Facilitating Creative Workshops course

This is a hands-on, interactive, virtual class training where you will learn by doing over 2 x half-days.

Dates for classes

Classes are via Microsoft Teams on Thursday 23rd July and Thursday 30th July, from 9am-1pm AEST (Brisbane time).

What you will learn

• Principles of workshop facilitation and design thinking
• Building empathy and defining the problem
• Idea generation and prioritisation
• Building consensus and engaging stakeholders
• Tools and logistics for running in-person and remote workshops

Who this course is for

• Anyone running workshops
• Product managers
• CX managers
• UX designers
• Service designers

Course outline

1. Guiding principles of workshop facilitation and design thinking

• What is facilitation and what makes a good facilitator?
• Why traditional meetings and focus groups often don't work.
• The 5 phases of workshop facilitation.
• What design thinking is and where workshops fit into the process.
• Planning a successful workshop and designing your approach.
• Getting the right participants to attend and preparing for a smooth workshop.
• Managing difficult participants and engaging stakeholders in the process.
• The technologies, tools and logistics of remote virtual workshop facilitation.

2. Building empathy and defining the problem

• Build empathy for your customers through research and methods such as collaborative journey mapping and empathy mapping.
• Running your workshop: how to open and general facilitation tips.
• Defining the problem and using ‘How Might We?’ (HMW) statements.

3. Ideating, prototyping and testing

• Creative brainstorming methods and gameplay such as ‘How Might We?’ carousel game, SCAMPER and Crazy Eights to ideate incremental and disruptive innovative ideas.
• Avoiding 'Idea killers'.
• Understand how to apply convergent thinking to prioritise ideas based on measures such as customer value, effort and feasibility and identify ‘quick wins’ that will make a difference.
• Creating concept cards and different types of prototypes.

4. Building consensus and engaging stakeholders

• Facilitating participants to reach a common conclusion.
• How to involve stakeholders and build empathy using methods such as co-design to ensure stakeholders buy-in to the solution.
• Managing your time and what to do when it all goes pear-shaped.
• Capturing workshop outputs.
• Running a solution design session with stakeholders after testing your prototypes.
• Pros and cons of in-person versus remote virtual workshops.

Your trainers

Tania Lang and/or Miranda Wee will be your trainer for this course.

Tania Lang: Over 20 years' experience as a customer experience practitioner. Industry leader and presenter at UX conferences such as UX Australia Design Research. Has delivered UX training to over 3,500 participants including whole teams in organisations such as ATO, Services Australia, CASA, ANZ, CommBank and several other government agencies and private companies. Highly qualified: M. Bus. (Research) in User Behaviour, Grad. Cert. Human Factors, Grad. Cert in Arts (Marketing) and B.Sc.

Miranda Wee: More than 15 years' experience as a user experience practitioner. Has led UX research, design and testing projects for organisations such as TAFE Queensland, Queensland Ambulance Services, Transport and Main Roads (Smart Ticketing CX rollout) and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Specialises in end-to-end UX—from discovery to design, prototyping, and testing. Passionate about uncovering deep user insights and usability issues to create better user experiences. Skilled in facilitating collaborative design workshops and stakeholder engagement.

Program delivery

This course will be delivered virtually, using Microsoft Teams and Miro. Breaks are scheduled throughout the day to reduce online meeting fatigue and we include plenty of interactive activities and break-out activities, ensuring you won't be just sitting passively watching a presentation all day. The activities have been carefully designed to help you learn in this environment and our trainers, Tania Lang and Miranda Wee are both skilled at creating engaging learning experiences regardless of the delivery mode.

Refund policy

Cancellations received 30 days or more before to the course start date will incur a 25% administration fee. Cancellations received less than 30 days are non-refundable.

If PeakXD postpones or cancels a course (e.g. due to insufficient numbers), attendees can elect to receive a full refund, attend the new date or have their payment transferred to another course.

Read our terms and conditions for full details.