Learn the methods and strategies to plan and confidently facilitate in-person creative workshops and achieve great outcomes for your organisation.

What you will learn

  • Principles of workshop facilitation and design thinking
  • Building empathy and defining the problem
  • Idea generation and prioritisation
  • Building consensus and engaging stakeholders
  • Creative workshop methods and logistics

Who this is for

  • Anyone running workshops
  • Product managers
  • Customer experience managers
  • UX / Service designers

Course outline

There's an art and science to facilitating effective creative workshops and PeakXD teach you the tools and confidence to achieve both.

  • Principles of workshop facilitation and how you can use it as part of the design thinking process

    • What is facilitation and what makes a good facilitator?
    • Why traditional meetings and focus groups often don't work.
    • The 5 phases of workshop facilitation.
    • What Design thinking is and where workshops fit into the process.
    • Planning a creative workshop and designing your approach.
    • Getting the right participants to attend and preparing for a smooth workshop.
    • Managing difficult participants and engaging stakeholders in the process.
    • The logistics of running an in-person workshop (see our related course on Facilitating remote creative workshops if you want to learn about remote workshops).
  • Building empathy and defining the problem
    • Build empathy for your customers through research and methods such as collaborative journey mapping and empathy mapping.
    • Running your workshop: how to open and general facilitation tips.
    • Defining the problem and using ‘How Might We?’ (HMW) statements.
  • Ideating, prototyping and testing
    • Creative brainstorming methods and gameplay such as ‘How Might We?’ carousel game, SCAMPER and Crazy Eights to ideate incremental and disruptive innovative ideas.
    • Avoiding 'Idea killers'.
    • Understand how to apply convergent thinking to prioritise ideas based on measures such as customer value, effort and feasibility and identify ‘quick wins’ that will make a difference.
    • Creating concept cards and different types of prototypes.
  • Running a co-design workshop and engaging stakeholders
    • How to involve stakeholders to co-design a prototype of a system, website, product, or service and ensure stakeholders engage in the solution.
    • Running a solution design session with stakeholders after testing your prototypes.

Your Training Team

Mentors with 15+ years experience

591

Finished client projects

3,093

Students trained

18

Years of running UX courses

196,924

Post-it notes (and counting)

Requirements

Entry requirements

  • A desire to run better workshops that engage stakeholders and produce results.
  • A willingness to collaboratively learn.

Once you start you need

  • Ability to attend location in person

You do not need

  • Laptop or computer
  • Presentation skills
  • Confidence or experience with running group sessions.
  • To buy any specialist software.

Schedule - Facilitating creative workshops

Sydney

To be determined 2024

  • Metro Hotel Marlow Sydney Central
    431-439 Pitt Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000
  • 9am - 4:45pm

Canberra

10 October 2023

  • Flex by ISPT
    4 National Circuit Barton, ACT 2600
  • 9am - 4:45pm

Melbourne

To be determined 2024

  • The Jasper Hotel
    489 Elizabeth St Melbourne, VIC 3000
  • 9am - 4:45pm

Brisbane

To be determined 2024

  • Punthill Apartment Hotels | Spring Hill
    40 Astor Terrace Spring Hill, QLD 4000
  • 9am - 4:45pm

Frequently Asked Questions

We have had complete beginners as well as advanced practitioners complete our course and they all give us good course ratings. You do not need to have any skills or experience in workshop facilitation.

Yes, when you register for our in-person course we will ask you for your dietary requirements and do our best to cater for these. We will also send a reminder just prior to the event to make sure we have captured any changes to your dietary needs. No additional charge for dietary requirements.

If you are unable to attend for health reasons, please refer to our terms and conditions.

We are confident of running in-person training events in 2023 but COVID is still around and your safety is paramount to us. Please refer to our terms and conditions for more detail regarding our policy relating to COVID. 

Unfortunately, we don't hold spots. If you are concerned the tickets will sell out, please contact us.

If you have in-principal approval and just need to get official approval, we recommend that you register and select the pay-by-invoice option at checkout. You can then give this to your accounts area or manager to process the payment via EFT. If your accounts area or manager prefers to pay the manual invoices via corporate credit card we can arrange that but credit card fees will apply as we use a separate secure payment gateway that charges ~1.9%. 

Alternatively, you can get approval first to pay by corporate credit card at the time you register with no credit card fee. 

When you register you select the pay-by-invoice option at checkout. You can then give this to your accounts area or manager to process the payment via EFT.

If your accounts area or manager prefers to pay the manual invoices via corporate credit card we can arrange that but credit card fees will apply as we use a separate secure payment gateway that charges ~1.9%.

If you have 4 or more people we may be able to offer you a team ticket at a discounted rate, however, this is subject to availability.

If you have more than 8 people interested in attending, you may also consider in-house training. Please see Corporate Training Options

Hear from our graduates

The course gave me the tools to effectively engage stakeholders in the design process.

Anonymous

Fantastic course, will be taking my learning back to my business area.

Rachel

I found the course very insightful & a great refresher for my existing skill set!

Jane McNamara