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When Fast Work Needs Slow Collaboration
I’ve recently become enamored with analog journaling. I’ve built a whole journal ecosystem: a leather cover that holds a small stack of different books including a monthly planner, a to‑do list scribbler, a commonplace book, my personal journal, and a…
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Packaging Workshop Outputs for Future You
You are standing in front of a board full of sticky notes, scribbles, and half-formed groupings. The session went well. People were engaged. You got what you needed. Now you need to capture it in a way you can actually…
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Are You Performing Workshop Theatre? (Video)
Earlier this year, I gave a talk at UX Camp Chicago about Workshop Theatre. Here’s the tl;dr: 72% of meetings are unproductive, costing $37B annually (Zippia). Sticky notes everywhere, outcomes nowhere. Are your workshops any better — or just Workshop…
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Designing Collaboration When “Back to the Office” Still Means Remote
You’re being told that going back to the office will fix collaboration. It might not. You may find yourself in the office more often while your team is still scattered across locations and schedules. In that scenario, “being together” becomes…
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What Did We Create Together? Redesigning How Your Team Spends Its Time
Most organizations do not have a meeting problem. They have a collaboration problem disguised as meetings.We gather people, fill calendars, and call it teamwork, but often nothing meaningful is produced. Eight people in a one-hour meeting represent an entire day…
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When Collaboration Is New: Letting Culture Set the Pace of Your Workshops
I was brought in to redesign a national service for a program that had always been run regionally. Each regional team treated its territory like a separate organization. Their work, audiences, and priorities all felt local. When I started talking…
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The Part of Workshop Design AI Still Can’t Do
Last week, I hosted a small cohort for The Workshop Workshop. Unsurprisingly, we talked a lot about whether AI and machine learning can help with workshop design. For the most part, it is still too early. Not because AI can’t…
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Designing for sense‑making
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…
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How AI Is Quietly Replacing Working Sessions
Lately, I keep hearing the same line at work: “I put this into AI and it came up with this model / framework / analysis.” A few years ago, those same problems would have triggered a working session: get the…
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Less Explaining, More Doing
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,…
