ThemeDesign the session
CardCard 29 of 63
Questions5 to explore
StepDesign it

Outcomes & Goals

What we want to get out of the workshop

A workshop without a clear goal is just a meeting, and online that confusion hits harder because people's attention and patience are thinner.

Outcomes and goals define what the session is actually for. An outcome is what will exist or be true at the end that was not before: a decision made, a set of ideas generated, a shared understanding reached, a plan agreed. Goals can also include what participants will feel or be able to do. Both need to be concrete enough that at the end you can check whether you got there.

Setting outcomes before you design anything else is what prevents a session from becoming a vague conversation. It tells you which activities belong in the session and which do not, how long you need, and who actually needs to be there.

Share the outcomes with participants before the session, not just at the start of it. People who know what they are working toward arrive more prepared and stay more focused.

Online, specificallyOnline the stakes of a vague outcome are higher: with no ambient room energy to carry people through, a session that feels purposeless loses participants to distraction far faster than an in-person one would.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Write outcomes as statements

Good facilitators write outcomes as concrete statements ('By the end we will have agreed on the three priorities for Q3') rather than themes or topics ('We will discuss priorities'), so everyone can check whether the session delivered.

Share before the call

They include the session outcomes in the calendar invite or a pre-read so participants arrive knowing what they are there to produce, not just that there is a workshop.

Return to them mid-session

About halfway through they briefly name where the group is against each outcome, which resets focus and signals whether they are on track or need to adjust.

Separate goals from agenda

They distinguish the outcome (what we produce) from the agenda (how we get there), and communicate both, because a clear agenda with no goal is just a schedule and a clear goal with no agenda is just a hope.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What will exist or be decided at the end of this session that does not exist now?
Have participants been told the outcomes before the session, not just at the start of it?
Are the outcomes specific enough that the group will know whether they were achieved?
Do all the activities in the session point toward at least one of the outcomes?
What will you do if you reach the end of the session and an outcome has not been met?

What trips people up online

Outcomes written as themes ('explore innovation') give participants no way to know when they have succeeded, and no way for you to know what the session needs to include.
Overloading a remote session with too many outcomes means none of them get proper attention; two or three concrete outcomes are usually better than a list of eight.
If participants do not know the outcomes in advance, the first part of an online session gets spent on setup rather than work, which eats into the limited attention span of a screen-based session.