5 Steps to Prepare a Workshop (Free template)

“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything.” —?Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States from 1953 to 1961

Workshops are excellent for brainstorming and involving stakeholders in design. You can find a lot of facilitation tips and tricks online.

But I've noticed emerging facilitators often need help setting up a workshop. So, in this post, I'll show you some of the tricks I use to prepare mine. I divided them into 5 steps, so let’s take a look.?

Step #1: Start with Why

Whenever I have to plan a workshop, I ask myself why I need it. What do I get when I put people in the same room? What is the endgame? Do they have to explore a specific problem and come up with a solution? Or do I need to create a safe place so the team can reflect and learn?

My role as a facilitator goes beyond scheduling the meeting, announcing the agenda, and telling people where to place stickers. I have my own goals. So, what exactly are they?

Step #2: Pick up a goal

The next thing I do is define the workshop’s success. What should the participants produce at the end so that I can become closer to reaching my goals? Is it an agreed-upon solution, an action plan, a list of team agreements, sorted cards representing the participants’ mental model, or something else?

In their Gamestorming book, Dave Gray, Sunn Brown, and James Macanufo compared a workshop to a game. In short, some workshops have straightforward goals. It is clear why we are meeting and what is expected at the end—for example, a card-sorting workshop or post-mortem retrospective. Yet, there are times when neither I nor the participants are sure what we can come up with during the brainstorming session. In this case, the workshop's goal is fuzzy.

Step #3: Create a workshop structure

Every workshop consists of 3 stages:

1. Opening (A): greeting the participants, stating the goal, and announcing the agenda and rules that must be followed.
2. Exploring (B): performing some activities to reach the workshop's goal.
3. Closing (C): to reach a conclusion and create the artifact.?

Depending on the goal and activities, some workshop parts may run simultaneously or repeat one after the other. For example, whenever participants split into groups, or the workshop consists of several parts, their activity will have the same “opening → exploring → closing” structure.?

Nevertheless, keeping the goal and structure in mind helps me decide on the best activities for the workshop. Once I've figured it out, I can start designing a game with rules.

Step #4: Create a Workshop Card

After determining my goal and activities, I put my workshop plans on paper. I call such a document a Workshop Card. It is where I keep track of all workshop details and actions I need to take. You can call it a workshop PRD.

I love this approach and encourage all facilitators to do the same. Why? Because I can run the same workshop more than once. For example, when not all participants can attend the workshop. Or I can organize separate events for the senior leadership and the team to ensure unbiased results. So why reinvent the wheel?

I include these sections in the workshop card, but you can adjust it depending on the context.

1. Name: what do I call the workshop?
2. Goal: why am I organizing the workshop? What problem am I trying to solve??
3. Outcome: how do I know if I’ve organized a successful event?
4. Description: how do I pitch the workshop? For this, I write a few sentences that follow the "problem → solution → outcome" or "what → so what → now what" pattern.
5. Date and place
6. Participants
7. Agenda: what should be covered at the workshop?
8. Action plan: for this, I use the before-the-event, at-the-event, and after-the-event checklists. They help me to keep track of details, like asking if all participants can attend the workshop the day before. Or checking the calendar event to see if I included a conference room name or a Zoom link. Or emailing a workshop summary and compiling the results into a fancy deck.

I’m happy to share the Workshop Card Template. It is available on Google Docs and docx.

Step #5: Schedule the meeting

After finishing the Workshop Card, I start executing items in the before-the-event list. From my experience, it is better to over-communicate than under-communicate. That’s why I include the workshop name, goal, description, and agenda in the calendar event I will share with the attendees. As well as sharing these details at the opening stage. Thus, all attendees will be on the same page and have time to prepare if necessary.

I made it a mandatory rule after an unexpected group of attendees showed up in the middle of my workshop. They appeared to be out of context, so the event was ruined. I'm sure you'd be unhappy in such a situation as well.

By the way, how do you plan workshops? Leave your thoughts, tips & tricks in the comments.