A team workshop shouldn’t feel like a presentation with occasional opportunities for people to speak.
This article is part of our Team Communication Insights Centre.
Explore more Facilitation Activities →
Yet it is surprisingly easy for that to happen.
There is a lot to cover.
Slides have been prepared.
Someone needs to explain the model, introduce the strategy or provide the background.
Before long, participants have spent most of the session listening while the facilitator does most of the work.
If you want to make a team workshop more interactive, the answer isn’t simply to add more activities.
The better question is:
What do you want participants to think about, talk about, explore and discover for themselves?
Interaction should help the workshop achieve something.
Not simply make it feel busier.
What makes a workshop interactive?
An interactive workshop gives participants an active role in creating the experience.
They aren’t simply receiving information.
They are:
- thinking
- discussing
- questioning
- choosing
- comparing
- creating
- reflecting
- experimenting
- making decisions
That doesn’t mean the facilitator stops providing information.
Sometimes people need an explanation.
Sometimes a model needs introducing.
Sometimes everybody needs to understand the same context before they can do anything useful with it.
The difference is what happens next.
Instead of:
Explain → explain → explain → activity → explain
think:
Introduce → explore → discuss → reflect → apply.
The participants start doing more of the work.
1. Start with a question, not an answer
One of the easiest ways to make a workshop more interactive is to ask people what they already think before telling them what you think.
Suppose the workshop is about communication.
You could begin with ten slides explaining effective communication.
Or you could ask:
“What makes communication difficult in this team?”
Suddenly you have material.
People already have experiences, opinions and examples.
The facilitator can listen for themes and use those responses to shape what happens next.
This also changes the relationship between facilitator and participants.
You’re not simply there to deliver answers.
You’re helping the group examine what it already knows.
2. Reduce the amount of information you provide
One of the hardest things about designing a workshop is deciding what to leave out.
If you know a subject well, everything can feel important.
It isn’t.
Ask:
What does the group actually need to know in order to have the next useful conversation?
Perhaps a behavioural model can be explained in ten minutes rather than forty-five.
Perhaps participants don’t need to know its entire history.
Perhaps three slides will provide enough context for an activity.
The objective isn’t to demonstrate how much the facilitator knows.
It’s to give participants enough information to do something useful with it.
Less input creates more room for exploration.
3. Give people time to think before asking them to talk
A facilitator asks a question.
Two seconds pass.
Nobody answers.
The facilitator becomes uncomfortable and answers the question themselves.
This happens constantly.
But silence doesn’t necessarily mean people have nothing to say.
They may simply be thinking.
Try:
“Take a minute and write down your thoughts before we discuss them.”
The quality of the conversation often changes immediately.
Individual thinking time also makes participation more inclusive.
The quickest thinkers and most confident speakers no longer automatically shape the conversation before everyone else has formed a view.
A useful rhythm is:
Think → Pair → Share
Think individually.
Discuss with one other person.
Then bring ideas into the wider group.
A simple change in process can dramatically increase participation.
4. Use small groups before whole-group discussion
Whole-group discussion has limitations.
In a group of twelve people, three or four may do most of the talking.
In a group of thirty, participation becomes even more difficult.
Small groups increase the amount of conversation happening in the room.
Instead of one conversation involving thirty people, you might have six conversations involving five people.
Then bring the important observations back together.
Give groups a clear question rather than simply saying:
“Discuss this on your tables.”
For example:
What is the biggest barrier to effective communication in this team?
What is one behaviour we should do more of?
Where are we making work unnecessarily difficult for ourselves?
Specific questions create more focused conversations.
5. Give people something to respond to
Blank sheets of paper can be intimidating.
“Write down your strengths.”
“Describe your communication style.”
“What behaviours do you value?”
People can spend more time trying to find the right words than exploring the question.
Providing something to respond to can make participation easier.
That might include:
- behavioural statement cards
- photographs
- objects
- quotations
- questions
- diagrams
- scenarios
- physical building materials
- statements positioned around the room
Instead of generating everything from scratch, participants choose, sort, arrange, reject or respond.
That decision itself creates information.
Why did you choose that?
Why didn’t you choose this?
Who saw it differently?
The resource becomes a prompt rather than the activity itself.
6. Make thinking visible
Some conversations become much more useful when participants can see what the group is thinking.
Rather than allowing ideas to disappear after somebody says them, capture them.
Use:
- sticky notes
- cards
- flipcharts
- facilitation boards
- diagrams
- voting dots
- physical objects
- simple visual maps
When ideas become visible, people can compare them.
Patterns emerge.
Several people may have independently identified the same issue.
Two groups may see a situation completely differently.
One important topic may be sitting by itself.
Visual facilitation allows the group to work with its collective thinking rather than relying upon somebody to remember what was said.
7. Introduce movement where it serves a purpose
Interaction doesn’t have to mean people constantly moving around the room.
But changing physical position can change the energy of a workshop.
Ask participants to:
move to the statement they most agree with
stand beside the priority they think matters most
position themselves along a continuum
visit another group’s work
move between discussion stations
Now people are making a visible choice.
That creates another question:
“What made you stand there?”
Movement should still have a purpose.
Getting people out of their chairs isn’t automatically facilitation.
But when physical positioning represents a decision or perspective, it can make an abstract discussion much more tangible.
8. Use activities to reveal something
Interactive workshops can become overloaded with activities.
Activity follows activity.
Everyone is busy.
There is lots of energy.
But nobody is quite sure what any of it means.
Choose activities because they might reveal something useful.
A communication exercise might reveal who speaks and who doesn’t.
A behavioural activity might reveal differences between self-perception and how colleagues experience someone.
A prioritisation exercise might reveal that the team doesn’t agree about what matters most.
A building activity might reveal how differently people interpret the same instruction.
The interesting question isn’t:
“Did everyone enjoy the activity?”
It’s:
“What did the activity help us notice?”
9. Leave enough time for the debrief
This is where interactive workshops often lose their value.
The activity takes longer than expected.
The agenda is slipping.
So the facilitator shortens the debrief.
That’s usually the wrong thing to cut.
The activity creates an experience.
The debrief helps participants make sense of it.
Ask:
What happened?
What did you notice?
What surprised you?
Where did you see things differently?
Where does this happen in our everyday work?
What might we do differently?
You don’t need all six.
Choose the question most likely to help participants connect the experience back to their work.
10. Don’t be frightened of changing the agenda
An interactive workshop generates information.
That means participants may surface something more important than the facilitator expected.
Perhaps an activity reveals a disagreement.
Perhaps everybody identifies the same obstacle.
Perhaps a question creates a conversation the team clearly needs to have.
The temptation can be:
“That’s really interesting, but we need to move on.”
Sometimes you do.
But sometimes the conversation is the work.
A workshop agenda should provide enough structure to create direction without becoming so rigid that the facilitator ignores what is happening in the room.
This is one of the differences between presenting and facilitating.
The presenter primarily manages content.
The facilitator also pays attention to what is emerging.
11. Build towards application
Interaction shouldn’t end when the workshop does.
Towards the end of the session, begin moving from:
What have we discovered?
to:
What are we going to do with it?
That doesn’t necessarily require a detailed action plan.
You might ask:
What should we continue doing?
What should we do differently?
What conversation needs to continue?
What should we notice over the next month?
What is one small experiment we could try?
Small behavioural commitments are often more useful than an ambitious list of actions nobody looks at again.
Interactive doesn’t mean complicated
You don’t need expensive technology, elaborate exercises or a room full of equipment to create an interactive workshop.
Sometimes all you need is:
a useful question
something to respond to
time to think
someone else to talk to
and:
a good debrief.
Tools can help.
Cards can give people language.
Building blocks can make ideas physical.
Facilitation boards can make collective thinking visible.
Behavioural profiles can provide insight.
But the tool isn’t what makes the workshop interactive.
What participants do with it does.
Using Colour Energies activities in an interactive workshop
Colour-based behavioural activities can work particularly well in interactive workshops because they give people an accessible way to discuss behavioural differences.
The Colour Energies Card Game, for example, provides behavioural statements that participants can choose, compare and discuss.
Rather than telling somebody what their behaviour means, the facilitator can ask:
Which statements do you recognise in yourself?
Which would colleagues choose for you?
Where do your perceptions differ?
Which behaviours does this team have plenty of?
Which might we need more of?
Similarly, physical Colour Energies Building Blocks can provide a visual way of representing behavioural preferences, team patterns or different perspectives.
The important part isn’t the cards or blocks.
They give people something tangible to work with.
The conversation is still the intervention.
From workshop activity to better team conversations
The best interactive workshops don’t simply create more participation during the session.
They change the quality of the conversations people are capable of having afterwards.
Someone asks rather than assumes.
A colleague provides feedback sooner.
A team notices a familiar communication pattern.
People become more comfortable challenging an idea.
A behavioural difference becomes something to explore rather than something to complain about.
That’s a much more useful measure of workshop interaction than how many activities appeared on the agenda.
A useful question when designing your next workshop
Look at each section of your workshop agenda and ask:
What are the participants doing here?
If the answer repeatedly is:
“Listening to me”
there is probably an opportunity.
You don’t necessarily need another activity.
You may simply need to stop providing the answer and create enough space for the group to explore the question.
Because the most interactive workshops aren’t necessarily the busiest.
They’re the ones in which the participants do most of the thinking.
Return to the Team Communication insights Centre
Turning Awareness Into Action
This is where designing interactive workshop activities become valuable.
Not because people need another profile. But because they need opportunities to talk.
When teams discuss communication regularly:
- Awareness becomes understanding.
- Understanding becomes feedback.
- Feedback becomes action.
- Action becomes improvement.
That is where meaningful change begins.
Why Facilitation Matters
The most successful team communication activities are rarely those that provide the most information.
They are the activities that generate the most meaningful discussion.
- When people exchange observations.
- Share perspectives.
- Challenge assumptions.
- Recognise strengths.
- Acknowledge blind spots.
The conversation becomes more valuable than the model.
The framework simply provides a structure. The workshop facilitator provides the space.
Take a look at our free guide: 7 Questions That Improve Team Communication and learn how to improve team communication without another profile.
So What Happens Next?
If your team has recently completed a profile workshop, the next step is not another profile.
The next step is conversation.
Because communication does not improve when people complete a profile.
Communication improves when people start talking differently to one another.
A team workshop shouldn’t feel like a presentation with occasional opportunities for people to speak.
This article is part of our Team Communication Insights Centre.
Explore more Facilitation Activities →
Yet it is surprisingly easy for that to happen.
There is a lot to cover.
Slides have been prepared.
Someone needs to explain the model, introduce the strategy or provide the background.
Before long, participants have spent most of the session listening while the facilitator does most of the work.
If you want to make a team workshop more interactive, the answer isn’t simply to add more activities.
The better question is:
What do you want participants to think about, talk about, explore and discover for themselves?
Interaction should help the workshop achieve something.
Not simply make it feel busier.
What makes a workshop interactive?
An interactive workshop gives participants an active role in creating the experience.
They aren’t simply receiving information.
They are:
- thinking
- discussing
- questioning
- choosing
- comparing
- creating
- reflecting
- experimenting
- making decisions
That doesn’t mean the facilitator stops providing information.
Sometimes people need an explanation.
Sometimes a model needs introducing.
Sometimes everybody needs to understand the same context before they can do anything useful with it.
The difference is what happens next.
Instead of:
Explain → explain → explain → activity → explain
think:
Introduce → explore → discuss → reflect → apply.
The participants start doing more of the work.
1. Start with a question, not an answer
One of the easiest ways to make a workshop more interactive is to ask people what they already think before telling them what you think.
Suppose the workshop is about communication.
You could begin with ten slides explaining effective communication.
Or you could ask:
“What makes communication difficult in this team?”
Suddenly you have material.
People already have experiences, opinions and examples.
The facilitator can listen for themes and use those responses to shape what happens next.
This also changes the relationship between facilitator and participants.
You’re not simply there to deliver answers.
You’re helping the group examine what it already knows.
2. Reduce the amount of information you provide
One of the hardest things about designing a workshop is deciding what to leave out.
If you know a subject well, everything can feel important.
It isn’t.
Ask:
What does the group actually need to know in order to have the next useful conversation?
Perhaps a behavioural model can be explained in ten minutes rather than forty-five.
Perhaps participants don’t need to know its entire history.
Perhaps three slides will provide enough context for an activity.
The objective isn’t to demonstrate how much the facilitator knows.
It’s to give participants enough information to do something useful with it.
Less input creates more room for exploration.
3. Give people time to think before asking them to talk
A facilitator asks a question.
Two seconds pass.
Nobody answers.
The facilitator becomes uncomfortable and answers the question themselves.
This happens constantly.
But silence doesn’t necessarily mean people have nothing to say.
They may simply be thinking.
Try:
“Take a minute and write down your thoughts before we discuss them.”
The quality of the conversation often changes immediately.
Individual thinking time also makes participation more inclusive.
The quickest thinkers and most confident speakers no longer automatically shape the conversation before everyone else has formed a view.
A useful rhythm is:
Think → Pair → Share
Think individually.
Discuss with one other person.
Then bring ideas into the wider group.
A simple change in process can dramatically increase participation.
4. Use small groups before whole-group discussion
Whole-group discussion has limitations.
In a group of twelve people, three or four may do most of the talking.
In a group of thirty, participation becomes even more difficult.
Small groups increase the amount of conversation happening in the room.
Instead of one conversation involving thirty people, you might have six conversations involving five people.
Then bring the important observations back together.
Give groups a clear question rather than simply saying:
“Discuss this on your tables.”
For example:
What is the biggest barrier to effective communication in this team?
What is one behaviour we should do more of?
Where are we making work unnecessarily difficult for ourselves?
Specific questions create more focused conversations.
5. Give people something to respond to
Blank sheets of paper can be intimidating.
“Write down your strengths.”
“Describe your communication style.”
“What behaviours do you value?”
People can spend more time trying to find the right words than exploring the question.
Providing something to respond to can make participation easier.
That might include:
- behavioural statement cards
- photographs
- objects
- quotations
- questions
- diagrams
- scenarios
- physical building materials
- statements positioned around the room
Instead of generating everything from scratch, participants choose, sort, arrange, reject or respond.
That decision itself creates information.
Why did you choose that?
Why didn’t you choose this?
Who saw it differently?
The resource becomes a prompt rather than the activity itself.
6. Make thinking visible
Some conversations become much more useful when participants can see what the group is thinking.
Rather than allowing ideas to disappear after somebody says them, capture them.
Use:
- sticky notes
- cards
- flipcharts
- facilitation boards
- diagrams
- voting dots
- physical objects
- simple visual maps
When ideas become visible, people can compare them.
Patterns emerge.
Several people may have independently identified the same issue.
Two groups may see a situation completely differently.
One important topic may be sitting by itself.
Visual facilitation allows the group to work with its collective thinking rather than relying upon somebody to remember what was said.
7. Introduce movement where it serves a purpose
Interaction doesn’t have to mean people constantly moving around the room.
But changing physical position can change the energy of a workshop.
Ask participants to:
move to the statement they most agree with
stand beside the priority they think matters most
position themselves along a continuum
visit another group’s work
move between discussion stations
Now people are making a visible choice.
That creates another question:
“What made you stand there?”
Movement should still have a purpose.
Getting people out of their chairs isn’t automatically facilitation.
But when physical positioning represents a decision or perspective, it can make an abstract discussion much more tangible.
8. Use activities to reveal something
Interactive workshops can become overloaded with activities.
Activity follows activity.
Everyone is busy.
There is lots of energy.
But nobody is quite sure what any of it means.
Choose activities because they might reveal something useful.
A communication exercise might reveal who speaks and who doesn’t.
A behavioural activity might reveal differences between self-perception and how colleagues experience someone.
A prioritisation exercise might reveal that the team doesn’t agree about what matters most.
A building activity might reveal how differently people interpret the same instruction.
The interesting question isn’t:
“Did everyone enjoy the activity?”
It’s:
“What did the activity help us notice?”
9. Leave enough time for the debrief
This is where interactive workshops often lose their value.
The activity takes longer than expected.
The agenda is slipping.
So the facilitator shortens the debrief.
That’s usually the wrong thing to cut.
The activity creates an experience.
The debrief helps participants make sense of it.
Ask:
What happened?
What did you notice?
What surprised you?
Where did you see things differently?
Where does this happen in our everyday work?
What might we do differently?
You don’t need all six.
Choose the question most likely to help participants connect the experience back to their work.
10. Don’t be frightened of changing the agenda
An interactive workshop generates information.
That means participants may surface something more important than the facilitator expected.
Perhaps an activity reveals a disagreement.
Perhaps everybody identifies the same obstacle.
Perhaps a question creates a conversation the team clearly needs to have.
The temptation can be:
“That’s really interesting, but we need to move on.”
Sometimes you do.
But sometimes the conversation is the work.
A workshop agenda should provide enough structure to create direction without becoming so rigid that the facilitator ignores what is happening in the room.
This is one of the differences between presenting and facilitating.
The presenter primarily manages content.
The facilitator also pays attention to what is emerging.
11. Build towards application
Interaction shouldn’t end when the workshop does.
Towards the end of the session, begin moving from:
What have we discovered?
to:
What are we going to do with it?
That doesn’t necessarily require a detailed action plan.
You might ask:
What should we continue doing?
What should we do differently?
What conversation needs to continue?
What should we notice over the next month?
What is one small experiment we could try?
Small behavioural commitments are often more useful than an ambitious list of actions nobody looks at again.
Interactive doesn’t mean complicated
You don’t need expensive technology, elaborate exercises or a room full of equipment to create an interactive workshop.
Sometimes all you need is:
a useful question
something to respond to
time to think
someone else to talk to
and:
a good debrief.
Tools can help.
Cards can give people language.
Building blocks can make ideas physical.
Facilitation boards can make collective thinking visible.
Behavioural profiles can provide insight.
But the tool isn’t what makes the workshop interactive.
What participants do with it does.
Using Colour Energies activities in an interactive workshop
Colour-based behavioural activities can work particularly well in interactive workshops because they give people an accessible way to discuss behavioural differences.
The Colour Energies Card Game, for example, provides behavioural statements that participants can choose, compare and discuss.
Rather than telling somebody what their behaviour means, the facilitator can ask:
Which statements do you recognise in yourself?
Which would colleagues choose for you?
Where do your perceptions differ?
Which behaviours does this team have plenty of?
Which might we need more of?
Similarly, physical Colour Energies Building Blocks can provide a visual way of representing behavioural preferences, team patterns or different perspectives.
The important part isn’t the cards or blocks.
They give people something tangible to work with.
The conversation is still the intervention.
From workshop activity to better team conversations
The best interactive workshops don’t simply create more participation during the session.
They change the quality of the conversations people are capable of having afterwards.
Someone asks rather than assumes.
A colleague provides feedback sooner.
A team notices a familiar communication pattern.
People become more comfortable challenging an idea.
A behavioural difference becomes something to explore rather than something to complain about.
That’s a much more useful measure of workshop interaction than how many activities appeared on the agenda.
A useful question when designing your next workshop
Look at each section of your workshop agenda and ask:
What are the participants doing here?
If the answer repeatedly is:
“Listening to me”
there is probably an opportunity.
You don’t necessarily need another activity.
You may simply need to stop providing the answer and create enough space for the group to explore the question.
Because the most interactive workshops aren’t necessarily the busiest.
They’re the ones in which the participants do most of the thinking.
Return to the Team Communication insights Centre
Turning Awareness Into Action
This is where designing interactive workshop activities become valuable.
Not because people need another profile. But because they need opportunities to talk.
When teams discuss communication regularly:
- Awareness becomes understanding.
- Understanding becomes feedback.
- Feedback becomes action.
- Action becomes improvement.
That is where meaningful change begins.
Why Facilitation Matters
The most successful team communication activities are rarely those that provide the most information.
They are the activities that generate the most meaningful discussion.
- When people exchange observations.
- Share perspectives.
- Challenge assumptions.
- Recognise strengths.
- Acknowledge blind spots.
The conversation becomes more valuable than the model.
The framework simply provides a structure. The workshop facilitator provides the space.
Take a look at our free guide: 7 Questions That Improve Team Communication and learn how to improve team communication without another profile.
So What Happens Next?
If your team has recently completed a profile workshop, the next step is not another profile.
The next step is conversation.
Because communication does not improve when people complete a profile.
Communication improves when people start talking differently to one another.
