SessionLab

When you're co-facilitating, how do you usually divide up the session? 🔹 We assign blocks in advance and everyone knows their role 🔹 We decide on the day 🔹 One person leads, others support as needed 🔹 Honestly? We wing it 😅 Vote in the poll and tell us why in the comments.

We’ve been thinking a lot about surveys these days. What makes them good, what makes them bad, what to do with the results. We’re fans of surveys that get attention by doing something a bit differently, and that combine awareness that people are busy (e.g. by making most questions optional) with space to go a bit deeper (e.g. with open, reflective questions). Here are some ideas from the pre- and post-training question bank we’ve just put together: - Before: "What would make this training feel like a success for you personally?" - After: "What is one thing you intend to do differently as a result of this training?" - 30 days later: "What, if anything, has changed in how you work?" Read our practical guide to pre- and post-training surveys: when to send them, how to keep questions sharp and unbiased, and a ready-to-use question bank you can copy and adapt straight away. 👉 https://lnkd.in/d_45QZfA #Facilitation #TrainingDesign #LearningAndDevelopment

🗓️ Save the date — June 3rd | 9:00–10:30am PST Andy Pearson, Head of Customer Success at SessionLab, is joining the Virtual Facilitation Practice community for a hands-on session. Whether you're already using SessionLab or just curious, this is a great chance to see it in action, ask questions directly, and pick up practical ideas you can use straight away. Here's what's lined up: 🖥️ Live demos of SessionLab's new features 💬 Q&A with Andy 🌍 This is a multilingual session with live caption translations in English, Portuguese, and Spanish 👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/djssnWaR

Most people think "training materials" means slides. Maybe a handout. But if you're running instructor-led training at any kind of scale, a slide deck isn't a system. It's just one piece of a much bigger picture. A complete set of ILT training materials covers eight components. A few worth highlighting: 📋 Facilitator guide: the backbone of consistent delivery, containing everything a trainer needs to run the session without reconstructing it from scratch; ⚡ Pre-work: underused and underestimated; at its best, it shifts someone from "I have to attend this" to "I'm curious about this" before the room fills up; 📬 Follow-up materials: where most training programs leak value; what happens after the session is over matters as much as what happens in it. We walk through each of these in depth in our latest guide, with tips on how to organize and maintain them so they don't become a liability the moment the person who built them goes on leave. → https://lnkd.in/d5Wn9QPA #InstructorLedTraining #LearningAndDevelopment #Facilitation #TrainingDesign

There are many advantages to having a facilitation culture in your organization. It leads to better processes, clearer decisions, improved onboarding, higher employee retention, and more high-functioning teams. It’s much more than “running a good workshop”. On June 23, Robert Cserti, co-founder & CEO of SessionLab, is joining Voltage Control's Facilitation Lab to walk through the Facilitation at Scale maturity model and help you figure out exactly where your organization sits on that journey. Through guided exercises and peer reflection, you'll leave with a sharper picture of where your workplace is today and a concrete sense of what moving forward requires. Free to join. If you work in L&D, OD, or lead teams where collaboration and workshops are core to how you work, save your spot. RSVP → https://lnkd.in/dQBKB-Hj #Facilitation #LearningAndDevelopment #OrgDesign #Leadership

There is a lot of overlap between facilitation and training, as long as training is instructor-led, participatory, and experiential. And they share challenges, including how difficult it is to measure the effectiveness of such “soft” interventions. Most such programs end with a feedback form. That tells you participants had a good time. It doesn't tell you whether anything changed. The real proof of a well-run training shows up weeks later: in how someone handles a difficult conversation, onboards a colleague, or solves a problem without escalating it. And most L&D teams have very little visibility into that. We’ve written a practical guide on how to close that gap, covering: 📐 Why measuring ILT effectiveness is structurally different from e-learning (no built-in data infrastructure, and the meaningful evidence lives elsewhere) 🎯 What "effective" actually means for a program, and why you need to define it before design begins, not after delivery 📊 The Kirkpatrick model as a shared vocabulary with stakeholders, and why Levels 3 and 4 are where most programs fall apart ⏱️ How to structure data collection across the full arc: baseline before, commitments during, and sequential check-ins at 30, 60, and 90+ days 💡 The case for proxy indicators: observable signals that show learning transferred, even when direct measurement isn't possible The article also draws on findings from the 2026 State of Facilitation report: fewer than one in three facilitators agree on measurable outcomes with clients before a program begins. Impact assessment is retrospective by default, and 43.5% of practitioners cite a lack of follow-up as the single biggest obstacle to lasting change. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/de-RB6B9 How does your team currently approach measuring training impact? What's the hardest part to get right? #LearningAndDevelopment #Facilitation #InstructorLedTraining #TrainingEffectiveness #WorkshopDesign

We’ve been thinking a lot about surveys these days. What makes them good, what makes them bad, what to do with the results. We’re fans of surveys that get attention by doing something a bit differently, and that combine awareness that people are busy (e.g. by making most questions optional) with space to go a bit deeper (e.g. with open, reflective questions). Here are some ideas from the pre- and post-training question bank we’ve just put together: - Before: "What would make this training feel like a success for you personally?" - After: "What is one thing you intend to do differently as a result of this training?" - 30 days later: "What, if anything, has changed in how you work?" Read our practical guide to pre- and post-training surveys: when to send them, how to keep questions sharp and unbiased, and a ready-to-use question bank you can copy and adapt straight away. 👉 https://lnkd.in/d_45QZfA #Facilitation #TrainingDesign #LearningAndDevelopment

Imagine a company where facilitation isn't something that happens in special sessions. It's just how people work together. That's the vision behind Level 4 of the Facilitation Maturity Model. At this stage, the infrastructure built at Level 3 is fully in place. The question becomes distribution. How do facilitation skills, materials and processes reach every corner of the organisation, not just the L&D team or a handful of trained specialists? Three things that define a true culture of facilitation: 👥 Facilitation as a leadership competency - Skills training is built into leadership development and onboarding. 📝 A living, organisation-wide repository - Templates, facilitator guides and programmes are tailored by region, audience and format. The system scales because the materials do. ⚡ Impact is measured, not assumed - Reporting dashboards connect delivery data to business outcomes. Program managers have visibility across the organization and a continuous improvement loop that actually runs. Level 4 is about having a company-wide culture of facilitation, made operational. Very few trend-setting organizations are there already; if yours is, we’d love to hear about it! Read the full guide → https://lnkd.in/dt-MR4YT What would a culture of facilitation change in your organisation? #Facilitation #LearningAndDevelopment #WorkshopDesign #Leadership

The most interesting part of sharing this process video of Forms in action has been learning how facilitators approach gathering participant input before they start designing. Jeffrey Cufaude shared questions he uses to gauge participation preferences (introvert/extrovert), alongside whether people tend to think in a big-picture or more analytical and detail-oriented way. He also mentioned how illuminating it can be to feed patterns and insights back to the group itself. Nathy Ravez mentioned she runs short participant interviews to uncover context and challenges that might otherwise get missed in the workshop And James Smart captured something many facilitators probably recognise: every time we properly make the time to ask participants what they need, we usually learn something that improves the session design! People use lots of different tools for this: forms, interviews, surveys, comments, sticky notes… it depends on the group and the kind of participation you’re trying to invite. And not to sound biased 😅 but personally, I’ve genuinely loved using Forms in SessionLab. It’s quick, easy, and already part of my workflow without needing to jump between external tools. Have you noticed that better workshops often begin long before people enter the room? Carrin from SessionLab 💚

When facilitation is embedded in an organisation, decisions are made faster, change processes are clear, and training quality is consistent, whether it’s delivered in London or Singapore. That's the promise of Level 3 of the Facilitation Maturity Model, where facilitation moves from a dedicated hub to a managed organisational capability. Facilitation and training delivery is no longer the sole responsibility of the core L&D team. Facilitation skills are spreading into leadership development. Programmes are standardised. There's a structured process for every step from intake to delivery to feedback. Three things that define progress at this stage: 👥 Distribute the skills - When managers and team leads are trained to facilitate, quality improves across the organization. 📝 Systematise your materials - A unified repository of approved facilitator guides, templates and feedback forms becomes the standard every facilitator can refer to. ⚡ Close the feedback loop - Moving from gut feeling and vanity metrics to data that tells you what's actually changing is what gives leadership the evidence they need. At Level 3, the infrastructure for a genuine culture of facilitation is in place. Level 4 is about extending its reach across the whole organisation. Read the full guide → https://lnkd.in/dt-MR4YT How are you approaching consistency at scale in your organisation? #Facilitation #LearningAndDevelopment #WorkshopDesign #Leadership