I want to take you back to one of the most interesting sessions I've ever facilitated. It was many years ago, with a leadership group at a refinery site, and it's stuck with me ever since.
The brief was simple to say and hard to do. They needed innovative solutions to some genuinely complex problems and tried and tested thinking wasn't going to cut it. So, we pulled together a group that, looking back, was wonderfully diverse. University qualified leaders sat alongside trade qualified workers and people with no formal qualifications at all. Young and old, neurotypical and neurodivergent, different genders and cultures, all in the one room. It wasn't built as a diversity exercise, it just turned out that way, because we invited the right people for the problem at hand.
What happened that day was a really robust conversation, full of opposing viewpoints on the issue we were unpacking. Out of that, the organisation landed on a genuinely novel approach to their problem. I won't go into the detail, that's their story to tell, not mine. But what surprised and delighted me wasn't just what got solved in the room, it was what happened in the weeks afterwards.
People took that shared thinking back to their own corners of the business. Other improvements and efficiencies started showing up, things nobody had set out to fix that day. By the time it was all tallied up, the savings ran into the millions, and every bit of it was an unintended benefit of one good conversation.
That session taught me something early in my career that I still hold onto. You can set the scene, you can make sure the right people are at the table, you can be deliberate about who's in the room and why, but you can never fully predict what a really good, facilitated conversation will produce. You simply have to leave a little room for the magic to do its own thing. Had we structured that day too tightly, planned every minute and controlled every outcome, we would have missed it entirely.
So if you're planning your next workshop or leadership session, ask yourself honestly, are you leaving any space for the unexpected? Or have you planned the magic right out of it?
