When we hear the word planning, we usually think of solutions, timelines, and next steps. But what about the pre-work? If you want to build a foundation for real change, I recommend having three important conversations at the leadership level before your full-team gathering. Learn about them here, and get access to a list of questions you can borrow for your own conversations.

Having a defined plan is important—essential, even—but it must be balanced with curiosity and adaptability. If you’re constantly navigating stakeholder pressure, team friction, and the gap between strategy and execution, learn how to build muscle memory around this balance with my facilitator-approved tips.

If you’re thinking about leading a workshop yourself, learn about the five most common roadblocks that stall progress, along with a few of my facilitator-approved tips for getting ahead of the spiral.

You don’t always need to wait for a big strategy offsite to kick off meaningful conversations with your team. Here are five facilitator-approved, easy-to-run micro-workshops designed for teams working on innovation, new product/feature design, ideation, or simply looking for more productive ways to collaborate.

How do you successfully shift from strategic planning into execution? In this article, I’ll cover the common blockers to a smooth transition and the solutions to the challenges that block execution so you can keep team momentum going long after the strategy has been set.

When conflict arises in work and life, it can seem easier to ignore or divert, but finding middle ground helps us become more resilient, better communicators and de-escalators, and better at embracing diverse perspectives. In this article, you’ll learn facilitator-approved tools and mindsets to better navigate hard conversations at work and in your personal life.

In this article, learn about the essential yet undervalued bookends of workshops: the prep work and wrap-up activities. The tips in this article will help elevate your workshop design, support better outcomes for the teams you lead, and set you up for success as a facilitator.

Use these facilitation methods to unify, empower, and activate teams  that are dispersed, fragmented, remote, or disengaged. You can copy/paste these activities into your next worksop to get your team out of the weeds, dissolve or soften resistance, and re-energize the group.

What does it take to stitch an innovation mindset into the very way teams operate? This article is about shifting our perspective on when to workshop and makes the case for cultivating a workshop practice within organizational culture as a necessary stepping stone to building a culture of innovation.

Here are my facilitator-approved dos and don'ts for running a successful strategic workshop, whether you’re leading a planning session, collaborative brainstorm, or facilitating another type of strategic gathering. These tips will help you turn the momentum you generate into tangible results.

Don’t let the ideas and energy you’ve generated in your workshop stall out. End on a high note by facilitating the fifth and final part of a winning workshop: wrap-up activities. This article covers my favorite methods – the ones that outline a path forward to ensure your team maintains momentum.

In today’s installment of my series on intelligent workshop design, I’ll be sharing my favorite facilitation activities for idea generation – the ones that elevate brainstorming sessions from mere discussions to the kind of collaboration that produces actionable, viable possibilities.