If you’ve ever left a validation workshop feeling like you just watched a bunch of people nod politely at your slides without providing meaningful feedback, you’re not alone. Too often, these sessions become glorified reaction shots where participants silently view the outputs of your hard work and are asked to “comment” while feeling like the work is already done and there’s not much point.

Not exactly a recipe for breakthrough insights.

Let’s flip the script.

Instead of asking stakeholders to passively react, get them to roll up their sleeves. Hand over the raw materials (including data, sketches, half-baked ideas) and let them build their own version of the solution. Then, you can compare what they create with your original outputs and do a gap analysis.

That’s where the real validation (and learning) happens.

Here’s how I put this into practice: After doing interviews, a literature review, and job shadowing, I drafted a service blueprint. But I didn’t present it to the stakeholder team for a thumbs up or down. Instead, I put each of the blueprint elements on a card and had the team assemble their own version. The result? Their blueprint was 30% different from mine. That’s not a failure; it was a goldmine! I took those differences back to other teams, validated, iterated, and finally landed on a blueprint everyone could get behind.

The key to facilitating a workshop like this is to maximise input, not force consensus. In fact, disagreement is your friend. Encourage participants to poke holes in your models, break things, and justify their objections. Capture those disagreements because they’re valuable data for later analysis. And don’t be afraid to use a “straw dog” (an intentionally incomplete or flawed starting point). It’s amazing how much more engaged people get when they’re fixing something, rather than building from scratch (or staring at a blank whiteboard).

So next time you’re planning a validation workshop, skip the passive feedback and get your stakeholders actively involved. You’ll end up with richer insights, stronger solutions, and maybe even a little fun along the way.