In summary

Have more breaks and use them to create the report during the workshop
Reduce the expectations and deliver a photographic report
Make people do the report at the end of the workshop (with a survey, group summaries or a pre-built powerpoint)

Have more breaks and use them to create the report

Breaks are a good moment for participants to recharge their batteries.

And while the participants have fun, you can take a few pictures and put them already in your report.

As the topic is fresh in your mind, it's really easy for you to make a summary and to make sure that you have gathered all the pieces.

Compare this to a workshop where you have hundreds of photos to go through at the end of the day, and you don't remember if these sticky notes were for this exercise or another one.

You can benefit from this downtime not only by using breaks but also by using more individual work moments or sub-group work moments.

During these moments, as a facilitator, you have to give everybody a bit of space to get started.

And it's at that time that you can work on your report.

Reduce expectations

A very simple photographic report of the results is good enough for most workshops.

Having a photo of the sticky notes with a little title that says what this was about is good enough for most people. That's why it's important that you synchronise yourself with the organiser before the workshop to let them know that you will create a photographic report. Basically a presentation with photos of sticky notes.

And make sure to explain that you don't do any more analysis work or synthesis after the workshop.

And if people want that. Then this is another project.

When I have clients that want that more advanced report with synthesis, next steps and analysis.

I usually have two reports.

The first is a Photographic Report I sent the same day or the next day.
By sending this report very quickly, my client already has a few results, and I can take my time to do the Strategic Report that I will share a few days or weeks later.

Make people do the report for you

Sometimes the topics are so technical that it's difficult for you as a facilitator to summarise them. Or you just don't have the time to do it yourself.

In these moments, it can be smart to have an exercise in the workshop where you ask people to make the synthesis and the summary of the workshop for you.

This can take many different forms:

Survey at the end

You could have a little survey where you ask people to write down the top learnings they took out of this workshop.

Subgroup summaries

You could create subgroups where each group makes a summary on a big poster board. Ask each group to draw on a poster paper as a visual summary of the workshop.

Which you would then photograph.

You can ask each group to share a pitch of three minutes that you will record in a video format. And if you want to go the extra mile, you can use a tool like Descript or otter.ai to transcribe these videos, to have a text version of these summaries.

Powerpoint template to fill

One of the latest tricks I have used to make workshop participants create a workshop report for me was to create a workshop report template in advance and have 30 minutes to 45 minutes at the end where I take the participants and write the report with them.

I will then split the group in subgroups and say: you guys work on the concept video. You guys explain the prototype. And you guys add a few bullet points about the next steps we need to take.