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 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!

When a meeting or event flows well, it can feel like magic. But it actually isn’t: you can easily improve your day-to-day meetings or stakeholder events by applying some simple group management tips.

In this article, we’ll explore what makes group facilitation effective and share 12 tips to help you bring out the best in any group you’re working with.

What is group facilitation?

Whenever a group of people assembles to get something done, there is a need for guidance and organization.

Group facilitation refers to the craft of helping a group achieve a common goal. The goal might be realizing a project, creating a shared strategy document, or learning something new together. 

Accompanying a group to define and achieve their goals is the job of group facilitators. One aspect of this role is project management, which may include familiar tasks such as defining steps and setting deadlines. Another aspect has to do with creating conditions conducive to good collaboration, which is typically the goal of a process-oriented facilitator.

To understand more about what facilitation is and how it can help your team or organization achieve its objectives, we’ve compiled a guide to what is facilitation. 

What is a group and what is a team? 

A group and a team might seem like the same thing, but there’s an important difference. A group is a collection of individuals who share a common interest or purpose but work mostly independently. A team, however, is a group that has become a unit, collaborating closely and working toward shared goals. In a team, a successful outcome does not only depend on individual efforts, but also on how those efforts come together.

A facilitator helps turn a group into a cohesive team by creating alignment and clarity. They guide the group in defining a common purpose, ensuring everyone understands the shared goals. The resulting work can last a long time, but can also be a temporary team, lasting only the duration of a 3-hour training session. 

When does a group process need facilitation?

My first answer to this is going to be “always”. As long as the group has a purpose it wants to achieve, facilitation will help.

Suppose you are just hanging out with your friends. In that case, facilitation might be optional—although I’ll still make an argument that some facilitation skills might help improve even an unstructured evening with friends (for example, by removing unnecessary friction about which restaurant to pick for dinner).

Note that I am talking about a group needing facilitation, not necessarily needing a facilitator. A facilitator is a person dedicated to the task of facilitation, usually someone appointed externally. 

You should also consider hiring an external professional if your session or gathering has elements of complexity, such as:

• a numerous group (over 20 people);
• participants with different, even conflicting interests;
• members of the group do not know one another (yet) and/or come from very different backgrounds;
• the timeframe for decisions is tight, decisions are risky and complex.

For general day-to-day business, on the other hand, a group still needs facilitation, but this can be interpreted as a role to be distributed among group members and taken on by the collective. You might, for example, have someone time-keep and another person take notes on the meeting. 

By including facilitation in your day-to-day workflow you can ensure productivity, a better agenda, and better relations all around. Let’s look at 12 facilitation tips that will help you become a better group member or leader.

12 group facilitation tips

Facilitation is an endlessly creative process, where there is always something new to learn and experiment. Creating activities and agendas to fit the particular needs of a specific group at a certain time is part of what keeps our work fresh and innovative at every turn. 

Having said that, certain rock-solid processes or tips can apply to any group facilitation, anywhere. Here are 12 group facilitation tips you should always keep in mind, whether you are just starting out or a seasoned pro. Next time you need to lead a session, try out these methods and mindsets to improve the levels of collaboration in your team.

We’ve included 5 practical tips to get you started, as well as 7 tips that have more to do with the mindset of a great group facilitator.

5 practical group facilitation tips to get started

Before getting into the skills and mindset of facilitation, let’s see what can be achieved in practice by adding just a few activities and processes to a standard meeting. Here are 5 beginner-friendly group facilitation tips you can easily apply with any group

These tips are guaranteed to improve the flow of a meeting process whether you are in the room with an established team, online at a webinar, or in any other situation a group gathers!

Create ground rules

Any time a group gathers to get something done, it will create its own culture. This is simply a fact of how we work together as social beings (and a good reason for facilitators to be interested in anthropology). You can pick up signs of this micro-culture everywhere: what do people in this group wear? What kinds of jokes do they make? What is acceptable and what is not?

As group facilitators, we leverage the culture-creation aspect of a group gathering by making it more explicit and intentional. We do this by asking the group members to reflect on what kind of a culture they hope to create together. What is conducive to their best work? 

Ground rules, also known as group compacts or group agreements, are a written document in which the group, aided by a facilitator, spells out behaviors it wishes its members to adhere to for the time they are together. 

No matter how short the session you are facilitating, creating ground rules is a guaranteed way to make it flow better. If you are short on time, prepare a generic draft and submit it to the group for approval. “Respect”, “confidentiality”, “punctuality”, “phones silent (if in person)”, “video on if possible (if online)” are some classic examples of what you’ll want to see there. If you have more time, or you’ll be working with a team for a series of sessions, craft those agreements together. 

All collaborations require connection. Harnessing diversity requires inclusion and belonging.

Adam Kahane, Facilitating Breakthrough – How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

Have (and share) an agenda

To write down these tips, I’ve been thinking about the session I’ve most recently facilitated, a networking and upskilling day for high school teachers. What elements did I introduce to the agenda in order to create an atmosphere conducive to learning, positive interactions and, ultimately, change? 

Many things I did were quite simple. As participants arrived, I had a coffee break set up to welcome them (see below “Never underestimate the power of breaks”). Once we were gathered, I and my cofacilitator Rossella had planned a 30-minute slot for introductions and opening activities. I went through some simple group agreements, then pointed to a whiteboard where I had written out the agenda for the day.

Having an agenda is essential to the facilitation process. Facilitators are famously improvisers, but still need a structured plan to improvise upon. Agenda design is a key skill of group facilitation; to read more about this you might want to check out SessionLab’s complete guide to planning a workshop.

Sharing your agenda with participants early in the process fulfills a basic need for clarity and safety in the group. Now, every participant knows what will be expected of them in terms of style of participation, thanks to your group agreements, and in terms of time to dedicate to the event, thanks to the agenda. Keeping the agenda visible throughout the session keeps you, and the entire group, accountable for time management. 

In SessionLab’s agenda planner, you’ll find a great ally for agenda design and sharing. This is the go-to place for group facilitators to craft sessions, and includes a variety of customizable options for how to share your plans with clients and participants. To start a group facilitation session, you can share a QR code, or share your screen, pointing attendees to the key elements of the agenda (such as the timing and title of each activity block). 

Encourage group members to participate as early as possible

The earlier people are encouraged to make their voices heard, the more likely they will be to intervene later. This is a key tenet of online facilitation, in which a good guide will encourage participants to check in using the chat as soon as they join the call, and holds just as true for in-person facilitation. 

There are numerous ways you can encourage participation as early as possible. Which to choose depends greatly on the amount of participants, the location (online, offline, hybrid) and the style of your gathering. Here are some classic examples:

• Invite a tour de table, asking everyone to introduce themselves briefly. Do 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, and if you are worried about a round taking too long, have everyone stand up!

• 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.

• Impromptu networking is a wonderful method from Liberating Structures, taking the form of an invitation to quickly chat with a couple of attendees and start making those precious connections.

Never underestimate the power of breaks

The apparently trivial matter of a coffee break can be a group facilitator’s ally in many ways. Wondering how to best welcome participants and set the tone? Make sure they find refreshments upon arrival. Getting a sense that the group is overtired, with conversations going around in circles? Take a break.

Breaks should be included in your agenda about every hour and a half, but a good group facilitator knows that it’s best to anticipate the break, or call for a quick 5-minute breather, whenever it feels appropriate. 

A break can be an amazingly effective way to defuse tensions and allow everyone to return to the session refreshed and ready for a change of perspective. Seemingly intractable problems sometimes dissolve with a breath of fresh air.

Mix different types of activities

A major challenge when facilitating a group is figuring out how to create space for contributions coming from many different kinds of people. Some of us enjoy quiet thinking time, others get their best ideas from conversation. For some people, speaking in front of the whole group is second nature, while for quieter participants it may be much preferable to express thoughts in writing. How do you, as facilitator, cater to all these different needs? 

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be complicated: all you need to do is make sure, when designing your agenda, that you have made space for many different ways to contribute.

A classic, evergreen way of doing this is by using the Liberating Structure 1-2-4-all. This means asking a question of the group then giving first some time for individual reflection, then for conversation in pairs, discussion in small groups and, finally, sharing insights in a plenary. 1-2-4-all is a perfect example of how group facilitation activities can create space for different types of personalities to contribute. 

Giving people some time to write ideas on sticky notes before reading them out loud and clustering them on a board is another classic facilitation technique. This allows both those who appreciate quietly writing out ideas and those who prefer an animated discussion to bring their voice to the table. 

You can find a ready-to-use flow for a workshop that integrates these top tips among SessionLab’s collection of templates. This essential workshop session includes all the building blocks you need to start off with group facilitation on the right foot, with space for check-ins, group agreements, debrief activities, discussions in small groups and, of course, breaks! 

7 ideas to keep in mind for great group facilitation

The five tips above should give you enough to go with to start designing and leading your first facilitated sessions. Besides practical tips though, there are also some more general concepts that it’s good to keep in mind to make sure your sessions are engaging, meaningful, and help drive the group forward.

Here are 7 ideas I find important when designing and leading group sessions. If you have others to add, use the comments or join the conversation in SessionLab’s friendly community! 

Connection before content

Trainers and learning facilitators will always tell you to put connection before content. People need to feel comfortable enough in their surroundings, and clear about their reason for being there, before they can effectively absorb new information or contribute new ideas. 

In practice, putting connection before content is often as simple as having a round of check-ins before starting a meeting, or asking for expectations before a workshop. Impromptu networking is a great method to create connections, including in large groups and/or online. 

Make the process explicit to the whole group

When it comes to group facilitation, transparency is key. Making the process explicit means letting participants know what to expect at each stage of a session. This clarity helps people feel more comfortable and confident, knowing what’s coming next and why. It also demystifies the facilitator’s role, turning what might feel like an unfamiliar process into something the group can engage with fully.

Sharing your plan at the start is part of this mission, and so is explaining the purpose (the “why”) behind each activity, as well as clarifying to participants which part of the workshop process you are currently in.
It’s a simple shift that builds trust and invites everyone to be active participants in the process, rather than passive observers.

A skilled facilitator will occasionally narrate the day back to participants as the hours pass: “This morning we started with brainstorming, and collected so many different ideas; now we are going to change gears and prioritize those ideas, as we want to reach a shortlist of three before the break”.

Balance attention to each group member and to the whole

The facilitator role includes balancing the needs of the whole group with those of each individual. The group’s goals and progress matter, but so does making sure that every participant feels seen, heard, and valued. This balance can be tricky, but it’s essential for maintaining both momentum and morale.

In practice, this might look like managing time so that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts, while also keeping the group focused on the collective goal. Having someone assist with co-facilitating a session is particularly useful in case any one person needs some extra attention or just a side conversation during a break. 

Reframe troublemakers as message-bringers

In group facilitation, what some might label as “troublemakers” can actually be seen as valuable contributors. Often, those who challenge the process or raise difficult questions are highlighting issues or needs that others in the group might also be feeling. Thinking of these individuals as message-bringers can shift the dynamic from conflict to curiosity.

Reframing a person who strikes me as “difficult” as a messenger was a key learning for me early in my career. Is the session not responding to their needs in some way, are they pointing to something that would benefit the whole group, and how can I adapt to this? Sometimes, finding out what message they are carrying might require a separate, 1:1 conversation. In many cases, assigning a clear role to those apparent troublemakers, such as helping out with facilitation, can give their energy a more constructive outlet.

Be aware of the local culture

Group facilitation isn’t one-size-fits-all, and being aware of local culture is crucial to guiding a group effectively. Cultural norms influence body language and personal expression, from how people communicate, to who gets to speak (and for how long), to how participants respond to authority. Therefore, facilitators need to be sensitive to these dynamics. What works well in one setting might not work at all in another.

To adapt to local culture, it’s important to observe how the group interacts and adjust your approach accordingly. Group agreements definitely help make assumptions explicit; I once ran a series of workshops in Sicily where we agreed to spell out on a poster at the entrance that “This is what we mean by punctuality: we will start 20 minutes later than the agreed starting time” (yes).  

Being aware of local culture could mean changing how you frame questions or make eye contact, adjusting the pace of activities, or being mindful of when silence means contemplation versus discomfort. If you find yourself misunderstanding body language, for example, you might need to ask what people intend to communicate or check in on how they are feeling. A little cultural awareness goes a long way toward creating a space where everyone feels comfortable participating.

If you are working in a culture different from your own, the best tip I can give is to cofacilitate with somebody local: the combination of an outsider and an insider perspective can make for truly great insights! 

Pay attention to power imbalances

It is not necessarily the facilitator’s job to redress or change power dynamics, but it’s certainly part of the job to be aware of them. In a hierarchical context, such as a business setting, it’s perfectly fine to give more time to the leader or CEO, and in decision-making workshops it’s common for a team leader to have the final word over assignments.

Keeping that in mind, it can be beneficial for the group’s development to have the facilitator champion quieter voices and make sure they are heard. Do people dare express their own ideas? An effective facilitator will find a way to encourage people to contribute without compromising their sense of safety.

In more horizontal settings, such as a volunteer group, good group facilitation might imply making hidden power structures visible and checking if they are serving a purpose (e.g. seniority in the group will often implicitly give people more of a say, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the needs of the moment). 

Paying attention to power imbalances in practice often translates into noticing things that are happening and mirroring them back to the group, then asking if this is something that works well for them or something they might want to address and change. 

Time is on your side

My “facilitation mantra”, a sentence I repeat to myself when group work gets tough, is something like “This is exactly the right time for this group”. Getting time on your side can be a struggle in group facilitation, but it doesn’t have to be. Having a clear (and visible) agenda helps with this. 

Transparency is also a great aid: when I ask for a round of comments, for example, I’ll generally bring the group’s attention to the number of people involved and the time we have, saying something like “We have 10 minutes for this debrief and there are 15 people here, so if we each speak for a minute, that will be too long, right? Please do feel free to take the time you need to make your point, but also aim to be concise”. 

I personally really dislike ending workshops in a rush: my antidote to that is to have a timer set to ring in my pocket about 10 minutes before the established ending time. At that point, even if we have not completed all activities, I know I have to start leading the group towards closing.

“Although we have not fully completed this plan, we probably have enough to go with for now: what will our next steps be? What are we taking away from our time together?”. Having time to debrief and share thank-yous and goodbyes leaves people in a much better mental state than rushing through a conclusion. 

What are group facilitation skills?

As you have seen above, there is a lot to keep in mind when dealing with group facilitation. Leading a bunch of people through a process and all the way to an outcome is exhilarating (if tiring) and important work.

As you practice this craft, you will come to understand and hone a series of facilitation skills that include:

• nailing the planning process, so that you arrive with a clear agenda to share;
• knowing how and when to improvise, throwing the plan away to better serve the needs of that particular group and that particular time;
• leaning into trust and curiosity, rather than trying to condition the outcomes;
• reading and understanding group dynamics, and how to shift a group’s energy around (insider’s tip: it’s much easier to shift the mood of a group than it is to shift the mood of an individual).

For more ideas on what facilitation skills are and how to develop them, read SessionLab’s guide to the head, hands and hearts of facilitation skills. 

6 group facilitation techniques you’ll want to know

As you find more opportunities to facilitate meetings, you’ll soon discover a need to diversify your toolkit and make sure you have an idea for an activity always at hand.

In SessionLab’s extensive library of facilitation techniques, you will find all the inspiration you need to keep your sessions fresh. 

Having said that, there are a few tried and tested group activities that are basic enough, and flexible enough, to warrant recommending them as a go-to essential toolkit for group facilitation. 

The aforementioned 1-2-4-all is a versatile Liberating Structure (to learn more about Liberating Structures, read up here) applicable to any situation where you want to encourage group members to reflect and share. It simply means inviting people to jot down their answers to a question first individually, then discussing in pairs, then in a small group, and ultimately reporting back to the plenary.

Becoming better group members often has to do with practicing listening skills, and learning the ability to momentarily quiet the voice in our minds that is preparing to respond. Paired activities are a great way to stretch our listening muscles. I’ll often invite an active listening exercise early in a session, even on something as basic as “what are your expectations for today?”.

We’ve mentioned ground rules quite a lot in this post, but you may be wondering what is an effective way to co-create them. Here you go! The activity takes about 45 minutes and will get you a set of tailored group agreements for a team to adhere to. 

If the group you are hosting is meeting in person, it’s good to remember to leverage the possibilities of using physical space as a facilitation asset. Sending participants on a paired walk functions as an energizer and, at the same time, a practical way to deepen conversations and handle difficult questions. Creative ideas are much more likely to be sparked during a walk than sitting down at a table!

When it comes to prioritizing options and starting to converge towards a decision, a solid way to work with a group is using some variation of dot-voting. At a recent workshop with academics, for example, I asked everyone to mark with a green dot those sections of the whitepaper under discussion that were ready to go, and in red those that needed revisions. In just a few minutes, the group produced a clear “heat map” of the necessary next steps.

There are many tricks a group facilitator can use to get time on their side. Quick rounds such as one-breath feedback, are a good idea if you need to reach a sense of closure but have very little time left! 

You can find more activity ideas in SessionLab’s library; download our Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit to have these and other basic tools of group facilitation always at your fingertips.

How to learn more about group facilitation 

With a bunch of methods at your disposal and some key tips to keep in mind, you should be more than ready to start practicing facilitation. You’ll be joining a growing number of facilitation enthusiasts!

Facilitation is practiced by a network of incredibly generous people, who often offer workshops, materials and resources for free. To look into more resources, including facilitation training courses and where they can take you, check out our blog post on how to learn facilitation.

Another essential resource to orient yourself in the world of group facilitation is the yearly State of Facilitation report, where you can read up on trends, challenges, and top 10 lists of books, podcasts and more, as voted by the worldwide facilitation community. 

How SessionLab can help with group facilitation

SessionLab is the go-to platform for session design. We strongly believe in creating a culture of facilitation in workplaces and groups everywhere and, as such, have set out to provide anyone interested in facilitation with as many practical and applicable resources as possible.

Here are some of the ways SessionLab can help you with group facilitation:

Build a session in SessionLab’s planner. SessionLab’s agenda planner is an intuitive tool that enables great session design, made easy. Simply drag-and-drop different activities to create an agenda. By automatically calculating time, showing you lists of materials, and enabling you to color-code different sections, the planner simplifies your work and makes designing for engagement an intuitive process. Try it out! 

Use ready-made templates. To start your first session, visit the Template collection and pick a ready-made agenda created by top professionals in facilitation and learning design. Duplicate a session, especially the ones marked #essential, to get started, or browse the collection for learning and inspiration.

Learn from SessionLab’s library. SessionLab hosts the world’s largest collection of facilitation activities. Get familiar with how to use it, and how to drop activities inside your new sessions, to make sure you never run out of ideas for things to do with your group!

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In this post, I’ll explore the six roles of a facilitator and how to use them in your practice. Each one highlights a unique set of skills that facilitators use to help groups stay focused, energized, and productive — much more than simply handing out sticky notes.

6 roles of a facilitator

Facilitation is a relatively new field of interest and, as such, we don’t really have a neat box to categorize it in. Is it a form of training? Is it business consultancy? It can be those things and more, but it also has its own, distinguishing features. 

One way of defining facilitation is to say it’s the craft of leading groups towards a desired outcome. While that is true, saying it out loud is likely to be received with crickets and blank stares. To clarify what facilitation means, when holding training programs for newcomers to facilitation I have found it useful to use metaphors. A facilitator is like a guide. Like a compass. Like a mirror. Like a bridge.

In the next few pages, we will go through a series of roles that characterize what a facilitator does and how. Each, on its own, says something about the craft of facilitation. The most effective facilitation combines all these roles (and more) to create inclusive learning environments and meaningful group discussions.

You’ll probably find some of these roles more familiar, or more natural to your facilitation style, than others. It’s important to remember that they all serve a purpose to drive the group forward, so you should consider developing those in which you feel weakest or, if you can co-facilitate, leaning into your strongest suit and pairing up with someone who favors different roles.

Here is how we will describe the role of a facilitator in the next few pages:

Facilitator as Guide

The role of a facilitator can be likened to that of a guide, leading a group through unfamiliar or complex terrain. Like a hiking guide helps travelers navigate trails, a facilitator provides direction and support without imposing personal judgments or solutions. Your role as a guide is to set the course for discussion, ensuring participants stay on track while also encouraging the exploration of different perspectives. 

Just as a guide doesn’t walk the path for the hikers but helps them find the best route, a facilitator helps a group uncover solutions and make decisions that are their own.

Your role as facilitator is akin to being a guide every time you:

• Go through the session agenda before the actual workshop, using experience and foresight to craft a good itinerary for your group, and prevent potential pitfalls;
• Present participants with a sense of the journey you’ll take together and the destination (outcome) you are aiming for;
• Remind everyone of what part of the process they are currently in, such as divergence (ideation, brainstorming) or convergence (decision-making, narrowing down options).

The guiding role of a facilitator is essential for a group to achieve its aims because it provides structure without dominating the discussion. A facilitator enables the group to remain productive by steering the conversation away from distractions or unproductive tangents while encouraging participation from everyone. By guiding rather than directing, the facilitator empowers the group to take ownership of its decisions and progress.

What are the skills of a facilitator as guide? 

To be an effective guide, you’ll need to hone and practice several key skills, including:

• Clear communication: strong verbal and non-verbal communication skills help facilitators provide clear instructions and ensure everyone understands the process, keeping the group on track.
• Neutrality and impartiality: the ability to remain unattached to any particular outcome is critical, as it allows the facilitator to guide discussions without favoring certain viewpoints.
• Adaptability: a facilitator learns how to sense the room, picking up group dynamics and patterns and adapting their route according to what is really going on for the group at the moment, rather than sticking to a pre-established plan. 

Facilitator as Community Builder  

A facilitator’s role can be compared to that of a community builder, someone who fosters connections and encourages collaboration among a group. Like a community builder, the facilitator creates a welcoming, inclusive environment where all participants feel valued and heard. The goal is to establish trust and create a sense of shared ownership over the group’s outcomes.

For example, in a workshop aimed at team collaboration, you may start by organizing icebreaking activities that allow participants to get to know each other better, breaking down barriers and encouraging open communication. With your community builder hat on, you’ll be inviting group members to share ideas and perspectives, fostering a sense of belonging. When everyone feels comfortable, the group becomes more open and productive in their discussions.

Of all the roles of a facilitator, this is the one closest to my heart and to my personal style as a group leader. When I worked as a tutor for summer school students, for example, I generally dedicated most of the first day in our programs to activities aimed to help participants learn about one another, from name games to deeper questions around motivation and purpose. 

“Sit together with one other person and share something about your ancestors, or the places you come from” I remember telling a group of young engineers, much to their surprise. At the end of their week together, more than one of them came to me to share variations of this feedback: “At first, I was annoyed that we could not go straight into talking about engineering. But now I realize we worked better together because of personal conversations we had”. 

Ground rules are a useful tool for the facilitator as community builder. This refers to having a section of the workshop dedicated to sharing and agreeing upon how participants intend to behave with each other during the time they share. 

This community-building approach helps the group achieve its goals by establishing a foundation of trust and respect, which is crucial for collaboration. People are more likely to engage and share their best ideas when they feel they are part of a supportive community.  

What are the skills of a facilitator as community builder? 

To be an effective community builder, you’ll need to cultivate several key skills, including:

• Empathy and emotional intelligence: building a sense of community starts with understanding and connecting with others. Facilitators need to recognize the emotions and needs of the group, showing genuine care and concern for how people are feeling. This helps create a space where participants feel valued and heard.
• Group dynamics awareness: every group has its unique energy, and a facilitator who is tuned into the dynamics can encourage positive interactions while addressing any tensions before they escalate. Being able to read the room and understand the relationships at play helps create an inclusive, supportive environment.
• Conflict literacy: no community is without conflict, but a skilled facilitator can help navigate disagreements in a way that brings people closer rather than driving them apart. By guiding the group through challenges with fairness and calm, facilitators help solidify trust and maintain harmony, ensuring everyone remains engaged in the collective effort.

Facilitator as Team Coach  

A facilitator can also be seen as a team coach, guiding and motivating the group to perform at its best. Like a sports coach, the facilitator doesn’t dictate solutions but helps the group identify its strengths, set goals, and work through challenges. The focus is on empowering the group to improve and make progress.

Facilitation and coaching share a lot of terrain, and the words are often used interchangeably, which can create some confusion. In the sense I am using here, coaching is the ability to identify potential and explore ways to work towards the realization of that potential. As such, it can be seen as a possible component of facilitation. We are not talking here about 1:1 coaching which, while sharing some DNA with facilitation, is a different application of similar skills. 

You are taking on the mantle of a team coach when driving a group to realize its aims and objectives. Many facilitation methods help increase motivation. In a problem-solving session, for instance, you might encourage team members to reflect on past successes and challenges, helping them identify what strategies worked well and what could be improved.

Another aspect of this role has to do with asking powerful questions. If it feels like participants are getting too comfortable, and you have a sense that they may be falling into groupthink, you’ll need to push the group to use critical thinking skills.

If the group easily agrees on everything, which might, at first glance, feel like a good thing, it’s your job as a facilitator to challenge participants and dig a bit deeper. Are we sure this approach is the best? Is someone perhaps sitting with criticism they are not airing?

The six thinking hats method crafted by Edward De Bono is a useful tool for the facilitator as team coach. Asking everyone to temporarily wear the “black hat” of critical thinking is great way to draw out disagreements safely and playfully. “Yellow hat” thinking invites the group to reach for its highest potential.  

I’ve sometimes found that the role of facilitator as team coach and that of facilitator as community builder can feels at odds with one another. Should we be aiming to make everyone cozy and comfortable, or challenge them to rise to higher standards? As with all things facilitation, the answers are “it depends”, and “both”.

Creating safer spaces and pushing people beyond their comfort zones serve different purposes. You can think of these tasks sequentially, as something appropriate to different parts of the process: community building comes first, making it possible to push the team later. If you are working with a co-facilitator who’s skilled at a different style, it can be useful to separate roles a bit: as a person who loves to create an inclusive, comfortable community, I often like to work with someone more likely to challenge the group.

Learning happens right at the edge between risk and comfort, so getting this interplay right can really make the difference for your participants, especially in a training course or learning environment.

Key skills for a facilitator as a team coach

• Motivation and encouragement: a team coach knows how to uplift the group, keeping energy levels high and helping participants stay focused on their shared goals. By offering positive reinforcement and celebrating progress, a facilitator can boost feelings of accomplishment and momentum that push the group to keep moving forward.
• Asking powerful questions: effective coaching is about guiding people to their own insights. When coaching the group, a facilitator uses powerful, thought-provoking questions to challenge assumptions, encourage deeper thinking, and help the team explore alternative solutions without providing the answers themselves.
• Goal setting and progress monitoring: as a coach, a facilitator helps the group clarify its objectives and create a roadmap for success. You can keep the group accountable by regularly checking in on progress, helping everyone stay aligned, keeping an eye on task management and adjusting the course when necessary to ensure goals are met.

Facilitator as MC/Host  

The role of a facilitator can also be likened to that of an MC (master of ceremonies) or host at an event, who sets the tone, keeps things moving, and ensures that everything runs smoothly. The MC introduces the speakers, keeps the audience engaged, and makes sure the schedule is followed—all while being the face of the event, ensuring the energy remains positive.

In your role as host, you’ll be expected to set the stage at the beginning. This not only means explaining the agenda and goals (which is more of a guiding role) but also inspiring the group through, for example, reading a quote, telling a story, or inviting a moment of grounding and reflection.

Given how busy people’s lives are, they are likely to arrive to any session, especially online, with scattered thoughts and attention. As host, you can ask to focus on the other people in the room, including in a videocall, thanking everyone for being in the space and appealing to their desire to focus, learn, and achieve something together.

Throughout the session, it is also your role as host to transition smoothly between activities, and maintain the group’s energy level with energizers, breaks, or even music if it fits the mood!

Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.

Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

This role helps the group meet its objectives by keeping the session organized and dynamic, maintaining a flow that keeps participants energized and on schedule. In large events, conferences or panels, this is the role of the moderator: facilitators sometimes act as moderators, especially when events include an element of active participation from the audience.

Time management is a key function for the facilitator in their role as host. While the actual agenda for the day may be open and flexible based on emergent needs, it’s important that starting and end times, as well as breaks, are respected, and that work gets done in the time allotted.

When designing a tool to support facilitators, that’s the first thing we helped solve with SessionLab’s planner, which allows facilitators to design sessions that fit the allotted time, and easily drag-and-drop activities to change the plan as required.

Key skills for a facilitator as an MC/host

• Time management: as an MC, a facilitator ensures the event runs smoothly and on schedule. This includes juggling transitions between activities and speakers, keeping everything on track to make sure participants time is used in the best possible way, without them having to worry about logistics or overrunning.
• Public speaking: confidence in front of an audience is key to fulfill this role of a facilitator. Your presence sets the tone for the event; you’ll need to think about how to clearly and succinctly engage the audience and communicate with the group, making sure that everyone is informed and ready for what’s coming next.
• Energy management and pacing: a skilled host knows how to read the room and adjust the flow of the session to maintain energy. Use your instincts to either pick up the pace or slow things down when the group needs a moment to reflect or recharge.

Facilitator as Peacebuilder

A facilitator’s role can also be compared to that of a peacebuilder, someone who helps resolve tensions, fosters understanding, and encourages collaboration among differing viewpoints. Much like a peacebuilder works to manage conflict and find common ground, a facilitator ensures that discussions remain respectful and that any disagreements are handled constructively, allowing the group to move forward together.

For instance, in a meeting where team members have conflicting opinions about the direction of a project, you might find yourself stepping in to mediate by allowing each participant to express their concerns in a calm and structured way.

Active listening is your best friend in such situations. Listen carefully, then help the group identify shared interests or goals that can serve as a foundation for moving forward. This peacebuilding role is essential for helping the group achieve its goals because it allows the team to navigate through conflicts and disagreements without stalling progress. Although this role can feel difficult at first, with some practice you will learn how to leverage differences as a source of growth rather than an obstacle.

The relationship between facilitation and mediation is another complicated one. While many facilitators are trained in mediation, not all are, nor is it a requirement for the job. Mediation has its own highly specialized set of methodologies and tools, usually focussing on mediating between two positions, rather than dealing with whole-group tensions. 

I believe it is essential for professional facilitators to become literate in the language and concepts of conflict mediation, but it is equally important to know when to step back and recommend professional mediation as a pathway to building peace.

Once a workshop is over, it’s also the facilitator’s job to document outcomes and draft reports. You can think of this as part of a peacebuilding role because it enables parties to continue their journey of mutual understanding together. Writing up reports is an underappreciated source of power: make them clear and actionable and you’ll have boosted collaboration for longer than just the timespan of single workshop!

Key skills for a facilitator as a peacebuilder

• Conflict literacy: when taking on a peacebuilding role, a facilitator must understand the nature of conflict and be able to identify its root causes. When you catch frightened gazes looking your way for help (conflict is scary!) you might need to step in and help everyone navigate differences without escalating tension.
• Active listening and empathy: to cultivate peace, a facilitator needs to listen deeply to all sides, ensuring that everyone feels heard and respected. By showing empathy and validating different perspectives, you can create an environment where participants are more open to understanding each other. Being an active listener will also make it easier to write clear, actionable reports after each event.
• Emotional regulation: remaining calm and composed in the face of conflict is essential. A key skill for a good facilitator is self-awareness, knowing how to manage one’s own emotions while helping the group manage theirs.

Facilitator as Experience Designer  

A facilitator can also be seen as an experience designer, someone who crafts an intentional and engaging process for participants to move through. As experience designer, the facilitator carefully plans the flow of activities, ensuring that each part of the session builds toward the group’s overall goal.

This behind-the-scenes work ensures the session is both structured and purposeful, using foresight to anticipate potential challenges and making sure the agenda is adaptable to any changes that may arise. 

This experience-design approach helps the group achieve its goals by providing a structured yet flexible pathway that maximizes creativity and collaboration. By thinking ahead and planning a well-balanced session, you can ensure that the entire group moves efficiently toward its desired outcomes.  

At SessionLab, we support facilitators and workshop designers to streamline the work of agenda design. Using SessionLab’s agenda builder, you can easily drag-and-drop activities you’ve ideated or selected from a library of over 1300 methods, and arrange them into a coherent flow. To learn more about the skill of agenda designing, read our guide to designing and planning a workshop here. 

Key skills for a facilitator as experience designer

• Session planning: a well-designed agenda is the backbone of a successful session. As experience designer, you are carefully crafting a flow of activities and discussions that align with the group’s goals. 
• Creativity and innovation: designing engaging and meaningful experiences requires creativity. A facilitator needs to think outside the box, choosing or creating activities that capture the group’s attention and encourage participation, all while keeping the core purpose in focus.
• Flexibility: no matter how well-planned a session is, group dynamics can shift. A skilled experience designer stays flexible, adapting the agenda in real-time to meet the emerging needs of the participants. This ensures that the session remains relevant and impactful, regardless of any unforeseen developments.

3 things a facilitator is (probably) not

Another way of looking at facilitation to understand it better is to compare it to similar tasks that are alike, but not quite there. This can help clarify the role of a facilitator with respect to some other tasks that sometimes cause confusion.

With this in mind, here are three things a facilitator is (probably) not. Having the skills of teachers, event planners and tech wizards can certainly make our life easier, but should not be seen as basic requirements for the job.

Is a facilitator a teacher?

A facilitator is not a teacher or a subject matter expert because your role is not to provide instruction or share specialized knowledge with the group. Unlike a lecturer, who imparts knowledge or skills, a facilitator believes that the knowledge is within the group, and their role is to draw it out, not impart it.

This is what distinguishes facilitation from training: while training involves delivering information and teaching specific skills, facilitation is about leading group discussions, and arriving at collective outcomes through guided interaction. The facilitator’s role is to create a conducive environment for the learning process, not to be the source of knowledge.

While that might sound straightforward in principle, it’s worth noting that reality is a lot more nuanced. The role of training facilitator includes elements of both facilitation and education.

When leading training sessions, facilitators create inclusive learning environments; a good training facilitator might design a training program and help lead it, even if they are not subject matter experts themselves. 

Yet another source of confusion is what happens when running programs and workshops to train facilitators. If you want to learn more about how wearing all those hats at the same time might work, I’ve written about my experience training facilitators in this article. 

Is a facilitator a wedding planner? 

Not quite! While a facilitator is certainly there to ensure a smooth process, you should not be expected to hire the catering or figure out how to get everyone to the venue on time. 

Sure, we might show up early to rearrange the tables for better group interaction, but when it comes to logistics—like organizing coffee breaks or setting up AV equipment—that’s best left to a dedicated logistics team. In larger conferences or events, facilitators work alongside those managing the venue, not in place of them. The facilitator’s job is to guide the conversation and help the group collaborate effectively, not to worry about whether there’s enough almond milk for the coffee.

Is a facilitator a studio technician? 

A facilitator is not a studio technician, and should not be expected to expertly rig up microphones, troubleshoot the projector, or make sure the Zoom call has flawless audio! While a studio technician’s job is to handle the technical aspects—wiring up sound systems, adjusting lighting, and ensuring the technology runs smoothly—a facilitator’s role is quite different.

Although some facilitators, especially those working mainly online, have acquired great abilities as tech hosts, it is not always a part of the skillset. It’s important to remember that facilitation is part of a broader team effort. While the facilitator creates a space for productive collaboration and problem-solving, they rely on other team members to handle logistics like technology, organizing a learning management system (if online), catering or room setup (in person). 

When negotiating with clients, it’s important to clarify expectations in terms of technical setup and make sure someone is taking care of these important matters. 

3 FAQs from facilitation training programs

Having looked at all these facets of facilitation in turn, there are three more things I’d like to share from my experience in training facilitators. When I host training programs sharing facilitation skills, we generally dedicate a good chunk of time to discussing what a facilitator is, and what makes an effective facilitator. Here are three questions I get a lot when training facilitators, and my answers.

Q: Is the facilitator inside or outside the group?

Facilitators often find themselves balancing between being inside and outside the group. While you are a part of the group process, you also need to maintain a certain level of detachment. This distance allows to manage the flow without getting caught up in the content, and help the group see the bigger picture. 

Think of the facilitator as someone who stands both on the balcony, observing the group from above, and on the dancefloor, jiving with everyone else. The key is to be involved enough to guide the group but distant enough to help them reflect and make their own decisions.

Q: What is the relation between facilitating a group and leading a group?

Facilitating and leading may seem similar, but they serve different purposes. A leader often takes charge of decision-making and drives the group toward a specific goal. A facilitator, on the other hand, doesn’t lead the group in a directional sense but instead guides the process. 

The facilitator’s role is to create the conditions for the group to find its own way to the outcome, rather than making decisions for them. It’s more about nurturing collaboration, drawing out ideas, and ensuring every voice is heard. In this way, facilitation supports leadership, but doesn’t replace it. Team leaders can certainly benefit from gaining facilitation skills, although with more complicated meetings it’s generally easier to separate the two roles. 

Q: Do I have to do it all myself?

Not at all! Facilitation is a role, but it doesn’t mean you have to wear all the hats at once. In fact, facilitation is often more effective when responsibilities are shared. You might designate someone as a timekeeper to ensure the meeting runs smoothly, or assign another person to take notes and capture key insights. 

Spreading out these tasks allows you to stay in the main facilitator role, guiding the process and keeping everyone engaged. By delegating certain other aspects, you can make the session more efficient and ensure that each aspect of the facilitation process is handled with care.

What’s next

How do you feel about facilitation after reading this? If you have the sense it might be a good career choice for you, you might want to check out our article on how to become a professional facilitator.

To get a sense of what facilitators do in practice, you can use SessionLab’s template collection, particularly templates marked as #essential, to begin! And if you’d like to know more about what makes great facilitation, read our guide to general facilitation skills.

Certain tools are closely associated with the facilitator’s role. Sticky notes and markers, as well as online whiteboards like Miro and Mural make up the toolkit that enables facilitators to deliver great experiences, on and offline. For the preparation phase of designing workshops and events, the go-to software is SessionLab’s agenda planner.

Try it out and discover how it can help you quickly grasp the basics of facilitation, making it easier to craft engaging sessions, pick out new activities from an extensive library of facilitation techniques, deliver professional printouts to your clients, and more.

To get to the bottom of these matters I’ll be using my own experience, that of colleagues from my networks and, in particular, data drawn from the State of Facilitation in 2023 report, which is based on over 1100 responses to a global survey.

If you are considering starting a career as a facilitator or want to brush up on your skills, read on to be prepared for all these questions that will soon be coming your way.

In this article, we will look at:

Facilitator definition & meaning

In its simplest definition, a facilitator is someone who makes things easier. In this context, a facilitator is a person who helps to guide a group through a structured process in order to achieve specific goals or outcomes.

Facilitators typically occupy a neutral, impartial position while using facilitation techniques to encourage engagement and collaboration where participants are heard and their contributions are valued.

A facilitator typically does not take an active role in the conversation or provide solutions, but instead helps guide the group to find their own ideas and solutions. Facilitators do this with a combination of effective facilitation techniques, carefully designed agendas and by creating the ideal conditions for effective collaboration.

Here are some other key elements to highlight:

• Facilitators work 1-to-many rather than 1-to-1: although we will talk one-to-one for interviews with participants, or when negotiating with a client, most of our work is with a group of people. This is helpful, for example, to distinguish the role of facilitator from that of leadership coach;
• The facilitator’s role is to support a group’s process, steering it by, for example, designing activities, opening an important discussion and offering key questions. Content in a facilitation process comes from participants themselves (as opposed to what might happen with public speaking or training);
• A facilitator’s position is neutral with regards to the content (but not with regards to the process). It is part of the facilitator’s job to make sure different voices are heard in the room, but not to choose among those voices or suggest solutions (as opposed to more “traditional” consultancy roles). Facilitators have opinions, of course, but staying neutral and setting them aside to focus on allowing the group’s opinions to surface is important.

We can summarise the above by saying that a facilitator designs and runs group processes with the aim of making it easy for everyone to contribute and achieve a shared goal. 

Facilitators often also have coaching, mediation or teaching/training skills; these are all different roles, different hats that can be worn by the same person. Remember that in its simplest form, a facilitator makes things easier and are there to support group members as needed.

As a tutor for students in a summer school program, for example, I am sometimes acting as a coach (in individual conversations with participants), sometimes as a trainer (providing short classes on communication skills), occasionally as a mediator (stepping in to offer support in a conflict) and mostly as a facilitator (designing a learning process and setting up activities to support individual participants to come together as an effective learning group). 

Want to explore the topic of facilitation more specifically? See our guide with a definition of facilitation and exploration of its benefits and principles.

What are the core responsibilities of a facilitator?

Facilitators can be called on to facilitate everything from events and meetings to training courses and workshops. While every project and group has different needs, facilitators often have core responsibilities which are required in order to be effective.

If you’re hiring a facilitator, here’s some of what you can expect from a good facilitator. If you’re a facilitator yourself, here’s a refresher on some things you will likely need to do.

• Design and organize an effective group process that help create a desired outcome or goal. The plan for this group process is most often in the form of an agenda.
• Solicit input from stakeholders, team members and subject matter experts in order to create an effective process that is fit-for-purpose.
• Guide discussions, encouraging participation and using active listening to ensure everyone in the group is head.
• Manage group dynamics, creating a sense of psychological safety and facilitating effective, inclusive collaboration among the group.
• Encourage the group in generating their own ideas, coming up with solutions and taking shared responsibility for a common goal.
• Report back to the client or stakeholders after a session to support further action and create momentum.
• Maintain neutrality and impartiality throughout.

Depending on the project, additional responsibilities might be expected of the facilitator. We’ll outline these in the practice section below. You might also find our collection of facilitation skills helpful in understanding what might be expected and how to improve your core facilitator skill set.

What is the purpose of facilitation?

A facilitator’s attention goes to encouraging balance between the three pillars of group work: objectives, relationship, and process.

Objectives answer the question: what is the aim of our work together? What do we want to achieve? This is the realm of KPIs, targets, and concrete outputs. What does a successful future look like for the team? What is the groups’ desired outcome? What values would we like to embody on the way?

Process is about how we work together. What are our group processes? Who takes decisions? How do we keep one another accountable? How do we learn (from success as well as failure)? Here, an effective facilitator will help groups take control of their process, and may touch on elements of collaborative task management and collaboration and team problem solving.

Taking care of relationships is about raising mutual trust inside the group. Who are we working with? How well do we know one another and communicate? Helping people learn how to participate effectively and with mutual respect is a vital element of effective facilitation.

Depending on the needs of the specific team and job, a skilled facilitator will design activities that help the group reflect on its current situation and steer towards change in one, two, or all of these dimensions. Let’s see a couple of examples. 

In business scenarios, facilitators often encounter teams that have dedicated their time almost exclusively to objectives, to the detriment of process and relationships. Trust might be eroded or there may be a lack of clarity on how to work together effectively. New conditions such as online work make it especially clear when process is badly defined: lots of energy and time can get wasted by duplicating efforts or leaving projects stalled in a bottleneck!

In such cases, an effective facilitator will suggest ways of working on the team’s cohesion, encouraging participation and setting agreements as to how to work together, co-creating processes that fit that particular context.

Facilitation is sometimes misconstrued as a tool for “feeling good”, but the actual aim of getting-to-know-you games and playful energizers is to create a good environment in order to get things done! A few hours dedicated to diagnosing how the team is managing its own internal dynamics and learning new skills, such as in this team Self-Management workshop, can radically improve group effectiveness.

In non-profit contexts, such as citizen groups, I’ve sometimes diagnosed the opposite illness: the group is so focused on feeling good and creating internal cohesion that it’s not really advancing towards its objectives, or has never set clear objectives at all!

A facilitated workshop might then be devoted to creating or refreshing a shared vision and mission for the group. An ideation workshop, such as the one detailed in this template, might be just the thing. Taking a look through our template collection will give you more ideas of what a facilitated event or workshop can achieve!

What do facilitators do in practice? 

Facilitators are experts in group process and group management. Malia Josephine, founder of the start-up Facilitation Jobs, has put together a comprehensive list of over 30 job titles that refer to facilitation, from Organizational Development Specialist and training facilitator to Retreat Designer and more.

As Voltage Control’s Douglas Ferguson put it in his commentary to the State of Facilitation 2023 report, “Facilitation is Everywhere”. Facilitators are present in private and public sectors, in NGOs and big corporates, facilitating board meetings and outdoor team building. What are all these facilitators up to?

Depending on the context and needs, here are some actions facilitators might typically take.

Facilitators will work behind the stage to design appropriate processes based on the task at hand. Some of a facilitator’s routine activities in this stage include:

Preparation & design

• interviewing key stakeholders, having meetings with the client (and other relevant roles such as, for example, someone in HR or in a communications role) aiming to understand current needs, past history and future hopes;
• designing meetings, events, workshops or retreats around the overall topic and purpose, including preparing lists of intended outcomes and a detailed agenda;
• reviewing, revising and amending that agenda with the client;
• suggesting needs for a location (such as how to organize seating spaces, how many tables are needed and so on) or, if the workshop is online, recommending what software to use;
• drafting information to include in the invitation and/or communicating directly with participants before the event to share expectations, inform them on what types of activities will be run, what technology will be used, considerations around accessibility and so on (for more about how to set up your facilitation events for accessibility, read Marie Dubost’s top tips) 
• doing some research on the topic, e.g. by studying project documents, to get a grasp of the technical jargon or specialised knowledge participants will refer to.

Leading activities

An event agenda typically includes sections with speakers: parts of the day where information is presented by, for example the host/client, a department manager, the team presenting a challenge. Other points of the agenda will be participatory activities: here is where facilitators take the stage to introduce, give instructions, lead debrief sessions, clarify any questions. In such moments, facilitators will:

• Welcome participants, introduce the process;
• Propose activities that help co-create psychological safety, build a healthy group dynamic and set up a good environment for the day. These could be, for example, ice-breakers, energizers, creating ground rules, exploring personal motivations, and so on;
• Lead activities to encourage ideation, new ideas, creativity, brainstorming (divergence);
• Guide activities designed to reach a conclusion, such as consensus building, defining action plans, next steps, and finalizing outputs (convergence).

Moderating conversations

During conversations and discussions, facilitators use their moderation and meeting management skills to:

• Direct the traffic of conversation, for example using rounds, talking pieces, active listening, activities in pairs and small groups, setting time limits for people to speak, and so on. Facilitation does not necessarily mean “everyone will have exactly the same amount of time to speak in” (though sometimes it might) but it should mean everyone gets the opportunity to express their opinion, whether it’s in written form with sticky notes, in turns, or in a myriad other ways. Facilitators will encourage everyone’s participation (but should not enforce it! Some people prefer to be quiet and that is also ok);
• Step in to suggest ways of working through conflict. Not all facilitators have mediation skills, but expert professionals will have an understanding of how to handle conflict creatively and constructively;
• Summarise the conversation, ask clarifying questions, or suggest topics that push the group to go further in its thinking;
• Time management and taking meeting notes, or setting in place mechanisms to do that collaboratively (here is an example of how to do that).

Following up & debriefing

A facilitator’s work does not end when the meeting or event ends. Some typical tasks get done in follow-up, such as:

• Drafting reports. Often clients will request reports of how the project went. Make sure you have an agreement about what to highlight! I’ve had clients reveal to me only after an event was over that they needed specific data collected on participants, or surveys filled in. It would clearly have been much easier to collect such data points if we had had an agreement before! 
• Sharing resources and materials. After a workshop it’s typical to send participants materials, resources, pictures, or reminders of any follow-up work to be done;
• Take part in debrief meetings and help collect learnings. A facilitator might in fact be the one insisting that the team meet again after the event or series of workshops to discuss learnings: what went well? What would we change next time? This is part of how we build a lasting, productive relationship with clients.

What do facilitators not do? 

Here are 5 things facilitators typically should not be expected to do. Scouting locations, registering participants, setting up audio and video equipment are things facilitators might be able to do (I have found myself doing these myself upon occasion) but are not normally part of our role. If you are organizing an event or workshop, making sure you have a dedicated person to take care of logistics, enrollment and equipment will save you awkward misunderstandings. Most importantly, someone specialized in such tasks will surely do a better job of it!

The other two points on this list (providing content and offering solutions) are what really separates the facilitator’s role from the trainer, teacher, lecturer, or “traditional” business consultant.

1. A facilitator will not scout and book the location for you. Generally, the client takes care of finding the right location as well as of logistics such as catering or accommodation. That said, the setting of the room is a key element that influences the design of activities, as we shall see in more detail in the “What should I keep in mind when hiring a facilitator?” section below.
   
   Often facilitators will know places they might recommend and/or have specific requests the client should keep into consideration. If the workshop is online, on the other hand, it is more likely that facilitators will suggest the software(s) they are most familiar with.
   
2. A facilitator’s job is not to enlist participants. I have occasionally been mistaken for a communication or a graphic design expert, which I’m certainly not! While some people might have skills in such areas, particularly those facilitators who organize their own workshops, preparing flyers and invites falls outside of a facilitator’s expertise.
   
   Giving facilitators a say on what is written in the invite can certainly help set expectations, but the hosting team is more likely to do the actual work of creating visual assets and finalizing a participants’ list.
   
3. Facilitators should not be expected to set up the tech. While it is extremely common for facilitators to walk into the workshop space early in the morning and start rearranging tables and chairs, they should not be expected to set up audio-video equipment, microphones, cameras, and the like.
   
   In online environments, facilitators are likely to be working with a dedicated “producer” or “tech host” to take care of all the backstage technical details. To learn more about the different roles that support facilitation, read our blog post on co-facilitation.
   
4. A facilitator is not a content expert. Hiring a facilitator who has expert knowledge of a certain topic may be a benefit, because it lowers the communication barrier if, for example, jargon and specialized terms are used. On the other hand, our “naive” questions can sometimes be a hidden gift, by creating a safe opportunity for participants to reveal that they do not fully understand something either.
   
   Lately, this happened to me when facilitating a workshop on micromobility: during a pre-event briefing, I asked a question about what exactly the different categories of vehicles being discussed were. This led to discovering there were various interpretations of those categories and no clear consensus (yet). Result: my “stupid question” ended up becoming the first activity of a multi-stakeholder event, which in turn informed the first section of the resulting position paper (and possibly, a step toward clear consensus).
   
5. Lastly, of course, facilitators will not provide ready-made recipes to solve a team’s problems! One of the core tenets of facilitation is that the resources needed to create change and make steps forward lie within the team itself. If more resources are needed (such as, for example, an executive decision, more time, more funding) it’s still up to the team to find ways of moving towards its objectives. Facilitation can offer a safe space to design those pathways, and helpful tools to focus attention, but ultimately, results are determined by the participants!

How to become a facilitator?

Are you someone who loves helping groups solve problems and become active agents in their own learning and development? Facilitation might be for you!

You have a few different paths available when choosing to become a facilitator. Typically, facilitators learn their trade with a mix of practice and training.

Many organizations and professional bodies exist for training facilitators. See more in our guide to the best facilitation training. If you want to become accredited and pursue a career as a freelance facilitator, this is a great next step.

Learning facilitation skills and applying them in your workplace or volunteering organization is also a common place to start what may become a facilitation career.

Read this article for an overview of general facilitation skills. And if you feel ready to try out facilitating daily meetings, you can use SessionLab’s template library, particularly templates marked as #essential, to begin!

Check out our post on how to be a great workshop facilitator for a practical guide you can deploy during your next session.

Want to learn at your own pace? This collection of facilitation resources is a trove of insight and learning material!

What does a facilitation career look like?

Based on results of the State of Facilitation 2023 survey, 54.9% of facilitators are freelancers, working with multiple clients at a time, on many different projects. This is part of what I love about freelancing as a facilitator: as a perpetually curious person, this enables me to observe and partake in the efforts of many different teams on different fronts.

Not all facilitators work in this way though: another possibility is to be part of a team of facilitators in what effectively amounts to being small consultancy businesses. That’s the case of my friends Melania Bigi and Ilaria Magagna over at Tara facilitation: they’ve put together a group of facilitators, all with slightly different expertise (such as graphic facilitation, small-team leadership and development, decision-making, communication) with a focus on supporting small and medium enterprises.

Last but not least, there is the case of in-house facilitators. The rise of agile, design thinking, and design sprints has created a need for specialized roles available to offer facilitation services continuously and combine this with a deep understanding of the context. In-house facilitators mostly work in large companies, corporates, and foundations. They might be tasked, for example, with creating inter-departmental sessions for strategic planning, involving stakeholders in consultation processes, and designing customized trainings for staff. 

Whatever the position, facilitators’ daily life is likely to be divided into two main groups of tasks:

1. Designing interventions. Whether it’s events, workshops, one-off or long-term, much of our time is spent at the desk and in preparatory meetings to define the objectives of our work, negotiate agreements with clients, interview stakeholders, design a learning process and set up agendas. I am going to include follow-up work here, despite the fact that it happens later, as it has a similar character of being backstage desk work. SessionLab’s Planner is a helpful tool at this stage, saving you time in designing, keeping all your sessions and methods neatly organized, and enabling you to share professional agendas with clients. To follow all the steps of how designing workshops works, here is an in-depth guide.
   
2. Hosting/leading events, workshops, meetings. This is the most visible part of our work, when we are actually delivering to participants whatever design we’ve agreed on. This is when we step up, moderate conversations, interact, steer the flow of activities and so on.

The International Association of Facilitators, IAF, describes professional facilitators’ core competencies in this document. The list shows a balance between design and delivery: three Competency areas—Creating Collaborative Client Relationships, Plan Appropriate Group Processes, and Build and Maintain Professional Knowledge—revolve around preparation. 

The other three are more focused on delivery: Create and Sustain a Participatory Environment, Guide Group to Appropriate and Useful Outcomes and Model Positive Professional Attitude. Reading through the details and the Code of Ethics will give you a very clear idea of what is important to know about professional facilitation. 

When do you need a facilitator? 

This is another version of the question “What do facilitators do”, this time slanted towards results and achievements. What impact does a facilitator’s work have? Where is the value?

Having a facilitator involved in a group process will improve the effectiveness of your work, saving you time, energy and, ultimately, money. The prime example of this is probably meetings: if your meetings leave everyone tired, confused and frustrated, a facilitator can help give them direction, organize the agenda, ensure the group stays on track to reach desired outcomes.

I have often had the opportunity of facilitating one or two-day kick-offs for large, multi-stakeholder projects: participants gathering from different Countries, using different jargons and working in different areas of expertise. By the end of the event, they should have clarity about their project, each individual team and person’s role in it, next steps, how communication will flow, timelines, and feel motivated about doing the project at all! A facilitator (or more likely in this case, a facilitation team) can help with all that. 

If nobody is in charge of the process, there will be a lot of confusion, resulting in many more meetings and emails to be exchanged later. If the event is an unimaginative series of lecture-style presentations (I am quoting from a real-life situation here) people will say things like “the speeches took too long, and breaks were the only time when we could actually talk to one another and figure out how we will work together.”

Facilitation helps set up effective collaboration and maintains it in time. It also supports engagement and buy-in by ensuring everyone’s voice is heard early in the process. This can mitigate a lot of risks!

A colleague of mine recently facilitated public participation dialogues between a train company wanting to run a new line close to a mid-sized town and the local citizens. At the very first meeting, a group of citizens proposed a slight variation to the proposed track which would mitigate their concerns about car traffic changes: this was quickly accepted by the company.

One of the locals told the facilitator “If they had started building based on the original proposal we would have picketed the site for months! Thanks for saving us a lot of time and effort.” I also imagine it was a great return on investment for the train company, which had paid a few thousand Euros for the facilitation process.

Other facilitated activities such as using case studies or simulations help save time and money in the long run by “acting out” possibilities in safe environments, hearing out many different opinions, and different ways of thinking, before a decision is taken.

In closing

In this piece, we’ve gone through an overview of what facilitators are, what they do on a daily basis and what a facilitation career looks like. We’ve seen what actions facilitators take to design and lead processes that make it easier for groups to get together and achieve lasting results.

I leave you now with a question: how would you explain facilitation to a 5-year old?

I might say something along the lines of “Facilitators help adults play and learn together”. Facilitator and trainer Mirna Smidt added this contribution: “It’s like your kindergarten teacher, who creates order when you all want the same toys, just with adults at their work.” Others have likened the facilitator’s position to a tour guide, an architect, or a pilot.

What would you say? And what more would you like to know about the world of facilitation? Join the conversation in our community!

A quick look at Google Trends told me that worldwide searches for the word “facilitation” have almost doubled from 2019 to today. A recent uptick in interest may be credited to the new needs of complex remote-first or hybrid workplaces. Whatever the reason, facilitation is on the rise. 

Do you want to improve the way you run meetings or manage teams in your current position, or to set up your own freelance business? In this article, we’ll look at all you need to know if you are interested in becoming a professional facilitator.

How did you get interested in facilitation? For me, it was seeing a facilitator in action. It was 2008 and I had joined a weekend course on citizen activism for environmental causes. I was drawn by the topic, but then I fell in love with the way things were run and presented.

I was instantly hooked by the trainer’s use of sticky notes, whiteboard paper, and skillful questions to get us participants active and involved in learning. She had set up what is commonly known as a “Parking Lot” board, a place where ideas, topics and questions could be “parked” for further discussion. I wrote a single question on that board: “How do I get a job like yours?” 

Perhaps something similar has happened to you. You may have seen someone facilitating and thought: “That looks like something I’d like to do”. Or maybe a colleague informed you that the way you were leading a meeting or team project was “like something professional facilitators would do”. You might have read somewhere that facilitation is a growing profession, and facilitation skillsets are increasingly required in workplaces, especially when work is remote-first. So, how does one become a facilitator? 

In the next paragraphs, we’ll cover some of the most frequently asked questions about how to become a facilitator, including how and why to join facilitation training courses, what to expect from a career as a professional facilitator, and tips on how to get started. 

What backgrounds do facilitators have?

What do you need to study to become a facilitator? There is no single valid answer to this question. Very rarely, if ever, do people decide to go into facilitation early in life. I’ve met exactly one teenager who told me he wants to be a facilitator when he grows up, but then again, that is what his dad does! 

Among facilitators I know and admire there are all sorts of backgrounds: a geologist, an urban designer, an environmental engineer, a programmer, an advertising agency head, a teacher, and more. As for myself, I’m a communications major with a past in theatre and event management. Is there anything at all these people have in common? 

In terms of background, I am going to say no. Most facilitators (81.5%, according to the 2024 edition of the State of Facilitation report) have a higher education degree, but even that is not always the case. One of the best facilitators I know started touring with an improvisational theatre company at 16 and never even finished high school. 

You can come to facilitation from any background at all. Most facilitators stumble into what, in this podcast episode, Jenny Theolin and her guest Marcus Crow appropriately call The Accidental Profession. 

If you asked the world’s careers councilors in schools […] I bet none of them ever go home and say: I had a kid come to me today, 16, 17 years old, asking me about being a facilitator. I don’t think that has ever happened, anywhere in the world. My thesis is that this is an accidental profession. Everyone in it had some sort of professional accident that dropped them into in somehow.

Marcus Crow, founder of facilitation and training business 10,000 hours.

Experience and studies in other sectors can help you may help you best serve professionals in that particular field. Think, for example, of a facilitator who trained as an architect; it will be easier for her to work with urbanists and policymakers to shape a new neighborhood design, thanks to shared specialized knowledge and jargon. 

The most common pathway to facilitation is to start a different career and then, at some point, get frustrated with the way meetings are run and projects are organized, and set off on a quest to find something better. Budding facilitators start by asking questions about organizational change, or wondering how learning happens, and sooner or later arrive at sticky notes, whiteboards, and markers (or their online equivalents).

That said, if you are picking a field of study and interested in facilitation, degrees related to sociology, psychology and education will certainly come in handy. 

How do I know if I can be a facilitator? 

How can you tell if you’ve got what it takes to become a good facilitator? That’s a great question, and not an easy one. 

First of all, let’s tackle a common misconception. You do not need to be an extrovert to become a facilitator! You need to be comfortable talking in front of a room (or a screen full of people Zooming in), but you also need excellent listening skills, and the ability to be a “guide on the side” and disappear into the background when the conditions are right. 

Different people have different facilitation styles: quiet and grounded, joking and fun, tending to the group like a gardener or challenging them like a sports coach. Whatever your style, you will find clients and projects for whom it works. 

Great facilitators can appear almost invisible, but are also there to show up when needed: this is a mix of introverted and extroverted traits that excludes nobody. Co-facilitating with someone with a different personality and style is the best way to combine strengths.  

So far we’ve established there is no common background, nor any common style, to facilitators. What do facilitators have in common and how can you tell if you might want to join the club? 

Here are some indicators:

• You are a good communicator. An effective facilitator knows how to give clear instructions and rationales for a certain way of doing things, without hogging the microphone for too long. Are you generally good at communicating clearly? Do you have a natural ability to put yourself in the shoes of a beginner and explain, in simple terms, what is going on? This, like all the skills below, can be honed and cultivated, but it sure will help if you have a good starting point.
• You find yourself saying “it depends” quite a lot. This is practically a running joke in the world of workshops. It’s quite rare for a facilitator to have a clear-cut, this-not-that, answer. It all depends. If you have a natural tendency to take different points of view and see the world in scales of gray, this will help you facilitate workshops. 
• You are attracted to non-directive styles of leadership, such as “servant leadership”. Without going into a treatise on leadership styles (we have a good article about it here), let’s just say that people who are comfortable with consulting others, taking the time to allow everyone to express their opinion before taking a decision, are good facilitator material.
• You find it easy to understand different positions. Facilitators cultivate curiosity and empathy. This doesn’t mean you must agree with any position, including those far from your own values. It means you are always interested in understanding those diverging ideas, and learning more about where differences in opinion and worldview are coming from. If you like anthropology, you might like facilitation (here is another podcast recommendation: Beth Cougler Blom discussing the connections between anthropology and facilitation with Dr. Monty Badami)
• You tend to observe yourself. Exercising self-awareness is an essential meta-skill for effective facilitation. Complex spaces for dialogue will inevitably challenge you. Expert, skilled facilitators may appear imperturbable, an island of calm in a storm, but that is rarely the truth of what is going on. A mora accurate description is that they have learnt to refocus on there present moment despite being temporarily knocked off-kilter by what we label “disruptive” behaviors, or by a fleeting emotion.
• You hate waste. If time and energy wasted in futile discussions or confusing meetings drive you up the walls, this is also a great indicator that you have the motivation to drive change through facilitation.
• You enjoy working with other people. This does not mean that you are a social butterfly or the life of the party, but certainly as a facilitator you will be working with people, their particular quirks and qualities, most of the time. I often say one of my favorite things about being a facilitator is that I love being constantly surprised by the unexpected things other people do.

If we can think like anthropologists, we will have access to the most valuable resource in understanding complex experiences and diverse groups, and that resource is our humanity.

Beth Cougler Blom, host of Facilitating on Purpose

There are a couple more things I’ve personally noticed among my colleagues that may be distinctive traits of people who are drawn to facilitation, although these are personal observations, so take them with a grain of salt:

• Neither at the center of the party nor outside. My absolute favorite place to be at a social gathering is somewhere at the periphery, perhaps on a terrace overlooking the scene. I love to listen to the sounds of people having a good time, observing the dancing, the dynamics, the social groups forming and dissolving, the body language. I was surprised when I learned that at some facilitation trainings this is actually codified as the facilitator’s position: “on the balcony”. Facilitators are both inside and outside groups at the same time, so if you find yourself resonating with that position, this may be the job for you!
• Mixed backgrounds anyone? I come from a family with mixed backgrounds and so do plenty of my colleagues. My personal theory: it may be easier to get into facilitation for those with mixed family backgrounds, and for bilingual/multilingual speakers. My assumption is it is easier to hold opposing positions and views as valid, which facilitators need to know how to do in order to maintain equidistance, aka “neutrality”, if you’ve been doing it since childhood. Naturally, this is not a hard rule, there are plenty of facilitators to whom it does not apply. Having diverse interests might help gain a similar perspective (like a facilitator I’ve worked with who has degrees in both psychology and mathematics). 

What are the benefits of becoming a facilitator?

Facilitation is a growing field and, at the same time, not a fully mature or established profession yet. This has its advantages and its drawbacks. If you like security and stability, being a freelance facilitator in an ever-shifting working landscape may not really be for you. Same can be arguably said if you have the highly technical and/or scientific mindset that is best suited for work in the STEMs where there might, in fact, very well be “a right and a wrong answer”. 

While the ground under your feet may not always be stable, here are some of the benefits of becoming a professional facilitator:

• Creative work that’s never boring
• The opportunity to support many different people and teams
• It’s a meaningful career where you’ll often feel you’re making a difference
• Continuous learning (of course this is also a con: the learning never ends, nor do the moments of failure!) 
• A supportive and generous community of peers
• Autonomy and independence (if you go the freelancer route) 

I second the point made in this blog post about how learning facilitation amounts to future-proofing your work: the core skills of facilitation are not something AI is likely to replace anytime soon. (That said, AI can certainly assist your facilitation career, and to learn more about that, look no further than the AI Tinkerers’ Club, hosted by Alex Eisenchteter.) 

Cognitive, Interpersonal and Self-leadership sections [in the McKinzey study on the future world of work] read like a checklist of the exact skills facilitators learn in training.

Simon Tratnik, Product Strategist and Founder of Human1st

How to learn facilitation

Now that we’ve established that facilitation is picked up rather than studied, and that professional facilitators come from all walks of life, it’s natural to ask: but how does one go about learning facilitation?

Here are some of the many ways you can learn more about how to guide a group.

Picking facilitation up on the go

Almost 70% of respondents to SessionLab’s 2024 State of Facilitation survey stated that they learned facilitation mostly “by doing”. 

This can mean a lot of different things. It may imply watching someone else doing it, or being hurled into hosting your own workshop by random chance, with little more than a session plan to support you. These is no single pathway here. 

To pick up facilitation on the go, start by making small interventions to improve how meetings are held in your workplace or volunteer association. Ask around: what is working well in how we hold our meetings? What would you like to improve? Let everyone know you’d like to propose something new, frame your experiments as such, and ask for feedback at the end. Some of your best lessons will come from failures! 

Reflecting on practices and behaviors

You can learn a lot of facilitation skills by training yourself to observe and notice patterns of behavior, in yourself and others. Keep notes about what happens in meetings and workshops. What works well? What doesn’t? Ask yourself why people behave the way they do, take note of body language and tone of voice. You might start to notice patterns repeat themselves: these are the basic blocks of group dynamics.

One of my favorite bits of facilitation wisdom is to consider any “trouble” or “disturbance” as if it were a message, telling you something important about the group and its needs. Did that small disagreement blow up because people were tired and frustrated that a meeting scheduled to last 30 minutes had gone on for over an hour? 

You’ll be surprised how much you can learn about how to facilitate group discussions by just observing behaviors (including yours) and sitting down with your notes to reflect afterward. 

Getting experience as a volunteer

As a beginner, it may not feel safe to start experimenting with facilitation methods in the workplace. On the other hand, volunteer groups, local associations, and neighborhood committees may be ideal places to practice facilitation in a low-stakes setting. 

Look for opportunities to join a local group and ask if you could help out organizing meetings. Volunteering is a wonderful way to start learning facilitation skills! Many facilitators started in youth groups, as scouts, or in theatre companies (there is definitely some overlap between theatre skills, particularly improv, and facilitation).

Another way of looking at the overlap of volunteering and facilitation concerns volunteering within facilitation communities. The IAF (International Association of Facilitators) local chapters are volunteer-led and always looking for some help organizing online workshops or offline festivals. This is a great opportunity to pick up skills while giving back to the community and networking at the same time! 

Free resources to help you learn facilitation skills

Facilitators as a whole tend to be a helpful and generous bunch. This includes often putting out free resources and guides to help newbies, and freely sharing tips and tricks about a certain tool or methodology. 

In this article we’ve collected many such resources, including 10 of our favorite free toolkits you can download and read at your leisure. To start your reading list, I suggest going through the list of core competencies compiled by the IAF; it will give you a clear orientation of what learning facilitation entails, and what skills you should practice. 

Joining a community and learning from experienced facilitators

Facilitation is best framed as a craft. As such, it’s learned by passing on knowledge from one person to another. But how can you get in the loop and find opportunities to learn from good facilitators? 

The rise of digital tools and remote communities has enabled the creation of numerous excellent professional networks you can join, often for free. They generally include online workshop sessions and the opportunity to join or lead discussions with other professionals, more or less experienced. 

SessionLab’s friendly community hosts a calendar of events you can join to explore specific topics related to facilitation and leadership skills. Sessions are always free, online, and interactive. This is also a great place to ask questions to fellow facilitators and share stories and experiences.

Why you should join facilitation training courses

Once you’ve learned a few basics about facilitation, perhaps joined some online workshops, listened to some podcast episodes, and tried your hand out at leading a few meetings, you’ll probably start feeling the need for a facilitation training course.

A facilitation training course will help you in your career in many ways, including:

• learning about group dynamics. Training sessions are often the only place where you can pull back the curtain and learn the theoretical foundations of practices and methodologies;
• practicing in a safe context. Well-rounded training courses all include opportunities to practice, whether it is with your peers or by including hours of required practice after the course. Practice and reflection will help you hone your skills;
• raising your confidence levels. A great reason to take facilitator training courses is to become more confident and assured in your own facilitation style;
• building your CV. Starting out in the profession, it is important to show that you are putting in the work and growing your skillset. 

Joining a facilitation training course is often quite the investment, in time, money, and/or travel, but it will pay back. Most courses include peer learning, and/or personalized coaching by an expert facilitator, and will prepare you to go out into the world and lead workshops in real-world settings. 

To learn more about what courses are available and what you should keep in mind when choosing one, check out our dedicated guide to facilitation training courses. 

Do you need certification to be a facilitator?

Facilitation as a profession does not have a central, universally recognized accreditation body. There is no university degree you need to practice facilitation, nor must you register anywhere. In other words: you do not need a certificate to be a facilitator. In fact, most facilitators around the world do not have any form of written documentation testifying to their skills besides their CVs. 

Is this a good, or a bad thing? You guessed it: it depends. 

Both perspectives were covered in this conversation hosted by Myriam Hadnes in her Workshops Work podcast, discussing the topic of certification among participants in SessionLab’s Community and the NeverDoneBefore Community. 

Those who speak in favor of certification and accreditation have arguments such as:

• Training is necessary in order to improve facilitation skills beyond knowledge of individual facilitation techniques;
• Certification and accreditation can help structure the field and make it clearer for people on the outside;
• It can harm the field if people join with good intentions but no formal training;
• Certification offers more clarity to prospective clients trying to navigate a very fragmented field;
• Certification is a boost to personal confidence.

On the other side of the debate, the claim that certification is not needed includes views such as:

• Many great facilitators have no certification at all;
• A certification is no guarantee of quality;
• Certification can be an expensive barrier to entry;
• There is no objective way of evaluating what makes a good facilitator. 

Maybe we learn best from community, and on the job. But what happens to the profession if none of us follow courses and everyone believes that we can just learn it on the job, without a certification or accreditation?

Myriam Hadnes, host of Workshops Work

When discussing this topic, it’s important to make a clear distinction between certification as proof that you’ve completed a training course, and accreditation, which is the process of testing and certifying your proficiency in a certain skillset. 

Various schools and training organizations offer certification at the end of your training process. Having a certificate of this kind can be a great way to boost your confidence and prove to yourself that you have achieved a professional development milestone. It is also a good asset to add to your CV, showing prospective clients what kind of skills you’ve been working on. 

Accreditation in facilitation, as far as I know, is currently provided by two bodies: the International Association of Facilitation (IAF) and the International Institute for Facilitation (INIFAC). For more information on their programs, you can check out our summary here. 

The idea with accreditation is that you submit your work to a rigorous process of examination, often including assessors overseeing you while you facilitate a session. This is not something for beginners: accreditation may come later in your career, once you’ve got a good number of hours of workshops under your belt and want to advance your skills further.

Knowing how the accreditation process works is a good reason to start creating your portfolio from day one (more on this later). 

What professional facilitation looks like

As a professional facilitator, you can expect your time to be divided between preparation and delivery of workshops, sessions and events. In this article we discuss what types of tasks facilitators do. 

What should you expect from a career in facilitation? A lot depends on whether you go in the direction of freelance work, or if you’ll be looking at working “inhouse”, within a larger company or organization. Let’s look at those different options in turn.

Working as a freelance facilitator 

Many facilitators work as individual freelancers. In the 2023 edition of the State of Facilitation report, 97% of respondents stated they sometimes or most of the time work alone. Of the total respondents, 38% were either independent freelancers or the only facilitation professional in their company. 

This led us to wonder whether facilitation can be a “lonely” profession. The answer from the global community came in the form of discussions, articles and podcasts. The conclusion? Facilitation often happens alone, but facilitators are never lonely, being surrounded by communities of practice, reflection buddies, mentors and peers.

As a freelance facilitator you can expect all the ups and downs or a solopreneur life. There will be times of abundance and of scarcity, and it may prove hard to establish a solid client base. On the other hand, you will have autonomy, independence and freedom to pursue varied interests in many fields. Kirsty Lewis’ podcast A Facilitator’s Journey has numerous episodes dedicated to the business aspect of having a freelance facilitation career. 

After the pandemic, it is now the norm for facilitators to work both in person and remotely. You might choose to specialize in one or the other mode, but truth be told, your clients will ask you to solve a problem: it will be up to you to advise whether this is better done in an intensive in-person setting, via shorter online interventions over a period of time or (more likely) a mix of both. This means you’ll need to be up for a decent amount of travel as well as spending time at your desk! 

Working in a facilitation agency 

If you know that you prefer to work in a team, you could consider banding up with others to create a facilitation agency. Facilitation agencies operate like small consultancies: you might start off with a staff of two or three facilitators and one or two marketing and sales people to create a boutique business. This is more of an upfront investment in time and work, but if it works out for you it can create a stable income and a situation in which you might even be able to take a holiday and let the work continue without you! 

When facilitation agencies get larger commissions and contracts, it’s quite common for them to hire “associates”: freelancers who are connected to the agency, might have received training on the same methods, and are assigned to handling certain workshops or events. 

Working with sessions designed and created by someone else can be tricky. A couple of years ago I was part of a team of no less than 50 facilitators around Europe contracted by an agency to deliver online and in-person “town hall” style sessions for citizens in preparation for the EU-wide elections.

To harmonize work across such a large number of people, it was essential for the NGO to hold a series of preparatory workshops, Q&A sessions, and share a detailed session plan, almost a script, for the event. The SessionLab planner was an essential tool in this process, enabling us share sessions, add comments, and check that our timings were harmonized. 

Working as an in-house facilitator

Having a facilitator in-house is a growing trend in large companies. Inhouse facilitators run workshops for various teams, organize programs for offsites and teambuilding events and might host workshops with external stakeholders as well (think for example of a design sprint involving clients). In some companies, this combines with training roles, upskilling managers and staff in such skills as active listening, giving and receiving feedback, effective meetings or communication. 

More frequently though, you may be using facilitation skills in roles that are not called explicitly “facilitation”. Examples of such positions include project managers, community managers, event planners, and training roles in learning and development. The border between facilitation and training is permeable, and you will find many of the same skills used in both. Malia Josephine wrote a handy write-up of possible areas of focus for facilitators looking for work in her blog. 

4 tips on how to become a facilitator

As we’ve seen, there are as many different ways to start a facilitation career as there are facilitators. From my experience in the field, here are 4 tips to keep in mind as you test the waters.

Build a network

There is a lot of discussion in the facilitation community about what can help fuel a consistent string of jobs in such a fragmented market. The industry is driven by referrals and word-of-mouth, so what can you do to establish a good reputation if you are just starting out? 

In my experience, many people’s first breaks come from more experienced facilitators either asking rookies to co-facilitate or passing their contact information to clients when more run-of-the-mill, simple jobs are on the table. Taking care of professional relationships is essential in the facilitation world. Ways to start building a network include joining events and communities, and keeping in regular touch with peers you’ve taken a course with.

Cofacilitate

The State of Facilitation report points out that experienced facilitators are more likely to co-facilitate. This may have to do with the higher price tag associated to hiring more than one person, as well as with the simple fact that the more tricky situations you’ve experienced, the more likely you’ll be aware of the power of cofacilitation! 

If you’ve met an experienced facilitator whose style you like, try asking if they ever need a co-pilot. They might ask you to cofacilitate online as a “tech host”, keeping an eye on the chat and making sure all participants feel seen, heard and comfortable with the tech. In doing so, you will get comfortable with the tech yourself! 

In a live workshop, I’ll often ask less experienced co-facilitators to help me with the logistics and, once activities begin, be available to support individual participants if they need anything. An extra assistant in the room can be extremely helpful to “huddle” in breaks and discuss any spur-of-the-moment changes needed, or sit at a particularly rowdy table to help steer the discussion. 

Cofacilitation is the best way to learn facilitation on the job, and is a great relief to experienced folk: if you are a professional facilitator reading this, I urge you to check whether there is some space in your calendar to foster new professionals this way.

Create a portfolio

Creating a portfolio means keeping an orderly record of each workshop, session, event or facilitation gig you’ve been assigned to. If you’ve created the invitations and posters, add those, and if you can, add pictures of the actual event. Creating a portfolio is an important part to becoming a professional facilitator. 

Don’t be one of those people who decide to get accreditation ten years down the line and suddenly discover they’ve never kept track of their projects! The exact way you compose your portfolio depends of course on your individual style. Graphic harvesters will naturally pay more attention to their portfolio than general process facilitators, adding all sorts of visual elements to really make their collection pop. 

Your portfolio should show, at a glance, how much experience you’ve accrued, and in what sorts of settings. I’ve also found a portfolio an invaluable tool to look back to my years of work and catch trends, such as what type of client did I serve, how they found their way to me, whose problem I solved. Using SessionLab’s planner to create a knowledge base from the beginning of your career can help you easily find all your old sessions, adapt them, reuse them, and create customized printouts to add to your facilitation portfolio. 

Find your niche

You may think “facilitation” is a niche profession in and of itself but, actually, as you discover more about it you’ll inevitably find it has niches within niches. Finding your niche in facilitation may have to do with:

• What types of clients you serve. 

Facilitation skills, tools and methods are extremely flexible. Once you know how to use them, you can easily host a session about batteries for electric bicycles one day and another on water scarcity in rural areas the next (true story).

At the same time, having specialized knowledge in a certain industry can definitely improve your understanding of what is going on in the room. Eventually, you are likely to get recommended to other people who work in the same industry you’ve already served. Having a specialization in a certain topic or industry makes it easier to market, and to explain what you do. It answers the question “Ok, you facilitate. But what do you facilitate?”

If you are starting from a background in a particular field or industry, consider approaching potential clients from the same niche, and start from there. 

• What methodologies you use. 

Getting certified in a well-known framework or methodology, such as Design Thinking or Lego Serious Play, can help you get a consistent stream of jobs. It will be clearer to potential clients what you offer, and someone else will be doing part of the marketing for you.

• Where in the world you are.

Location can also be a niche. If you live in a country where languages other than English are spoken, that will be part of your specialization. Facilitators tend to travel a lot, but sometimes clients will look for someone local to the area, e.g.  in order to follow a longer-term process. Being the best professional facilitator in a certain region can help bring clients your way.

What tools will you need to facilitate group discussions?

Here are some of the things you’ll want to budget for to start a facilitation career. Disclaimer: like with any other profession, personal toolkits and tech stacks might get extremely sophisticated, but here I’ve decided to point out a few things you’ll need to begin with.

What is in a facilitator’s (physical) toolbox?

I started facilitating in Italy and in the NGO sector and as such, my background is in low-key, low-tech facilitation. I still rely on hand-drawn posters, and I like to transmit to participants or trainees the sense that meaningful conversations don’t depend on fancy tools.

While this may vary based on the setting, industry and client, but the essential facilitation tools for in-person workshops are:

• Sticky notes of varying sizes and colors. Buy the good brands: the cheap ones tend to get unglued and start fluttering around at a key moment of your brainstorming session;
• Large sheets of paper and rolls of paper tape you’ll use to stick posters to the wall (without ruining the wall);
• Markers. Facilitators can get very specific about their markers, but starting with three or four different colors will get you there. Just check that they don’t bleed through the paper;
• Some way of displaying and communicating the passing of time, whether it’s a bell, an alarm on your phone, a large-sized clock, a gong, or whatever time management device you prefer. 

For remote facilitation, all you really need is a computer, a quiet space to work in, an earset and a good video camera, but your setup is likely to get more advanced as you learn more about what is possible. A second screen is particularly useful in order to view your session from participants’ point of view. 

What is a facilitator’s tech stack? 

Software tools are becoming more and more integrated into facilitation, both online and in real life. In the 2024 State of Facilitation report we’ve called this the era of digitally-assisted facilitation. You can go through the report’s sections on tools for plenty of inspiration in this sense, as well as check out our guide to online tools for workshops and meetings. 

It’s not as easy to define what is in a facilitator’s tech stack as it is to recommend buying stacks of Post-its and boxes of Sharpies. That said, you’ll probably need:

• to get familiar with more than one tool for remote meetings. Which tool to use does not always depend on you, but often on a client’s preference, so make sure you become an advanced user of Zoom, Microsoft Teams (not a facilitator’s favorite, but often a requirement for use in large companies and universities), and Google Meet.
• You can design your sessions on pen and paper, in Microsoft Excel or in a GoogleDoc, but the only tool for session design you’ll find that fits facilitation like a glove is SessionLab. It was designed with facilitators’ needs in mind and will allow you to create sessions in minutes, move activities around without having to recalculate timing, share notes with your collaborators and clients, and more;
• Online whiteboards are a wonderful boost to remote collaboration. Mural and Miro are the market leaders and you should get very comfortable using one, the other, or both!
• Last but not least, you’ll need a software tool to help you collect information from your participants. Mentimeter, Kahoot, or GoogleForms are all possibilities that enable you to show participants quizzes and surveys before, during and after a session.

Tips for facilitating your first session

If you’ve come so far, you are well equipped with information needed to look ahead to the next couple of years in your professional facilitation career. But what about tomorrow, or the day after, when your first session begins? What should you keep in mind then? 

Here are my top 4 tips for facilitating your very first session. And before that: congratulations! We need more facilitators in the world to help create meaningful dialogue that moves groups forward. And the only real way to learn is to jump in and try.

1. Be clear about your role

Calmly and clearly set participants’ expectations. Share that you are beginning along this path and trying new things. Say a few words about why you think facilitation will help them achieve their goals. Do what you can to clarify how you will support participants, and explain why you’ve chosen certain group processes. 

Facilitation is new to a lot of people, and they may project their ideas of “teacher” or “captain” upon you. Explain that your role is to offer them new ways of doing things, not tell them what to do.

2. Use a template

Designing fully realized sessions is a rather advanced skill. Start trying your hand at holding and directing a group by using an existing template. You may need to adapt it to your needs, but at least you’ll be starting with a solid base. We’ve got a rich collection of session templates in SessionLab to help you out, including a customizable flow for workshop sessions you can fill out with content based on the specifics of your situation. 

3. Keep it simple

There are many methods and processes you can learn and introduce to groups. Learning new methodologies is a never-ending process! Don’t get lost in the abundance: the right place to start is with basic, tried-and-true processes that will make a great difference despite their apparent simplicity. A meeting can be transformed by introducing a check-in, a checkout, and a focussed conversation method such as 1-2-4-all or World Café. 

Keeping your structure simple will allow you to fully focus on the participants, practicing active listening and helping them along by reformulating and timekeeping. Keep it simple! 

4. Ask for feedback (and celebrate!) 

We can only grow our skills if we adopt a learner’s mindset. Ask participants to give you feedback at the end of your session. Collecting written feedback after the workshop is over is probably the best way to get honest responses you can then reflect on. 

Don’t just ask what you could have changed: also ask what worked well, what they enjoyed. These are your best features, those you can work on to really define your own style, offering and “facilitation signature”. Reflecting, taking notes and making plans for improvement after every facilitation session should become part of your professional routine.

A final tip: facilitation is a rewarding and exciting profession, but it is by no means easy. Make relaxing, celebrating and recharging after a session part of your routine as well!

Where to go next

Would you like to know the steps required to fully plan a facilitated workshop? Read our guide on Workshop Planning, from the initial idea all the way to reflection and followup. 

Want to learn more about what a facilitator’s challenges and practices are? Go through the data and expert contributions of the 2024 State of Facilitation report. 

Got a question to pose to experienced facilitators? Would you like some advice on how to handle your first facilitation session, or to share ideas and stories from real world settings? Join SessionLab’s facilitation community and ask a question there! 

Ready to try your hand at session design? Sign up for a free account on SessionLab, duplicate a simple template such as the Essential Workshop structure, and customize it to fit your needs! 

We’re dedicated to sharing the benefits of facilitation in the world and increasing the number of people with facilitation skills, so we put together a handy list of the best facilitation courses you can join, remotely or in person.

Boost your career and increase your confidence in leading groups with these hand-picked and vetted facilitation training courses.

Facilitation skills are considered “the best kept leadership secret” (that’s from a Forbes article) and a workplace superpower. Knowing how to design a meeting or session productively, include different voices, ultimately leading groups to shared decisions: these are skills that are essential in today’s complex work environments, where collaboration and buy-in are key. 

In this article we’ll focus on in-depth facilitation training and courses but also touch upon other related topics, such as accreditation and resources such as podcasts and newsletters. Here’s what to expect:

What is facilitation training?

Facilitation is the craft of designing group processes and guiding people through them. To do this, facilitators will employ a set of techniques and best practices that will engage participants and help them achieve their collective goals.

In facilitation training, participants will develop a set of facilitation skills, techniques and best practices that will help them facilitate with confidence. Facilitation training can come in many forms: online, in-person, self-paced courses and more. It can look like a single workshop or training session or an ongoing practice-based qualification that results in professional accreditation.

In most cases, you’ll learn facilitation experientially, with a mix of theory, practice and feedback from an experienced facilitator. Choosing which is right for you depends on your circumstances and career goals. Hopefully, this guide will help you choose facilitation training that is right for you!

How will facilitation training help develop your career?  

A growing number of professionals are making facilitation their main profession, either as freelance facilitators or working in-house to lead workshops for various company departments. That said, facilitation is not only for those who choose to make sticky notes and whiteboards the stuff of their daily life. 

Facilitation skills are invaluable in many situations, such as:

• managing team meetings and workshops;
• improving participation and engagement at events and conferences;
• increasing clarity in group processes, getting everyone on the same page;
• including a diversity of opinions and stakeholders;
• evaluating choices, creating action plans as a group;
• supporting the group in making actual, effective progress toward its goals.

Facilitation is valuable for anyone who leads groups, brings people together to solve problems or wants to collaborate effectively.

It’s especially important for leaders who are responsible for helping their teams work together to achieve their goals and any people who want workshop facilitation to be their main role.

Want to learn more? Read about how to improve your facilitation skills in this guide.

Why should you invest in a facilitation training course? 

It is quite a common pathway to discover facilitation a bit later in your career. You may have gone through more than your fair share of boring and unproductive meetings and want to make them better. Maybe you took part in a design sprint and were intrigued by the participatory methods used. Or you’ve simply seen a facilitator in action and gone “How did they do that? Why did that work?”. 

Based on the results of the State of Facilitation 2024 report, the core skills of facilitation are mostly picked up on the job, through learning-by-doing (69.9%) and observing experienced practitioners at work (40.8%). 

Direct practice, shadowing experts, and sharing tips and tricks with peers are key to testing your abilities as a facilitator and beginning to practice those skills. But what about training courses? Where does one go to learn how to facilitate and even get a form of recognized certification? 

Given the current scarcity of facilitation courses within the formal education system (something I hope will change over time), private training organizations are currently the main source of facilitation education. 

Let’s be clear: you do not need a certification or a course to be a good facilitator. Many experienced professionals out there never got any certification at all. At the same time, going through a course, whether online or in real life, peer-based or self-paced, is an invaluable opportunity to systematize your knowledge, give names, meanings and frameworks to actions you might take intuitively or because you picked them up along the way, and boost your confidence. 

Facilitation certification can also help you build credibility with clients if you are considering a freelance facilitation career, or be an extra asset in your curriculum as you search for your next position. As collaboration needs increase in workplaces around the world, especially (but not exclusively) in remote-first environments, collaboration skills will become more and more valuable.

10 great facilitation training courses 

Without further ado, in no particular order, here are 10 training courses for facilitators we recommend if you are interested in investing your time and energy into learning facilitation.

Facilitator School 

The Facilitator School’s Facilitation Masterclass offers a six-week online experience to learn impactful facilitation skills. It includes self-paced video lessons and live workshops and is peer-based, with a new cohort starting every few months. 

This course works well for busy professionals, as activities are distributed along a relatively long period (six weeks). Each week includes 3 or 4 video lessons to watch in your own time and a 2 hour online participatory workshop with hands on activities and discussions.  Each participant will also lead their own workshop before the course is over, testing their new skills with feedback from the whole group.

Facilitator School staff have clearly given lots of thought on how to reach a global audience, so live classes are held in two different timeslots, friendly for both Asia/Pacific/EU and Europe/Americas.

This course is great for

• Busy professionals;
• Team leaders, managers, and other people who might be expected to lead meetings and teams as part of their job;
• Learning how to facilitate in digital-first, online environments;
• Those who learn best in experiential training, with a cohort of peers.

Facilitator School course price

€1500 to €4000 (+ taxes) 

Do I get certification?

Yes

Liberating Structures Immersion Training

If you are looking for a way to pick up an evergreen set of methods, Liberating Structures is for you. Liberating Structures, developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, are micro-structures for facilitating dialogue that are flexible, adaptable, versatile. They are enough in and of themselves to form the toolkit of a good facilitator. 

A Liberating Structures training is practical, based on trying things out as participants, and then trying out leading them. “Once you’ve seen a Liberating Structure in action and practiced doing it in the workshop, you can use it in any setting.” 

Immersion trainings are 2-day in-person workshops, regularly organized around the world. There is also the opportunity to join an online version, composed of four 3-hour workshops delivered over the span of a month (for more information, this is the website). Over 14% of professional facilitators responding to the State of Facilitation 2024 survey have gone through these trainings, making them the most popular form of facilitation training currently out there. 

This course is great for

• Picking up a reliable set of methods you can apply anywhere;
• Consolidating your skills as facilitator;
• Those who prefer to learn in person;
• Practice, practice, practice.

Liberating Structures Immersion Training price

Varies depending on organizer and location

Do I get certification?

Varies depending on organizer and location.

LEGO Serious Play Certification

One of the most valued certifications out there, combines fun, hands on experience, storytelling and LEGO® bricks! LEGO® Serious Play (LSP) is a well-established methodology pioneered, of course, by LEGO® itself, but now practiced and taught all over the world. 

Depending on your location, you can find individual trainers and organizations offering training and certification in LSP in different locations, mostly in person (for self-explanatory reasons), although you can even get an introduction online. Usually, trainings last 4, intense, days. SERIOUSWORK is the best-known provider in this space but keep an eye out for local opportunities and courses as well. 

Becoming a Lego Serious Play facilitator can be quite the investment, not only in training but also in materials (and you will need to lug suitcases of blocks around) but can also prove incredibly rewarding. It’s a valued form of training, with a growing body of evidence supporting claims of its effectiveness. In these courses you will learn some structures through which to guide participants. At its core, LSP is about using building blocks to make metaphors and stories and sharing them with colleagues and peers, thereby building shared understanding and meaning, as well as planning for change. 

This course is great for

• Professional facilitators, coaches, and consultants wanting to up their game;
• Working (mostly, although not exclusively) in the private sector;
• People determined to make learning and training experiences interactive and playful;
• Lego lovers who’ll be happy to invest in materials!

LEGO Serious Play Certification Price

Varies depending on organizer and location

Do I get certification?

Yes.

Voltage Control

Voltage Control hosts a cohort-based, online certification program to develop facilitation and workshop design skills. The 3-month program is extensive, starting with Facilitation Foundations, which focuses on assigned readings from foundational facilitation texts alongside hands-on application of facilitation skills.

The second module, Facilitation Electives, consists of one-on-one instructor coaching, cohort-partner discussions, and a choice of two self-paced course electives from a library of 20 facilitation courses, such as Workshop Design, Liberating Structures, and Design Thinking Foundations. The final module, Facilitation Capstone, focuses on developing a personal facilitation portfolio by gathering and illustrating examples of how you’ve demonstrated key facilitation skills.

Upon acceptance and enrollment, participants receive a reading learning pack of facilitation books, resources, and tools. The program lasts three months, is carefully curated, and aligns with the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) core competencies (which, by the way, ought to be required reading for anyone contemplating getting into facilitation!)

Check out one of their free Intro to Facilitation workshops to get a better understanding of their method-agnostic, competency-based approach. 

This course is great for

• Team leaders, executives, managers and other professionals with a passion for collaboration in the workplace;
• People who are able to attend live sessions from 11:00AM – 2:00PM US Central Time;
• Getting serious about facilitation.

Voltage Control course pricing

$5000

Do I get certification?

Yes

ICA ToP facilitation courses

Have you ever noticed a huge blue sticky wall in a training or facilitation space? That’s a dead giveaway that a ToP-trained facilitator is in the room. ToP stands for Technology of Participation.

The Institute of Cultural Affairs’ (ICA) methodology was first named Technology of Participation with the publication of the book Winning Through Participation, written by Laura Spencer back in 1989.  The first ICA:UK ToP training course under that name was in 1996, making ToP courses the longest-running in the business, with over 30 years of experience delivering facilitation training worldwide. 

ToP offers a range of courses. The foundational 2-day, in-person ToP Group Facilitation Methods course is available in many countries, but on a regular schedule of public courses in Australia & New Zealand, Canada, Taiwan, UK & USA. This and other ToP courses are also available online from several ICAs (Institutes of Cultural Affairs) in different time zones. 

I’m a great advocate of peer-to-peer experiential learning at meetups, conferences and the like, but for a really in-depth learning experience on a particular topic, method or approach there’s really no substitute for a tried and tested training programme with a recognised expert in the field.

Martin Gilbraith, IAF Certified Professional Facilitator | Master & ICA Certified ToP Facilitator

This course is great for

• People working in public participation, social enterprises and organizational change;
• Learning a lot in a short time span;
• Facilitators wanting to expand their knowledge through one of the many extra courses offered.

ICA ToP facilitation course price

Prices vary greatly from country to country, generally including tiered pricing. A typical 2-day UK course starts at £395.

Do I get a certification?

Most courses offer a Certificate of Completion. Certification as a CTF (Certified ToP Facilitator) is a separate process, rigorously checking your competencies, which can start after training for those interested. 

AJ&Smart

AJ&Smart is an award-winning studio with particular expertise in using Design Sprints. They offer a range of online courses as well as coming to your company in-person if you are looking into training for a whole team. Their starter program is Facilitation Fundamentals, with about 5 hours of self-paced videos to watch, a rich workbook and access to a community of past participants. 

For individuals wanting to seriously train as facilitators, they offer the Workshopper® Master facilitation program. The course itself is fully online, with about 8 hours of videos to watch and a wide range of resources and templates, and includes weekly 1:1 coaching sessions. Here you will find a deeper focus on how to make facilitation a profession, including marketing and career development advice.

Check out their free 1-hour videos to see if this is the right course for you. 

This course is great for

• Joining in your own time, as it’s self-paced;
• Those aiming to become professional facilitators;
• People who have had some practice with facilitation and want to structure and consolidate their knowledge;
• Learning not only how to facilitate but also how to design, and sell, workshops.

AJ&Smart course price

€6000 

Do I get certification?

Yes 

Art of Hosting 

Art of Hosting (and harvesting conversations that matters) is a leadership approach working around the pillars of Hosting Oneself, Hosting Others, and Being Hosted. Participants explore soft skills and leadership abilities around deep listening, connection to self and others, and meaningful conversation. 

Some of the preferred methodologies include Open Space Technology, World Café, and Appreciative Enquiry: methods that have in common a high degree of freedom and autonomy given to participants, so it’s really about being able to create a solid container for great conversations to emerge.

Training is generally provided in the form of three-day course, where participants learn and practice a range of collaborative methods. Practice is empathized, with the training team guiding and encouraging participants to take the lead in hosting different parts of the program. Most trainings are residential, happening around the world (a recent check included locations in the US, Canada, Colombia, Germany, and more).

This course is great for

• Learning the deep foundations of great facilitation;
• Those who like to learn in residential settings and in community;
• Learners who want to get more comfortable with holding complex, emergent, transformative spaces;
• Acquiring the kind of transferable leadership skills you will find yourself using beyond meetings and workshops.

Art of Hosting training price

Varies based on provider and location

Do I get certification?

No, the Art of Hosting is an informal network of practitioners and does not provide forms of accreditation.

XChange

XChange organizes some of the best conferences and events in the world, and their experts put their knowledge at learners’ disposal in online courses that are both heartfelt and scientifically based. 

xchange offers a Conscious Facilitation Masterclass, which is a 1-day immersion into the most practical and powerful elements of the xchange Approach. After completing the 1-day masterclass training, participants have the option to continue the learning journey on a path to certification, as well as the option to join a vibrant membership community of purpose-driven change agents.

Membership with xchange sets you on a path of continuous learning and development, with a variety of opportunities for learning, coaching, practicing your facilitation technique, and connecting with peers.

This course is great for

• Balancing the heart and the head of great facilitation;
• Those who want to know about the scientific data behind facilitation skills;
• Trainers and conference organizers who want to develop a faciltiative approach to learning;
• Continuous learning: participation includes a lot of resources to dig into in your own time;
• Learning a lot in a very short timespan.

XChange 1-day Conscious Facilitation Masterclass training price

$997

Do I get certification?

No, you are “trained” upon completion of the 1-day Conscious Facilitation Masterclass and then have the option to become an xchange certified Guide through a comprehensive certification process that involves learning, applying and engaging with the community to demonstrate your skills.

IIFACE

What if you want to study facilitation but are not comfortable working in English? In this post we’ve focussed on courses for anglophones, as those are the majority of offerings in an international context, but they are far from the only ones! Many local organizations in various countries offer facilitation training in languages other than English. For Spanish, of the main reference points is iiface, instituto de facilitación y cambio, the institute of facilitation and change. 

IIFACe’s training courses are very in-depth, generally delivered in a series of residential modules over weekends during a year. They are in three levels, beginners to advanced, with each level a year long, opportunities to practice and on-the-job training. 

This course is great for

• Spanish speakers;
• A long-term commitment and a transformative life experience lasting one to three years;
• Those who have time during the weekend;
• Learning in peer groups and in residential settings.

IIFACE course price

Varies based on provider and location; generally includes tiered pricing

Do I get certification?

Yes

School of Facilitation

Facilitator and trainer Kirsty Lewis founded the School of Facilitation in 2014 in pursuit of a dream of creating learning-in-community opportunities for freelance facilitation and training professionals. Since then the School has flourished, offering classes, coaching, community “pod” online calls, and a four-month learning pathway called the Flourishing Facilitator Experience.

The program is blended and based in the UK: it includes two residential intensive weekends and a series of online workshops, conversations, masterclasses and courses. 

This course is great for

• Trainers, L&D managers, and creators of learning experiences with an interest in facilitation and participatory learning;
• UK-based people or those willing to travel to the UK;
• Getting serious about fine-tuning your skills and building a more professional practice;
• Learning in community, both online and in person.

Price

£2099 + taxes (early bird price) 

Do I get certification?

No

How to get your existing facilitation skills accredited

Besides training and certification, there is another important pathway to consider on your way to professional facilitation: getting your skills accredited. You may have picked up facilitation abilities informally, by co-facilitating with others or simply on the job, and now feel it’s a pity that you have no formal piece of paper to showcase this. If that sounds like you, you might want to consider accreditation.

Accreditation is a different process from training: the aim is to demonstrate your existing skills to assessors, rather than gain new ones through a learning course. This is usually done by showing a portfolio, undergoing tests and/or interviews, and having an assessor present at one of your sessions. 

The process itself can be an intense and important professional growth experience as you reflect on work done in the past years and improve it to rise to the occasion. Some of the organisations above offer accreditation as a further pathway to pursue after training. This is the case of the community-based Xchange certified Guide and the ICA’s ToP Facilitator Certification.  

The two organisations we will focus on next, on the other hand, focus mainly on accreditation. If you know of others, we’d love to hear about them: add them in the comments section or talk about your experience with accreditation in SessionLab’s community! 

IAF Accreditation programs

The International Association of Facilitators (IAF) doesn’t certify any particular approach, but gives accreditation levels, attesting your range of facilitation knowledge and ability to facilitate. This is coherent with its mission to share the power of facilitation around the world in its many forms and variations.

Leaders, trainers and professionals applying facilitation skills to their jobs and wanting to demonstrate this to clients and employers can apply to be Endorsed™ Facilitators (like myself).

To become an Endorsed™ Facilitator, you need to:

• be an IAF member
• have been facilitating for at least one year 
• demonstrate that you understand the IAF Core Competencies. 

When you apply, you provide information on how you use the competencies in your day-to-day practice and take a multiple-choice online exam to demonstrate your understanding of the competencies. 

IAF assessors review your application and exam results to determine whether you have met the standards to become an IAF Endorsed™ Facilitator. 

The endorsement is given for 4 years. To maintain it, you must remain an IAF member and apply again after 4 years. 

If professional facilitation is your main profession and you want to demonstrate proficiency, IAF accredits CPFs, Certified Professional Facilitators. This refers mainly to people facilitating workshops and sessions (not to trainers, coaches, or team leaders using facilitation in their daily work). The process is thorough, including interviews, role-play, presenting a work portfolio, and having assessors observe how you facilitate a workshop.  

The International Institute for Facilitation

INIFAC, the International Institute for Facilitation, was founded in 2003 to advance the profession and promote mastery in facilitation. It has an extensive accreditation program and a rigorous program testing competencies. 

While IAF focuses on facilitation per se, INIFAC includes accreditation for those applying facilitation to learning and training, as well as a specific accreditation program for virtual-first facilitators. 

INIFAC’s accreditations are:

• Certified Competent Facilitator® and Certified Skilled Facilitator®. This is actually the same program, with different names based on your region of provenance; The Certified Competent Facilitator® is a mark of distinction in the Asia Pacific area, and the Certified Skilled Facilitator® is at the same level of distinction in the Americas and European countries. A candidate for CCF® or CSF® must have facilitated at least 7 sessions with a minimum of five different project sponsors from a minimum of three different organizations.
• Certified Learning Facilitator®. Requirements to become a CLF® are the same as above, but with a focus on training and learning sessions.
• Certified Advanced Virtual Facilitator® Requirements to become a CAVF® are the same as above, but with a focus on online facilitation skills. 

And the advanced Master levels Certified Master Facilitator® (which requires documenting at least 30 relevant facilitated sessions over the three-year period prior to application, of which 15 must be in person) and Certified Master Learning Facilitator®.

Other ways to learn more about facilitation

Besides these top facilitation courses and accreditation programs, there are many other ways to learn about facilitation. You can find short introduction videos online, some offered by the same providers we’ve listed above. 

There are also plenty of free resources available to explore, some of which we’ve included in this guide to some of the best downloadable toolkits.  

Podcasts and newsletters are very popular ways of fitting a bit of learning in your everyday life. If you’re interested in facilitation but not in investing time and money in a full course, read on for podcast and newsletter tips. 

7 podcasts hosted by expert facilitators

Podcasts are a great way to stay updated on trends, new techniques and learn the latest insights about successful workshops and effective collaboration. Here is a pick of 7 of the most popular ones, where you can eavesdrop on discussions and conversations at your convenience.

First Time Facilitator

Leanne Hughes’ long-running First Time Facilitator podcast is a great place to begin. With over 240 episodes, you’ll find inspiration and encouragement that are consistently beginner-friendly. The podcast has a focus on training and learning, bringing a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to creating learning experiences that really work.

Workshops Work

Myriam Hadnes has collected so many in-depth interviews in her essential podcast Workshops Work that she had to have a special map designed just to help listeners orient and choose! Workshop Work has a faithful following among facilitators worldwide and was voted the most-listened to podcast in the State of Facilitation 2024 Report.

It features deep, insightful interviews with experts in meeting design as well as with professionals drawing in their expertise from other fields, such as mediation, marketing and the arts. You can also download scripts and one-page summaries of each conversation.

Facilitating on Purpose

Imagine sitting in a cafe and listening to two facilitator friends talking shop. Beth Cogler-Blom’s podcast Facilitating on Purpose is for anyone who wants the inside scoop on designing and facilitating learning experiences. 

We love it for the host’s infectious enthusiasm: Beth has a real knack for getting authentic insights that are both beginner-friendly and intriguing for those more advanced in their careers.

A Facilitator’s Journey

A Facilitator’s Journey gives a glance into what it’s really like to be a facilitator, with a special focus on the business side of things. 

Kirsty Lewis and her guests cover topics such as pricing, promoting and the day-to-day of running your own facilitation business. Full of important and inspiring ideas to develop your career, especially if you are just starting out as a freelancer. 

Facilitation Lab 

Douglas Ferguson is on a mission to help everyone have better meetings, and understand how important that is, with his Facilitation Lab podcast. He speaks with experts about their various jobs and how they apply facilitation to many industries, sharing real-world advice you can use right away.

Known for being both practical and inspiring, the Facilitation Lab podcast (previously known as Control the Room) is all about making a difference and having an impact, whatever your role. 

There’s a Workshop for That! 

There’s a Workshop for That! is a podcast created to supercharge your facilitation skills. Host Nathy Ravez’s interviews top facilitators, book authors and corporate managers across the globe who share their advice on building workshops for better collaboration.

One of the unique things about this podcast is that Nathy began it when she was herself a rookie of the freelance facilitator world, coming from years of experience inside companies: to tune into the early episodes is to share an authentic learning journey into how to start building a successful freelance business. 

Facilitation Stories

Facilitation Stories is brought to you by the England and Wales IAF chapter. Here you can discover how facilitators ended up in the profession, and how facilitation methods, principles and techniques are used more widely.

Because of its roots in the International Association of Facilitators, you’ll often find episodes exploring how the different local chapters work, full of ideas useful for community organizing and supporting one another as facilitators. 

5 newsletters packed with facilitation tips

Let’s say you prefer reading to listening (or want to do both). Subscribing to facilitation newsletters equals keeping constantly in touch with what is currently important to global community. Here are 5 of the most popular facilitation newsletters you should definitely be getting in your inbox! 

The Quest

The Quest is a much-loved newsletter, written by Gwyn Wansbrough, who shares her experience of facilitating 1000s of hours of online workshops. It’s filled with information for facilitators and those passionate about effective learning design. 

The online workshop is such a popular format these days, it’s certainly worth checking out Gwyn’s newsletter and learning from her what facilitation techniques and models work best online. 

Melting the Ice

Jan Keck’s weekly tips to melt the ice includes ways for you to increase engagement, build trust and foster deep connections – without making people cringe. Many facilitators resist the idea of icebreakers as key to good facilitation: misuse of these fun tools has led to a widespread (incorrect!!) sense that they are useless and embarrassing. 

Jan has leaned into that to debunk the concept and correct course, rebranding them as Ice melters. Ice melters are effective, empowering tools that can help a group get into the right groove for the work ahead. But they must be used wisely! How? Sign up to his newsletter to learn more, and get snippets of wisdom from his upcoming book.

Workshops Work 

In her beautifully written, deeply personal newsletter, Myriam Hadnes shares insights from her life as a professional facilitator and takeaways from conversations and learnings.

The newsletter is also where you will find excerpts and insights from her vast collection of podcast interviews, and announcements about upcoming episodes. After every podcast episode, Myriam generously puts together a 1-pager summary, and has recently reached the milestone of 250! 

IAF newsletter

The IAF (International Association of Facilitators) shares regular facilitation news for both members and non-members. In this newsletter you’ll often find reading recommendations and invitations to online and live events and meetups around the world. 

In recent years, opportunities to learn online through IAF events organized by various chapters have really boomed. By subscribing to the newsletter you’ll be informed of many learning opportunities to join and peek into the lives and discoveries of facilitators world-wide. It’s also the best way to get save-the-dates and advance notice about main events in the yearly facilitation calendar, such as Facilitation Week, Impact Awards, and global conferences. 

SessionLab’s newsletter

Our very own SessionLab newsletter focuses on a different facilitation, training or learning design topic each month. It’s packed full of blog content, ready-to-use workshop agendas and resources to elevate your workshops and meetings!

How SessionLab can help you learn facilitation skills 

Here at SessionLab we believe that anyone working in groups and teams should have a handle on at least the basics of facilitation.

This is not because we think everyone should be a professional facilitator: learning facilitation skills is beneficial in many other ways. First and foremost, it will make you a better group participant, skilled in collaboration, organization and listening. Facilitation is a leadership superpower!

Besides providing facilitators and leaders with software to help them design excellent sessions, we’ve created a range of free materials you can look into to learn more about facilitation skills, what they are and how to develop them further.

Delve into SessionLab’s learning manuals

Download these learning materials and read at your leisure.

• We’ve packaged ideas of activities to help you improve your next meetings in our Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit. Here you will find 12 easy-to-use group activities to open, run, and close your meetings with.
• If you want to create a workshop but are not sure about where to start, read the Complete Guide to Workshop Planning for a thorough step-by-step approach from the first idea to execution.
• Applying facilitative approaches and tools to training will ensure learning sticks and your participants have a memorable experience. To read up about applying facilitation to training design (especially with adult learners), download the Training Design Handbook.

Subscribe to SessionLab’s newsletter

Over 70% of facilitators surveyed for the State of Facilitation report said that staying abreast of changes was very or somewhat challenging for them. With SessionLab’s newsletter we try our best to help with that, sending emails twice a month that are packed with tips, links and opportunities to improve your facilitation game. 

Browse SessionLab’s library of facilitation techniques

Techniques and methods are just one, often the most visible, part of facilitation. That said, the more you facilitate the more you’ll want to have many activities to choose from. In SessionLab’s library, you’ll find over 1300 activities and techniques, complete with instructions and tips from the professional facilitators who compile it. Open up a session plan in SessionLab and easily drag and drop any activity from the library to create an agenda in minutes! 

Get SessionLab’s free email courses delivered to your inbox

From reflecting on what is working well (and what needs improvement) in your workplace to facilitating difficult conversations, learn more about the basics of facilitation and mastering facilitation challenges with our email courses, delivered to your inbox every Mondays and Tuesday. Subscribe from this link. 

Find inspiration in SessionLab’s collection of workshop facilitation templates

Facilitation is best learned by doing or by watching someone at work. In our collection of templates, we’ve distilled learnings into plans you can read through, adapt and be inspired by for your own workshops and training courses. 

For each template, you’ll find an introduction explaining its objective and requirements. From there you can directly open the template as a session in SessionLab’s agenda planner. You’ll see the workshop agenda divided into blocks for each activity, with detailed information, instructions, and facilitation tips guiding you each step of the way. 

Many templates were provided by our friends and partners, making this a great way to learn about the many different styles and applications of facilitation.

Learn from the best in SessionLab’s free community events

SessionLab’s friendly community hosts a calendar of events you can join to explore specific topics related to facilitation and leadership skills. We keep a nice variety of offerings throughout the year, with something for novice and experienced practitioners. 

Sessions are always free, online, and interactive, giving you the opportunity to learn from the best while at the same time building a network of peers. You can also watch recordings (although you’ll miss out on the interactivity!). SessionLab’s community is also a great place to ask questions to fellow facilitators and share stories and experiences.

Read up in SessionLab’s blog

If you found this article, you probably know already, but let’s reiterate: SessionLab’s blog is the place to go for guides and information about many aspects of facilitation and workshop design. Here are some of the content you’ll find there:

• A collection of icebreakers to add to your next event or retreat;
• A practical, in-depth guide to workshop design, from ideation to delivery;
• More specialized guides like this one on hybrid facilitation;
• General introductions of who facilitators are and what they do, and more!  

In closing

We hope this article is sending you on your next step in learning facilitation. If you are just exploring, this could be about subscribing to one (or more!) newsletter or checking out some podcast episodes.

Ready to go deeper? Many of the facilitation training schools listed above offer some free materials to start with, perhaps a video or a pamphlet. Check those out to see if the courses are right for you!

We’ve been purposefully using the word “investment” when discussing facilitation courses. Most of them require a strong commitment, whether financial, in terms of time and effort, or both. They will also deliver life-lasting results and improvements in your collaboration style and level of awareness of what is going on in the room, and how to exercise your influence to get the best possible results from a group of people. 

Best of luck in your facilitation journey, and do let us know in the comments or in our community how it’s going!

On a good day, facilitation can feel like effortless magic, but that is mostly the result of backstage work, foresight, and a lot of careful planning.

Read on to learn a step-by-step approach to breaking the process of planning a workshop into small, manageable chunks. 

The flow starts with the first meeting with a client to define the purposes of a workshop. In other words, we are working on the assumption that the facilitator has already been chosen and hired for a job. 

It’s also possible that you are designing a workshop agenda you have ideated yourself. You have a topic to share with your audience, and potential participants in mind: great! You can still use the same process, although not all steps may be relevant to your case.

How to plan a workshop in four phases

We have divided the process of designing a workshop step-by-step into four sections. This structure is inspired by the insightful design methodology known as Dragon Dreaming, as codified by John Croft. The framework is an invitation to move in a structured way from dreaming to designing, from designing to doing, and from doing to celebrating and learning.

In this workflow, we will go through similar steps, albeit much simplified and adapted to this specific example. If you find this categorization intriguing and you’d like to learn more, here is a page about Dragon Dreaming project design. The methodology originated in Australia, and you can see a wink to its origin in how the design turns counterclockwise! 

Each phase (vision, design, action and learning) is divided into subsections defining specific actions you need to take in planning your workshop. Each also includes a checkpoint with the client. These four meetings, plus a facilitation team meeting to draft the agenda, are described in detail in the accompanying Workshop Planning Template.

In the template, you will find ideas and inspiration for five one-hour meetings in which to:

• draw out the overall vision and desired outcomes;
• define a draft schedule;
• get buy-in for the workshop agenda;
• check-in for a briefing before the actual workshop;
• run a retrospective after the event is over.

I see this process as a dance between working alone and co-designing with a client. In this dance, two different ways of working interact, from being alone at the desk surrounded by sticky notes, to talking things over and getting feedback, into a new iteration of the design, and so on. Successful workshops all start, as most things do, with a vision, and a conversation. Let’s take the first step! 

Phase 1 – Vision

Every project begins as an idea in somebody’s mind, which really starts to take shape once it’s shared with someone else. In the first part of the process, we cover how to lead conversations that will move the idea from the abstract to a more concrete realm.

This process starts with a kick-off meeting attended by the facilitator, the client and, if applicable, other members of the team. To help you set it up, we have prepared a dedicated template complete with a workshop structure you can use to collect all the information from this visioning stage!

What are the desired outcomes of the workshop? Who will be the participants or what is your target audience? Once you have some initial answers to these questions, you can use them to shape a concept note, sign agreements, contracts and/or an MoU (memorandum of understanding). 

Sharing intentions

According to the State of Facilitation report, a majority of facilitators find negotiating with clients and stakeholders quite the challenge. In the survey on which the report is based, we asked over 1000 professionals what was hard for them in the previous year.

While the top challenge reported was “keeping up with the trends”, a series of matters more related to difficulties negotiating, designing and getting buy-in from stakeholders emerged as well. We hope the following workshop planning tips can help you overcome such obstacles.

Designing based on the “why” is a necessary premise to prepare workshops that will prove meaningful to participants and clients. Often, though, this “why” is not entirely clear from the get-go. A skilled facilitator will use a range of communication skills such as probing questions, active listening, and appreciative inquiry to clarify intentions.

In most cases, it’s a matter of slowing the client down, and gently inquiring into their motivations. Run a mini-workshop with your client and transparently share what you are looking for. Time spent on this now will save time and resources by minimizing the risk of misunderstandings and re-writes later!

There are four key elements I check for when looking for desired outcomes with the client at this very early stage:

• Non-negotiables. These are the boundaries for your design, the things that are set and cannot be changed. This might be, for example, the duration of the workshop, the location, or the list of participants.
• Tangible outcomes (aka deliverables). What needs to be produced, concretely, by the end of the workshop? Is it an action plan? A set of decisions? A report? Try to get as many details as possible on this requirement.
  
  If this point is not initially clear, invite your client to explore the future with their foresight and imagination: at the end of the workshop, what do they want to have that was not there before the start?
• Intangible outcomes. What intentions are connected to the workshop in the immaterial world of communications, connections and emotions? Mark down the keywords you hear your client use. Is it a matter of increasing networking opportunities and connections? Deepening trust? These “soft” outcomes can inspire and direct your choices of activities, setting and style.
• Levels of participation. If you are planning a workshop rather than a training event, I have found it very useful to introduce the concept of the ladder of participation to clients, early on in the design stage (here is a version relating to citizen engagement).
  
  This involves probing how much power is allocated to participants into shaping future choices. Will proposals selected by participants in your workshop be adopted directly? Is this a consultation process someone else will turn into a decision later? Or, perhaps, the workshop is meant to inform and get buy-in on choices that have already been made?
  
  All these scenarios are possible and valid, but it’s important to know which one your workshop falls into, so as to minimize the risk of disappointment or confusion.

Once you have collected this information, you probably have an idea of where you want your workshop to focus. All you need now is to figure out who is it for before drafting a concept note and initial agenda.

Defining the target audience

Once you have clarity about the desired outcomes, it’s time to focus on your hypothetical participants and your target audience. You may already have a list provided by the client, or it may be a completely open invitation. In any case, it’s a good idea to spend some time focussing, after the “why”, on the important question: “who?”

Things that can be useful to consider doing at this stage, depending on the specific situation, include:

• Creating a “persona” for the workshop. Who will benefit? What are their needs, pain points, interests? Why will they come? This work will initially be based on your assumptions only, but it could lead to an exchange of information with your client to learn more. Here is a canvas from MediaLAB Amsterdam that can help you create a persona for your event.

• Having interviews with potential participants that match your target audience to collect more information on their wants, needs and expectations. If you are able to contact participants before the workshop, aim to talk to a few. If key decision-makers will be in the room, it’s definitely a good idea to ask for a half-hour chat with them! 

Start by clarifying that you are talking to a few people in order to better prepare your workshop. Next, kick-start your exploration by asking them what their motivation for attending the workshop is. Listen carefully and take notes! It’s good practice to have a list of questions that will be the same for all your interviewees, but also let the conversation flow naturally. 

End the conversation by asking your interviewee whether they know of someone who should definitely be at the workshop, and add them to the list of potential invites!If time does not allow for 1:1 interviews, you can also consider sending your questions out via email.

Finally, check back in with the client to ensure they have considered who should be there and whether any important stakeholders or potential workshop participants are being overlooked. 

In my personal practice, I do hold a commitment to widening representation and will often reach out to my clients with questions, for example, on gender balance or including underrepresented groups. Can we get more women’s voices in a conversation about the future of logistics and mobility? (The answer turned out to be yes!). In this urban planning process, will someone be speaking with the interests of elderly citizens in mind? And what about the children’s?

At this stage, it’s also important to start making notes of any special needs. Does your persona include, for example, families with small children? Or people with mobility concerns? These considerations have a bearing on such key planning elements as your choice of venue, location, and timing. Successful workshops are those in which the needs of target attendees are considered and steps are taken to ensure participants can take part.

Drafting the initial concept 

Once you know the “why” and something around the “who” of a workshop, it’s time to start designing the “what”.

What is needed at first is some clarity as to the main points of the agenda, not a detailed run-through. The client will probably have more feedback once things start to look concrete, and it’s not particularly fun to have to revisit the entire thing and do work twice. That is why I have found it good practice to keep the agenda still quite open at this stage.

An initial concept draft for a successful workshop should contain:

• A summary of the desired outcomes;
• A list of benefits for participants (what are their pain points that this workshop will solve?);
• A list of learning/key objectives;
• A description of the main activities or building blocks of the workshop.

At this point, you’ll need to circle back to your client, share the draft with them and ask for feedback. In my experience, it’s a good idea to approach this step lightly, with curiosity, knowing you have done your homework but ready if necessary to change your entire concept around and pivot to something different.

To learn more about how to create an initial concept draft, find inspiration from what trainers do for course outline creation: we’ve made a summary in this guide.

Signing agreements

By the end of the vision phase, facilitators and clients should share a feeling of commitment and alignment. This is made visible and concrete through signing agreements, contracts and/or a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

What exactly these contain varies greatly depending on circumstances and location, but here is a useful summary, complete with template examples of what your MoU might look like, from Malia Josephine over at the startup Facilitation Jobs. 

Phase 2 – Design

So now you have a draft outline of the workshop and an idea of who will participate. The next section is all about the nitty-gritty details of planning. Think of any other event, such as a family gathering or a wedding: there are a lot of things to consider so that everything will be ready when attendees arrive in the space you have designed and set up for them. It can be a very creative phase, if a bit solitary at times for the workshop leader! 

In the design stage, we are aiming to answer the question: how will this happen? This includes choosing dates and venues, drafting an agenda, creating a communication plan so that your workshop attendees will get the invite and join, populating a participant list, and refining your draft agenda into a detailed script. 

Establishing time and place

A workshop begins to feel like it’s really going to happen once the date and location are decided upon.

Whether you are scouting for a location yourself or not, you still need to clarify and communicate a list of requirements clearly. Don’t give anything for granted! List any needs such as accessibility, type of space, and equipment such as tables or presentation equipment. No location is going to be perfect, but the clearer your request, the closer to ideal you might get. 

If you’re running a virtual workshop, you still need to put it in the calendar and arrange for a virtual space to hold it in, such as a Zoom account and a whiteboard space. And if it’s hybrid, you’ll need to do both: scout for a location (with great wifi and acoustics, here you can read more about why that’s important) and set up online resources as well. If you don’t know yet what kind of room setup you will need, take a look at our detailed guide here.

Once the location has been chosen and booked, make sure you have an understanding with the location manager of how your session will work and what they can expect.

Will you be using masking tape to hang posters on the wall? Is that ok? How early do you expect to be at the location, and who will be there to open the doors? Will you need breakout spaces for smaller groups to work in? Will participants be milling around using outside spaces, which, and when? What about wifi use, passwords, and other tech needs? 

Having a persona in mind might help establish a schedule. Is this a personal development workshop that people sign up for as individuals (that will probably mean running it in the evening or on weekends?) Or is it going on at the workplace? When are employees free to attend, and what will not clash with previous engagements? Will it be a one-off thing or a series? Successful workshops take all this into account to ensure workshop participants can actually be there!

If you are working on a series of meetings for participatory planning and would like to encourage a diverse attendance, it could be a good idea to switch times and dates around quite often, so that people with different jobs and schedules can fit at least one meeting in. And get a babysitting service, or have someone who works with youth set up a related workshop with the young ones.

Drafting the workshop agenda 

So now the word is out, and there is probably some time to wait before the workshop kick-off. This is the moment to sit down with yourself and work on the facilitation design. For many trainers and facilitators, this is a favorite part of the process.

Here is where we create a detailed schedule, choose activities and methods and assemble them into a coherent flow. You’ll seek to create a workflow that balances group discussions, experiential activities and different learning styles in order to meet your workshop’s purpose. Proper planning and a structured process is a proven way of turning a workshop idea into a reality.

The actual process of creating a draft agenda is quite personal. You may be working on it completely alone (hopefully, with a hot or cold beverage of your choice, and plenty of time!) or with a co-facilitator.

Results from the State of Facilitation report indicate that facilitators like to work directly with online tools, such as SessionLab, others, me included, prefer to start with pen and paper… or by taking voice notes while taking a walk!

However you approach the matter, you are likely to do all of these things (and more!), while not necessarily in this order:

• Create a timeline, showing when your workshop starts, ends, and how long each section will last;
• Check your notes from meeting with the client, refer back to desired outcomes both tangible and intangible;
• Refer back to your interviews with participants, or any other information you may have collected from them, to pinpoint main needs and expectations;
• Brainstorm activities you believe will meet the client’s and the participants’ needs;
• Pick among those activities: which are “must-haves” and which are optional?
• Assess how much time each activity will take, and add a bit of buffer to account for the unexpected;
• Check that your activities are diverse enough to include people with different styles and approaches (e.g. by having both individual and group activities);
• Add essential opening and closing activities such as icebreakers and introductions at the beginning and feedback and drawing conclusions at the end
• Arrange them in a timeline;

And whatever you do, don’t forget to schedule some breaks! A successful workshop ensures that the workshop facilitator and all participants are able to participate and maintain their energy levels will learning new skills.

A successful workshop is one with a clear structure that supports the learning process. With the Session Planner, you can easily drag and drop your content blocks to quickly build an effective flow.

Start by creating a skeleton of each item in the workshop agenda. What time does the workshop start? End? How about lunch breaks? What is the main activity I want to place at the heart of things? Next, I can add additional content once I feel confident in the flow. SessionLab makes it easy to eventually shuffle things around as the plan changes.

Refining the agenda

Once you have a solid agenda, it’s time once more to check in with the client. Run through the agenda together, checking that you share an understanding of what is going to happen, and making any needed tweaks and changes as you go. I always aim to share my reasoning with clients and share tidbits of facilitation along the way. 

If you’re using SessionLab, you can invite clients and stakeholders directly to your agenda so you discuss and co-create in real-time or asynchronously. Collaborating in one-place can really help ensure your workshop preparation is smooth and that your session will meet your goals.

Refining the agenda is the subject of the third client/facilitator meeting detailed in the template that goes with this piece. The first thing to do is restate the high-level purpose and objectives of the workshop, before going into a review of details. This process encourages clarity and alignment, as well as enabling the facilitator to check whether the proposed agenda is fit for purpose. 

This is also the stage in which, if I am facilitating a group discussions on a topic I am not familiar with, I’ll be doing research into that topic. Opinions about how knowledgeable, if at all, a facilitator should be about the topic under discussion vary greatly. Personally, my attention is on the dynamics of their conversation rather than on the content. Because of this, I don’t mind working with groups or companies who are talking about something I am not informed about. 

At the same time, I find it useful to have at least a beginner’s understanding of the discussion. To enable this, I will ask clients to send me some papers or links to study. Mainly, I will be looking for jargon and terminology: I want to have at least a sense of what people are talking about and what terms to use myself. I also try and get a sense of what in the field is clear, and what is contested or up for debate.

Research can lead to changes to the agenda: in a recent workshop I chaired, reading some documentation led me to assume that terminology being used in the field was still not well-defined. Different stakeholders were using different terms to indicate the same things, or the same term to indicate different things!

I checked in with the client to verify if this was indeed the case and we decided to add a section discussing terminology at the beginning of the workshop. We did not aim to settle the argument once and for all, but rather to share with participants the current state of the art in this particular industry and agree on what terms we would use for the duration of the workshop. 

This is also a great time to reconsider the implications of your setting. If you’re running a virtual workshop, how will you encourage participants to take part and explore ideas in such an environment?

Creating a communications plan 

Whether you are opening the workshop for participants to enroll or whether it’s the host preparing a list of attendees, it’s likely someone will be working to create a buzz around the event.

Often this is not handled by the facilitator directly but rather by a communication agency or office. That said, do your part by preparing material for dissemination and helping make sure the news reaches the right ears.

If you are not doing communication and enrollment yourself, avoid missteps (such as the advertising sending a message that is not aligned with your intention and design) by preparing such a brief well in advance.

A basic communication plan for your workshop should include:

• How will people find out about the workshop? Where will it be advertised? Are there networks, groups or individuals that should be reached out to? 
• What should people know about the workshop in advance? Create a one or two-sentence description of the workshop to go out in communication channels and invitations. What is the workshop’s unique value? How can you entice people to be excited to join?
• How will people enroll in the workshop? And how can they find out more? Who should they contact to register, is it you, or the client, or should you set up an automatic registration service (such as Eventbrite)? What information do you need to collect upon registration? Do participants need to sign authorizations (e.g. for audio-video use)? Will they get a confirmation email? Automatically or through you/the client?

Establishing who will be there  (team and participants)

Many hands make light work: now that you have your detailed agenda or script set out, you should have a clear sense of whether other people are needed to make it work. Will you need a tech host? An assistant to help with the practicalities? A video-maker? Photographer? Visual practitioner?  If you need to assemble a team, it makes sense to onboard them once you know the agenda and tasks they will take on.

The other aspect of establishing who will be there is having a final (or “almost final”… there are usually last-minute surprises!) participant list. Registration can also be an interesting opportunity to collect information on your workshop attendees that might inspire some final details of the design.

When registering participants for a short (3-hour) leadership workshop for the international organization C40, besides asking for basic information such as names and emails, I added three optional questions concerning people’s motivation for joining, interesting initiatives they might like to share, and a blank space for “any other communications”.

This process was useful for me to start to get a sense of who was going to be in the room and adapt my choices and language to the audience. Furthermore, these questions can kick-start the workshop long before it begins by asking participants to start reflecting on a certain topic.

Phase 3 – Running the workshop!

As the moment of running a workshop draws closer, there are some tasks to do that are very practical, having to do with implementing what has, up to now, existed in words only.

This is the phase for getting things done: assembling materials, briefing your team and any speakers, taking care of your inner work and preparation and then, in a leap of faith, trusting that all you’ve done is enough, finally doing away with plans, and going with the flow! 

Running workshops can be tough work, so in this section we’ve collected some tips for managing workshop attendees (and yourself) that should help running the workshop easier!

Assembling materials

Shopping time! The stationery shop is like a second home to most facilitators: it’s time to get your gear together and fill up boxes of sticky notes, posters, and marker pens. Now things are getting real! (And if you used SessionLab to plan your session, you’ll find a handy list of materials consolidated on the information page!)

As the date of the workshop approaches, make sure you have all the materials you need ready at hand. This might include your presentations, virtual whiteboards, or physical goodies. I have found myself roaming Rome at dawn to get photocopies of materials in a neighborhood with no such services. Not fun! 

I often wonder how important is it to give participants printed handouts. On the one hand, let’s admit it, such materials don’t often get read. Printing is a waste of energy and paper and my sustainable-minded self would rather avoid it. 

On the other hand, printed materials might be a useful reference a long time after the workshop is over, and many people like to have something physical to hold onto and take notes on. You can also consider the option of having digital-format handouts to send to everyone before or after the workshop. 

Briefing team and speakers 

A few days before the workshop, set a briefing call with the client, your team and, if applicable, speakers or other guests. I have sometimes avoided doing this for the sake of efficiency, and usually regretted it. Even though it seems like everything is clear and smooth, by talking a workshop through, even in a brief 30 min meeting, something might emerge that needs attention.

If you have external speakers joining, e.g. for a keynote or presentation, remember they have not dedicated the amount of time and attention to this event that you have! Brief them on the intention behind the workshop and on the participants in the room, and discuss what will happen before and after their speech. As your star guests, they should feel welcome and well prepared. This will improve alignment and the overall experience for participants.

When running a workshop with a team, it’s very important to know who will take care of what. Take the time to clearly define roles and responsibilities and add to the script the names of the people who will be, for example, presenting or tech hosting at a given time.

You might also have pre-workshop communication you want to send out to participants, perhaps to remind them of logistics or do some prep work. Always include a way to contact you (or someone from your team) if something happens at the last minute! 

Personal energy management

Once all the design and preparation are done, so much rests on the facilitator’s personal stance and attention. Here are some examples of things facilitators I know, or myself, do in terms of personal energy management:

• No work the day before and/or after an important event;
• Meditation and focussing activities;
• Spending time in nature, taking walks;
• Coaching session with trusted colleagues or a professional coach;
• Taking time to reflect on possible biases and on personal intentions. 

What do you do to prepare yourself before a workshop? Do you take time and space before the start to tend to your own needs? We’ve also been sharing this conversation in SessionLab’s community space: join us here. 

Running a workshop: going with the flow

Step by step, you have now reached this exceptional threshold. People have assembled in a physical or online space, which is equipped with all they need to learn and grow together. The workshop is about to begin! 

This is what all the preparation work was for: take a deep breath and delve into the agenda. Skilled facilitators know how to read the room, trust their instincts, and stick by the plan, or change it, depending on what is needed in the moment, here and now. 

Phase 4 – Learn

The workshop may be over but the work is not! Learning, celebrating and reflecting should take just as much of your time, energy and commitment as any one of the other phases. This is the step where we truly grow and become, with time and experience, wise and excellent facilitators!

In this learning phase, we aim to close a cycle mirroring how it was opened. This means continuing a dialogue with our client and making time to think back together. Such reflections are too often swept aside in the hustle of business cycles. Yet, the more space we can make for them, the better.

As we learn together, we consolidate trust and strengthen partnerships. Furthermore, reflecting and celebrating builds momentum for the next workshop cycle, which is often just around the corner! 

After the end of the workshop: reporting

Agreements taken with your client might include your contribution to drafting a final report. And even if they don’t, it’s still a great idea, for your own records, to take some time to look back and write up a summary of what happened. It will be invaluable in time, e.g. when two years down the line a client calls you back to know: “Could you do that workshop again?” “What made this a successful workshop and what would you change in any future workshops?”

A workshop report generally includes two main parts: one is about information, the other is focussed on learnings.

Report Part 1  – information on the workshop

The first is a collection of data about the workshop: when and where was the workshop held? How many people attended? What was the schedule? 

• Workshop concept 
• Agenda (you can use SessionLab to include a handy printout of the session agenda!)
• Data on attendees (e.g. how many people attended, and whatever data about them is relevant and can be shared)
• Pictures from the event

Report Part 2 – learnings from the workshop

The second part of the workshop report is more subjective. This is the place in which to include reflections on how it went, a summary of key conversations and discussions, recommendations, notes on methodology

• Reflections on the methodologies chosen
• Facilitator’s notes and observations
• Feedback received
• Key recommendations or decisions taken. 

Following-up

Presenting a report, and opening it for final revisions, is a great excuse to set up that precious follow-up meeting with your client. 

Reserve a chunk of time to look back at your work together and reflect: what went well? What would you change next time? This is a time for constructive feedback, expressing appreciation, and really taking care of the relationship. You can find some inspiration on what to include in such a meeting in the last part of our Planning a Workshop template. 

Besides following up with your client, you also may have some follow-up actions to take towards participants. Here are some ideas of what that may include:

• Sending certificates of attendance with the number of hours spent at the workshop and the main topics covered;
• Sending lists of extra materials, bibliographies, and resources;
• Collecting feedback through a questionnaire;
• Inviting people to subscribe to your mailing list, follow you on social media, or in any case providing ways for them to stay in touch. 

And of course, if you haven’t done it yet, it’s also time to do that bit of life admin and send an invoice! 

Collecting learnings

The follow-up and reporting steps are mostly outward-facing, that is, you are writing for others. While you do that, probably some ideas and learnings will emerge that are about your work and practice. A collection of personal learnings can be the outcome of your own reflection or, if you are part of a community of practice or professional development program, of time spent debriefing the workshop with your peers, coach, or mentor.

I don’t always have as much time as I would like to properly debrief and collect learnings. At the very least, I take 15 minutes to think through this quick “Regret, Celebrate, Learn” process I learned from the Mediate your Life program. To do that, I quickly jot down some notes or a mental map in response to the following three questions:

• Regret – what happened at the workshop that I regret, am worried or sad about? How did I feel about that? Do I know why I did it (what needs was I trying to satisfy?) 
• Celebrate – what happened at the workshop that I really celebrate and am glad about? How did that feel? What needs of mine were met? 
• Learn – with those things in mind, are there any learning points I want to draw and remember? 

I might, for example, regret answering a participant’s question rather brusquely, and realize I did that because I was feeling rushed for time. At the same time, I might celebrate that I did take that person aside to check in with them during the break. This may lead me to remind myself to invite people who have off-topic questions to “park” them on a poster to answer at a later time. 

You may want to add some notes next to certain tools or methodologies you used: most workshops present an opportunity to do something slightly different next time. If you are using SessionLab, you can add these to a certain activity’s card, so you’ll find them waiting for you next time you pick the same method from your personal library. 

Celebrating

Celebrating can mean different things to different people. If I am traveling to/from the workshop, I consider that time spent on the train on my way back, taking notes on my diary, part of celebration. 

Plenty of other actions might help you feel like the circle is closed: taking a relaxing break, going out for dinner with your team members, buying yourself a little gift… whatever helps you keep your energy level high and integrate the experience into the flow of your life.

Processing your reflections and giving them some time to settle is likely to lead straight to the next great idea. How about we took this learning from this workshop and did that with it? Time to start taking notes, because these thoughts are the sign that a new cycle of ideation is about to begin! 

Processing your reflections and giving them some time to settle is likely to lead straight to the next great idea.

In closing 

When I asked our in-house designer to come up with the illustration on the top of this article, it felt very appropriate to summarize the complicated process of designing a workshop into a single, perfect circle.

Now that it’s done, I realize it’s really not a circle at all, because once all the work is complete nobody, neither client nor facilitator nor participants, is in the same place they began from. The process of designing a workshop is actually like a spiral, that widens and opens each time we go around.

By the end of all these steps, everyone will have changed in some way. Relationships will have formed, new ideas defined, and lessons learned.

At the start of the spiral, there is only an idea, which becomes a design as it is shared, consolidated and refined. The facilitator’s job is to turn it into an agenda, and go through all these steps, alone or with a team, to make it happen.

By learning from all that took place, the flow will, in time, become more natural, fluid, almost second nature. My hope in setting it down in this piece is that it will help you along the journey.

How to run a workshop (4 quick tips)

Are you preparing to debut as a facilitator, trainer, or workshop guide in some capacity? Maybe you’re a team leader who’d like to try out more collaborative methods but don’t know where to start?

In this guide, we’ve gone through a step-by-step process for the complete flow of workshop planning. We hope it’s all useful stuff for you to keep in mind. But if you just need a quick start guide, here’s a cheat sheet of 4 things you need to do to run your first workshop.

• Be clear about your objective and intention. Every choice expert facilitators make when designing a workshop is centered around the established purpose of the event. Clarify this for yourself, write it on top of your plan, and let participants know.
• Have an agenda. Set out clear timings for beginning, ending, breaks and activities. Start designing from a tried-and-true essential workshop template to speed up your work.
• Make it interactive. Add activities to your agenda to make sure participants have different ways to make their voices heard. If you only know one method, make it 1-2-4-all: it is easy to learn, easy to give instructions for, and allows people to quickly process concepts and start building consensus.
• Collect feedback. However it goes, all workshops are learning opportunities. Ask participants to tell you what they enjoyed (and build on that) and what didn’t work so well (and you might want to change). And get ready to do it again!

What’s next

Want to see an entire workshop journey in action and get help in putting together a water-tight agenda? Explore our workshop planning template to go through a proven agenda design process that will help you dazzle potential attendees.

Looking for ideas and inspiration on what workshops could achieve for you? Read our guide on what is a workshop, check out real-world template examples, or find individual activities in SessionLab’s extensive library of methods.

Does this process describe how you have been designing your workshops? Did it give you new ideas? Leave a note in the comments, and join the discussion in our Community!

In a business, this approach is often employed in a training session where employees learn new skills or work on professional development. But how do you ensure your training is effective? In this guide, we’ll explore how to create an effective training session plan and run engaging training sessions.

As team leader, project manager, or consultant, you may often be asked to put on the trainer’s hat and upskill a team in some new concept or process. 

In practice, designing a training session includes setting intentions and understanding what the practical application of learning will be in the daily lives of the people you are training.

I’ve often had the luxury of being the facilitator for training sessions, supporting the group’s learning journey while expert content providers provided specialized information on key topics.

In this article, I’ve put together some lessons I’ve picked up along the way about designing great learning experiences: tips, tricks, and workflows that will help you create unforgettable training session plans, whatever your topic.

We will be looking into:

The first thing you need to do when designing a new training course is draft a general outline of your training session plan. This should include your objectives, an agenda of activities and timings, a task list, and a list of resources. Let’s see, in more detail, what all of that entails. 

What is a Training Session?

A training session is a structured gathering where people are brought together to develop their knowledge and skills under the instruction of an experienced trainer.

Often, training sessions are initiated as a result of a training needs assessment that has identified a skills gap or a need to improve performance. New employees may undertake training sessions as part of the onboarding process or to learn new skills that are central to their role.

Training sessions tend to include space for learners to see a demonstration of new skills, practice those skills, receive feedback and guidance and then be assessed on their ability to use those new skills.

Training sessions can be delivered in a variety of formats, ranging from one-off sessions, to virtual training, workshops and online courses. Instructor-led training tends to be delivered live to a cohort of trainees, while eLearning is it’s self-paced cousin.

Choosing the format of your training session should be based on the needs of your team, your training goals, and the skills or knowledge being taught.

Whatever the nature of your program, a successful training session will always begin the same way: with a structured training session plan.

What is a Training Session Plan?

A training session plan is a structured and organized document that outlines the framework and details of a training program or session. It’s a roadmap for trainers and facilitators, helping them design and deliver effective learning experiences. A well-crafted training session plan ensures that learning objectives are met, participants are engaged, and the training session is both informative and interactive.

Key components of a successful training session plan typically include:

• Objectives: Clearly defined learning goals that specify what participants should know or be able to do by the end of the training session.
• Agenda: A detailed schedule of activities, topics, and the timing of each segment within the session. Depending on your style, you might even include a script. If collaborating with other trainers, it can also be useful to delineate who is running which section and who is supporting (see our co-facilitation guide for more advice on this).
• Materials: Any training material, resources, and tools required for the session, such as presentations, handouts, workbooks, or multimedia aids. In virtual sessions, this can also include links to resources you may share during the training. These are great to add to your agenda so everything you need is in one place. 
• Follow-up: Plans for gathering feedback from participants and assessing the overall success of the training session. This might include choosing a survey tool, having a paper exit form, or having an activity planned to facilitate this. 

A training session plan is a valuable tool for trainers, educators, and anyone responsible for imparting knowledge or skills to others. It provides structure and coherence to the training process, helping to achieve specific learning outcomes and create a positive and impactful learning experience.

In SessionLab, you can build your training session plan in minutes by dragging and dropping your training content into place. Add instruction, materials, and clear timing to complete your agenda and refine the ideal learning experience. 

When it comes to delivering your training sessions, you can export a customized PDF to share with your participants and co-trainers. Holding your training session online? Share an online training agenda so your learners can see what’s coming and follow along too! 

Creating Effective Training Sessions in 8 Steps

Having a clear, visually attractive session plan is key to getting clients and stakeholders on board. What began as a mere idea is now turned into a detailed plan.

Having it all mapped out allows you to clearly communicate your intentions, show how you will reach your client or team’s objectives, collect feedback and make decisions about any changes. 

When I’m creating a training plan, the first thing I do is write out the training objective. I’ll then jot down a few ideas of activities I’d like to run.

Next, I’ll open a new agenda (or an old one, if I am modifying an existing template) and set start and end times, so I’m clear about how much time I actually will have with my participants.

While every trainer has their own style and approach to creating a lesson outline, the process of planning a training session can be broken down into 8 simple steps:

Step 1: Set Learning Objectives

Before a training course begins, it probably is just a vague need in the mind of a team leader or client. To turn it into reality, the first thing to do is clarify what exactly that need is. What new skills need to be shared? Is it about sharing information, or learning to do something practical?

This sort of question can lead you (and your team) to define the learning objectives for the training course.

Learning objectives are typically two or three short sentences that describe the condition participants should have reached by the end of the training. It’s common to state these in the present tense. Typical examples sound something like this:

• [At the end of the training] participants are able to articulate and explain the difference between concepts A, B and C;
• And/or are able to apply process D in real-world situations.

To further refine and clarify these objectives you may need to set up interviews with relevant parties, and even, if possible, with prospective participants. 

It’s worth spending some time refining each learning objective. These short sentences can help guide all the choices to come. If you’re following Gagne’s instructional design principles, you’ll know all about how often you’ll refer back to your learning objectives.

If at a later point in the design process, you find yourself undecided among different possible activities, going back to the learning objective will help you make choices in such a way that prioritizes keeping the design coherent. 

Step 2: Use a Framework

When it comes to workshops designed to support learning, the best-known framework to support design is probably Kolb’s learning cycle. Originally outlined in 1984, this model of Experiential Learning describes four stages that support practical, hands-on education. 

Kolb’s learning cycle is widely used in training design, especially when it comes to working with adult learners. Simply go through it step-by-step and include activities for each of the four parts of this cycle.

• Concrete experience, with room for practical, experiential activities;
• Reflective observation: a time to debrief, form opinions on what the exercise revealed, and discuss them with others;
• Abstract conceptualization, when it’s up to the trainer to offer models, theories and frameworks conducive to deeper understanding and, lastly
• Active experimentation, in which participants are guided to begin applying new learnings to real-world situations, for example with a role play or simulation.

You can see a general example of how these activities come together in a workshop in this ready-made template for a training session.

Using SessionLab, open this Essential Training Session template and simply drag-and-drop your additional content onto it, radically speeding up your design process! 

While I definitely recommend basing your training plan designs on Kolb’s learning cycle, it is not the only framework out there. When working on environmental topics, I often rely on Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects “Spiral”, which includes four steps going from Starting with Gratitude to Taking Action. 

For short sessions, even something as simple as “Why/How/What” can help create clarity. Start with an activity to discuss why a new tool or process is needed (Why), include a presentation to illustrate the new process (How) and wrap it up with a practical use case (What).

Whatever your preferred framework, the takeaway of this section should be that basing your training upon a general structure is the antidote to chaotic, unfocussed training experiences. Using such a high-level framework will help you keep it coherent and ensure a smooth learning experience for your participants. 

At this time, you might also start to outline your general course flow in the form of a course outline that nails down the main blocks of course content in line with your objectives.

Explore this guide on how to create a course outline and use the accompanying template to quickly create a skeleton structure for your course.

Step 3: Create an Opening Section

Adult education principles stress the importance of preparing trainees for learning. Before we can open up to new learning, we need to feel safe in our environment, have a sense of who the other people in the room are, and understand what is expected of us as well as the practical purpose of the session. Those are quite a lot of boxes to tick in what is generally a rather short opening slot!

The best trainers out there are skilled in participatory education and have a lot in common with facilitators (for more on the commonalities between teachers and facilitators, you can check out our article on what teachers can learn from facilitation practices). Good trainers and good facilitators, generally speaking, will take a solid chunk of time, let’s say the first 30 or 45 minutes of a session, for introductory activities that help set the stage. 

Far from being a waste of time, these opening sections serve several purposes. Practical information such as going through the agenda or describing certain features of the location (such as where to find drinks, for example) are helpful in that they allow attendees to familiarise themselves with the situation and relax.

Rounds of introductions or getting-to-know-you activities are particularly important. In the words of George Lakey, author of my go-to book for training tips, Facilitating Group Learning, ‘“Who am I in this group?” is the participant’s preoccupying question as any learning group convenes, and there’s limited capacity for learning anything else until this question is answered’. 

As you prepare your training plan, consider what activities you will run at the opening, including making space to describe the general aims for the day and giving time for attendees to reflect on their intentions. Use an agenda planner to easily add important information and structure your session.

Even before the opening section, there are things you can do to start introducing the key topics of your training to your learners, such as sending a welcome email. Make pre-course communications engaging and interactive, for example through a quick questionnaire or a video, to increase the likelihood of participants actually reading it!

Top tip: add a “before the course” section to your agenda plan to include a checklist of actions that need to be taken before the training begins. 

Step 4: Structure the Agenda

Now that you know the general learning objectives and have a framework set up, as well as an opening section, the next thing to do is go through the agenda and add activities for each section of your framework.

If you are using Kolb’s learning cycle, for example, different types of activities naturally lend themselves to being used for each step. Start with a practical exercise, thereby providing “concrete experience”, then move on to structured dialogue, such as a 1-2-4-all or World Café activity, to stimulate reflective observation.

The third step, abstract conceptualization, is the right time for you as trainer to step in front of the group, highlight the most important points mentioned, and provide mental models, frameworks, and information. Finally, case studies and simulations are great ways to include active experimentation in a training setting. 

In my experience with training, less is certainly more. Just a few days ago, I was asked to demonstrate a range of different activities on conflict resolution during a train-the-trainer workshop. Participants had been given a study manual that included three exercises, and my client was keen for them to experience them all.

I argued that, in the limited time available, it was more important to thoroughly debrief activities, answer questions, and for participants to try out giving instructions themselves. In the end, we only ran one single activity, but I am confident that all attendees went home with the ability to lead that exercise. This is much better, in my view, than having experienced a bunch of different “games” with not much clarity about how to use them. 

In many cases, training sessions are set up so that participants can learn how to do something on their own. The most common complaint about workplace trainings is that it was not relevant to participants’ real lives. Your job as a top trainer is to make sure your sessions are relevant. Having less activities but including a lot of space for debrief, discussion, practical applications and trying processes and tools out directly are the keys to success. 

Having participants apply new tools directly, in the safe space that training provides, is the best way to ensure they retain what you are teaching. When I train students to lead workshops, I generally dedicate the last half of the session to asking learners, divided into groups, to create and guide activities for the other participants. Afterwards, they give each other feedback, and try again! 

Let’s look back at the two examples of generic learning objectives we used earlier in the piece. By the end of the training participants should, we said “Be able to articulate and explain the difference between concepts A, B and C” and “to apply process D in real-world situations”.

Having time and space during the training to try to “articulate and explain concepts A, B and C” to their peers, as well as to try out “process D” are essential to achieving those goals. Testing and trying new tools (versus just sitting and hearing about them) is more likely to guarantee they are remembered and put to use.

Despite how obvious this sounds, opportunities for participants to take center stage and put their new competencies to the test are still all too rare in training programs.

Step 5: Include Multiple Learning Styles

As trainers and facilitators, we naturally have a general tendency to develop sessions that are ideal for people who think like us. As someone who loves words, and learns through sharing with others, I tend to fill my plans with dialogue sessions in small groups, huddled around a central question, with a poster and pens to keep notes. 

That’s great, but what about the people in the room who retain key ideas when they are shared visually? And how about those who learn better through individual reflection? When creating an agenda for your training session, make sure you’ve given thought to different learning styles and made some space for everyone. 

An excellent training session will combine ample time for individual reflection, discussion with others, and practical applications. It should include creative spaces such as using visual thinking, art, or building blocks, as well as music. Whenever possible, enable participants to choose their own pathway, for example by offering different ways of interacting with the material (with a discussion, by turning it into a poster, and so on) at various tables. 

Different preferences and tendencies in terms of learning styles are only one of the many ways diversity will show up in your participant groups. As you define activities, remember to keep in mind how accessible they will be to your attendees. You may have this information in advance (is anyone challenged in terms of mobility? Sight?) or you may discover this only during the training itself. 

Just a couple of months ago I was chatting with a participant a few minutes before the training when he told me of a hearing impairment and kindly explained what I should do to make myself heard. My mind raced forward to a moment in the workshop when I had planned to ask everyone to pair up and discuss a question. In the small room we had, twelve people talking at the same time would surely be overwhelming for him! 

Luckily, we had outdoor space available, so I asked trainees to spread out in space and take advantage of the sunny day. This reduced the level of noise drastically, making it easier for everyone to hear one another. 

Unless you are working with an established team, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll know everyone’s needs in advance or notice them during the workshop! I like to improvise, but if you are just starting out as a trainer or know that you like to stick to the plan, make sure you have considered accessibility needs and have activities planned that will work for everyone.

Consider the “cut-curb effect”: an activity accessible for people with disabilities will also be accessible to everyone else. The term refers to how a slide cut into a sidewalk to facilitate access to wheelchairs will also make life easier for families with strollers, or someone with a heavy trolley coming in from the train station.

Similarly, asking my group to spread farther out so it would be easier to hear one another in pairs made the experience more pleasant for everyone, not only the gentleman with a hearing impairment! 

Lastly, as you go through your agenda take some time to ponder: how could I include some elements of novelty and wonder in the space? Bringing colorful items, games, music and posters are all ways of adding creativity, and an element of surprise. 

The most common way for facilitative trainers to bring innovation to a learning space is to start by changing the seating arrangement. As a participant told me recently in feedback: “I came to the event assuming we would sit and listen, but then I saw the small clusters of chairs around those little coffee tables I went ‘oh-oh’, we are actually going to have to do something here!” 

Consider how the seating arrangement and light levels will influence your learning space. To learn more about how seating influences learning and interaction, you can delve into our dedicated guide to room setups.

Step 6: Pay Attention to Closing and Follow-up

As you enrich your agenda with ideas and details, you’ll probably start wondering about how to make it all fit in the allocated time. Rather than shave off a few minutes here and there or, worse, remove breaks, opening or closing sections (more on those later), go back to the original learning objectives, and get rid of whole activities. Remember: less is more! 

As you iterate and change your plan, SessionLab’s agenda planner will come to your rescue by automatically adjusting the time of each slot based on your changes. I usually start my designs by locking the start and end times, as well as the time of any lunch breaks.

While I don’t mind going off schedule during activities if something takes more or less time, I am really keen to make sure the kitchen and catering staff get to do their job as we’ve planned. More importantly, I hold ending times sacred. 

To make sure we end on time and don’t have to hurry through closing activities, I generally reserve a 30-minute slot at the end of the day for closing and feedback. 

For a training session to end successfully, at least three things are needed:

• Clarity about the next steps, whether these are personal action plans, dates of future lessons, or information of the “you’ll be getting a certificate of attendance in your inbox on Monday” kind;
• A closing moment or small ritual, designed to create a memorable connection and a sense of completion. This can be as simple as asking participants to unmute their microphones if you are working online, and saying “goodbye” in their native tongues. I like to close by referring back to whatever activity we started with. If we opened with introductions in a circle, for example, I’ll invite to close the day with a few words from each participant (but standing up, to make it quicker!);
• Time for participants to give feedback back to you, the trainer. I recommend this be done in at least a couple of ways so that people have the option to give you their opinions both publicly and privately, both personally and anonymously. It’s really lovely to hear a big circle of “thank you” at the end of an intense training, but I also deeply value the critical feedback that often only emerges in written form. You can enable this, for example, with posters by the door on which participants are asked to leave a comment before leaving, or in a questionnaire sent soon after the training ends.

With regular evaluation and feedback built into your training plans, you create a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. Your future trainings will get better and more impactful based on the input from participants. Your team benefits from increasingly targeted, relevant, and engaging learning experiences.

Be sure to also find time for some self-assessment, which is essential for your own professional development. Take notes during your session where possible (your agenda is a great place for this) and find space to consider what went well and what could have gone better.

When it comes to running your training sessions again, duplicate your SessionLab agenda and make adjustments with these learnings in mind. Not only will you have saved time designing an effective training session plan, but you’ll also have improved the quality of your training methods!

Step 7: Prepare Training Materials

With your session structure in place, it’s time to build out any presentations, workbooks, exercises, or other training materials you may need. Keep the following tips in mind:

• Focus on visuals: Use photos, graphics, charts, and diagrams to bring your content to life. Visual aids are engaging and can help reinforce learning though be sure to keep it relevant to your learning experience and your audience. GIFs and memes can be great, but are they right for your learners? As with any aspect of your training, be sure to balance and vary such elements where possible. 
• Keep text minimal: On presentations and handouts, use bullet points and headlines rather than long paragraphs. Your verbal explanation and activities are more important than written text. I find it useful to think of the text in a visual presentation as a prompt for me and an anchoring point for learners, rather than a copy of my script. 
• Use real-world examples: Share stories, case studies, and scenarios from relevant work experiences or environments. These make concepts more concrete and easier to apply. Where possible, include further reading or research opportunities for learners to explore after the session is done. 
• Use video as necessary: video content can be a wonderful way to enrich your training materials. Bringing in an outside voice or expert can be transformative, and it also gives you as a trainer a chance to take a breath and adjust if needed. 
• Borrow, reuse and reference: no single person is an island. Find existing resources, references and materials and reuse or adapt them if permission is available. Creating a training program can be an enormous undertaking, and it’s okay to stand on the shoulders of training giants who came before you. Just remember to reference and give credit!  
• Provide workbooks or worksheets: For more complex topics, give participants resources they can refer to again after the session. Workbooks with examples, diagrams, checklists, and room for note-taking are helpful for continued learning.
• Use an interactive presentation approach: Don’t just read through slides. Discuss key points, give examples, ask questions, share stories, and prompt participants to add input in their own words. Your energy and engagement will fuel the learning experience.
• Practice and prepare: Know your content inside and out. Practice your presentation and run through any activities or discussions to ensure a smooth facilitation experience. It can be easy to throw off your rhythm if you present a slide you are unfamiliar with! 

With compelling and interactive materials, your training session will be both impactful in the moment and valuable as an ongoing resource for your team.

Well-designed workbooks, presentations, exercises, and discussions can continue to support learning long after the session has ended, contributing to real change and improved performance. Check out our guide if you need help designing engaging visual presentations. 

Step 8: Share Your Plan

Once you have a draft plan for your training session, it’s time to share it with colleagues and clients, and start collecting feedback. In my experience, when designing trainings on behalf of a client, they will definitely want to see a high-level overview of my plan as early as possible. Discussing concrete details of the plan is often the point where intentions and needs are really clarified.

For example, I recently led a 1-day teacher training session that included some tricky logistics: reaching, and coming back from, the coffee break area took more than 10 minutes each way! At first, it seemed like my clients found this detail irrelevant: it was only when looking at the actual plan for the day that they realized what this entailed. Seeing the timing laid out eventually led to changing the location of the morning coffee break, and using the walk in the afternoon for a paired walk exercise.

As facilitator and trainer, it’s your job to go through the agenda in your mind and imagine how things will work in practice, and communicate this to clients, colleagues and other stakeholders (such as staff in charge of logistics). The SessionLab planner can be a great support at this stage of planning a training course, thanks to visualization features that allow you to share different views of your agenda with different people. 

You can have a general overview to share with participants, for example in a welcome email, as well as a more detailed schedule including materials and practical notes for your clients, and a fully fleshed out plan, with your notes and a script, to keep for yourself. All these can be printed, exported, or shown online, including by sharing a QR code. 

Training Session Plan Example

This training session plan template is an example of a session that uses Kolb’s learning cycle to take participants through an experiential process that creates engagement and deeper retention.

This framework works for everything from teaching customer service skills to technical training and employee engagement sessions. By following this example, you can ensure that your trainees will receive a learning experience designed to help them succeed.

Explore the full example training session and adjust it to your needs to create an effective foundation for your training sessions.

Conclusion: Deliver an Unforgettable Training Session

With careful planning and preparation, you can facilitate a training session that motivates your team, expands their knowledge and skills, and drives real performance improvement.

By following the 8 steps in this guide, you will assess your team’s true needs, establish clear objectives, apply effective adult learning principles, develop valuable interactive content, and build in mechanisms for continuous improvement. Your confidence in your abilities and passion for the topics will shine through as you deliver an engaging learning experience for your participants.

While training sessions require effort and time to plan, the rewards of an empowered, high-performing team make it worth the investment. You help individuals progress in their careers and strengthen your organization by developing talent from within.

Use these strategies to plan future sessions and deliver an unforgettable experience that creates a lasting impact. With practice, you will be facilitating transformational learning opportunities and inspiring your employees to reach their full potential.

What next?

This article focuses on getting your training agenda ready. If you want to continue learning about the other steps required to deliver great workshop experiences, here is our full guide to planning a workshop. 

Ready to plan your training session? Start from an existing basic template for a training session based on Kolb’s learning cycle and add your own favorite activities! 

Designing an online course? You may find this guide on creating a storyboard for elearning helpful when creating materials to implement in an LMS or similar.

Many of the theories and tips referenced in this article sit at the border between facilitation and teaching. To learn more about the commonalities and differences of the two professions, and how we can learn from each other, check out our piece on Teachers as Facilitators. 

Designing a training course with live and async elements? Explore our blended learning course template to see how you might structure such a course and collaborate with your team and subject matter experts in one place.