ThemePurpose & people
CardCard 9 of 60
Questions5 to explore

Challenges

Possible challenges you could prepare for

Every workshop has a handful of things that could go wrong, and the ones you thought through in advance are the ones you survive.

Challenges are the foreseeable difficulties that could disrupt the workshop: a participant who tends to dominate, a topic that carries emotional weight, a group that does not know each other, a facilitator who is nervous, a room with bad acoustics. They are not the catastrophic unknowns but the things you can actually see coming if you pause and look.

Preparing for challenges does not mean expecting the worst. It means deciding in advance what you would do if something predictable happens, so you are not improvising from scratch in the moment. A challenge you named before the day is one you can plan around, brief your co-facilitator on, or build a buffer into the programme for.

This is also the place to surface challenges that belong to the group or the topic rather than the logistics. Political tension between teams, unequal power among participants, a recent layoff, a subject people feel strongly about: these shape how you design the session, what exercises you choose, and how you open the day.

Easy to missWrite down three specific challenges by name before the workshop, not a general worry but a real scenario, and decide what you would do in each one.

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.

Name them explicitly

Experienced facilitators list concrete challenges, not vague concerns. 'One senior person tends to speak first and close down others' is plannable. 'The group dynamics might be difficult' is not.

Brief the co-facilitator

If you have a co-facilitator, share the challenge list before the day so you both know what to watch for and who takes the lead when something arises.

Build in small buffers

For challenges that are likely but not certain, experienced facilitators add a few minutes of slack near the relevant point in the programme, so they have room to handle it without losing time.

Design for the trickiest person

When a group has one participant who tends to derail conversations, designing for that person often improves the experience for everyone: clearer process, more structured turns, stronger facilitation.

Questions to plan around

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

Who in this group, or about this topic, could make the session harder than expected?
Are there power dynamics, emotional histories or team tensions that will be in the room?
What is the one thing you would most hate to have happen, and what would you do if it did?
Which parts of the design are most vulnerable to disruption, and can you build a small buffer there?
Have you briefed your co-facilitator on the specific challenges to look out for?

Watch for

The challenges you do not name are the ones that catch you off guard. Spending ten minutes the day before listing what could go wrong is rarely wasted.
Logistical challenges get all the attention (will the projector work?) while group-dynamic challenges get none, and it is usually the latter that derail a session.
Preparing for challenges can tip into over-engineering: you are looking for the two or three real ones to plan around, not a risk register.