Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash
“Even though the Head of Product felt the workshop was good, he was still confused about what, exactly, we had achieved by the end.”
I’ve been hearing that from designers a fair bit recently, across companies and domains. Workshops have been fading recently: not gone but quieter. It’s not because stakeholders suddenly hate collaboration.
It’s because the last time they did one of these, they walked out with a Miro board nobody looked at again and a vague sense that something had happened.
The week-long, 30-person workshop is basically dead. The State of Facilitation 2025 now recommends that most facilitation sessions be 60 to 90 minutes.
If you’re still pitching anything longer than that, you’re already losing the room before anyone’s shown up.
The “what did the business get out of this?” problem
“Great, so you did a workshop. What was the outcome? Did the business make money? What were the cost savings? What did you implement? Oh, you don’t have that. You just have some Post-its.” — Design Manager
That’s not one person being harsh. It’s a pretty common reaction in 2026, and the reason is usually the same: nobody defined what “done” looked like before the thing started.
Gothelf and Seiden were making this point in Lean UX, and it’s somehow more true now than when they wrote it. The board full of stickies has become the output. It looks like work, it feels like momentum, and then nothing moves.
There’s also the math, which almost nobody does out loud.
Your workshop isn’t free, and it’s not because of catering. It’s just that the cost doesn’t show up anywhere obvious. If a VP blocks off half a day, that’s thousands of dollars in opportunity costs to attend your workshop. Multiply that across everyone attending, and that might be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One designer I know tried to bring nearly 40 stakeholders from several teams together to work through a shared problem. It fell apart, and it wasn’t because the problem wasn’t worth solving. It was because those teams were all trying to ship things. Stopping to attend a session with no guaranteed output wasn’t a trade they were willing to make.
That’s the real reason workshops disappeared. Not because collaboration is dead. Because nobody made the case that this one was worth what it actually cost.
Why is this a designer’s problem to solve
Designers are actually pretty well positioned to fix this, and it’s not because we’re the best facilitators in the room. It’s because we’re the most motivated to get it right.
We spend most of our working lives translating things: between users and engineers, between research and roadmaps, between what someone says they want and what they actually need. The instinct to reframe the problem before jumping to solutions isn’t something we learned in a workshop certification. It’s just kind of how we work.
Gothelf calls the real output of a good workshop “shared understanding.” Not the deck, not the Miro board, not the summary doc nobody reads. The alignment means teams stop having the same argument in every meeting. That’s a business outcome. We just don’t call it that, which is part of the problem.
We’re also the ones who have to design something when it’s over. That matters more than people give it credit for. We have more skin in the game than anyone else in the room, which means we have more reason than anyone to make sure something real comes out of it.
Facilitation is increasingly being recognized as a leadership skill, not just a process tool, with nearly a third of professionals now using it in-house. Designers who get ahead of that are going to look very different from those who are still booking conference rooms and buying Post-its.
How to run the workshop that actually works
The organizations doing workshops well have moved toward what’s being called “Activation Workshops”: sessions designed not to generate insights, but to turn existing insights into decisions. Here’s how to actually build one.
Let’s say someone comes to you with this: “We need a workshop to figure out what we don’t know about user group B.” That’s a real request. It’s also not a workshop yet. Here’s what you do with it.
Make it about a time-based decision. Don’t just book a conference room based on “What we don’t know about user group B.”
Push back, and ask one important question:
Why does the team need to know about user group B right now?
If the answer then becomes “we’re trying to decide if we’re expanding the product to serve this user group?”
That’s the real point of the workshop, not cataloging knowledge gaps.
Shrink the room by doing the math out loud. Figure out the rough opportunity cost, because small, focused teams outperform large ones. If you’re bringing in executives, who might cost $500/hour to be in the room? You have to be able to answer “What does the business get for that?”
Having 5–6 people in the room for 1 hour often is $1500+ in opportunity costs.
If you’re justifying it by saying “We’ll be able to say whether user group B is worth designing for”, then you need to ensure that you have the right people who can make those decisions.
There’s no sense in workshopping with your product team if they can’t make these big business decisions without a VP.
Cap the time and don’t apologize for it. A 90-minute session with a named decision on the table is a completely different meeting from a half-day alignment session.
Shorter formats force sharper objectives, and people tend to stay engaged when they feel their time is respected. Pitch the shortest version that could still hit the goal. You can always go longer. You can’t get buy-in back once you’ve lost it.
Format follows outcome:
Rather than planning a long agenda, defining the outcomes also helps to determine the content of the workshop. If your goal is to determine “Yes/No” on user group B, it might take the form of an Impact/Effort Matrix exercise (and a prioritization framework).
Bring existing research to make that existing exercise easier. That’s a very different design from “let’s brainstorm what we don’t know.”
With those things in mind, the original request of “a workshop to figure out what we don’t know about user group B,” became a 90-minute session with six people, a clear decision on the table, and a format built around making that call.
That’s how facilitation works in 2026.
Designers who run workshops this way stop being the person who organized the sticky-note session and become the person who helped the team make a call they’d been avoiding for three months. That’s the positioning shift, and what makes them valuable when people are cutting budgets.
Kai Wong is a Design Educator and author of the Data and Design Newsletter. He helps designers tell the story of why their work matters to businesses, to get buy-in for their ideas, and advance their careers.
It seems to me that we lack a basic understanding of how workshops are properly organized and structured yet we write articles like this that only show lack of knowledge and competence in the field. Workshops require specific activities based on the workshop goal, a facilitator to make sure folks are guided properly towards that goal, activities must be timeboxed and we all must follow a timeline towards the end result. This article simply says that bad workshop are bad and shouldn’t happen, which is true, it doesn’t say that what good workshops are. You can have an efficient 3day design or empathy workshop with amazing outputs if one knows how to organize and facilitate. I think this article simply shows the author has no idea how to correctly run a workshop, sorry.