Last week, I talked about a 90-minute workshop I was designing, and how I used an LLM to help me prepare the foresight scenario since we would not have time to do that exercise in the room. Here's my debrief from the session.

The session was a visioning exercise with four executives. They had initially set aside 90 minutes, but ultimately chose to spend three hours with me over the course of the day.

We began by reading through the scenario. They tested it, corrected it, and filled in gaps so it covered the issues they needed to address in the visioning work.

Then I had them do one of my favourite generative activities: brainwriting. This is a silent, individual activity where participants write on a topic for a fixed amount of time. For each of nine topics, I showed a slide with a central question and a few prompts. They had two minutes per topic to capture as many thoughts as they could. I then transferred their input to a board.

They wrote for nearly 20 minutes and it flew by for all of us. By the end, the boards were completely full.

We then discussed their contributions to each topic and determined which ideas were most important to carry forward into the vision. We had planned to discuss every topic, but the depth of the conversation meant we covered only about a third before time began to run out.

I had planned for a tightly compressed session. But the group was doing the work the agenda was meant to enable: testing ideas, building on one another’s contributions, and making visible progress. Rather than cut that short to preserve the schedule, I asked whether they wanted to continue.

With 10 minutes left in the session, I pitched going for a second round either later that day or the next, depending on their schedules. The executives offered their lunch hours. They came back with their lunches and continued for another hour. As we got closer to completion, they offered to come back at the end of the day to wrap things up.

They had originally given me 90 minutes in very busy calendars for an exercise that would normally take five to eight hours. I had designed the workshop around that constraint: shortening activities, preparing a draft scenario in advance, and creating prompts that would help the group get to substantive discussion quickly.

But preparation is not a guarantee of a good workshop. It creates the conditions for one. The real work came from participants who were willing to think carefully, challenge the scenario, build on each other’s ideas, and stay with the conversation when they could see it was producing something useful.

My job in that moment was not to protect the compressed agenda at all costs. It was to notice where the value was emerging, keep the group oriented to the purpose, and make room for them to continue. The fuller schedule did not come from asking for more time in the abstract; it came from the group seeing meaningful progress: on the wall, in the conversation, and in the vision beginning to take shape.

Sometimes good facilitation means keeping time. Sometimes it means recognizing when the group has found something worth spending more time on. A workshop plan should be a useful container for the work, not a constraint that prevents the work from happening.

Learn how to design workshops that give groups enough structure to make progress and enough flexibility to follow the valuable work that emerges in the room.

Join my upcoming Workshop Workshop training sessions on September 29 or November 24 to build practical skills in workshop design and facilitation.