I keep running into a specific kind of magical thinking about workshops. We do the session, work through a set of activities, fill a canvas with ideas, flows, pain points, and open questions, and somewhere along the way someone quietly decides that’s enough. As if one workshop, one artefact, one burst of “innovation” or “collaboration” will somehow turn itself into a solution. The moment the canvas looks full, the expectation shifts: we must be done now.

What one session actually does

In practice, it’s the opposite. A workshop that actually engages people tends to raise more questions than it answers. It surfaces gaps, contradictions, and decisions that still need to be made. It shows us where people don’t agree and where we don’t know enough. At best, it’s the starting point to figure out the design or the change, not the moment we declare it finished.

Workshops as one piece of a longer process

We do something similar with “innovation” and “collaboration.” They get treated like events: book a workshop, invite a cross‑functional group, run some activities, and assume that’s enough. In reality, innovation, collaboration, design, change, and engagement work best when they’re recurring, when they show up as patterns in how the team spends its time. One workshop doesn’t build that. At best, it gives you a glimpse of what it could feel like if it were part of the culture.

That’s why I think of a single workshop as one piece of a longer process. It can make the current situation visible in a way that a slide deck or report won’t; people see the mess together instead of alone. It can surface disagreements and tension points that usually stay buried. You start to hear where people’s mental models don’t match, and where the narratives about the work begin to clash.

A workshop can also give people a shared language for the problem. Naming the same pain points with the same words is more powerful than it looks; it makes future conversations quicker and clearer. It can help identify which decisions and questions need more work, instead of pretending everything is equally important. At its best, a single session ends with a small, specific commitment about what happens next: who will take which piece forward, what needs more discovery, and when the group will come back to look at what’s changed. That’s enough. It’s valuable. It’s still not magic.

Clearing your own expectations

When I talk about workshops, I try to be explicit: this is one step in the work, not the work in its entirety. It’s here to make things visible, to give us shared language, and to agree on what happens next. The real test isn’t whether the canvas is full at the end. It’s whether anything about how we work and decide changes afterwards.

If you’re planning a workshop, it’s worth being honest with yourself:

• What am I secretly hoping this single session will solve outright?
• What do I expect to be different the next day, and is that realistic?
• Which parts of this problem will still exist after the workshop, and how are we planning to work on those?