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.

Don’t let the ideas and energy you’ve generated in your workshop stall out. End on a high note by facilitating the fifth and final part of a winning workshop: wrap-up activities. This article covers my favorite methods – the ones that outline a path forward to ensure your team maintains momentum.

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.

I quit social media 3.5 years ago and am opening up about the initial change and impact on my brain, some longer-term effects, and practices for eliminating or reducing the use of social media in your own life.

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.

In a perfect world, we'd have perfect professional chemistry with all of our colleagues. But alas, it's not a perfect world—not even close. Fortunately, even if there are certain stakeholders you mesh with less than others, it's almost always possible to overcome personality clash and find a way forward. Here are the tips I've found to be most helpful for working with, not against, your most difficult teammates.

How did a self-care promoting, work-life-balance advocate wake up one day and realize that burnout had gripped my life? And what could I do to escape the cycle and find a new, more sustainable way of being? This is the story of my “burnout intervention” and how I’ve spent the last year of my life making a concerted effort to break free from the toxic cycle.

There’s no magic button to eliminate unruly behavior among workshop participants, but there are a few things facilitators can do to get ahead of it. In this post, I share my four favorite ground rules that set teams up for better meetings and workshops, along with a few bonus rules that apply to virtual sessions.

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.

No matter the team dynamics, conflict is inevitable. What if conflict wasn’t to be avoided, but embraced? Cultivating an openness to conflict with your product team just might be your secret to unlocking your team’s best new ideas. Here are my facilitator-approved tips for doing just that.

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.

My remedy for the summer scaries is an entire shift in how we perceive change and letting go. Here, I share my tips and mantras for embracing closure in order to harness the power in choosing what to pay attention to and how to invest our time.

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.

The return-to-office conversation has been top of mind for many as more and more companies call employees back to work in person. Rather than simply telling people to return to the office without any structure or intention, let’s instead think about the best way to accomplish the work to be done. Here’s a workshop format for team leaders and managers who want to handle this next chapter with intention.

Helping teams make decisions can be a complex process when there are various group dynamics, cultural quirks, and political intricacies at play. But it doesn't have to be. Let’s explore a few essential facilitation techniques that empower groups to harness their collective wisdom, navigate challenges, and arrive at well-informed decisions.