Learn how to plan and confidently facilitate creative workshops and engage diverse participants in modern day business working environments.

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
  • Tools and logistics for running remote workshops

Who this is for

  • Anyone running workshops
  • Product managers
  • CX managers
  • UX designers
  • Service designers

Course outline

Learn how to facilitate effective workshops that encourage creativity, participation, and engagement. This is a hands-on interactive remote training where you will learn by doing.

  • 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 successful remote 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 and 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?’ statements, heuristic ideation and SCAMPER 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.
  • Building consensus and engaging stakeholders
    • Facilitating participants to reach a common conclusion.
    • How to involve stakeholders and build empathy using methods such as co-design to ensure stakeholders buy-in to the solution.
    • Managing your time and what to do when it all goes pear-shaped.
    • Capturing workshop outputs.
    • Running a solution design session with stakeholders after testing your prototypes.
    • Pros and cons of in-person versus remote virtual workshops.

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

  • Computer (Mac or Windows)
  • Separate mouse (recommended)
  • Reasonable internet bandwidth (to attend workshops online)
  • Access to a microphone and webcam for video calls
  • MS Teams online meeting tool
  • A quiet place where your colleagues won't interrupt you

You do not need

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

Schedule

Virtual Classes

29 Aug - 7 Sep 2023
  • MS Teams
  • 29 Aug Guiding principles of workshop facilitation and design thinking
    31 Aug Building empathy and defining the problem
    5 Sep Ideating, prototyping and testing
    7 Sep Building consensus and engaging stakeholders

  • 12-2pm AEST (or 2-4pm NZDT) Tuesday & Thursday

Frequently Asked Questions

We have had complete beginners as well as advanced UX practitioners complete our course and they all give us good course ratings. While it will help if you have experience or qualifications in either IT, digital, market research, psychology, social research or marketing, it is not essential. However, if you are side-stepping from a completely unrelated field and want to switch careers into UX, we recommend you join our UX Accelerator mentoring program instead.
While is not essential that you attend each workshop, we highly recommend it, they are enjoyable and interactive, and you will benefit from participating in them. Attending the interactive workshops will help you apply what you learn to a case study project to cement your learning. We don't record sessions and offer replays as the workshops are about collaboration and working with others. The learning occurs while you are participating, so there is little benefit in watching a recording later. If you miss a session, you can still attend the next scheduled session in the series. 
The interactive workshops are intended to cement the theoretical knowledge you have obtained watching the video lessons and we assume all participants have this base knowledge.  Each of the workshops also builds on the previous workshop activities so it can be disruptive to the session if new participants aren't across the outputs of the previous workshops. For this reason, unfortunately, we cannot allow substitutions as your colleagues won't have access to the training portal to watch the video lessons and may not understand the theoretical foundations underpinning the practical, hands-on workshop. 
We will run these sessions via Microsoft Teams as this is commonly used in many large organisations and government agencies. You can get a free version of Microsoft Teams.
Not at all. The beauty of these live virtual interactive workshops is that you can participate from anywhere in the world. We have had people from USA, Canada, UK, Hong Kong, Brazil and New Zealand complete our courses and all have found them extremely relevant and useful. The case study we work on relates to public transport which is relevant to most countries across the globe.  We have tried to schedule the workshops during lunch breaks for people working on the east coast of Australia which is why we run them from 12-1:30 pm (in case your boss won't give you time off). This time is still within business hours in all of Australia, New Zealand and most of Asia. This converts to early or mid evenings on Mondays and Wednesdays in the United States.  Check out our favourite Time Zone Converter to see when the workshops run in your location (note, you may need to change the date or add your location). 

Hear from our graduates

I was impressed with the trainers depth of knowledge and how much hands on learning I received.

Daniel Ng

The fact that it was all online meant that I could continue working and not worry about having to commute to attend class.

Francis

Good content covered in a way that was obviously steeped in real world experience. Organic, informative and authentic.

Danny K