We’re working on a future vision and gap analysis at the moment. As I mentioned in a recent issue about designing a workshop series around short executive windows, the executives involved only have limited time together.

When people see a workshop, they usually see the 60 or 90 minutes in the room. But the work happens before, during, and after it. This particular week, most of my time was spent in the “after.”

Recently, it looked like this.

I spent the latter half of last week deep in analysis and synthesis. I printed (!) the outputs from all the recent executive workshops I’ve led and pinned them up all over my cubicle. I cross-referenced everything, checking that key ideas were carrying from one session to the next. I added Post-its and made notes all over the walls.

I joked on calls that I was just missing some red string to complete my journey into full conspiracy-theory mode.

That analysis did not start with a pile of workshop outputs. Before the sessions began, I designed the workshop series and its activities around the decisions the executives needed to make. That included the pre-work, the sequence of conversations, and the prompts I wrote for each activity.

In one session, I led a brainwriting exercise using prompts I had developed to help the executives articulate their view of the future and identify the characteristics our organization would need in that context. The outputs were designed to become the raw material for the analysis and discussion that followed.

Between sessions, I identified themes in their brainwriting outputs. This helped the group sort and discuss the ideas, but it also helped me check that we were covering the key areas in subsequent sessions.

I then generated a future-state story based on their inputs. The story gave them a narrative version of the ideas they had produced in brainwriting. In the following session, they reviewed it and modified it until it accurately reflected their vision.

Once we had a version of the future they agreed with, I asked them to identify the gaps between the current state and the future described in the story.

After the session, I expanded those gaps into real-world comparisons:

We do X now, but in the future we will do Y.

This step mattered because it turned broad themes into something more tangible. It also created a direct relationship between the problems we experience today and the outcomes the group says it wants to achieve.

I then separated each comparison into its two parts: the current-state description and the future-state description. I grouped those descriptions by theme and sent the executives a ranking exercise.

They were asked to rank:

I know which two statements originated as part of the same comparison. That means I'll be able to see whether the issue and its proposed future outcome receive similar rankings.

If both statements rank highly, we have a clear priority. If both rank low, we can probably set them aside for now.

The more interesting cases are where the rankings do not match.

An executive might see a current issue as important to address, but not agree that the future-state statement is the right outcome. Or they may see a future state as highly desirable, even though the current issue attached to it does not feel urgent. Those mismatches are useful. They show us where there is more to discuss, rather than assuming that a problem and a solution belong together simply because I originally wrote them in the same sentence.

In the next workshop, I'll identify the low-low items as parking-lot material. We'll quickly confirm the high-high items. Then we can use the limited time we have together to resolve the high-low and low-high items.

With only short windows together, executives aren't going to get into the detail of every topic. They don't have the time, and their role is not to collectively sort every raw input or trace every connection between workshop outputs.

My role isn't limited to facilitating the sessions themselves. Between sessions, I need to carry the thread of the work forward. I need to make sure important ideas have not disappeared, turn a large collection of inputs into material the group can use, and decide what needs executive judgment next.

Realistically, this means I'm doing two or three days of preparation work for each 60- to 90-minute session.

One participant referred to this as “pre-chewing” the inputs for them.

I think that's a useful description. Pre-chewing is the work of reducing the effort required to get back into a complex conversation. It means making the links visible between what the group said in one session and what they need to decide in the next. It means bringing them a clear enough picture that they can spend their time on the tensions, choices, and trade-offs where their experience matters most.

Facilitation isn't only what happens when you're in the room asking questions and managing a conversation. It's the work of designing activities and prompts that produce useful inputs, then doing the analysis and synthesis to turn those inputs into the group’s next piece of work.

The executives still own the vision, priorities, and decisions. My job is to design the conditions that let them make those decisions, then carry the work forward between their short windows of time.

That is what the manual labour looks like.

Getting a group in a room is the most expensive way to make a decision. Rather than build on hope, build with intention. Join me for half a day to learn how on September 29 or November 24.