Roles & Responsibilities for your next workshop - A quick guide

While some workshops are simple enough to be delivered in-house, others are important or complex enough to need a specialist fulfilling two distinct but linked roles - Experience Design and Facilitation

<Adapted from 2013’s ‘Gather: The Art & Science of Effective Convening’ by Noah Rimland Flower and Anna Muoio at Monitor Institute>

This diagram is one of the most helpful things I’ve ended up showing new clients as we plan their session.

Its main role is to show the difference between a Facilitator(s) - who delivers the session ‘in the room’, and an Experience Designer - who creates the actual plan to deliver. Most of the time they will be the same person (that’s mainly how I work), but not always.

But then I discovered that clients found it helpful to help plan their wider supporting roles whether from their own team or mine.

And just occasionally it’s also proved useful to clarify to the client what their role as Sponsor should and, just as importantly, shouldn’t be during the process.

Hope it’s helpful.