How long should planning a session take?

Longer than most people allow, and less than it feels like once you have a template. Getting the outcome sentence and the arc right is usually an hour of real thinking; the slides after that are quick because the decisions have already been made.

Do I need a slide deck at all?

Often not. Slides are a delivery aid for input sections. If most of your session is the group working, you may need three slides and a well-prepared set of instructions.

What if the client keeps adding content?

Take it back to the outcome sentence and ask which part of it the extra content serves. Content added late almost always comes out of the apply and close blocks, which is where the value is.

Resource — template

SESSION PLANNING TEMPLATE

Plan the arc before you plan the slides: outcome, then structure, then interaction, then close. Copy the six sections below into a doc and fill them in — in that order. Most weak sessions are weak because the deck got built before those decisions were made.

How to use it

SIX SECTIONS, IN ORDER.

The order matters more than the format. Each section constrains the next: the outcome decides the arc, the arc decides where interaction sits, and the close is designed deliberately rather than left as whatever time remains.

It works for a ninety-minute meeting and for a two-day programme — the blocks get longer, the questions don't change. Keep the filled-in version; it's also what you'll debrief against afterwards.

Shane McGrath planning a session structure — Arc first, slides later

The template

COPY THIS INTO YOUR SESSION DOC.

Outcome — one sentence

By the end of this session, the group will have ______.
How will we know it happened? (a decision, a written plan, a demonstrated skill)
What is this session explicitly NOT trying to do?

If you can't write the outcome as one sentence, the session isn't ready to design. Everything below gets judged against this line — anything that doesn't serve it comes out.

Audience — who's in the room and why

Who's attending, and who chose to send them?
What do they already know, and what will they assume this session is?
Who has a stake in the outcome, and who has authority to decide?
What's the likeliest source of resistance?

Group size and seniority mix change the format more than the topic does. A decision with two senior stakeholders in the room is a different session to the same decision without them.

Arc — open, build, apply, close

OPEN: why we're here, what we'll produce, how the time works, how we'll behave.
BUILD: the input or raw material the group needs — as little as will do.
APPLY: where the group does the actual work against their own context.
CLOSE: what's decided, what's owned, what happens next.

Write timings against each block and then cut about 20% before you extend anything. Sessions almost never run short.

Interaction points — where and why

Where does the group need to generate options? (individual writing first, then share)
Where does it need to narrow to a decision? (ranking, forced trade-offs, dot voting)
Where does it need to commit? (people saying their own next action out loud)
For each one: what format, how long, what output do we keep?

Don't spread participation evenly across the day. Cluster it where the real thinking has to happen and keep the connecting sections tight.

Materials and logistics

Room setup: can people see each other, and can they move into small groups?
Capture: whiteboard, flipcharts, shared doc — where does the thinking live during the session?
Pre-work, if any — and what happens if half the group hasn't done it.
Virtual: breakout rooms configured, chat prompts written, someone watching the chat.
Your fallback if the tech, the pre-work or the room isn't what you expected.

Every logistics failure costs time from the apply block, because that's the flexible part. Plan it so it isn't.

Close — what people leave with

The specific output: decision, plan, list of owned actions.
Who does what by when — named, not 'we should'.
What each person will personally do differently, in their own words.
Who reinforces it afterwards, and when.

The close is the part most likely to be squeezed and the part that determines whether anything survives the room. Protect its time in the plan rather than hoping for it.

Questions

COMMON QUESTIONS.

Keep reading

A TEMPLATE HELPS. BEING WATCHED HELPS MORE.

Facilitation training works on your real sessions — plan, deliver, get specific feedback on what happened in the room, then change one thing.

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