How to prevent the rush to solutions that undermines good decisions
Last week I wrote about how AI is quietly replacing working sessions. Instead of pulling people together to understand a messy problem, someone “puts it into AI” and emails around the output as if the thinking is done. This week, I want to look at the human version of the same move: when participants want to press the fast‑forward button on your session.
Picture this: you’ve done the prep, clarified the purpose, designed a structure that intentionally creates space for discovery and sense‑making. As you start to lead participants through a thoughtfully crafted series of activities, a senior voice asks: “I think we all understand the problem; maybe we can jump to options.”
On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Of course, no one wants to over‑explain the obvious. Underneath, it quietly erases everything you haven’t surfaced yet: the people who don’t actually share the same picture of the problem, the constraints you haven’t named, the risks no one has said out loud. It’s the same shortcut I described with AI. Instead of doing discovery and sense‑making, you declare the problem “already understood” and rush to options. The work gets replaced by a performance of decisiveness. The visible outcome is a quicker “decision.” The hidden cost is a decision that collapses later because it never had a real foundation.
When a leader with that mindset walks into your workshop, your agenda stops being a design and becomes a suggestion. The parts that make the session worth doing are suddenly the easiest to cut, because they don’t look like progress. You could end up facilitating a performance about the work instead of time to do the work. (See: Workshop Theatre)
So how do you prevent this from sabotaging the work? You have to design for it.
Slowing down when participants want to rush to solutions
Treat the opening as non‑skippable: That the work of the session relies on making the problem visible and understood instead of assumed. Structure a task around getting participants to write in their own words the problem they are there to work on. Cluster and name the differences. Capture constraints and stakes: who is affected, what absolutely cannot change, what success would actually look like. This grounds the discussion in a common understanding. If you’re urged to move things along faster than intended, you have an artefact to point to: “If we skip this, we are choosing one version of the problem and ignoring the others. Are you comfortable with that risk?”
Use your workshop invitation to clearly state the purpose ahead of time. Include what the workshop will produce, and what it will not do today. “We are here to build a shared map of the problem and identify 3–5 viable options. Vendor selection and funding to be determined in a subsequent session.”
When the request to move along is made, you can reiterate the intent: “To keep the commitment we made in the invite, we need to understand the problem before we start working on a solution.”
You won’t stop every request to accelerate. But you can make it harder for your workshops to be redirected into performative decision-making. And in a world where tools and timelines are constantly pushing toward moving faster, protecting even a small pocket of real collaboration is worth designing for.
