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Magical Thinking: The Single‑Workshop Fantasy
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…
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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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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,…
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Are your workshops too long?
Why workshop length is a design decision “We need a half-day workshop.” Sound familiar? I’ve found workshop length is often treated as a given before the session even gets designed. Workshop length is a design choice But workshop length is…
