People see the workshop. Two hours, a room full of founders, pens and cards and energy. What they do not see is the week before it, because that is where the session is actually made. By the time I walk in, I want to know more about the room than the room knows about itself.
Over time I have settled on five questions I ask before I agree to run anything. They are simple, but they decide whether the session will be useful or just enjoyable, and those are not the same thing.
First: who is actually in the room, and who makes decisions? A workshop for founders is different from a workshop for a marketing team, and both are different from a mixed room. Second: what do they already believe? Every room walks in with a theory about its own brand, and half the job is finding out which theory is holding them back.
Third: what should be different on Monday morning? If the organiser cannot answer that, the session has no destination. Fourth: what has been tried before? Nothing is more deflating than running an exercise the room did last year with someone else. Fifth: what are they not saying? Every organisation has a topic it avoids, and it is usually the one the workshop needs.
Why it matters
These questions are not bureaucracy. They are respect. The people in that room have given up hours of their working week, and the least a facilitator can do is arrive having done the work.
The best compliment after a session is not that it was fun. It is that people left clearer than they arrived. Clarity does not happen by accident. It is prepared, quietly, in the days before anyone walks through the door.
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