Elevate your workshops: Essential tips for prepping and wrapping up like a pro
As a facilitator, the pressure to deliver high-impact sessions is real, but success hinges on more than just the content you share or the level of detail in your agenda. While the activities and methods of your session are important, there’s another aspect of workshop design that doesn’t get enough credit: the prep work and the wrap-up activities. These bookends are responsible for a lot of the magic behind a good workshop, impacting a group’s ability to be:
Prepared vs scattered
Aligned vs conflicting
Flowing with momentum vs stalling out
In this article, I’ll share essential tips for both preparation and wrap-up that will elevate your workshop and, most importantly, improve the outcomes for the teams you guide. With many years of facilitating groups under my belt, I’ve fine tuned my approach and want to share it with you.
I recently spoke to the Brazilian Design Sprint community about my experience leading teams to design and build digital products, and I was reminded during the session of how important it is for us facilitators to share our secrets and avoid gatekeeping.
In that spirit, I want to tell you my formula for prepping and wrapping up a workshop because I truly believe that giving these areas more attention will create better results for you and the people you want to help.
Workshop Prep & Wrap-Up Tips
Prep Tips: 2-3 Weeks Pre-Workshop
Workshop prep goes well beyond agenda setting and content planning. In fact, a few weeks before a workshop, it’s really important to:
Identify the opportunity: What problem is the team hoping to solve? What outcome would they like for their customers or users? Having this information at the forefront helps align the team before you even set foot in the same room.
Gather background info: What does the team already know? What consumer insights have been gathered? Where does the work stand to date? Having this context will help speed things up when you kick off.
Identify the team: Make sure you have a diverse mix of titles, expertise, and departments present for your session. Someone from customer service is going to bring a totally different POV than the engineer or the designer, so make sure you’ve got the right folks in the room to help push ideas (and decisions) forward.
Plan logistics: Hone in on a meeting space (in person vs virtual), and clear schedules so team members can focus on the workshop objectives rather than the work they’re “missing” to be there.
Create a workshop brief: This document should summarize the purpose of your workshop, background information, the team members participating, and success criteria so that it’s easy to circulate all the details to any stakeholders, executive team members, or other folks who need insight into your plans.
If you’re leading a Design Sprint or prototyping effort, think about how you’ll get testers lined up: Can you identify your target customer in advance? How might you reach them? Will you incentivize them? Do you need an NDA? Who will line them up? Answering these questions beforehand makes the process run a lot more smoothly once you’re up and running.
Prep Tips: 1 Week Pre-Workshop
At this point, all the contextual details should be sorted out, which means you can now focus on prep activities like:
Gather supplies for participants: I like to bring yellow 3x5 Post-It Notes, pens, Sharpies, and printer paper, at a minimum.
Gather your facilitation supplies: I always have whiteboard markers in a few colors that are easy to see, another Post-It note color that differs from the one I give participants, small sticky dots (one color), large sticky dots (another color), a Time Timer, masking tape, scotch tape, white out, and scissors. For a complete list of items and links, check out my facilitation toolkit (organized by books, materials, and additional reading).
Make sure the room will support collaboration: It’s your job to ask questions about a physical facilitation space to make sure there’s ample room for breakout groups, access to whiteboards, and, ideally, natural light. I also like to ensure that there are giant Post-It notes in case whiteboard space gets filled quickly, and a screen along with the necessary cords and adapters (to share background information, lightning demos, and slides or a Miro board to guide the session).
Deliver the workshop agenda: I always like to send a high-level agenda to the participating team the week before we gather so that they know what to expect. This doesn’t need to include all of the details, but should be enough to give them a general overview. I also invite them to ask any questions of me in advance. I find that it gives us a better jumping off point when we’re finally together and helps ease anticipatory nerves about the gathering.
Doing this level of prep will jumpstart your sessions with teams and get you to clarity, alignment, and ideation much faster. But the work doesn’t end there.
To ensure you keep the momentum going, there are a handful of wrap-up activities that are essential to closing out a workshop in a way that ensures the work will still push forward without you.
Wrap-up Tips: Closing Agenda
Let’s say your team just finished a productive day of conversation and solution exploration. The whiteboard is full of incredible content, your team is excited about the possibilities, and now the group is tempted to follow up via email on next steps.
Don’t let this happen to you!
The final moments of a workshop or meeting are essential for aligning on priorities and outlining some initial next steps while the team is still gathered in the same room. Here are some of the activities I like to use to accomplish this. Feel free to copy and paste them into your own workshop plan.
Wrap-up Tips: The Week or Day Immediately Following the Workshop
Timing for this component will depend on the length of your workshop (e.g., a 5-day Design Sprint vs a 1-day workshop), but the goal is the same either way: to regroup with the team while the information is fresh so you can complete activities that will help push the work forward, including:
Talk about what you learned: Debrief on findings, clarify where you landed, align with the group on what was agreed upon, and compare your outcomes against the brief or problem statement.
Define next steps: Delegate tasks, define roles and responsibilities, set check-in deadlines, and create specific action items. Again, these wrap-up activities will come in handy if you weren’t able to get to them during the workshop.
Put together a summary to share: It’s important to create a record of the work before everyone turns their attention back to other tasks and forgets about the details of the session, or what needs to happen next. This document can be a great North Star for team members to jog their memories on outcomes, and it’s also an awesome resource to share with stakeholders or key decision makers who might need insight into your progress.
Taking the time to adequately prepare for and wrap up after a workshop results in better clarity for all. Not only will you head into your session more aligned and informed, but the team will also walk away with distilled ideas, actionable items, and alignment around next steps, responsibilities, and timelines. By completing this important aspect of the work, you’ll create a team that’s empowered and prepared to keep the momentum going so that their good ideas can get off the ground and impact the people and parts of the business that matter most.