Workshop & Facilitation Design

Purpose

Designs the structure of a cross-functional workshop or design-thinking session.

Anchored in research

• Perplexity research — running workshops and design-thinking sessions
• Design Council (2004) — the Double Diamond (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver): alternates divergent and convergent phases. A workshop meant to both explore a problem and converge on a decision needs to make that phase switch explicit to participants.
• Kaner et al., Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making — the Diamond of Participation: a divergent zone (generating options), a "groan zone" (the necessary, uncomfortable phase where the group aligns on meaning before it can converge), and a convergent zone (narrowing to a decision). A workshop that skips the groan zone produces premature, brittle agreement.

Method

1. Clarify the workshop's single deliverable and where it sits on the Double Diamond — is this a Discover/Define session (diverge on the problem, converge on a framing) or a Develop/Deliver session (diverge on solutions, converge on a decision)? Mixing both in one session without saying so confuses participants about when they're allowed to disagree.
2. Design the divergent phase first — generate the widest reasonable set of inputs (problems, ideas, options) before any evaluation. Introduce evaluation criteria too early and the group anchors on the first idea.
3. Budget explicit time for the groan zone (Kaner) — the point where diverse inputs collide and the group has to build shared understanding before it can converge. Rushing this step produces a decision that unravels once people leave the room.
4. Design the convergent phase with an explicit decision rule — dot-voting, a scoring matrix, or a named decision-maker who breaks ties. A workshop that diverges well but never states how convergence will happen ends in a non-decision.
5. Sequence the agenda in blocks with a facilitator role and timing per block, not just a topic list — who's driving, how long, and what artifact comes out of each block.
6. Plan the close: decision, owner, and next step, captured before people leave the room. A workshop that "generated great discussion" but ends without a captured decision and owner hasn't produced a result.
7. For fast-moving AI prototyping specifically, consider a real-time, cross-disciplinary working session instead of a staged workshop. When development, design, and business stakeholders review and adjust an AI prototype together, live, in the same physical or digital space, feedback is immediate and the discover/decide cycle above can compress into hours instead of a multi-day workshop cadence. This isn't a replacement for the structure above — it's a format choice for when the material under discussion (a working prototype that can be poked at directly) makes live, side-by-side reaction more valuable than a scheduled agenda with prepared materials. Use it for prototype review and refinement cycles specifically, not for the initial problem-framing work that still benefits from the Double Diamond structure in step 1.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
• Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly ([assumption — verify]).
• Doesn't facilitate the workshop for you — it designs the structure and timing for the facilitator.

Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

• your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
• concrete templates (into ../../references/)
• reference cases / your own examples
• what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above

This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current usability. Track depth privately via the maturity field in skills_index.json (see ../../../meta/maturity_levels.md). Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are the only ones allowed (see ../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).

Continue from here

• Next in this pack: ../executive-narrative-and-storyline/SKILL.md — Turns analysis into a narrative and storyline that serves executive decision-making.
• A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see ../../../playbooks/
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/ — the pack's shared background material
• Step 7's real-time cross-disciplinary format is grounded in the general underlying idea only (live, siloless collaboration beats staged handoffs) rather than in a specific named model — a named model and its attributed originators could not be independently verified, see ../../../human-ai-collaboration-design/references/hitl-partnership-heuristics-research.md
• ../../CLAUDE.md — the pack's shared guardrails