Vision5 - a facilitation playbook
How to plan and run a workshop when nobody taught you how
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Title slide for the Vision5 workshop playbook, DTU
- Context
- Staging Co-Creation and Creativity, DTU
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Equal contribution
- Team size
- 5
- Tools
- Facilitation · Workshop design
- Contribution
- Team of 5, equal contribution across playbook, workshops and poster
A practical handbook for running workshops: five chapters covering theory, an inclusion framework, facilitation technique, tools and methods, and participant engagement patterns.
What it covers
A theory base drawing on universal design, participatory design, co-creation, associative theory and metacognition; an inclusion framework built around ability prompt cards; facilitation technique; a workshop planning method; and patterns for participant engagement and conflict handling. Structured around alternating divergent and convergent sessions, and written to be read in any order.
The idea it turns on
Proactive neutrality. A facilitator's job is not to lead the content but to create the conditions for collaboration, and that has to be actively maintained across three dimensions: impartiality, never favouring an idea or a person; equidistance, treating participants symmetrically; and fairness, staying transparent and keeping communication two-way. Where this slips, the group produces fewer and weaker ideas and more friction.
The most counter-intuitive part
Time pressure feels productive and is not. The strongest ideas tend to arrive late, once the obvious ones are out of the way, so compressing an exercise degrades what comes out of it. The playbook pairs that with reading the room: knowing when to call a break, run an energiser, or re-explain rather than push on.
What I owned
One of five, equal contribution. All members worked across the playbook, the workshops and the poster.