I facilitated two days in a conference room in the Pearl last week. Twelve people, four hundred sticky notes, a catering spread nobody touched after one in the afternoon. By the end of Thursday the walls were beautiful. Clusters, arrows, dot votes, three named territories with real tension between them.
Everyone left energized. The photos went into a deck. The deck went into a shared drive.
Nothing happened. Again.
I have complicated feelings about this because the workshop is not fake. The alignment is real. People who had been arguing by email for six weeks stood at the same wall and discovered they wanted roughly the same thing. That is worth two days. It is just not the same object as a decision, and we keep billing it as though it were.
A workshop produces shared understanding, and shared understanding is not a decision, which is why the work stalls three weeks later inside a calendar invite nobody accepts.
Three things fix most of it, and none of them are about facilitation technique.
One, name the decider before the invite goes out. Not the sponsor, not the room, the person who will be held responsible for the choice. Rooms cannot decide. Rooms can only agree, and agreement is what you get when nobody has to sign anything. If the decider cannot attend both days, move the days.
Two, end on one sentence somebody in the room would argue with. Three territories everyone can live with is the classic output and it is the reason nothing ships. Strategy that offends nobody has not chosen anything. I would rather leave with one uncomfortable sentence and two dissenters than with a wall of consensus that dissolves in the elevator.
Three, the artifact is a document, not photographs of walls. Sticky notes are a thinking tool, and thinking tools do not survive being emailed. Somebody has to sit down inside a week and write prose: here is what we chose, here is what we ruled out, here is what would have to be true for us to be wrong. Write it while people still remember why the blue cluster mattered.
I have sat on the agency side of this and I know the incentive. The workshop is the deliverable that photographs well, invoices cleanly, and makes the client feel like the money did something. The follow-through document is unglamorous, hard, and often unpaid. Guess which one quietly became the product.
Strategy that offends nobody has not chosen anything.
I brought a leftover pad of sticky notes home. Barnaby has eaten a corner off it and Truffles has knocked eleven of them behind the radiator, which is more decisive action than the last four offsites I ran produced between them.