ThemeYou as facilitator
CardCard 21 of 60
Questions5 to explore
StepPrepare yourself

Briefs & Instructions

How clearly do the instructions describe the task?

An exercise instruction that seems clear to you will often mean three different things to three different groups.

Briefs and instructions are the directions you give participants before they start a task or exercise. They determine whether people work on the right thing, whether the group moves together or fragments, and whether you spend the next ten minutes answering clarifying questions rather than the group doing the actual work.

Write the instruction before the workshop, say it aloud, and then cut everything that is not load-bearing. Most first-draft instructions contain more than the group needs to hear: context that belongs in your session plan, not in the instruction itself; reassurance that feels necessary but creates noise; and caveats that introduce doubt where you want clarity.

Test your instructions on someone who has not seen the plan. Ask them to tell you what they think they are supposed to do. Where they hesitate or guess, you have found a gap. A well-written instruction should leave participants ready to start without asking anything.

Easy to missRead every exercise instruction out loud in the room before participants arrive and time how long each one takes, because instructions that feel crisp in your head can run to two minutes when spoken and lose the group before the task begins.

How experienced facilitators handle it

The same building block, handled by people who have run a lot of workshops. Patterns and illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Write it, then cut it

Experienced facilitators draft the instruction in full, then remove everything that is not strictly necessary for the participant to start the task. The goal is the minimum that produces the right action.

Say it before you show it

When they use a slide or visual support, they speak the instruction first, then show the slide, so participants are listening rather than reading ahead and half-listening.

Check for understanding before starting

They end an instruction with a specific question ('what questions do you have about the task?') rather than 'is that clear?', which invites a yes even when people are confused.

Test on a naive reader

Before the workshop, they ask someone who has not seen the plan to read the written instruction and describe back what they would do. Gaps surface immediately.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Can a participant who has no prior context follow this instruction and start the task without asking a clarifying question?
Have you cut everything from the instruction that belongs in your notes rather than in what the group needs to hear?
How will you check that the group understood the brief before they start, without just asking 'is that clear?'
Are your written and spoken instructions consistent, and have you rehearsed the spoken version out loud?
What is the most likely misunderstanding of this instruction, and does the brief address it directly?

Watch for

Ending an exercise brief with 'does that make sense?' gets a yes from almost every room, regardless of how much confusion there actually is.
Instructions that pack in too much, covering what to do, how to do it, why it matters and what to produce, overwhelm participants and they remember the last thing said, not the most important.
A facilitator who ad-libs instructions rather than preparing them tends to add caveats and qualifications in the moment, which introduces ambiguity that a prepared instruction would have avoided.