A workshop pattern to cut exposition without losing clarity

When does your workshop make you talk too much?

Think about your last workshop. How much of the time did you spend explaining what was about to happen, why it mattered, and how each step fit together? If you added it up, it might be more than you expect.

That is usually not a personality issue, it is a structural one. When every step in the session needs a lot of set-up, you end up narrating the whole way through. Participants sit and listen while you walk through the agenda and frame every activity in detail. They fixate on some future “fun” activity instead of the one in front of them, or they simply forget half of what you said by the time they need it. The way the session is built makes the workshop feel long, and it often makes it longer than it needs to be to get the work done.

Last week, I wrote about workshops that run longer than they need to; this is one structural reason why.

Enter progressive disclosure

In UX, progressive disclosure is a design technique for reducing cognitive load by gradually revealing information as people move through a task instead of showing everything at once. It keeps interfaces easier to learn and helps people complete tasks more efficiently by limiting what they have to process at any given step.

You can borrow that, structurally, for workshops. Here, progressive disclosure means designing the sequence so you only reveal context, instructions, and structure when participants actually need them, in real time, inside the work. Each activity sets up the next, so you do not need to keep stopping to explain the whole path; you give just enough for the current step, then build on what they produce. Earlier, I wrote about why I keep agendas hidden in workshops; progressive disclosure is the same instinct applied to how and when you reveal the content itself.

Training workshops: move the teaching into the task

In my training workshops, I am tempted to over-explain. I usually have a lot of material I want to share, and if I am not careful, I front-load the content with definitions, frameworks, objectives, and background before anyone tries anything. Participants can end up listening and taking notes while the actual learning is still on hold.

If I use progressive disclosure, I design the session differently. I build it so the opening only needs a few minutes: why they are there, what problem this training helps them solve, and what they will do first. Then I move straight into a hands-on task that forces them to surface the concepts themselves, like talking about the worst workshop they have ever experienced and using that discussion to introduce the concepts we will be covering.

The explanations arrive in small chunks during the debrief and the next round, when people have something concrete to attach them to. I end up sharing the same ideas, but:

• I have cut my talk time up front;
• participants are more engaged because they are generating the examples; and
• I repeat myself less later because the concepts are anchored to their own work.

The session feels shorter and is often actually shorter, because that whole block of redundant explanation has been removed and the teaching is folded into the activity.

A small design challenge for your next workshop

If you recognise yourself in the long explanations before each step, the fix is not to become a different kind of speaker; it is to design your workshops so less explanation is needed. For your next session, you could experiment with one or two of these:

• shorten your opening so the first activity starts within about 5–10 minutes;
• skip the slide where you walk through every activity and rely on each activity producing inputs for the next to make the sequence clear; or
• pick one chunk of information you normally lecture about and turn it into a discovery exercise that generates the same input.

All of those are examples of progressive disclosure in workshop design: structural ways to say less while participants do more. You are getting people into the work faster and anchoring ideas in something they actually did, not in something they once heard you say. It is a simple shift, but it changes the experience: less talking about the work, more time spent doing it.