They Told Her She Needed Grey Hair to Run the Workshop

Most advice about running workshops starts and ends inside the room. Prepare your flip charts. Sort out the seating. Have your markers ready. It’s all reasonable, and it’s all about the hours or days when everyone is together. But anyone who has actually run a workshop that mattered knows the room is the easy part. The real work happens in the days before, in corridors and coffee chats and one-on-ones, long before anyone opens a marker.

In this episode of Stories of Facilitating Software Design and Architecture, Andrew Harmel-Law, Kenny Schwegler and Andrea Magnorski sat down with Katie Clark, a consultant based in Munich who has bounced between the business side, development, and now leadership. Katie brought two stories, and both of them are about the same thing: what happens around a workshop, not during it. One is from her early twenties, when she was told she was too young to be taken seriously. The other is from years later, when she was formally accountable for a project but deliberately chose not to be the one running the room.

The Workshop Nobody Would Take Seriously

Fresh out of university, Katie was working on a huge enterprise IT project, sitting on the business side of the supply chain master data. She was getting frustrated. Nobody understood the data in the ancient system they were trying to connect, and people were struggling to grasp that systems could talk to each other directly, without a whole department manually cleaning up data by hand.

So she asked what seems like an obvious question. “Can we just ask the people working on this today? What are their pain points? What are they even doing with the current system?” A workshop, in other words.

Two unexpected things happened. First, her stream lead physically walked her to the next building to meet the potential participants before any invitation went out. They chatted about the project, explained the workshop idea, and asked if people were willing to spend the time. Only then did the invite get sent. Katie didn’t have a name for it at the time, but that’s consent-based participation, done as a matter of course.

The second thing stung more. Her stream lead said the idea was good, but “you need someone with more grey hair to help facilitate and to make sure you’re taken serious.” Katie, in her mid-twenties and not fond of being told she couldn’t do something, had a hairdresser appointment coming up. She asked whether she should go silver or fully white to solve the problem. In the end, she got assigned a consultant to open the workshop and co-facilitate.

The Project She Owned but Didn’t Run

Years later, Katie was in a leadership role at a consultancy, formally accountable for a project that had finally been given the go-ahead to spin a new subdomain out into its own service. The team decided to break out a smaller mission team for focus, and there was a lot of buzz about whether to hold a kickoff workshop, maybe even on-site after years of primarily remote work.

This is where Katie made a choice that’s easy to miss. “From the start, this wasn’t my workshop,” she said. It was a mature team with high trust, and she wasn’t going to be the person overruling things in the room. She was accountable for the outcome, and she truly wanted it to go well, but she deliberately kept her hands off the facilitation itself.

What she did instead was influence everything beforehand. Coffee chats, one-on-ones, regular syncs. Was this workshop more business-focused or more tech-focused? Deep or broad? What was a realistic goal to have before lunch? She talked to individuals, subgroups, whoever, iterating on the plan. She even asked the team for permission to attend, and apologized that she could only join ninety minutes in, which quietly ruled out any thought of her facilitating the crucial opening.

Sliding Sticky Notes Across the Table

When Katie did join, ninety minutes late, she found a corner chair. The agenda was on the whiteboard. There was input on a flip chart. As a late arrival, she could see exactly where things stood, and she made the point that documenting early helps everyone, not just the forgetful.

Rather than interrupt, she waited to be looped in, got a two-sentence summary, and then started nudging. She reached for a marker and asked the usual questions for visualizing architecture discussions. Any boxes missing? Which way do the arrows go? Later, when people were hand-waving through the life cycle of their domain objects, she slid sticky notes toward the most vocal participant to get things written down.

My favourite bit is how she handled a team that kept enthusiastically agreeing with each other without capturing anything. She started saying, with her full sarcastic, American over-exaggeration, “Oh my gosh, that’s such a great point. It might even deserve to be on a sticky note.” It became the running joke for the afternoon. “Oh, yes, yes, maybe this does deserve a sticky.” The dynamic shifted, and things got written down. One participant later said they left with a common picture, “not just loads of words we will forget over the Christmas break.”

Grey Hair, Revisited

Kenny asked the obvious follow-up. Ten plus years on, does Katie agree with the grey-hair advice she’d been given? Her answer was more layered than you’d expect. She understands it, she doesn’t like it, and she thinks the problem sat with the organisation, which had ageism running in both directions. But it wasn’t only about age. She hadn’t been at the company for fifteen years, and she wasn’t a twenty-year domain expert, because twenty years earlier she’d been in kindergarten. It was about formal standing, about being seen as relevant enough to be taken seriously.

And here’s the twist. She’d give the same advice today. Not because of the ageism, but because pairing up a new facilitator with someone more established is a smart, healthy thing to do. She now asks for facilitation support even when she doesn’t strictly need it, because it’s more fun, it’s easier, and the second person learns by absorbing all the thinking-out-loud that goes into preparation. Facilitation as pair programming, as Kenny put it.

Delegating the Small Jobs That Eat Your Attention

Andrea pushed on the harder version of this. In high-stakes work, or as an external consultant, you can’t always afford to bring in a second facilitator to train. The contracts, the power dynamics, the “why this person and what are they costing us” questions all get in the way.

Katie’s answer for those situations wasn’t to hand off facilitation, but to hand off specific jobs. In one workshop that could have gone badly wrong, she and a colleague handed out roles to participants at the start. There was a CEO, the Chief Elmo Officer, responsible for “enough, let’s move on.” A CTO, the Chief Time-box Officer, who waved the timer at whoever was speaking as the time box was ending. And a CDO, the Chief Documentation Officer, who made sure someone took photos before anything was taken down. It freed up a few brain cells, she said, so she could stay present with the participants instead of babysitting the clock.

Patterns Worth Noticing

• The work before the workshop is the workshop. Andrew called it “rolling the pitch” — an old colleague’s phrase for flattening out the ground before anything happens on it. Katie’s real preparation was social: meeting people, floating a rough agenda, seeing which parts stuck. By the time the invite went out, the workshop was already half-agreed.

• Consent isn’t a formality, it’s a filter. Walking people over to meet the participants and asking if they’d give their time changed the relationship before the first slide. Katie has never had someone outright refuse, but she’s had plenty of skeptics, and the way she wins them over is by genuinely treating them as the experts and offering to work around their time.

• Ownership and accountability can live in different people. Katie was accountable for the project but deliberately not the facilitator. She influenced the shape of the workshop through dozens of small conversations rather than by standing at the front. That gap, held on purpose, is what let the team own their own session.

• A useful bias is still a bias. Katie leaned on the IKEA effect: people value what they helped build. She didn’t care whether the agenda item was called “interface design” or “system-to-system communication,” as long as participants used words they were comfortable with and felt they’d shaped the plan.

• Lunch is a decision boundary, not just a break. Setting a realistic goal to reach before lunch gave the group a natural checkpoint, a chance to converge, and something concrete to point back to. It also stops people relitigating the whole morning in the final ten minutes.

The Quiet Version of Being in Charge

What connects Katie’s two stories is a shift in how she used her authority. Early on, authority was something she lacked and had to borrow, in the form of a consultant with the right amount of grey hair. Later, she had all the formal authority she could want, and the interesting move was choosing not to use it in the room. Both workshops worked because the person who cared most about the outcome spent their energy on the things nobody puts on an agenda: who feels comfortable, who’s been consulted, whose words are on the sticky notes. If you find yourself accountable for a session but tempted to run it yourself, it’s worth asking what would actually change if you stepped back and simply made sure the pens were on the table.

Further Reading

Mentioned in this episode

• The IKEA effect — the cognitive bias, referenced by Katie and named more precisely by Kenny, that people place higher value on things they helped create. Katie applies it to workshop agendas: let people help shape the plan and they’ll be more invested in it.

Worth exploring

• Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner — a practical handbook on consent, participation and the group dynamics that Katie navigates before and during her workshops.

• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker — on the purpose and preparation of gatherings, and why what happens before people arrive shapes everything, which is exactly Katie’s point about “rolling the pitch.”

• Introducing EventStorming by Alberto Brandolini — a reference point for the structured, rules-based workshops Katie contrasts with her deliberately broad, open kickoff session.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — for anyone wanting to understand the cognitive biases, including the IKEA effect, that Katie uses as a facilitation tool rather than a trap.