Meet Chris. He’s been blueprinting a service for months, and he knows the subject matter well. He’s leading a remote workshop to prioritize the service gaps identified through that work.
He starts with a detailed, 45-minute presentation about the service blueprint. Then he sends everyone into Zoom breakout rooms to “Discuss in groups of four!”
But he doesn’t provide shared materials or discussion prompts. There’s nowhere to capture the results, although he does offer that participants can “drop thoughts in chat if they feel like it.”
In the breakout rooms, long moments of silence give way to confusion as people try to figure out what to discuss. Each group has its own conversation, with no shared structure to connect their work.
When Chris brings everyone back, he asks, “Does anyone have anything to share?”
The conversation stalls again.
Participants leave knowing that people talked to each other, but they aren’t sure anything was prioritized. One of them tells the project lead that it felt like busywork disguised as collaboration.
Chris had a clear goal. But sending participants into smaller groups wasn’t enough to help them reach it. He’d arranged the breakout rooms without designing the work participants would do inside them.
Same goal, deliberately designed breakout work
Let’s try that workshop again.
This time, Chris designs a sequence of activities to help the group prioritize service gaps and determine what to do about them.
He provides a brief overview of the service gaps identified through the blueprinting process.
Participants spend five minutes silently reviewing those gaps on a shared Miro board.
The group works together to cluster the gaps using specific criteria.
They select their top three priorities.
Participants work in breakout pairs to identify next steps, owners, and timing.
Everything is captured live on the shared whiteboard.
The breakout rooms are still there, but now they have a defined purpose. Participants know what they’re working on, what they need to produce, and where to capture it. Their work builds on the priorities selected by the group rather than becoming another separate conversation.
Chris hasn’t just changed the group size or given a more specific discussion prompt. He’s designed where the breakout work belongs in the session and how it will contribute to the workshop’s goal.
A breakout room isn’t an activity
“Discuss in groups of four” tells participants how they’ll be grouped. It doesn’t tell them what work they need to do.
In Chris’s first workshop, participants had to decide what was worth discussing, how to approach it, and whether to capture anything. Then, when they returned, they had to decide what might be worth sharing. None of that gave the groups a shared way to prioritize service gaps.
The second workshop asks something specific of the breakout pairs: work from the priorities already selected and identify next steps, owners, and timing. The breakout work has a clear starting point and an expected output.
Before you open the breakout rooms, design the work you’re asking participants to do. They’re there to work through the task, not guess what you meant.
Learn how to give your participants a task, not a guessing game.
In The Workshop Workshop, you’ll learn how to structure your workshops and design activities that help participants do meaningful work.
Join me on Tuesday, November 24, online
08:30am-12:30pm Eastern / 1:30-5:30pm British / 2:30-6:30pm Central European
Tickets are: $249 CAD / $178 USD / 160 EUR (plus applicable taxes).
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