10 Facilitation Skills
for the AI era.
AI changed what happens in a workshop. It didn’t change what a workshop is for. Ten skills, one a day, for the person running the room when the model is in it too.
Not just for facilitators. If you lead a team, run meetings, or sit in rooms where decisions get made with a model open on someone’s laptop, this is for you too.
Who does what, when the model is in the room
Most workshop agendas still don’t say where the AI goes. So it goes everywhere, and the facilitator ends up reacting to it all day.
Brief the model like a new starter
Bad AI output is nearly always a bad brief. The team blames the model. The model got one line.
Where AI goes in the agenda changes what the room thinks
Put the model first and every human idea afterwards is a variation on its answer. Put it last and nobody uses it. The order is a decision.
Ten options that are really one
Ask a model for options and you get variations. Getting something different means changing the question, not asking it again.
Ask it why this will fail. Then don’t believe it.
A model will give you five confident reasons your idea is doomed. Some are real. Some it invented to be helpful. The skill is telling them apart.
Build it in the room. Keep the question on the wall.
You can now turn an idea into a screen, an email or a role-play before the coffee’s cold. The risk is forgetting what the prototype was for.
The summary reads beautifully. Check it anyway.
An AI summary of your workshop will be fluent, confident and about 80% right. The missing 20% is where the disagreements went.
Synthetic users are a rehearsal, not a result
Simulated customers love your prototype. Of course they do. Use them to practise, then write down what only a real person can tell you.
Get the keyboard off the expert
Every AI-assisted workshop has one person who’s great at prompting. By lunch they’re running it, and the quiet half of the room has stopped contributing.
What leaves the room
The dangerous output of an AI workshop is a tidy summary. It looks like a decision. Nobody owns it, and nobody can tell which parts were checked.
Every slide, timebox and prompt from the series.
The facilitation deck we run HyperSprints from: the agenda template, the T.O.K.E.N. brief, the stress-test board, the role cards and the decision record. Free.