A better way to co-design (and now, co-facilitate) workshops
I am in the zone when I am facilitating workshops. I love to design structured experiences in which people can share and learn.
When working solo, I've long been a fan of using a simple word processing document to design individual workshops. But a few weeks ago I was co-designing a client workshop with my colleague Liz Solomon, on Zoom. She said, "let's try SessionLab". Their website describes their offer as: "The most intuitive session planning system for facilitators, consultants and trainers. Design facilitation plans collaboratively, share professional-looking agendas with your clients and have a shared knowledge base within your team."
They, and Liz, are right. It is easy and intuitive. It gives remote partners virtual templates to share. You can work on your plans in real time or on your own time. It keeps track of how much time you have allotted to each exercise and adds up the total workshop time, and it makes it easy to designate who is leading which of those exercises.
Yesterday, Liz and I co-facilitated another session with a client group. The screen grab above is our SessionLab plan. The colored bars on the left chart the whole session. In the app when you click on any one of those you are brought to the detailed descriptions you and your partners have co-created. This is a very cool tool that I will use again and again. Thanks, Liz.
Planning/Design Tool: SessionLab