Getting Better at Facilitating Conversations

Advanced facilitation, LEGO® Serious Play and a little help from AI

A preview of what it might look like when LSP is involved in a meeting

I spend a lot of my working life in rooms (physical or virtual) where people are trying to do good work together, often under slightly messy conditions. And what I’m really doing in those rooms isn’t “running workshops” so much as facilitating conversations: the ones that happen in meetings, retrospectives, trainings, planning sessions, or whenever a group needs to think (and decide) together.

A team with no previous Scrum Master. A legacy product that comes with ten years of history and three years of “we should really fix this.” A small new-product setup where I’m wearing the Product Owner hat and thinking about UX.

In all of those contexts, better conversations mean better work.

That’s exactly why I didn’t want to coast on “I’ve facilitated a lot, so I’m fine.” I wanted sharper tools and better instincts, especially for the messy middle of a conversation, when a group gets stuck or too polite or too chaotic. So I joined the **Advanced Facilitation Training by Mirna** (Trainer’s Toolbox) in London.

The setup was almost suspiciously intense…

The group from our Advanced Facilitation Training in London

… in a good way: four participants plus Mirna, lots of practice, lots of feedback, and a tone that was kind, playful and high‑energy. We worked with ideas like the facilitation diamond (diverge → groan zone → converge), powerful questions, decent debriefs (the part I often under-design), and the less talked‑about things: voice, body, room setup.

Outside the training space, I had my own little rituals, which were part recovery, part sense-making. The venue coffee was… optimistic, so after lunch we went out for real coffee, because apparently I’m the kind of facilitator who can handle a groan zone but not bad espresso.

And because the days were intense in that good, my-brain-is-full way, I needed something that wasn’t more input. So I’d hop on the 109 double-decker bus and let London roll by. And one evening I went to see Wicked, where I fully switched off, which I can recommend as a professional development strategy with excellent singing.

All of that “off time” turned out to be more useful than it sounds…

Because it’s when I started seeing the real challenges of my own training design.

A group discussion displayed as models on a base plate

Challenging Situations in Facilitation: 60 minutes of LEGO® Serious Play

One of my biggest design challenges was a 60‑minute LEGO® Serious Play (LSP) block. I had to create a practical and reflective space to explore the difficult situations facilitators face, and share strategies for handling them. The design itself was up to me. Naturally, I picked the most difficult method I could come up with to facilitate this topic in such a short amount of time: LEGO® bricks.

The tricky part: I didn’t know the other participants yet, so I genuinely couldn’t tell whether I’d be facilitating for LSP veterans, complete newcomers, or that very realistic mix of “I’ve heard of it and once touched a brick in 2019.”

That uncertainty created a classic dilemma:

• Do I optimise for speed and depth, and risk losing people who don’t have the basics?
• Or do I teach the foundations at the risk of boring the experienced folks and spending half the slot on “how to LSP” instead of using it to get to the actual point?

Either way, time was the real enemy. If I assumed the participants had enough experience and skip the precursory exercises, we might not use LSP properly and miss the gist of what the models can surface. On the other hand, if I focused too much on introducing LSP as a method to them, I’d burn precious minutes just trying to get everyone onto the same page.

What I actually did

I chose a middle path: a short skills warm‑up to get everyone building and sharing, and then a proper shared scenario build.

When people presented their shared model, I stayed in “curious facilitator” mode by asking questions, checking I’d understood, and capturing the insights on a flipchart in two columns:

A preview of the table as a converging tool on which I captured what was said regarding challenges and resolutions

Simple structure, yet surprisingly effective.

The flipchart became our converging tool: something the group could literally point at, refine, and build on — while I tried to write things down as clearly as possible.

The feedback reflected the trade‑off I was aiming for. The experienced LSP folks said we could probably have jumped straight into the scenario. The newcomers, on the other hand, appreciated the warm‑up and said the timing felt balanced. Which I’ll happily count as a small win.

And the notes on the flipchart were appreciated too, because they made the learning visible: not just “nice builds”, but concrete challenges and practical ways to handle them.

Where AI helped (and where it didn’t)

And yes, AI was part of this too.

A few examples where AI support helped me sharpen my questions and design a strong agenda

I used it as a beginner design partner: to test a few agenda variants, tighten the flow, and iterate on titles and questions (especially the ones aimed at experienced facilitators). It widened the option space.

But the final calls on what to keep, what to cut, what I felt comfortable doing live, stayed very much my own decisions.

What I’m taking back to my day job

My main takeaway wasn’t “new techniques,” but a shift in attention: designing better conversations in workshops and meetings means planning for the messy middle, matching the first exercise to the real purpose and tone of a meeting, and taking debriefs seriously.

Try it!

If you design workshops in agile/product/tech contexts: maybe pick one meeting you run a lot — and redesign just the opening and the debrief. Small changes do make a big difference.