d always recommend having a clustering and sense-making step before moving into refinement. A simple affinity diagram can help a group quickly turn an overwhelming mass of ideas into something more manageable.

The best ideas often come from a synthesis of others, and making the groups thinking visible can help facilitate alignment and excitement. It’s also possible to see that one idea or cluster is clearly rising to the top and so exploring that particularly solution space more deeply may be of interest.

Refinement

Remember what I said about coming up with ideas being easy? This is where you take all those first drafts and (potentially) horrible ideas with a seed of greatness and collectively turn them into something that will stick.

The refinement stage is the one most pliable to the needs of the group. Some teams will have a sticky note for each idea up on a board that everyone is encouraged to silently review before then undergoing a second round of ideation. In other teams, facilitators will put folks into groups to improve the most innovative ideas and turn them into something a little more concrete.

In our fitness tracker example, someone may have the idea to give people extra subscription time based on performance in order to help retain them as a customer. Okay, not bad. But what would that look like in practice? Could you take it further or refine it so that it matches your brand values and the specific problem statement?

While the ideation step was to get all the ideas out and share them with the group, refinement is about helping the best ideas rise up organically and beginning to turn them into something that you might deploy.

Depending on the group, you may run multiple rounds of refinement or even go as far as having groups start to build a business case or begin to scope the work necessary to deploy a solution. Often, the best bet is to refine enough to have a paper prototype, mock-up or clear vision you can share with the group, but not go too deep into implementation. Who knows – your idea might not make it or may be refined further down the line.

I think of the refinement state as taking a raw idea and transforming it into a potential solution. The aim is to shape, add depth and start to think about what that grand idea might look like in practice.

Presentation and voting

After the group has successfully refined their ideas, now comes the time to present them to the rest of the team. The format for this can differ based on the session you’re running and the nature of solutions you’re working with.

When we’re working on product ideas at SessionLab, we’ll create paper prototypes and hang them up in a space that folks can walk around like a gallery, leaving comments and sticky dots on the bits of the solution they like.

On the other hand, if we’re ideating on strategy and marketing items, a stand-up presentation is often a better way to help everyone understand the vision, ask questions and then qualify next steps.

After everyone has had the chance to present and/or review the various solutions, now comes the time for folks to share what they think and give an indication of which solution they would most like to implement.

In some cases, this is a democracy, where the group will collectively decide which idea to implement. In this case, a method like dot-voting is a fast, proven technique time and again by facilitators running ideation sessions.

It’s worth noting that even if there’s a single decision maker, it’s a great idea to give the group chance to share a snapshot of how they’re feeling. This can help inform the team lead’s decision and ensure everyone in the session continues to be engaged and included in the process. It also helps get an early sense of the roles various folks might play in implementation too.

Decision making

The culmination of a successful ideation workshop is usually the moment where you choose a solution you’re excited about and that the whole group is behind.

Sometimes, making a decision is as simple as getting folks to vote on which they think is most likely to resolve what came up in your problem statement.

In other ideation workshops, you may need to undertake a more involved process of ranking possible solutions. You likely consider possible impact and effort while thinking through the ramifications of possible solutions in order to pick the best one to work on right now.

With our fitness tracker example, it’s possible that you have a great idea for radical new features and diversifying business strategies, but you simply don’t have the capacity to implement them at present.

As such, your team might choose a simple solution in the short term while beginning to work on a larger project. (An impact/effort matrix is perfect for this!) Making the right decision means taking a little time in the ideation session to think about what it actually takes to make those ideas a reality and selecting a solution that solves your challenges while still being feasible.

Want to go deeper? Learn more about how to effectively make group decisions in this post on decision making techniques.

Next steps and closing

So you and your team generated a heap of new ideas, refined them as a group and then decided on a solution. Super! An effective ideation workshop also ensures that action is taken afterwards and that folks are best positioned to continue the momentum of the session.

I find it useful to have each person say what they’re going to do following the session and set a date for the next check-in meeting. This keeps things moving and ensures accountability and ownership.

As with any workshop, it’s also valuable to have a check-out round where people reflect on the process, share what they’re feeling and provide feedback. Symbolically closing your ideation workshops can help participants shift gears, putting aside those bad ideas they were attached to or adding them to a backlog and creating focus for the task ahead.

Though these steps are not exhaustive, they do provide a solid structure for an ideation workshop that you can tinker with further. I hope it’s given you an understanding of what to expect in an ideation workshop and how you might approach designing and running such a process.

Specific frameworks such as the Design Sprint also include steps for prototyping and testing you may want to consider too. As with each of the points above, consider what will best address the problem you’re working with and what is most feasible for the project and group present.

This ideation workshop template from the Board of Innovation is also a great example of how to approach the ideation process with a group. Check it out for inspiration or adjust to your needs!

Why run an ideation workshop?

In my experience, a diverse group of people will often be better than any single individual at solving a complex problem. Ideation workshops provide a powerful structure for helping a group quickly come up with new ideas and refine them into solid solutions that will actually solve the challenge at hand.

Running an ideation workshop is especially great when trying to solve important, complicated issues that have no obvious solution. If you find that a problem keeps occurring despite your attempts to fix it or you have a business critical issue that needs your attention, that’s a great trigger for a workshop.

So in short: if an issue is important to your business and you don’t know how to solve it, running an ideation workshop will help you discover how to solve it, get buy-in from your team and give you next steps too.

One misconception I’ve seen is that ideation and innovation workshops are only suitable for product teams or for folks that are building and designing things. While it’s true that the origins of these design thinking frameworks comes from product teams working to solve user issues, their application doesn’t stop there.

In my experience, a (tailored) design sprint or ideation session can be effective even when approaching any complex issue you want to solve collaboratively. This also applies to challenges like low employee morale, or complex systems issues and team conflicts.

While these frameworks aren’t quite one-size fits all, a skilled facilitator using a general ideation structure can help any group of people make progress on solving tough problems.

Tips for running an ideation workshop

So you’re running a dedicated session for ideation. Your room is booked, the right people are invited and you’re turning your mind to running the workshop and guiding the group towards the perfect solution.

In this section, we’ll share some tips and advice to help you and your group get the most out of your session. Not only will these help you in moment-to-moment facilitation, but they’ll ensure that you create a workshop structure and approach that is best suited to the problem space you’re working with.

There are no bad ideas (but there are irrelevant ones)

No bad ideas is one brainstorming rule you might have heard of. So what do we mean by bad ideas, and why are they okay? There are two main reasons:

1. Warming up.

Sometimes it’s helpful to think of ideation and creativity as a muscle. Before you go out for a big run or lift an incredible amount of weight, you warm-up and stretch. Not only does this help prevent injury, but it helps you achieve more during your exercise too. Not-so-great ideas are the equivalent of a warm-up for your creative brain.

This is also an extension of the quantity over quality principle. Don’t worry about whether they’re good ideas or bad ones, just get out as many as possible as quickly as possible in order to clear the way for better ideas to arise.

2. Creating a sense of safety.

The most effective ideation sessions I’ve ever been a part of have been ones where it’s felt safe to take risks, dream big and suggest something left field. Even if those first ideas that come out during the early stages aren’t perfect, feeling safe to suggest them helps the group go wider, think differently and keep moving.

In some groups I’ve also seen the term “negative ideas” used. This can mean “bad ideas” but can also refer to challenging ideas, or ideas which upset the status quo.

Sometimes, those ideas which challenge us the most are those which present new angles and help create genuine innovation. Make it safer for the group to truly innovate and solve business problems by letting all ideas exist in the space without being too quick to label them as good or bad.

So “bad ideas” are encouraged, but where I try and guide the group more carefully is when it comes to “irrelevant ideas.”

For example, let’s say we’re running ideation workshops on the subject of our fitness tracking app. During that session, one of the attendees writes an idea on a post it and presents it the group that reads “Soda should contain less sugar.”

Is it a bad idea? Technically no, but it is an idea that isn’t attuned to the needs of this particular ideation session. We don’t sell soda. Our users haven’t told us that soda is a problem they’re facing. The danger of an irrelevant question is that it splits the groups attention and sends folks down a rabbit hole that doesn’t serve the problem space you’re attending to.

All that said, an irrelevant idea is less dangerous than creating a sense of unsafety. No reprimands or public dressing down, please! In the above case, I’d gently try and move things along, guide the group back to relevancy and restate the problem space you’re working with.

Choose a wide or narrow approach

A framing question I find useful when thinking about running an ideation workshop is “how clear is the problem we’re trying to solve?”

The answer to this question will determine everything from who should be in the room to the ideation techniques you’ll use in order to find an effective solution.

Let’s take the example of the fitness tracker app with low user retention. You’ve got some background data but you’re not yet aligned on what’s causing the issue nor how should you approach it.

The cause of that issue is likely to be quite complex and so the specifics of the problem are unclear. As such, starting with the wider problem space of low retention is likely a better approach than narrowing immediately to an assumption like “our user emails have low engagement and that’s why retention is low.”

In this case, I’d advise the group to start wide and explore the low retention problem space before narrowing towards a solution.

On the flip side, if you’ve already done extensive research and discovered that your user onboarding emails are a big problem that deserves the team’s full attention, then the problem is clear, and so you can direct your attention to working on that explicitly with a more narrow approach.

Once you understand your level of clarity on the problem, then you can best choose who needs to be present.

If things are unclear and you need to do some big picture thinking, enlist those people in the group. Getting into the details of your entire onboarding program and need to discuss creative ways to personalize your communications based on user data? That’s likely a slightly different group of people.

Narrow and wide approaches are both extremely effective, but you’ll want to ensure you’re deploying the one that matches your challenge for best results.

Clearly frame the problem space you’re working on

We’ve established above that an ideation workshop can take a wide or narrow approach based on how much clarity you have on the issue. An effective ideation workshop is also one in which everyone is aligned on the problem you’re solving, regardless of their initial approach to solving it.

In the fitness tracker with low user retention example, you would frame either approach by saying that the the group will be working on the issue of user retention and then provide some supporting information. Why is this important? This framing ensures that people are focused and aligned on what to bring to the table. Without it, you might get great ideas that have nothing to do with the issue and find a lack of traction or shared understanding.

While you might have different perspectives on how to solve the problem you’re facing or even a different understanding of why a problem is occurring, it’s vital the whole group is aligned on the core issue you’re working on. Think of it as a north star you’re all travelling towards, even if the route is different for different participants.

Having trouble getting to the core problem you want to solve? Try The 5 Whys activity to help a group go deeper and frame the problem space effectively.

Work on the right problem

It’s one thing to have everyone aligned on the problem you’re working on, but it’s also vital that you are working on the right problem.

Narrowing down to a specific problem too soon or making an assumption without exploration can result in teams working on the wrong problem and, ultimately, spending time creating solutions that may not actually help address your biggest challenges.

So how do you avoid working on the wrong problem? Depending on how your organization works, you should have a way for challenges and initiatives to be recorded and to rise to the surface.

At SessionLab for example, we have a quarterly planning session where we choose what to work on in order to achieve our company goals. In this framework, challenges go through a consistent process of validation, background research and consideration before the planning session and even more during it.

Aligning your problem discovery process with your company goals is a great first step, but beyond this, you’ll also find that creating a well-defined problem statement, conducting user research or doing a root cause analysis before or during the session is helpful.

If you’re taking a wide approach to ideation, try starting the workshop with an exploration what your participants consider to be the biggest contributors to the issue.

The Sailboat exercise is a fantastic example of an ideation technique you can use to explore a problem space with a team and narrow down to the right problem in an informed, practical way.

Do your (user) research and gather data

Good data and user research are vital for any ideation or problem solving process. They are foundational pillars you’ll use when crafting a problem statement and also when informing new ideas and the solutions you develop.

In many cases, user feedback and data is what triggers the ideation session in the first place. Whether that’s consistent feedback about broken features or data to show a consistent decline in new subscribers year over year.

Whenever possible, bring data and user insights to share at the start of your ideation workshops and to support the framing of your challenge. This can help ensure you’re solving the right problem and also orient folks towards the root cause or even start the creative gears turning.

Whatever you do, ensure you’ve done some data analysis or can rattle off a summary to help folks make sense of what you present. I’ve seen ideation sessions get derailed by vast swathes of data that isn’t actually relevant or which would have been better presented in the form of a summary.

It’s also important to note that it’s not always possible to source deep user research to inform every idea or problem. Some times, you actually need to move faster than data gathering permits. In these cases, having experts and well-informed, smart people in the room is a good stop gap.

The final thing I’ll say on data is that there are times in an ideation workshop where making a decision on two great ideas feels impossible without first doing some further research to validate some assumptions.

In these cases, create a focused research task to be done at the first available opportunity and defer the final decision a touch until you can get at least a little validation.

Document everything (and make it accessible)

In both my personal and professional life, diligently recording ideas and taking notes has been instrumental in making projects become a reality.

A lot of ideation techniques involve each team member writing ideas on sticky notes and then sharing them with the group.

Take a photograph of the completed idea boards or ask a note taker to record those that resonate with the group and any connected conversations. It’s unlikely that you’ll implement all potential solutions immediately, and so these notes can be helpful when a product manager needs to remember that one great idea that now makes sense but which you can’t quite remember.

If working with an online whiteboard board or document, this is especially easy. Simply ask all workshop participants to add ideas to the virtual board, drag in inspiration and leave comments for everyone to see. You’ll also find online workshop tools that can help create summaries or transcriptions of your online chats to ensure nothing is missed.

The idea of documenting everything also extends to using a parking lot to capture conversations and ideas that might be peripheral to the problem at hand, but are worth coming back to. In a tightly structured ideation workshop, it can feel important to stay on topic. A parking lot means that anything that comes up while running an ideation technique isn’t lost, and you can circle back to it when it’s appropriate.

Balance solo and group thinking

Ever been in a session where one person speaks for an hour before you get chance to contribute or even have space to reflect? Not the best environment for new ideas, is it? Round robin brainstorming techniques can be incredibly exciting and effective at producing as many ideas as possible. Be sure to balance these group activities with time for reflection and solo ideation for best results.

Solo thinking and reflection time is also vital for avoiding group thinking and giving time for divergence to really occur. Particularly in groups with strong personalities and loud voices, this personal time can ensure that all areas are properly explored and you don’t double down on a particular solution just because the boss like it.

1-2-4-All is a great example of a technique that helps balance solo and group thinking while also ensuring everyone in the group is able to participate and have their ideas heard.

Engagement is key

When everyone in the room is fully engaged in the process, it can feel a little like magic. One person suggests something that challenges a long-held assumption and something clicks. Ideas come thick and fast and people step up to take ownership of deploying the solution. Getting participants fully engaged in the process and the problem is a large part of what facilitates this outcome. So how do you engage your group?

A well-designed agenda with varied ideation techniques is a great start. Try using brainstorming techniques that encourage visual thinking and critical thinking alike so that people with a broad set of skills can take part.

Workshop facilitation best practices can also help create an engaging atmosphere that positions the session for success. You’ll want to ensure you guide discussions effectively, solicit input, create space for reflection and much more. For more tips on facilitating engagement, read our guide on how to run a workshop.

Conclusion

When you bring the right people together with a common purpose and an effective structure, you can create genuine innovation and solve tough problems. An ideation workshop provides the ideal structure to make that happen.

Whether you’re looking for the perfect ideation technique to inform your process or some advice for leading the group effectively, I hope this guide has helped provide some practical examples you can bring to your next workshop.

Looking for an example ideation workshop as inspiration? Design Sprint 2.0 is a tried and tested process you can run over 4 days, including time for prototyping solutions and validating those prototypes via testing.

Need help understanding how to put together your ideation workshop? Explore our guide on how to plan a workshop to start making your session a reality.

But how to choose the right workshop format to use and how to make the most of time spent together as a team? In this blog post, we’ll share workshop ideas ranging from corporate sessions you can use to make an impact in the workplace all the way through to creative activities you can use to engage participants at any workshop event.

When should I host a workshop?

While there are a near infinite number of potential triggers and workshop topics, the primary reason you may need to host a workshop will likely fall into one of these two camps:

1. You have a group of people together in one place and someone (maybe you) says “Let’s use this opportunity effectively and run a workshop!”
2. You have a specific, (often challenging) goal that requires people to collaborate.

While the specific circumstances can differ, I find this useful to think about when understanding why you should run a workshop, and what kind of a workshop you should run.

If you have a specific goal, this is easy. Whatever your challenge or task, a well-facilitated workshop that is designed to achieve that goal is a great way to go. In the context of this blog post, you’ll find different types of workshop that each have a goal in mind, whether that’s skills development or problem solving.

Using these sessions as inspiration for your next workshop event will help you move things along swiftly while benefit from the insights of experienced facilitators too.

If you’re running a workshop event that is not in response to a specific goal, this is a little trickier. Maybe you have a three-day company conference and have been tasked with running a workshop one afternoon. What do you do?

In this case, it comes down to thinking about the needs of your participants and the context that brings them together. Workshops are always purposeful, even if that purpose is as simple as having fun as a team and building bonds.

If this is you, you’ll find a heap of workshop ideas that can serve as inspiration below. In addition, it’s worth talking to your team, your managers and event organizers to determine what would best serve the group with the time you have available.

You can read much more about this topic in our post on what is a workshop and why you should run one.

If you’re ready to move towards planning your workshop agenda, check out our guide on how to plan a workshop which also includes a template for a series of client planning meetings.

What are the different types of workshops?

So now we’ve established that workshops are a powerful way to bring a group together and get things done and you’re eager to run one. Next, it might be useful to understand some of the different types of workshop you might run.

Whether you’re organising a session in a workplace environment, at school or as part of a community, each of these workshop activities can be a great way to encourage teamwork and make meaningful progress on your goals.

Before you jump into designing a session, we’d recommend considering this (non-exhaustive) list alongside your goals and the needs of your workshop attendees. By holding all these details together, you can select the right workshop format as the basis for creating an engaging, interactive session.

Whether you’re looking for online workshop ideas or an agenda for an in person event or hybrid workshop, you’ll find something fit for your needs here.

Added bonus, for most of these workshop ideas we’ve also included a ready-to-use, high-quality template for you you can look at for inspiration or even take as a guideline to base your next workshop on! Let’s take a look.

Corporate workshops

In a corporate setting, workshops tend to be used in two primary ways:

1. as an efficient structure for collaboration;
2. as an engaging format for learning and development.

There are many ways to use workshops as a collaborative workplace tool. You might run an ideation workshop to create innovative ideas and solve tough problems facing your company.

Workshops can also be used to set team values, develop company strategy or effectively open or close an important project. What all these use cases have in common is a need for a group to work collaboratively on a common goal. Workshops provide an excellent format for structured work that encourages participation and shared responsible.

For example, a leadership development workshop can help aspiring managers develop the skills they need to lead their teams and build confidence. Similarly, a communication or public speaking workshop can improve how team members interact with each other and with clients, leading to more efficient and harmonious workplace dynamics.

By addressing specific needs and challenges within the organization, corporate workshops can drive significant improvements in performance and morale.

Skills development and educational workshops

While traditional lectures and teaching formats will always have their place, workshops are a powerful tool for learning. Educational workshops are designed to enhance knowledge, skills, and competencies by focusing on the latest research, trends, and best practices in various industries. Examples of educational workshop ideas include college workshops and industry-specific sessions tailored to meet the specific learning needs of the participants.

Educational workshops are particularly effective because they offer a hands-on, interactive learning experience. Participants can engage with the material in a meaningful way, ask questions, and receive feedback from experts and peers.

This approach not only deepens understanding but also helps attendees retain and apply what they’ve learned. Whether it’s a workshop on the latest technological advancements or a session on effective teaching strategies, educational workshops are a powerful tool for continuous learning and growth.

Creative workshops

Remember: all workshops have a goal. Sometimes that goal can be lofty and specific, such as in a strategic planning session or project retrospective. Other times, the goal of workshop events can be to simply create space for fun, memorable experiences with a group.

Creative workshops are interactive sessions where participants get the chance to practice and develop creative skills in a safe and engaging environment.

Examples of creative workshop ideas you might use with a group include art classes, music, and creative writing workshops. These sessions encourage participants to think outside the box, develop new skills, and build confidence in their creative abilities, all while sharing the experience with others.

For event planners, creative workshop ideas can be a great addition to a conference program, networking event or as part of a company retreat. At SessionLab for example, we always try to build in time for collective creativity during our team retreats, whether that’s an art class, pottery making workshop or even cooking together.

In our experience, the right creative workshop can also have profound effects on things like team cohesion, trust and general happiness. Especially as a fully remote team, we’ve found running a virtual workshop with the express goal to have fun and be creative as a group has helped keep our emotional batteries running high.

Corporate workshop ideas

Workshops are one of the most effective ways for a group to get things done. In a corporate environment, workshops can be used to help teams tackle workplace challenges, create innovation, learn new skills or even have memorable, team bonding experiences.

One misconception I’ve seen is that workshops are fluffy by nature, only for exploring creative topics and learning skills, and not for serious work. On the contrary, workshops provide a structured space for collaboration in whatever form is needed by the group.

You might run a leadership development workshop where would-be managers can share experiences, practice their skills and gain confidence as leaders. On the other hand, you might run a workshop to plan your yearly strategy or resolve an emerging problem.

It’s key to remember that workshops are goal and outcome oriented, designed to reach an intended outcome by engaging all participants in the process. If you have a clear goal and bring the right people together in pursuit of that goal, there are few things you cannot achieve in a workshop.

What’s more: workshops produce results quickly. Under the guidance of a facilitator, a corporate workshop can move things forward more swiftly than endless emails or Slack threads.

Here are some impactful ideas for your next corporate workshop:

Leadership development

Great leadership doesn’t happen overnight. The best organizations know that investing in learning and development is a powerful way to equip new and existing managers with the skills they need to lead their teams well.

Leadership development workshops often comprise a combination of training scenarios, skills development and peer support, all designed to engage new leaders and improve their abilities.(Read more on this in our guide on how to run a leadership workshop.)

While it’s possible to teach many of these skills asynchronously, the experiential format of a workshop can help spread best practices, improve learning potential and help new leaders learn from one another as they grow. Interactive workshop activities can play a crucial role in making these sessions more engaging and effective for leadership development.

The workshop format also allows participants to practice leadership skills and techniques under the guidance of an experienced facilitator. Yes, a role-playing scenario might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in the right format, it can help new leaders feel more confident in leading and managing their team.

Check out the leadership development workshop template to see what such a workshop looks like in practice and see this collection of leadership training topics to help choose the right focus for your team.

You might also find our collection of leadership training activities helpful for building out a learning and development program.

Team building

Team building can come in many different forms. Happy hours, escape rooms and fun games can all strengthen relationships in your team, but you can go further.

Team building workshops offer a dedicated space for collaboration that helps teams practice and demonstrate skills that will also help in their day-to-day work. These can come in the form of group problem-solving games, collaborative challenges or even exercises designed to expressly deepen connections and help people get to know each other more.

In our experience, these kinds of workshops can help improve communication, create memorable shared experiences and build bonds.

Explore our team development day workshop template to see how you might effectively structure such a team workshop.

Have limited time but want to add team building elements into your session? Our collection of team building activities come in all shapes and sizes so you can easily plug them into an existing agenda!

Design sprint 

When you have a tough problem without a clear solution, a design sprint is one of the best ways to approach the issue. First developed at Google, the design sprint is a structured approach for teams to explore a problem and ideate, refine, prototype and test solutions.

One of the major strengths of a facilitated workshop is structure. When collaborating on tough challenges with others, it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole or spend time inefficiently. Workshop formats like the design sprint have been tested and refined by facilitators for years. By using the benefit of all that experience, you’ll instead be able to focus on resolving challenges and creating innovation.

Check out the 4-day Design Sprint 2.0 template by AJ&Smart for a ready-to-use method for solving tough problems. Want to focus on fresh ideas and brainstorming? The one-hour brain sprint template offers a self contained brainstorming workshop that is ideally suited to a short workshop event.

Diversity and inclusion workshop

Workshops led with the guidance of an expert facilitator can be one of the most powerful ways to explore emotionally charged and complex concerns. Promoting awareness and action on diversity and inclusion can help create an equitable and inclusive work environment, but it’s not enough to just update company policies and ask folks to read up.

Workshop events can be used to create a safe forum for discussion, help participants feel seen and heard and to give practical examples to the group. By dedicating time and space to DEI, you can ensure that it’s given full attention by participants and ensure complete understanding too. 

When running a diversity and inclusion workshop, we’d recommend that you bring in an external facilitator to help. The expertise of a skilled facilitator with dozens of DEI workshops under their belt can’t be underestimated. Furthermore, the role of a facilitator as an unbiased third party can really help create the psychological safety needed for such a topic. 

Project opening and closing

So your team is starting a big new project. Isn’t the best bet just to email all stakeholders and say you’re getting started? Nope. A workshop is an ideal forum for kicking off complex projects, engaging all stakeholders and surfacing potential issues before they arise. 

A project kickoff is designed to engage all participants in the planning process and ensure that work will be smooth once you get started. It’s a great place for everyone involved to air concerns, ask questions and get aligned. You’ll often end with a list of follow-up actions, check-in dates and clear scope for the project.

Closing a project with a dedicated workshop is also important. A retrospective workshop can ensure key learnings are shared, celebrations are held and that the project is symbolically closed. 

Kickoff and project retrospectives are two formats that especially benefit from meta analysis. Take the time to reflect on the process itself and improve how you run these sessions in order to make future workshops even more effective.

Read more in this guide for running project kickoffs or try using this kickoff workshop template as the basis for your next agenda. 

Running a retrospective? This retrospective workshop template provides a simple and effective structure to aid reflection and help team members work on concrete steps for improvement.

Strategy planning workshop

Working on company strategy is rarely easy. Companies have many moving parts, competing priorities and organizational needs. The process of exploring, planning and implementing a strategy is often best served by the dedicated space of a workshop. 

A strategic planning workshop typically involves a process of exploring possible strategic directions and tasks, discussing them in line with overall goals and then formulating a plan for implementation.

Getting your best minds in one room and following a structure such as this EOS strategy planning workshop can help ensure decisions are made effectively and that all stakeholders are able to contribute effectively. 

Templatizing your process is a great way to simplify and improve how your strategy is created and rolled out. At SessionLab, we run a quarterly strategy planning process that benefits from reusing a recurring agenda and a Miro board that’s been refined over many strategy planning sessions.

Learn more about how we approach this process at SessionLab with this guide to running a strategic planning workshop.

Company values workshop

Your organization’s values determine everything from cultural norms inside your company to your direction and focus. It’s not uncommon for companies to develop internal friction if these values aren’t defined or people aren’t aligned on how best to live and practice them. 

A company values workshop is designed to either define or refine a company’s core values. Your team will explore questions like: What does the company stand for? What is most important to us? How do we want to treat one another and work together? How are our shared values reflected in our goals and company mission? 

By dedicating time and space to exploring these as a team, you can help create alignment, improve team cohesion and create a set of core values you’re proud to stand beside. 

Want an example? Explore your team values and define how you want to work together in this team canvas workshop template.

Stress management and mindfulness workshop

Mindfulness in the workplace needs more than lip service in order to be effective. While wellness budgets and no-meetings Tuesdays can help, you can have a more profound and lasting effect on employee stress levels by holding workshops designed to help solve root causes and teach valuable techniques to your team.

Stress management workshops and sessions dedicated to mindfulness can come in many forms. You might teach time management techniques and provide resources for reducing stress and achieving a better work-life balance. Alternatively, you might host a problem solving workshop on the topic of workplace stress and discuss the various obstacles and opportunities for tackling the issue.

Remember that workshops are emergent by nature: even bringing people together to talk about the subject can have transformative effects on how your team approaches stress and self care.

Using a group discussion format like World Cafe to invite folks to self-organize and discuss what’s most important on the topic of stress and mindfulness can help whatever needs to surface come to the fore.

Training workshops

When you need to teach your employees important new skills, competencies or train them in the use of technical equipment, you’ll likely need to run a training session or distribute learning materials. While some concepts can be taught with a single email or seminar, important topics can benefit from the experiential learning environment of a training workshop. 

While classic training may be more passive in nature, training workshops are designed to be interactive and practical. Participants will be expected to get involved, share their experiences with other participants and learn by doing. Training sessions like these are especially effective when teaching softer skills or when it’s beneficial to receive instant feedback from the trainer or facilitator. 

You’ll find more on this in our guide to running a training session and in our various skills development workshops below. 

You might also find this training workshop template – heavily informed by Kolb’s learning cycle – useful when it comes to structuring your next training event.

Skill development and educational workshop ideas

The distinction between a training session and a workshop can feel quite narrow, especially in the hands of an experienced facilitator or trainer. While training sessions may have a pass/fail criteria for participants learning a new skill, skills development workshops are often softer in approach.

For example, if you need your participants to master a piece of highly precise technical equipment, that’s a training session. If you want your participants to practice various ways of giving and receiving feedback in order to improve their interpersonal skills at work, that would work great as an engaging workshop.

In this section, we’ll share some ideas for workshops where learning and skills development is the primary goal. These are extremely useful for developing individual competencies or helping teams work together more effectively moment to moment. Let’s take a peek.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict and friction can occur whenever passionate people work together. In our experience, conflict is often a sign that something is important and needs extra attention. What’s important is that people are able to express a difference of opinion without it escalating into an unproductive or damaging discussion. As such, it’s important that companies equip their teams with the skills to manage and resolve conflicts effectively.

Developing conflict resolution skills in a workshop can look like a combination of case study analyses, role-playing activities and de-escalation techniques. It can also be incredibly effective to work on building team trust or giving participants tools like active listening and self management techniques that can help ensure discussions are more inclusive and productive in the first place. 

Read more in our collection of conflict resolution techniques, which contains exercises designed to teach conflict management skills alongside frameworks for discussing and deescalating conflict.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace

Emotional intelligence is one of those so-called soft skills that is incredibly important to the functioning of any organization. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and understand the feelings of yourself and others and respond effectively. When folks are emotionally intelligent, communication is good, people feel seen and heard and collaboration is a joy. Without it, communication breakdowns occur, people feel misunderstood and it can be hard to get anything done.

Emotional intelligence can be broken down into distinct skillsets and techniques such as self awareness, self management, empathy, group dynamics and more. This self awareness workshop template is an effective session for exploring and strengthening this skillset with practical techniques. 

Want more? See this guide to emotional intelligence activities for more practical techniques and workshop ideas you can bring to virtual workshops and in-person sessions alike.

Decision-making

The ability to quickly make effective decisions is an important skill to master. In truth, making good decisions often comes from a composite of many different skills working together and the application of decision making models. Good decision makers need to leverage everything from critical thinking, root cause analyses and interpersonal skills when making decisions.

Running a workshop on improving decision making skills can have a profound impact on how your team makes decisions both micro and macro. Making faster, more informed decisions about how to spend your day and what to prioritize can often be as valuable as how to make a decision on company direction, for example. Such a workshop would likely be a mix of decision making exercises, advice on how to make good decisions and moments for participants to discuss and practice as a group. 

Explore possible exercises and decision making workshop ideas with our collection of decision making techniques. 

Running a workshop where you want to actually make an important decision as a group? This is an excellent idea!

Read more in our guide on how to run a group decision making process. You’ll find heaps of tips and structures that will help your group discuss and finalize even the most complex decisions.

The decision making workshop template is also an excellent example of how you might structure such a process.  

Effective communication skills

How we communicate and share information can have a profound effect on our relationships and the work we get done. Whether it’s for customer facing teams or for improving internal processes, an effective communication workshop can be a powerful way to solve issues and improve efficiency in your organization. 

An effective communication workshop should include a combination of activities designed to improve self awareness and clarity, as well as tools for giving productive feedback and practicing active listening. It’s common for workshop participants to also spend time exploring why misunderstandings and miscommunications might occur and discussing how things might be done differently in the future.

This collection of communication games and techniques is a great starting point for running a communication workshop with your team.

Simply adding an active listening exercise or feedback technique like What I Need From You to a team building activity is a great way of developing this skillset and improving team collaboration in your group. 

Storytelling workshop

Humans love stories. Learning how to tell great stories is helpful to everyone from marketers and customer support staff, all the way through to leaders and folks delivering presentations and pitching to clients. 

Storytelling workshops will typically combine group discussions, some expert theory and plenty of opportunity to practice telling our own stories. Personally, I find that starting with examples of stories that have stayed with us is a great leaping-off point that helps keep attendees engaged before leaping into deeper workshop content.

A storytelling workshop typically includes techniques for grabbing the attention of an audience, storytelling devices that help create a compelling narrative and some practice on how to use visual elements, sound and memetic tools to help your stories stick. 

For a taste, you might find this story building activity useful when kickstarting your workshop. Alternatively, this creative writing exercise encouraging folks to write from the perspective of an alien is a good example of how creative explorations can inform how we tell stories.

Facilitation skills

Facilitation is a vital workplace skill that can improve how we hold space and collaborate. Key facilitation skills like process design, group management and consensus-building aren’t just for professional facilitators. Anyone who runs meetings, workshops or collaborates can benefit from these skills, especially if they’re also in a leadership role. 

Running a workshop on how to facilitate effectively can get a bit meta, but it can be an invaluable sandbox for learning how to lead better meetings, training sessions and workshops. It can help folks collaborate better internally and also make client-facing meetings run more smoothly and effectively.

Explore this facilitation skills workshop template to start imparting these valuable skills and begin building a culture of facilitation in your organization.

Effective feedback

The way we give and receive feedback can have a profound impact on our personal and working lives. It’s quite common for people to be afraid of feedback and to avoid giving or receiving feedback altogether. The result can be missed growth opportunities, recurring mistakes and an inability to express how something has made us feel. 

Feedback workshops can help participants understand how important feedback is to personal growth and development while also developing techniques to help make the process easy and productive. 

This art of effective feedback workshop is a simple template that will help teams explore the concept and develop practical feedback techniques they can put into practice immediately.  

Looking for a self-contained activity you can add to your next retreat or team workshop? Check this collection of feedback activities for practical, effective exercises your team can use in a pinch.

Creative thinking and innovation workshops

Creative thinking is a powerful skill to encourage in both our personal and professional lives. In a corporate setting, creativity can be important to everyone from CEO to frontline support. It can help everyone see opportunities for innovation and give them the tools to solve problems.

When people tell me they’re not creative, I’ve often found that they mean “I can’t paint or draw” or “I’m worried about being judged for being creative.” Workshops designed to awaken latent creativity or help people realize how to apply their creative impulses without fear of judgment can be transformative.

Whether it’s in the form of brainstorming activities or creative workshops, remember that creativity is often generative, joyful and gratifying for those involved. That’s even before you begin to think about the impact of those innovative solutions to your business. Take the time to encourage employees to think innovatively and solve problems creatively and you’ll see results both micro and macro.

Check out this collection of creative thinking activities for inspiration that can enliven any session.

Looking for a deeper session? This ideation workshop template provides an effective framework for creating new ideas and creative solutions.

Workshop ideas for business events

Workshops can add immense value to business events, whether you’re running a conference or networking session. Some of my most engaging and memorable experiences at these kinds of events have been when I’ve joined a workshop with people I’ve just met and created something as a group.

Remember that workshops can be effective in many different formats. Putting virtual participants in an online workshop where they get to do deeper work and connect more meaningfully can be more impactful than any number of icebreaker activities.

As with all of the session formats here, it’s important for the event organizer to consider the needs and expectations of the target audience when choosing a topic. If in doubt, ask attendees what they want as part of the event planning process and maybe even invite them to lead a session.

Open Space Technology 

When you bring large groups of people together in a shared goal or area of interest, something special happens. Topics emerge, ideas are shared and its possible to create lots of momentum for change. It’s also possible that the session descends into chaos. So how do you create space for emergence while also maintaining enough structure to ensure action and outcomes?

Open Space Technology was originally created by Harrison Owen and perfected in decades of collaborative work by the Open Space Technology world-wide community. It is an event format when participants of a session co-create an agenda together. To begin, a general topic or theme is decided upon for the open space. Next, participants are invited to propose topics for discussion and host breakout groups who will come together to discuss and work on that topic.

Sessions will then be run in parallel, with a mix of people hosting, contributing and coming and going freely from different sessions. Open space is designed to be emergent, though it has enough structure to allow for sessions to be organized, opened and closed with ease. 

If you have a group of people who all care about a certain topic or who have a giant problem to solve and you’re struggling to know what to focus on, Open Space is a great workshop idea. What emerges organically from a group of passionate people united in purpose is exactly what needs to come up, and it encourages folks to take responsibility, be creative and collaborate in an incredibly powerful way.  

Check out the Open Space Technology template to kickstart your event planning process and create a structured yet dynamic event.

Hackathon

Hackathons can be an extremely powerful way to create momentum and explore tasks in a safe, self-contained way that makes it easy to experiment. At business events, an impromptu or arranged hackathon can mobilize folks with a shared goal and deliver concrete outputs quickly. 

As with any other creative session, hackathons benefit from a careful balance of structure and free space to create innovative ideas. Hackathons typically have a focus area, topic or problem space and a strict timeframe in which teams work together to create a solution or innovation in that space.

Hackathons can be a wonderful addition to an event as they are often multi-disciplinary in nature, inviting participants with different skillsets to work together to create something in a short timeframe. I’d only urge that you take the time to add some structure to proceedings so that things can run smoothly can avoid potential descending into chaos!

Mastermind group 

Sometimes, the best way to learn is from our peers. A mastermind is where a group of skilled and like-minded people come together on a recurring basis for peer coaching and problem solving.

Masterminds work best with a consistent group that allows for accountability and vulnerability, though I’ve seen them create impact even when run as one-off sessions.

I once attended a cybersecurity conference when a mastermind format emerged organically in response to various professionals experiencing similar problems. We ran out first session on the spot and then followed up with online sessions as a group over the next few months. It was a great container for us all to share experiences and help one another solve tough problems. 

It’s also worth noting that Masterminds greatly benefit when there are people with significant experience taking part. Not everyone needs to be an expert, but if you have five people who are all newbies, it can be harder for any advice to be backed up by concrete learnings and practical experience. 

To experience the benefits of the peer-coaching Mastermind experience in a short timespan, you might want to try a Liberating Structure activity called Troika Consulting. This works by putting participants in small huddles of three people, in which one presents their current issue or challenge and the other two act as consultants. You’ll be surprised how much insight can emerge in the span of fifteen minutes!

What are the key characteristics of workshops?

Workshops come in many shapes and sizes and will differ in content and design based on the goal of the session. That said, workshops tend of feature some defining characteristics that collectively ensure that the session will be successful and engaging.

If you’re just getting started or need help understanding how a workshop is different than a meeting or a typical training session, this list will help make the distinction clear while also hopefully selling you on the prospect of running a workshop!

Workshops are an interactive environment

In comparison to lectures and webinars, workshops are interactive by nature. Workshops typically include a mix of practical exercises, group discussions, and real-time problem-solving where everyone is encouraged to participate and learn experientially.

The result is a session that emphazies full engagement and makes the process of working together a joy, rather than a dull, passive experience.

You’ll find a workshop format using interactive elements also encourages ownership and action: ensuring things actually get done after the session. If you find your meetings and events rarely result in decisive action and lack momentum, consider trying an interactive workshop instead!

Workshops have a clear goal and purpose

Workshops should always have a clear goal, such as developing skills, exploring a problem or building connections between team members. This purpose guides everything from the structure of the agenda to specific exercises and outcomes.

When running a workshop, it’s helpful to remember that a clear goal doesn’t always mean concrete, deliverable output.

In soft skills training sessions for example, the goal may be for participants to share previous experiences and practice new techniques as a team. There may not be a test at the end to give a pass/fail, but the goal of improving interpersonal dynamics has still been pursued.

On the other hand, the goal of a strategic planning workshop may include a completed strategy document, ready for the next steps of discovery or implementation.

All these goals are important and facilitators and event organizers should always measure whether they achieved the goal. Just remember that workshops are often very much worth running, even if the output isn’t a physical document: who doesn’t want to improve team cohesion or employee happiness?

Workshops are structured and time-bound

Workshops typically run for a specific amount of time, anything from an hour to multiple sessions over many days. To achieve the goals of the workshop in the allocated timeframe, the facilitator will create structure in the form of an agenda while also time-boxing and guiding the group through activities effectively.

Ever had issues with brainstorming going on for so long that you never get around to make a decision? Workshops can help with that.

Whether its a virtual or in-person workshop, the time-bound format is especially effective for helping attendees focus and leave other concerns at the door. When everyone in the room is gathered for a specific purpose for a specific amount of time, you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve together.

Workshops are facilitated

Workshops typically have a facilitator onboard to help guide the flow of the session, orient the group and provide structure. Teams might bring in an expert facilitator who also happens to be a subject matter expert or a manager or team leader might also take on the facilitator role. In addition to designing the session, the facilitator will also help manage group dynamics, run activities and report back.

The value add of a facilitator cannot be underestimated. Not only are they well positioned to encourage participation and ownership, but they’ll also ensure that the goal of the session is always in mind, whatever dynamically happens during the workshop.

Unsure about what else a facilitator actually does? Find a practical definition of facilitator and explore what they can bring to your session in this guide.

Workshops are dynamic

While workshops always have a concrete goal in mind, the way the best workshops achieve that goal is often dynamic and emergent in nature.

For example, let’s say you’re running a workshop to teach participants conflict resolution skills. The facilitator will have prepared an agenda in advance, but what happens if world events bring a unique energy into the room and some of the activities no longer seem fit for purpose?

Great facilitators will adjust the flow of the workshop in the moment to speak to the needs of the group and facilitate the best route towards the original goal. It takes practice, trust and a strong design foundation, but when it happens, the results can be especially impactful.

What’s next?

A great workshop is probably the best format for bringing people together to get things done. With effective design, good facilitation and the right workshop format, you can encourage participants to take part and create impact as a group. Truly, an engaging workshop can create memorable experiences that leave an indelible and lasting impression on all in attendance. So what are you waiting for?

I hope this list of interactive workshop ideas gives you some inspiration for running your next session and helps get the creative juices flowing!

For next steps, our post on how to plan and organize a workshop offers a practical, step-by-step process that can help you make your ideas a reality.

Check out the accompanying workshop planning template in SessionLab to kickstart your process with an easy to follow agenda that will help you design your next workshop too!

Have any questions or suggestions for other workshop ideas for keeping participants engaged? Get in touch in the comments below!

In this quick starter guide we will go through all the essential information you need to confidently run your first workshop. Taking it step-by-step, we will look into how to craft an invitation, what to include in the opening section of your event, how to guide the group through activities, and what to do in closing. 

To get you started designing your first workshop, we’ve also included a free Workshop Design Canvas you can fill out to kick-start crafting your agenda.

Many occasions might call for planning a workshop. You might be a new team lead aiming to design the best working practices for your group, or perhaps you need to run a quarterly meeting to explore ideas and set goals. Maybe you are working with your local community to prepare a great calendar of events, or aligning with key stakeholders around how to run a project. 

Whatever the motivation, a workshop is a great way to get people together, focus on a specific topic, generate new ideas, build new skills, problem-solve and make real progress. For more information on what a workshop is, and why to run one, here is our dedicated article.

This is what we will be looking at in the next pages:

We hope this will provide you with all you need to feel prepared for your first workshop. If you are more experienced, you might want to take a look and see if our tips correspond with your practice. Is there anything we mention here that you have not been giving much attention to lately? Or have we forgotten something important? Let us know in the comments! 

How to prepare for a successful workshop

Experienced facilitators have a rule of thumb: time spent preparing a workshop will be about double the actual time spent in the workshop. That means if you are planning for a two-hour session, you can estimate about four hours spent in workshop preparation. For a one-day event, at least two days will go into prep work. For a full run-through of all that you might want to consider for proper planning, check out our complete guide.

If that feels like a lot, stop and consider how much work you can save by hosting a well-designed workshop. A good workshop experience may save you hours of busywork, or improve return on investment by diminishing waste of energy and funds that might go into decisions that hadn’t been well thought out.

So, what are the absolute essentials of workshop preparation? Let’s say you are getting ready for something fairly basic, like a one-hour working session for your team. People know one another and know more or less what to expect. What do you need to do to prepare?

There are three key items you’ll need to set up to prepare your workshop, each answering some essential questions:

1. Space setup. Where, and when, will the workshop take place? This is about preparing a space, whether in person or online, and deciding on a time and date.
2. Agenda design. What will we do at the workshop? This concerns preparing a well-thought-out agenda, as well as materials.
3. Invite preparations. Who will be there? This is about sending out a compelling invite and making sure you know who should attend.

We will now look into these three points in turn, adding some tips on how to best manage them and avoid common pitfalls along the way. 

1. Timing and location

To start workshop preparation, you will need to pick a location and make sure the physical environment fits your needs. Go through your workshop agenda in your mind and check out materials and technical requirements. Do you need a projector and screen? What about whiteboards? Will participants require access to good wifi, and do you have the password? SessionLab’s agenda planner has a dedicated section that will help you create a checklist of materials, making the process of getting ready for the big day easier!

It is practically a running joke in the facilitation world that workshop facilitators are the ones who show up early and start moving tables around. This is due to the fact that most meeting or conference rooms are organized with lectures and presentations in mind, while for a participatory, engaging workshop you’ll probably want small huddles of tables, or chairs arranged in circles. If you want some ideas on which room setup to choose for your next workshop, here is our complete guide on how to use room setup styles to maximise engagement! 

Besides a location you will, of course, have to decide on a time. Give some thought to what time and day of the week will make attendance most likely. I have recently been leading a series of workshops with tour guides: to find out what time would work for them we had to keep up to date on local festivals, as well as avoid weekends, which are peak working times for this stakeholder category.  

If, on the other hand, your workshop will take place online, you’ll need to choose a meeting tool, create and share a link, and make sure you are familiar with all settings. While in a webinar it is common to simply present slides, in a virtual workshop there will be a lot of interactivity.

Using breakout rooms is a common way to kick off discussions in small groups: ensure you are confident in setting them up. Think of other needs you may have, such as sharing a whiteboard or quizzes. Running workshops online has its own challenges and may be worth a practice run-through! Here are some more ideas on how to pick online tools and handle virtual workshops with ease.

When preparing a virtual workshop, you also might be thinking of having participants join from different timezones. Make sure you schedule your workshop at a time that suits most perspective attendees. Giving for granted that everyone is in the same timezone, when they are not, is probably the most common scheduling error of all. Double check your timezone and write it clearly in the invitation! 

2. Crafting a workshop agenda

Creating a clear agenda is an essential step in running any successful workshop. A good agenda helps you make the most of your time together and ensures that every topic gets the attention it deserves. For a full guide to agenda design, look no further than our 101 introduction here. 

The basics of agenda design start with setting clear objectives. What do participants hope to achieve by the end of the workshop? Start with your goals and work backwards, mapping out activities that help the group reach those outcomes. It’s a good idea to include a mix of different types of activities, from presentations and discussions to interactive exercises and reflection time. This variety helps keep everyone engaged and caters to different learning styles.

Download and use our essential agenda design canvas (for free!)

At SessionLab, we specialize in supporting team leaders and facilitators in designing agendas for meetings that matter. Using SessionLab’s planner you can quickly put together a flow for your next workshop: a flexible drag-and-drop tool allows you to shift activities around and automatically calculates the timing, and by colour-coding each section you can see in an instant whether you’ve achieved a good mix of activities. 

Here are three ways SessionLab can help you design your next agenda with ease:

• Download and fill out the agenda design canvas. This is a simple tool to help you collect your thoughts and start the design process. Each section can help you focus on an essential part of the design, starting with the workshop’s purpose (and title), all the way to learnings and feedback you’ll want to remember to improve future workshops.
• Start from a ready-made template. SessionLab has a library of workshop templates you can take inspiration from. Each is prepared by expert facilitators who have provided their tips and tricks for how to run it. At the end of this article you’ll find a selection of beginner-friendly workshop templates to start from!
• Try out SessionLab’s planner. Its functions are made to help you design effective workshops, and you can pick activities from a vast library of over 1400 methods! 

3. The art of the invite

Now that you have your agenda, a time, and a place sorted, it’s time to gather the people. Sounds simple, right? Yet, if there’s one challenge I often face when organizing workshops, it’s ensuring that invitations are sent out on time and contain everything participants need to show up prepared. Here’s what you need to consider to craft a clear, motivating invite that gets the right people in the room.

Who should be at your workshop?

When deciding who to invite, focus on identifying potential workshop participants who can contribute the most to your workshop goals. It’s tempting to include everyone, but inviting too many can lead to confusion or make it harder to get things done. Instead, ask yourself: who has key information to share, and who needs to be involved for the decisions made in the session to be implemented effectively? It’s better to have a smaller, engaged group than a larger crowd that feels disconnected.

How many people should be there? 

Choosing the right group size is about finding a balance. Keep it small enough to ensure workshop attendees can participate actively, but large enough to bring in diverse perspectives. For most workshops, aim for 5-12 participants — this range allows for meaningful dialogue without becoming chaotic. Remember, quality over quantity is key; a focused, engaged group will always be more effective.

Handling no-shows gracefully

Even with the best planning, there will be times when people don’t show up. Instead of stressing, embrace the mindset of “whoever comes are the right people.” This principle, which comes from Open Space Technology, a brilliant method of working without a set agenda (intrigued? Read up here and check out our dedicated template and materials here), reminds us to focus on what can be done in the moment, with the people who are there, instead of stressing over who “should” be here but is not. 

To keep everyone in the loop, make sure you take thorough notes and share them afterward. At SessionLab, we use Notion to document our meetings so anyone who missed out can easily catch up and stay informed.

Crafting a clear and motivating invitation

Your invitation sets the tone for the entire workshop, so make it count. Start by clearly stating the purpose of the session and why it matters. Encourage potential attendees to join by explaining the impact of the future workshop: what will be done with results? Set expectations about the level of participation needed, especially if it’s an interactive workshop rather than a passive webinar. 

Example invitation:
“Hi team, we’re gathering next Wednesday from 10 to 11 AM CET, to brainstorm ways to improve our onboarding process. The session will take place on Zoom at this link [include link]. 

This is a valuable opportunity for us to address key challenges together, and your insights will help shape how we create a smoother onboarding experience for new team members.

It will be a collaborative, interactive session. If possible, please join from a computer rather than a phone, and from somewhere where you have a good connection and can keep your camera on.”

This way, your invite is clear, sets the right tone, and gives people motivation to join. Happy inviting!

Anyone can be a great workshop leader. If you have prepared well, you will be confident in your workshop delivery.

Pamela Hamilton, The Workshop Book

How to start a workshop

You can really tell an experienced workshopper from the way they open their sessions. An attentive host will make sure people are settled in and have all the information they need before actually kicking off activities. Starting a workshop by going straight into the topic, perhaps with a lengthy technical presentation, is exactly the kind of pitfall you want to avoid. 

A well-facilitated workshop will therefore have an opening section where the facilitator will:

1. Welcome participants
2. Present the agenda
3. Frame the purpose

Let’s look at these in turn.

1. Welcome participants to the workshop

Welcome workshop participants warmly and set the stage for a productive discussion by introducing a quick check-in activity. Icebreakers or check-ins fulfill a need to understand our role in the room and settle in. A common pitfall in workshops is to consider icebreakers (and feel free to rebrand them as ‘icemelters’) as futile exercises, while actually they can be powerful tools to create a good flow.

Pick a question that makes sense to your audience. Aim to help people know one another better, establish trust, and settle in the workshop space, not to make people uncomfortable! 

Online you can read many bad examples of using checkins, icebreakers or energizers in a way that makes people cringe. The worst I’ve ever heard implied asking team members to move around chairs and sit on one another’s laps based on the questions that were asked. This resulted in a very uncomfortable intern having to sit on her boss’ lap: a really awful case of facilitation gone bad!

Here’s a better example: a few days ago I was facilitating a workshop with citizens and local administrators of small villages. Most people knew one another by sight, but not very well. I started the day by asking participants to turn to another person and share something they love about their village. This lifted their mood, allowed them to share more or less personal things as they felt comfortable, and set the stage for a good discussion about needed improvements in local policy. 

A key reason to include an icebreaker or check-in question is to encourage participants to speak up as early as possible. The earlier people make their voices heard, the more likely they will be to intervene in group discussions later. Here are three simple ways to do it:

• If workshop attendees do not know one another, you may want to invite a tour de table, asking everyone for brief personal introductions. It’s up to the workshop facilitator to set clear boundaries for this, or introductions can take a very long time. I’ll typically ask for name, organization, and “what brings you here today?”. Model how long this should take by starting yourself.
• Ask a check-in question and have people share in turns. If you are short on inspiration, here is a list of over 200 ideas of what to ask.
• Online, start meetings and webinars with a chat waterfall. Simply ask everyone to use the chat as a check-in, and read out some answers as they arrive.

2. Present the agenda and set expectations

Now that the group is ready to get to work, it’s time to share the agenda with participants. Your agenda is more than a list of topics — it’s the roadmap for the day, helping attendees understand what’s coming and how to engage.

Start by providing a brief overview of the workshop’s structure, highlighting the key sections and activities. This helps everyone see the bigger picture and know what to expect, reducing any anxiety about what might come next. Be clear about the timing of breaks, interactive elements, and when there will be opportunities for discussion. When people know there will be dedicated moments for their input, they’re more likely to stay engaged.

A common mistake here is to launch into a detailed explanation of every single agenda item. Instead, keep it concise and focus on giving a high-level view. You can go into more detail once each activity begins. 

If you’re running an online workshop, it’s especially important to outline the agenda clearly. Use visual aids like a slide or a shared document that participants can refer back to throughout the session. This helps keep everyone on track and minimizes confusion, especially if participants join late or lose connection briefly.

In summary, give an overview, highlight key points, and share the plan visually if possible. If you are using SessionLab’s agenda planner, you’ll find it particularly easy to share a high-level agenda with participants: you can choose whether to download and share a PDF or Word file, or simply share a QR code to show everyone the flow of the day. 

A disclaimer is also in order here: experienced folk might want to keep their agenda to themselves, to encourage surprise and wonder, and to allow themselves more leeway in adapting to the group. This can be a good tactic in certain circumstances, but is not something for beginners to launch into straight away! 

3. Frame the purpose of the workshop

Besides welcoming people and sharing your roadmap, the other thing you need to do in the opening section is give a brief context of why the workshop is happening. Do not assume that people know: we have busy lives and not everyone may have had time to prepare before joining. 

Explain why the topic is important and how it connects to broader objectives (e.g., company strategy, project goals, or community needs). Avoid assuming that workshop participants are already on the same page — even if they’ve seen the invite, a reminder can make all the difference in helping participants shift their focus from their day-to-day tasks to the workshop’s topic.

A common pitfall here is to make this part too long or abstract. Keep it clear and straightforward, using language that resonates with the group. You might say something like, “Today, we’re here to brainstorm ways to streamline our onboarding process. We’ve seen some challenges with our current approach, and this is our chance to work together on real solutions that can make a difference.”

You may have already noticed that, with just a bit of facilitation skill, you can easily connect the workshop topic to the check-in question to make everything feel coherent. 

9 tips for running a workshop

Framing your workshop well will enable you to kick-off activities, conversations and discussions with momentum. Having concluded the opening, it is now time to introduce the core discussion topics and activities on your agenda. Here are 9 things to keep in mind when going through the items in your workshop agenda:

1. Mix different activities and exercises. You can combine different activities around the same question. A typical way to start is to introduce a question or topic, maybe with the help of an expert presentation, then call for initial individual responses written on sticky notes, cluster, and discuss them. 
   
   A great activity to learn is 1-2-4-all, from Liberating Structures. If you have a question for participants to engage with, you can start by asking them to reflect on it individually, then share in pairs, in small groups, and finally in plenary. This is a way of varying activities that enables everyone to contribute, and can ensure participants remain engaged throughout.
2. Be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. The facilitator’s position in a workshop is not to tell people what to think or do, but to gently yet confidently guide participants towards desired outcomes, and to create a collaborative environment. For more reflections on the role of a group facilitator, read about 6 facilitation roles, here. 
   
   Asking for permission is part of holding this role well. You are working with adults, in a professional or community setting, and nobody should feel like they are being forced to do or reveal anything. Frame activities as invitations, and give options to observe, opt-out or pass (for example, when leading a round of reflection, you might say something like “take your time to respond and please remember you can always just pass to the next person”). 
3. Make room for a break (or two). One of the most common mistakes a workshop facilitator can make is doing away with the breaks “because we are short on time”. You do not just want decisions to be made at the workshop: you want good decisions, and an increased sense of belonging and trust to boot.
   
   Making sure everyone’s energy levels enable them to work well together, including by taking refreshing, nourishing breaks, will do a lot to prevent excessive noise, confusion, and conflict.
4. Give clear instructions. Getting good at giving clear instructions is really key to effectively facilitating workshops. Try to put yourself in the participants’ shoes: what information will they need in order to participate in group activities? Introduce each section by briefly stating its purpose (why are we doing this?) and give step-by-step instructions as to how it will work.
   
   Online, it’s good practice to have instructions written out in a slide or in the chat box. When working in person, I like to write up instructions on posters or on a projected slide as well, as I feel it makes it easier for participants to follow along. Asking “Do you have enough information to start?” is a good way to get the group moving; if there is some confusion, you can usually trust other participants to help each other along.
5. Create a parking lot. Conversations can go in unexpected directions. What do you do if the discussion veers wildly off-topic? One useful facilitation tool is having a “parking lot” space (I’ve also heard it referred to as “port” or “fridge”) where you might ask participants to park any ideas that are interesting, or relevant, but outside of the scope for the day.
   
   Having a parking lot can really help alleviate the tension between wanting to cut a conversation short but realizing it’s still important, just not for now!
6. Beware of “Let’s hear back from the tables”. If you have divided participants in small groups and asked them to collaborate on a task, it’s common to want to have a round to hear back from every group. While this urge makes sense, it is often conducive to lengthy presentations that nobody is really paying attention to. Can you feel the energy drop when the fifth group repeats things everyone’s already heard?
   
   Counteract this by asking very specific questions (“Please share one tip you have for the other groups” has worked well for me), timeboxing strictly (3 minutes per table, tops) or moving to a different activity to collect insights, such as using a Mentimeter question and projecting results on a screen for all to see.
7. Silence (and music) are your friends. Good workshop facilitation is a lot about balancing spaces that enable both extroverts and introverts to work well together. Make room in your agenda for individual work and reflection, and do not panic if people stay quiet after a question: they may just be thinking!
   
   If silence while doing individual work is uncomfortable for you, consider bringing audio equipment and playing some soft music in the background. 
8. Throw it back to the group. It’s common for beginners at leading workshops to get the impression that every decision and choice is uniquely up to you. This can feel very overwhelming, and might lead you to double-guess every choice you make. Instead, you should always remember that you are in a room full of smart, experienced people. Your role is to guide them, not to take their place in every decision about what should happen at the workshop.
   
   In practice, this can translate to the commonly used facilitation tactic of “throwing it back to the group”. You might ask, for example: “What do you think, is it time for a short break or shall we continue for another 45 minutes before going to lunch?” Instead of deciding in place of participants, you can use your position to clarify what decisions need to be made and ask attendees for input. Collect a few ideas, then propose a way forward.
9. Design a flow that goes from ideation to decision-making. Facilitated workshops often begin with a brainstorming phase, called divergence, where new ideas are welcome and the aim is to stimulate creativity and innovation. Then comes a discussion phase, known as emergence, in which ideas are mulled over and refined.
   
   Last comes convergence, which is about selecting ideas based on realistic criteria such as available time, resources, or KPIs and finally making a decision (or deferring a decision to a group leader, who now will be able to make better-informed choices). 

5 foolproof activities for running workshops

Having come to this point you may be wondering what kinds of activities you should be familiar with in order to prepare and host a great workshop. The truth is, although you may explore many activities, and create your own, there are a handful of tried-and-true methods that will generally serve you well, whatever the topic, situation, or number of participants.

So let’s look at 5 foolproof activities you can guide, even if you need to jump into them because of last minute surprises! Here they are, in the likely order you’d use them in a typical workshop:

Break the ice with Impromptu Networking

Impromptu Networking is a quick and energizing way to kick off a workshop by helping participants connect and share ideas right from the start. Through a series of short, structured one-on-one conversations, attendees exchange thoughts on the workshop topic, setting a collaborative tone. This method is perfect for creating an atmosphere of trust and openness in any workshop setting. I like to use Impromptu Networking especially when facilitating large numbers of participants, as it doubles as a getting-to-know-you exercise.

Collect a flurry of ideas with the Walking Brainstorm

The Walking Brainstorm method gets participants moving while generating ideas, combining physical activity with collaborative thinking. By walking around the room and commenting on ideas in writing, and in silence, participants can spark creativity and fresh perspectives.

Debrief and reflect in a Paired Walk

Once a lot of ideas are on the table, certain topics or tensions might emerge that benefit from some time to discuss and debrief. You might, for example, discover that half the team wants to focus on AI use, while the other half views it with extreme skepticism. In workshop settings it is often not necessary to resolve such tensions definitively, but it is important to acknowledge them, air them, and see what emerges that might direct later choices.

A good way to enable moments of reflection and deeper understanding is to send people on a paired walk. Speaking in twos is generally less intimidating, and more conducive to understanding, than keeping every discussion in a large group. And a bit of fresh air can do wonders!

Organize ideas in an Impact/Effort Matrix

It’s been often commented that facilitators tend to have more methods for brainstorming and ideating than for making decisions. While that is true, it might be because convergence, that is, choosing a path among many, is a more structured, less creative process. As such, the convergent phase of any workshop will benefit from matrixes and canvases upon which ideas can be mapped and evaluated. A classic, all-purpose way of doing it is the impact/effort matrix. We use it here at SessionLab as well to evaluate what projects and activities to pursue!

Close the day with 3 Action Steps

The 3 Action Steps method is a strategic planning exercise designed to help groups and individuals take actionable steps toward a desired change. Typically used at the conclusion of a workshop or program, it involves participants discussing and agreeing on a vision, then creating specific action steps to achieve that vision. The process also includes defining the scope of the challenge by discussing factors that may help or hinder progress.

Here at SessionLab we host a library of over 1400 activities and methods that can form the key elements of your next workshop. Taking time to explore them will provide you with plenty of ideas and inspiration for successful workshops. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, to receive a curated list of our favorite facilitation methods in your inbox twice a month!

Timekeeping tips for smooth workshop flow

Staying on schedule is one of the most crucial aspects of running a successful workshop. It’s easy for discussions to run long, especially if participants are engaged and enthusiastic, but this can derail the rest of your carefully planned agenda. 

One effective technique is timeboxing, where you allocate a specific amount of time for each activity or discussion point. Clearly communicate these time limits to the group, and use a timer or a visible clock to help keep everyone on track. SessionLab’s planner helps with this by allowing you to clearly allocate time to each activity.

However, timekeeping isn’t just about sticking rigidly to your schedule. A skilled facilitator knows when to be flexible and adjust the timing based on the energy and needs of the group. If a discussion is particularly fruitful, consider extending it by shortening a later activity — just be sure to get the group’s agreement first. If energy is low, you might want to add a quick break.

Remember, your agenda is a guide, not a rulebook. Flexibility shows that you are responsive to the group’s needs and can help keep momentum without sacrificing the quality of discussions.

Effective notetaking and documentation

Capturing the key insights and ideas from a workshop is vital, not only for immediate follow-up but also to maintain momentum beyond the session. Designate a notetaker at the start of the workshop — ideally someone other than the facilitator, so you can focus on guiding the discussion. For in-person workshops, using a large whiteboard or sticky notes can help make the notes visible to all participants as they’re captured. In an virtual setting, collaborative online tools like Google Docs or Miro can be used so everyone can contribute in real-time.

Encourage the notetaker to highlight key points and group them by theme or topic. This makes it easier to review and synthesize the information later. If you’re using sticky notes for brainstorming, consider snapping photos or transcribing them digitally right after the session to avoid losing valuable input.

At the end of the workshop, it is good practice to share the notes promptly with all participants. This follow-up step reinforces what was discussed and decided, and it gives everyone a shared reference point for next steps. A clear and organized summary can make the difference between a workshop that fades from memory and one that leads to real, actionable change.

How to close a workshop effectively 

You made it! The time for your workshop is almost over and you have some happy, if possibly tired, participants in the room. What do you need to do to effectively close the workshop? You’ll be aiming to create an atmosphere conducive to feelings of accomplishment, progress and closure. Probably not every topic will have been successfully and completely closed, but that is not the point: the point is that progress has been made. 

Workshops are always at risk of running late. It is good practice to hold closing time as inviolable: people will have other engagements, personal or professional, afterward, and it is quite unfair to keep them seated with the (generally unspoken) threat that something important might happen in the room after they leave. 

Even if your activities are running late, you should start wrapping up about 15 minutes before the scheduled end. Remind participants of other opportunities they will have to pursue whatever topic or discussion is going on, and invite them to reach closing remarks. 

Once you have concluded the last activity, there are a couple more things you’ll need to do in the final phase of your workshop:

• Recap what happened, and provide some next steps. Briefly remind participants of the journey you’ve gone through together and inform them of any next steps: where will they find documentation about the workshop? What will be done with the output? Assign tasks if appropriate. 
• Ask for a checkout. Giving participants some space to reflect on how the workshop was, and how they feel now, provides a nice sense of closure and achievement. Techniques such as One Breath Feedback are ideal for this step. 

• Gather feedback and reflect. You can do this directly at the end of the workshop, or as part of the follow-up. Feedback is fundamental for your own reflection and improvement.
  
  A classic way of asking for feedback at the end of the workshop is to ask everyone to write at least one thing they appreciated and one thing they might improve on posters at the exit or, if the group is small enough, have a closing round of feedback.

Asking for feedback at a later time might imply more back-and-forth communication, but is also likely to get you more honest answers, as people tend to give very good report cards when asked directly at the end of a session. You can collect opinions at a later date by, for example, having a Mentimeter questionnaire ready asking for reflections on the workshop: this has the added value of giving you materials that are ready to collate into a report if you are planning to prepare one.

Reflecting and debriefing on your experience as a facilitator is the best way to learn and improve new skills. Make sure you keep some time in your agenda (hopefully, after getting a good night’s sleep – facilitating workshops can be tiring!) to look back on how things went and what you can learn from your own experiences at the workshop, as well as from participant feedback. Having a learning process in place will make all the difference for your future skills development. 

Templates and resources to help you get started as a workshop facilitator

We hope this guide helps you feel confident enough to feel you can now run workshops wherever you are. Whatever your personal style, whoever your target audience, we believe the world needs more collaboration, and well-run workshops can help achieve this. 

If at this stage you’d like more detailed information on planning a workshop, we have a dedicated guide that takes you through every step of the process in detail. You can read it here.

If you feel ready to step into designing your next workshop, you might find the process easier by starting from a ready-to-use template. Here are three suggested ones from our collection: simply duplicate them in SessionLab’s planner and adapt them to your needs! 

The Essential Workshop Structure template provides a foundational framework for participatory workshops. It includes an opening phase to set the learning environment, slots for activities and debriefs, and a closing section for reflections and next steps, adaptable to various workshop topics.

The Workshop Design Canvas Template, designed by experienced facilitators and trainers at Voltage Control, facilitates learner-centered workshop designs by applying backward design principles. Participants create detailed learner personas, manage cognitive load effectively, and align activities with assessments, resulting in engaging and impactful learning experiences

This Workshop Planning Template offers a structured approach to designing workshops through a series of five 1-hour meetings between clients and facilitators. It guides you from sharing a vision to refining the agenda, briefing the team, and collecting learnings, ensuring a comprehensive planning process.

Workshop facilitators as a whole are a collaborative and generous bunch. Check out more free resources on how to run successful workshop at this link, or join our friendly SessionLab Community and ask your questions there! 

Here at SessionLab, we’ve surveyed over a thousand facilitators, trainers, and leaders to uncover their top go-to facilitation books. Read on to find the 11 recommendations not to be missed!

Reading facilitation books will help you understand the deeper roots of the role, give you a bedrock of activities and tools and of course, if you are purchasing these as actual books and putting them on a shelf, will also provide you with a lovely and appropriate background for all your video calls. 

Why facilitation books matter

Facilitation is an ever-evolving profession, quick to react and adapt to changes in society. A generous, global network of practitioners offers constant opportunities to refresh knowledge and build new skills through online resources, training courses, and community events. If free downloadable guides are what you are looking for, we’ve compiled a blog post with online resources for you to peruse. 

All those free resources should have you covered when it comes to learning new tools and adapting to change. At the same time, there are certain truths about group dynamics and how to harness collective intelligence and lead effective collaboration that are not likely to change anytime soon. To learn about the foundations of facilitation and the frameworks and theories of group dynamics, there is some essential reading any group facilitator should do.

Experienced authors have labored years to collect these hard-learned lessons about what makes or breaks effective workshops and how to create meaningful experiences. Reading their practical tips and theoretical frameworks sooner rather than later will save you a lot of pain. It will also help you answer key questions about how and why facilitated activities work and, ultimately, make your practice better. 

Recommended books for learning about facilitation and group dynamics

When it comes to becoming a skilled facilitator, learning from the best books in the field is a great way to deepen your knowledge. The following books are recommended by facilitators around the world. Each of them offers insights on how to craft life changing workshops, deliver great meetings, and unleash your group’s creative potential.

Here are our top 11 tips for learning about facilitation and group dynamics:

To select these top books we’ve trusted not one, not two, but over a thousand facilitators who responded to the State of Facilitation survey recommending their favorite reads. For more tips on top resources, check out the latest edition of the State of Facilitation report! 

Inspiring reads on hosting meaningful connections

Facilitation isn’t just about managing a meeting—it’s about creating conditions favorable to connection and purpose. The following books will inspire you to host gatherings that leave a lasting impact, whether in personal or professional settings.

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Hosting meaningful gatherings feels ever more important, as a means to counteract isolation in our personal lives and polarisation in society. Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering teaches that hosting events is all about creating an experience conducive to genuine connection. From family reunions to corporate meetings, Priya Parker emphasizes the importance of intentional design and thoughtful planning.

I recently joined a facilitation case study class in which the speaker told us about a challenging multistakeholder workshop he had hosted. Inspired by this book, he actually started activities the evening before the formal start of the event. Attendees were invited to a dinner, in which they were called to share personal stories about their professional experience in the field. This led to an increased sense of trust, respect and mutual understanding which made all later negotiations much easier. 

One of the standout lessons from this book is how to create a sense of belonging in your events. Through case studies and personal stories, Priya Parker illustrates that gatherings, even in everyday life, have the power to create transformative experiences for all participants.

As someone who finds it much easier to say “yes” than “no”, I found the chapter on how to craft an invitation that is clear about who should be, and who should not be, included, particularly challenging (and enlightening). 

This book is a must-read for anyone who hosts groups and wants to bring more purpose and meaning into the mix.

Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane

Do you foresee upcoming high stakes situations in your practice? Would you appreciate some guidance on what to do when tensions are thick? In that case, Adam Kahane’s Facilitating Breakthrough is the book you want on your bedside table. This book shares real-world stories about navigating the most challenging of group dynamics—situations where success feels far from guaranteed.

From boardroom conflicts to international peace negotiations, Kahane draws from his extensive experience to demonstrate how a facilitator can help groups move forward when they’re blocked.

The very first chapter of the book is the one that sticks in my mind the most. Kahane tells the story of a once-in-a-generation meeting of parties in conflict in Colombia, where he learns that the job of a facilitator can be described as “removing obstacles to collaboration”. This idea of being a “remover of obstacles” has stayed with me since. 

If you enjoy this book, you should know that Kahane has a lot of other great titles in his back catalogue, and his new work on Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems is scheduled for publication in 2025. 

Most people want to connect, but there are structures that separate or exclude them. The consequences of these obstacles are estrangement and weakened communication, linkages, and relationships. Transformative facilitation focuses on dismantling these structures and thereby enabling connection. 
Adam Kahane, Facilitating Breakthrough

Treasure troves of practical techniques

The two texts above are inspiring, non-fiction narratives, and while you can gather a lot of great ideas from them, you’ll also want to check out a few books that can help you with practical advice and methodologies. The following texts are packed with hands-on activities and techniques that can be applied immediately to your facilitation practice, helping you boost creativity, participation, and problem-solving within groups.

The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

If there is one toolkit to rule them all, it’s Liberating Structures. This is a set of 33 micro-structures or activities you can use in isolation or string together to guide, and change, the way dialogue and engagement flow. Although you can read all available documentation concerning Liberating Structures on their website, you’ll probably want the book on your shelf to thumb through. 

The Liberating Structures toolkit is versatile enough to be used in any context, from small teams to large conferences. These activities help groups tap into their collective intelligence and allow everyone to contribute. Whether you’re new to facilitation or a seasoned professional, this book is a practical guide and can be immediately applied to any group setting.

Pro tip: when creating your next session in SessionLab’s planner, you can go to the Library and directly drag-and-drop your favorite Liberating Structures method straight into your sessions, complete with notes and lists of materials. Give it a try!  

Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo

Serious does not have to be the opposite of fun, as anyone involved in serious games well knows. Fun is, actually, one of the best ways to learn. Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo is a must-have for any facilitator looking to boost creativity and collaboration within a group. This highly visual book is a treasure trove of 80 activities and games designed to break down barriers and get people out of their comfort zones, sparking fresh ideas and solutions.

The subtitle says it all: Gamestorming is A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers. Each activity is carefully detailed (and whimsically illustrated) with a lot of guidance to help practitioners understand how and when to use games to encourage participants’ creativity, sense of adventure and open-mindness. Whether you’re facilitating agile teams or creative brainstorming sessions, this book will help bring energy and engagement to the room.

To enter into a game is to enter another kind of space, where the rules of ordinary life are temporarily suspended and replaced with the rules of the game. In effect, a game creates an alternative world, a model world. 

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, Gamestorming

Essential manuals to have all the basics of facilitation crystal-clear

Understanding group dynamics and learning how to guide groups toward productive collaboration are key to becoming a master facilitator. The following books offer a comprehensive resource for facilitators who want to build strong foundations in their practice and create better meetings and workshops as a consequence.

A Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner 

Can I just say I love this book? If you are considering buying one single text on facilitation, I’m going to say get your hands on a copy of this big, well-illustrated, practical and thorough workshop survival guide. Sam Kaner and co-authors Lenny Lind, Catering Toldi, Sarah Fisk and Duane Berger: if you are reading this, top of the hat and thank you.

A Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making provides a robust framework for all your future designs. A common principle in workshop planning is “start with the end in mind”. In this book, the end is “agreeing upon a decision”, and the rest is a detailed, thoughtful step-by-step overview of how to get there. 

When I teach facilitation, I often use handouts from Kaner’s book (which is full of illustrations and exceptionally handout-ready) to support discussions on decision making processes, on the divergence-emergence-convergence model, and more. 

The Art of Facilitation by Dale Hunter

The updated edition of Dale Hunter’s classic The Art of Facilitation includes a study guide that works as a self-study “training program” and can be used by a group of aspiring facilitators as a peer learning framework. The Art of Facilitation moves from an in-depth look into group dynamics to covering applications in practice, including describing how facilitation works in organizations, sustainability, therapeutic group work, and a new section on the key elements of online meetings. 

Clear, thorough and accessible, Dale Hunter’s book moves from definitions of what a facilitator is, and isn’t, all the way to giving practical cases of facilitation work in various fields. Dale Hunter also makes a strong case for why collaboration skills are growing in importance in our complex, interconnected world, and draws on the best available scientific research on leadership, group dynamics, and adult education.

This book is essential reading for facilitators who want to deepen their understanding of group processes and learn all about creating group synergy and managing group dynamics.

The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson

Here is another revised classic. The second edition of Wilkinson’s manual on Getting results with groups the SMART way (in this case, standing for “Structured Meeting and Relating Techniques”) is also expanded to include online facilitation. Michael Wilkinson also added sections on leading great meetings for cross-cultural teams, as well as designing for large groups and conferences. 

Of all the texts listed here, The Secrets of Facilitation is probably the best bet for team leaders wanting to add some facilitation magic to their toolkit. The chapter on how to create an in-house community of practice in your company provides actionable advice that can really help create a company-wide culture of facilitation wherever you are. 

Crafting excellent learning experiences

While there is a difference between facilitation and training, it’s nevertheless true that many facilitators are also trainers, and that methods and activities drawn from facilitation can make learning experiences more engaging. 

Furthermore, it’s possible to make the argument that all facilitated sessions are learning sessions, since in order to bring change and increase collaboration, some form of learning must happen. The borders between learning design, experience design, and facilitation are blurred! With that in mind, here are two of facilitators’ favorite texts on how to design for learning. 

Training from the Back of the Room by Sharon L. Bowman

Learning that is boring will never stick. Sharon Bowman’s Training from the Back of the Room is a field manual for how to design learning sessions that work. This book introduces brain-based techniques that help facilitators and trainers, as well as teachers, support participants in mastering new concepts and materials.

Bowman’s approach is designed to ensure that participants not only absorb the material but also retain it long after the session ends. The book includes 65 ways to step aside and support participants in taking ownership of their learning process, and includes ideas on how to make online learning interactive as well. For anyone who leads workshops or training sessions, this book offers a fresh perspective on how to teach more effectively.

When learners talk and teach, they learn.

Sharon Bowman, Training from the Back of the Room

Facilitating Group Learning by George Lakey

Whenever I am asked to design a new training, Facilitating Group Learning – Strategies for Success with Diverse Adult Learners is the book I pick out of the shelf to keep at hand. The first chapters, in particular, serve me as a practical reminder of things that should always be included in learning design. I love this book because it combines very practical tips with theoretical frameworks drawing from psychology, sociology and pedagogy.

Lakey reminds readers of the importance of creating a container and fulfilling some practical needs in learners before they can fully absorb information. His book is full of very concrete examples and even direct quotes from real-world workshops that, if you’ve ever tried your hand at participatory training, you’ll probably recognize. 

In order to learn, people need to feel safe. In a course or workshop or service learning project, they find safety by creating a social order of some kind. 

George Lakey, Facilitating Group Learning

The book is a how-to manual for experiential learning, where learners are actively engaged in the process, rather than passively receiving information. Lakey’s methods are therefor particularly effective in workshops or educational settings where collaboration and dialogue are key.

Facilitation skills for social change

Facilitation goes beyond the meeting room. It plays a vital role in social movements and transformative change. The following books explore how facilitators can drive social change, lead with empathy, and guide groups to face, and even transform, complex societal issues. 

A word of caution: all facilitation requires personal growth and self-awareness as a prerequisite, but social change work will put your belief systems to the test more than most! Expect rough waters, and a lot of growth and change! 

Theory U by Otto Scharmer

In Theory U, Otto Scharmer presents a framework for leading profound social and organizational change. The book’s approach is centered around deep listening and co-creation, where facilitators help groups connect with their highest potential. Scharmer’s model is a great resource for facilitators working in change-driven environments or organizations undergoing transformation.

Facilitators who want to explore the deeper, transformative aspects of their work will find Theory U to be an essential resource. Drawing on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tradition of action research and learning by doing, Theory U has evolved over two decades of experimentation and refinement by a global community of practitioners. Going way beyond the book are the ULab courses, online yet experiential 6-week programs teaching systems thinking, innovation, and how to be a leader in change. 

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

In Emergent Strategy – Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown explores how social movements can be facilitated through adaptive, flexible leadership. This book is a true original, unique in the landscape of facilitation books in the way it weaves together poetry, science-fiction, critical theory and personal stories to compose an inspiring call to action. 

Emergent Strategy is deep, radical, and ends in a whole section of self-reflection journal, which is very much the kind of thing facilitators enjoy. An inspiring read for anyone involved in social justice movements.

Change happens. Change is definitely going to happen, no matter what we plan or expect or hope for or set in place. We will adapt to that change, or we will become irrelevant.

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

FAQs

What are the best books on facilitation?

We can’t really tell you the best, as it depends on your focus and interest. However, based on a global survey of facilitators, these are the top books not to be missed!

How can facilitation books help improve group dynamics and collaboration?

Facilitation books provide frameworks, techniques, and strategies to help facilitators lead groups effectively. Whether it’s navigating difficult conversations, building consensus, or fostering creativity, there’s a wealth of knowledge that can transform your group dynamics. To learn more about facilitation skills, you can also start by checking out our article here.

What facilitation techniques are covered in these books?

From participatory decision-making to using games and Liberating Structures, these books cover a wide range of facilitation techniques.

There are also certain methodologies that have deserved their own individual books. You may want to remix and customize methods to suit the needs of particular client, group or moment (as well as your own preferences) but it good professional practice to always acknowledge the people who created a method in the first place, and to know how it’s originally supposed to work.

Here are some study recommendations if you want to learn more about some specific methods:

• The World Café Book: Shaping our future through conversations that matter by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs with the World Café Community of Practice. This is a thorough manual for anyone interested in guiding World Café conversations, a powerful yet simple method designed to facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence.
• Open Space Technology: A user’s guide. The deceptively simple instructions for leading Open Space meetings and events can be found in many places throughout the web (including our own template in SessionLab, complete with printable posters!), but if you want to fully understand the rationale behind Harrison Owen’s wonderful contribution to the field, pick up this guide.
• Cynefin. Weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world. How can you tell if a problem is simple, complicated, complex, chaotic? And what do you do when faced with complexity? Dave Snowden’s work on Cynefin is a must-read for anyone working in uncertainty.
• The Change Handbook. This is the book of books, a 400+ page long encyclopedia of methods. If you want a comprehensive list of resources to thumb through and bookmark, repeatedly, throughout your career, give yourself a copy next holiday season!

Conclusion: your go-to facilitation reading list

These books are more than just recommendations—they’re tools you can use to transform how you think about facilitation, leadership strategies, and learning design. Whether you’re looking to improve group productivity, find practical tips for delivering workshops, or explore how facilitation can push for a more innovative culture, there’s something in this list for everyone.

So, which book will you pick up first? Whether you’re new to facilitation or a seasoned practitioner, each of these books offers valuable insights that can help take your skills to the next level. 

For more ways to sharpen your facilitation skills, check out our facilitation courses and our step-by-step guide to planning workshops. Happy reading!