The six sessions 🧭 · from the first conversation with the sponsor to the record
The running case is Larkfield, a constructed software company. Two teams, Platform and Growth, must agree one shared roadmap for next quarter: eight candidate items, room for about four. Two ordinary meetings have ended with the two leads debating while nine people watched. Jo, from a third team with no stake in the roadmap, is asked to facilitate a 90-minute workshop. Larkfield and everyone in it are invented for teaching, and every page says so.
Own the process, not the answer
What a facilitator is for, the four participatory values and the four jobs they turn into, the three hats nobody can wear at once, and the contracting conversation before the room.
🗒️ Session 2 · coreAgendas as outcomes
Every item gets a purpose, an outcome you could hold up at the end, and a process with a clock time. Topic agendas against outcome agendas, on Larkfield's 90 minutes.
💠 Session 3 · coreDiverge, converge, decide
Kaner's Diamond read at source, why the groan zone is normal, a tool for each zone, and the decision rules: unanimity, consent, majority, the person in charge. Named before the talking starts.
⏱️ Session 4 · bench nightThe airtime bench
Forty real meetings, every speaker's airtime and turns measured in your browser. Who held the floor, what a round robin with a cap would change, what "let the loudest summarise" costs, and the break button.
🌩️ Session 5 · deeperWhen the room goes wrong
The dominator, the silent room, the fight and the side conversation. Change the structure before you address a person, and why silence is not agreement.
📌 Session 6 · deeperClose with decisions, owners and a record
Restate the decision and the rule that made it, give every action one owner and a date, and write the record before anyone leaves. Larkfield's workshop closes.
Your passport 🎫
Clear all three quiz questions in a session and it gets stamped. Six stamps means you can contract with a sponsor, write an outcome agenda, walk a group through the Diamond to a named decision rule, read airtime in a real meeting, steady a room that goes wrong, and close with owners and a record. Stamps live in this browser only.
What this is not, so you land in the right place 🧭
| If your question is | Go here instead |
|---|---|
| How do I run a training session or a class, with a run of show and difficult learners? | Course Design, Running the room ↗ |
| How do I turn a programme's meetings into tracked actions and status? | AI Project Management, Meetings to actions ↗ |
| How does a group make a better-calibrated forecast or decision? | Decision Intelligence ↗ |
| How do I deliver bad news or disagree with one person? | Communication ↗ |
| How do I give a talk to a room? | Public Speaking ↗ |
| I have to run a meeting where the group, not me, has to reach a decision it will actually keep. | you are in the right place |
A decision meeting, run from the process seat. Training rooms, programme tracking, forecasting, one-to-one conversations and talks are taught next door and linked from here rather than repeated.
Choose your path 🗺️
Three doors into the same conviction: the group decides, the facilitator makes that possible.
What is honest here 🧾
Facilitation advice travels with famous research, and some of the most quoted lines do not come from where they are said to come from. Each claim on these pages carries its status.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Every baseline bench figure: airtime shares, Gini, top share, turns, who started over whom | Really computed in your browser from segment timings for 40 AMI scenario meetings (AMI Meeting Corpus, CC BY 4.0); no audio and no words are shipped |
| What a round robin with a cap, or "let the loudest summarise", would do | Simulated or modelled by a rule printed on the widget, applied to the real baseline, and labelled on every number |
| "Google found that equal turn-taking makes teams effective" | A conflation. Google's own guide lists five dynamics and never mentions turn-taking; the finding is Woolley and colleagues' 2010 study, joined to Google's story by a 2016 magazine article. Session 4 traces it |
| "Equal airtime makes groups smarter" | Contested. A 2010 correlate that a 2017 direct replication did not find, and a 2021 meta-analysis whose "process" was something else. Session 4 teaches the disagreement |
| Kaner's Diamond and decision rules | Read at source in the publisher's own excerpt and index of the 2014 third edition |
| Larkfield, Platform, Growth, Jo and every Larkfield number | Constructed, for teaching |
The knowledge map 🧠
The whole path at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.