Often, a team’s inability to work productively is due to a lack of focus, lack of support, and/or lack of alignment. In this article, you'll learn why your teams are probably getting stuck, along with a solution that I’ve seen work time and time again for getting them out of the weeds and back on track.

In this article, learn about the essential yet undervalued bookends of workshops: the prep work and wrap-up activities. The tips in this article will help elevate your workshop design, support better outcomes for the teams you lead, and set you up for success as a facilitator.

Visual aids are a necessary tool for anyone who facilitates group collaboration. They break up dense information, activate different parts of the brain, and help participants better visualize ideas. As a facilitator, there are three primary ways I use visual aids, which I’ll cover in this article along with some examples you can apply directly to your work.

Use these facilitation methods to unify, empower, and activate teams  that are dispersed, fragmented, remote, or disengaged. You can copy/paste these activities into your next worksop to get your team out of the weeds, dissolve or soften resistance, and re-energize the group.

If you lead meetings or workshops regularly, you know things are going well when sessions feel productive, seamless, and collaborative. So, how do you access more of that and minimize the hard stuff, like disengaged or disruptive participants? And how do you ensure you’re unlocking the most potential from everyone, reducing friction and resistance along the way? Here are my favorite tips to help you do just that!

It’s more important than ever to kick off meetings, workshops, and strategic sessions on a positive note, especially when we’re not all in the same physical location. These icebreakers are appropriate for almost any team, but I find them to be extra helpful when working with remote or distributed groups who might require a little nudge to access a place of connectedness and optimism.

What does it take to stitch an innovation mindset into the very way teams operate? This article is about shifting our perspective on when to workshop and makes the case for cultivating a workshop practice within organizational culture as a necessary stepping stone to building a culture of innovation.

Here are my facilitator-approved dos and don'ts for running a successful strategic workshop, whether you’re leading a planning session, collaborative brainstorm, or facilitating another type of strategic gathering. These tips will help you turn the momentum you generate into tangible results.

Small and fractional teams need to collaborate differently than their counterparts in order to be effective. In this article, I share the secret to setting your teams up to do their best work and build momentum, along with an exercise you can replicate with your own team to unify the group.

If you’re a leader kicking off a new project with your team, or ideating on a new product your company could launch, it’s essential to be intentional about how you plan for and guide collaborative sessions to make them a success. Apply these five facilitation learnings to your work to ramp up the effectiveness of your collaborative sessions, and have a more powerful impact on the teams you lead.

Design Sprints have the incredible ability to unlock the full potential of a team’s creativity and push innovation to new heights – that’s why they’re such a powerful leadership tool. After nearly eight years of facilitating Design Sprints, I can confidently say they’re just as effective now as they ever were. If you’re having a hard time getting over the commitment hump, here are 5 reasons why you really can’t afford not to Sprint with your team.

In today’s installment of my series on intelligent workshop design, I’ll be sharing my favorite facilitation activities for idea generation – the ones that elevate brainstorming sessions from mere discussions to the kind of collaboration that produces actionable, viable possibilities.

Naming a new product isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be painful. It can be tempting to slap an acronym on it and call it a day, but taking time to come up with the perfect name is truly worth the effort. Here are my tips for picking a great product name, and a guide to get you get started on the naming process with your team.

Most workshops and complex problem-solving endeavors are far more successful with a facilitator present. So, what is it about a great facilitator that unlocks this potential? Check out the three key abilities that a great facilitator brings to the table – think of them as the ingredients that, when present, make a workshop feel fruitful and satisfying.

Have you ever experienced a moment in a workshop or meeting when it became abundantly clear that your participants weren’t on the same page about the objective for your time together? It’s mostly avoidable if you make time for one very important aspect of workshop design. In today’s installment of this series on intelligent workshop design, I’ll be sharing methods and activities you can borrow to nail this part of the process.

If your team has been spinning out on naming for many weeks or even months, I’m guessing at least one of four factors is at play. I cover them in this article, along with 7 facilitation methods from my own experience leading workshops that will get the group back on track.

Today, I’m sharing my prototyping hacks to help your team create the best initial, simplified version of their design – one that’s ready to be tested, iterated on, and validated. See why getting it right is so important, and lift these activities to streamline the next session you facilitate for your team.

Part 2 of this series on workshop design is all about understanding the customer and their needs. This article includes some resources and sample activities you can leverage as you design your workshop flow — they’re activities I use in my own work as a facilitator.

Understanding user needs and pain points is essential for building successful products and services, but that doesn’t mean we need to get stuck going down a multi-month research hole in order to be “ready” to collaborate, innovate, or prototype. Learn how to overcome research analysis paralysis with some actionable methods for gathering and applying insights – all without a big research budget.

In this five-part series, I’ll break down the arc of a winning workshop from beginning to end, with guidance around how the session might flow and sample activities you can copy/paste into your own plans. Part 1 of this series and today’s focus is all about grounding and expectation setting: the foundation of any workshop.