Work­shop facil­i­ta­tion is an indis­pens­able skill for soft­ware archi­tects and devel­op­ers. The high com­plex­i­ty of the chal­lenges and deci­sions that arise in archi­tec­ture work requires effec­tive and con­struc­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion in order to achieve good results. The stan­dard approach of “write PostIt’s — form clus­ters — dot-vot­ing” all too often leads to inad­e­quate results. I will intro­duce tech­niques and con­cepts that can be used to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly on issues in a group.

Top­ics include:

• What is the role of the facil­i­ta­tor? (Respon­si­bil­i­ty for struc­ture vs. respon­si­bil­i­ty for results)
• What is the role of the team? (e.g. with regard to tak­ing responsibility)
• How can I con­scious­ly shape the five design ele­ments of all inter­ac­tion struc­tures (invi­ta­tion, room design, par­tic­i­pant engage­ment, group con­fig­u­ra­tion and the course and dura­tion of workshops)?
• How do I deal with peo­ple with a high need to broadcast?
• How do I rec­og­nize that a con­tri­bu­tion is goal-ori­ent­ed or that it is in the solu­tion space?
• How do Lib­er­at­ing Struc­tures help to cre­ate cre­ative freedom?
• Which meth­ods help to make col­lec­tive deci­sions effi­cient­ly and effectively?
• How do the two types of think­ing — intu­itive (or “fast”) and ana­lyt­i­cal (or “slow”) think­ing — influ­ence the work­shop structure?
• Which myths about work­shop mod­er­a­tion should be urgent­ly debunked?