Setting the Objective

01 Title

On screen "Setting the Objective" · Module 2 · Facilitation Foundations

Years ago, a friend and I went to Ireland for a week. We landed in Dublin, and drove down to the south and all the way to the Ring of Kerry. About two hours in, somewhere past Bray, my buddy said 'so where are we actually staying?'

Nobody had booked anything. And not because we forgot. Because each of us thought this was a different trip.

He thought it was a week in Dublin. I thought it was hiking.

Two people. One car. Same day, same route, same playlist. We had agreed on all of that. We had never once agreed on what the trip was for.

Hold onto that car.

02 The session that had everything except a point

On screen a full agenda, a full room, an empty outcome box

Here's the workshop version, and you've been in it.

Room booked. Right people invited, or at least a lot of people invited. Good activities, decent energy, somebody brought pastries. And you walk out at four o'clock and somebody in the corridor says 'so what did we decide?'

And there are four different answers. And all four people are confident.

That session did not fail in the room. It failed three weeks earlier, when somebody typed 'Q3 planning' into a calendar invite and never wrote another word about it.

Everything downstream of a fuzzy objective is wasted, no matter how well you run the day. You can be brilliant in that room and it will not save you.

0:46 · then: "A session with no objective feels productive the whole way through."

And here's the cruel part.

It fails silently. A session with no objective feels productive all day. There's discussion, people are engaged, somebody says 'this is really useful' at the coffee break and means it.

The failure lands three weeks later, and by then it looks like a delivery problem, or a communication problem, or Dave being difficult again.

Nobody traces it back to a calendar invite. So nobody fixes it, and we all do it again next quarter.

03 Topic, activity, outcome

On screen three columns

Let's separate three things that get written in the objective box and only one of which belongs there.

A topic is a subject. 'The roadmap.' 'Onboarding.' 'Our team culture.' Topics are infinite. You can talk about the roadmap until you retire.

An activity is a thing you'll do. 'Run a retro.' 'Do a brainstorm.' 'Map the customer journey.' This one's sneakier, because it sounds like a plan. It isn't. It's a description of how you'll spend the time, with no claim about what you'll have afterwards.

An outcome is a thing that exists at the end that didn't exist at the start.

Topic, activity, outcome. Most invites contain the first two and almost none contain the third.

04 The finish line test

On screen "Could anyone in the room tell you whether we got it?"

The difference is a finish line, and there's a fast way to see it.

'Discuss the roadmap' is a topic, so it's done when the clock says so. 'Align on priorities' is a topic. 'Explore our options' is a topic. Notice none of them can be finished, only stopped.

'A ranked roadmap with an owner on the top three' is done or it isn't, and here's the test: anyone in that room could tell you which. Not just you. Anyone.

That's the bar. Not 'I know what I meant.' Could the most junior person in the room, at five o'clock, tell you whether you got it.

05 The objective sentence

On screen "By the end, we will have ______."

So here's the sentence, and I want you to use it literally. Not as a guideline. As a fill-in-the-blank.

'By the end, we will have blank.'

That's it. It looks almost insultingly simple and it's the highest-return ninety seconds in this whole path.

Because the sentence forces two things on you at the same time. 'By the end' forces a finish line. 'We will have' forces a thing, a noun, something that exists at five o'clock that didn't exist at nine.

And it will refuse your bad answers. If you cannot finish that sentence, you don't have a workshop yet. You have a meeting invite and a hope.

0:43 · then: a pen, a card, one line

One instruction about how to use it, and it matters more than it sounds.

Write it. Physically. On paper or in a doc, not in your head.

The sentence does its work through the resistance you feel while you're filling it in, and thinking about it lets you skip straight past that resistance. In your head, 'by the end we'll have a good conversation about onboarding' sails through. Written down, in front of you, it looks like what it is.

I've watched people sit with a blank line for four or five minutes on a session they'd already booked a room for. That's not the exercise going badly. That's the exercise working.

06 Four real ones, before and after

On screen two columns, four rows

Four real ones. Left is what actually landed in my inbox. Right is what it became after about ten minutes of pushing.

'Talk about the onboarding problem' became 'a written list of the top three drop-off points, agreed, in priority order.'

'Get the team aligned on the rebrand' became 'a signed-off decision on which of the two directions we're taking, and who tells the agency.'

'Kick off the project' became 'a one-page charter everyone in the room has actually read and agreed.'

'Team offsite to improve collaboration' became 'three specific working agreements the team commits to trying for one quarter.'

Look at the pattern in the right-hand column. Every one names something you could photograph. Every one on the left names a subject you could talk about forever.

0:51 · then: "What would we have at the end that we don't have now?"

And the pushing isn't clever. It's the same three questions on a loop, and you can have them.

'What would we have at the end that we don't have now?'

'If we got that, what would you do with it on Monday?'

'Who needs to see it?'

That last one is the sharpest, because it turns an abstraction into an object almost instantly. Nobody sends alignment to their director. They send a ranked list, or a one-pager, or a decision. The moment somebody tells you who has to see the output, you've usually found the artifact.

07 Artifact, not a feeling

On screen "Aligned on Q3" crossed out, "A ranked Q3 backlog with an owner on the top three"

This is the trap that catches good facilitators, not bad ones, because the sentence lets you cheat.

You can write 'by the end, we will have alignment on Q3' and it looks like it passes. It has a finish line, it has a noun.

It doesn't pass. Alignment is a feeling. So is clarity, shared understanding, buy-in, confidence, and energy. Every one of those is real and matters, and not one of them can be checked.

Two people can leave the same room, both genuinely feeling aligned, having agreed to completely different things. I've watched that happen, and then watched it surface six weeks later as an argument that neither of them understood the origin of.

08 The artifact test

On screen "Could you hold it up? Screenshot it? Send it to someone who wasn't there?"

Here's the test, and it's three questions in one.

Could you hold it up? Could you screenshot it? Could you send it to somebody who wasn't in the room and have them understand what was decided?

If yes, it's an artifact. You now have something specific enough to plan a session around, instead of a feeling you'd have to guess your way from.

If no, keep pushing.

Take the one people always raise: a retrospective. Feels like it's about feelings, so it looks exempt. It isn't. The artifact is three specific changes the team will try next sprint, with a name on each. Still about the human thing. It just leaves the room in a form that survives the walk to the car park.

And people hear 'alignment doesn't count' and think I'm being cold. Alignment isn't the enemy. It's the side effect. Build the artifact properly and the alignment comes free, because the group had to align to build the thing.

09 The steel-man

On screen "Sometimes the conversation is the point."

Now the strongest argument against everything I've just said, because there is one.

Some sessions genuinely exist so that people hear each other. A team that's been quietly resentful for six months. Forcing an artifact onto that turns something human into a deliverable, and I've done it and made the day stiff.

Two things I'd hold, though. Those sessions are rarer than people claim, and 'the conversation is the point' is the last refuge of a session nobody wanted to define. And even they have an artifact: each person has said what they came in carrying, and the group has named the two issues it'll work on next. Checkable. Just not a spreadsheet.

0:45 · then: a real request, three questions, one sentence

Let me do one end to end, as it actually sounds, because the questions look easy on a slide and land differently in a room.

The request comes in: 'Can you run a session to get engineering and design on the same page about the redesign?'

So I ask what they'd have at the end that they don't have now. 'A shared understanding of the constraints.' That's a feeling, but it's a useful one, because it tells me the real problem is that somebody keeps being surprised.

So I ask what they'd do with it on Monday. Pause. 'Well, design would stop speccing things engineering can't build in this quarter.'

Now we're somewhere. So I ask who needs to see it. 'Both leads. And probably the PM.'

And there it is: 'By the end, we will have a written list of the technical constraints that actually bound this redesign, agreed by both leads, in a form the PM can plan against.'

Three questions. Under ten minutes. And notice the session I would have designed for 'shared understanding' is a completely different day from the one I'll design for that sentence.

2:01 · then: the objective, written on the wall, all day

One thing about using the objective, not just writing it. Most people write a good one and leave it in the planning doc.

Put it on the wall. In the words you agreed, up all day.

When somebody drags the conversation sideways, you don't have to be the one who says no. You point at the wall. 'Is that going to get us to this?' The objective becomes the authority instead of you.

And at the end you point at it again and ask, out loud, whether you got it. Sometimes the honest answer is no, and saying so beats pretending.

10 One objective, not five

On screen five objectives, four greyed out

The opposite failure mode: too many.

Somebody sends you an agenda with five objectives and it reads as thorough. It isn't. Five objectives is a conference, not a workshop.

Here's the mechanism. Every objective needs its own room to open up, narrow down, decide, and commit. Skip any of those four and the objective doesn't land, no matter how good the sentence was. In a half day you get one of those done properly. Maybe two if they're small and closely related.

Five means you skim all five and land none, and everybody leaves vaguely dissatisfied without being able to say why. And because it felt busy, nobody blames the agenda.

So pick one. Here's the question that makes picking possible, asked out loud, with the sponsor. 'If we only got this one thing done today and literally nothing else, would that have been worth everyone's day?'

If the answer's no, you've picked the wrong one. Go again. If it's yes, cut the other four. And notice you haven't deleted them, you've sequenced them. 'Not today' is a completely different message from 'never', and it's usually the one people can accept.

1:16 · then: "'Get everyone excited about the new strategy.'"

My own failure on this, and it's why I'm hard about it now.

A few years ago a client asked me for a half day to 'get everyone excited about the new strategy.' I could see it was a feeling. I knew the test. I took it anyway, because they were confident and I was busy.

So I designed a good day around a bad objective. People did leave excited. And a month later I found out that three of the twenty in that room had walked out with different understandings of what the strategy actually was, because nobody had ever had to write it down.

The day worked. The objective didn't. And that was on me, because knowing the difference was my job.

11 The room list comes after the objective

On screen OBJECTIVE, then what must be decided, then who must be there

Now the bit almost everyone does backwards.

Most people build the invite list first. From the org chart, or who came last time, or who'd be annoyed to be left out. Then they design a session to suit whoever said yes.

Do it the other way round. Objective first. Then: what has to be decided to get there. Then, and only then, who has to be in the room for that decision to stick afterwards.

And that phrase, for the decision to stick, is doing all the work. The question isn't who has an opinion. Everyone has an opinion. It's who could quietly unwind this two weeks from now.

Sometimes that's obvious and senior. Often it isn't. It's the one engineer who'll have to build it and will simply deprioritise it. It's the ops lead nobody invited who owns the process you just redesigned. It's the person on leave.

If somebody can veto this later, they need to be in the room, or to have explicitly delegated it to someone who is, before the day. Not after. Everyone else on your list is optional, and you should treat them that way.

1:16 · then: "Invited" is not a reward. "Informed" is a real option.

The flip side, which is harder to say out loud in most organisations.

Some people don't need to be there. Being in the room isn't a status prize, and a room of fourteen makes a worse decision than a room of seven, more slowly.

Send them the output instead. And tell them that's the plan before the day, not after, because 'we'll send you the notes' lands completely differently when it arrives as a decision rather than an apology.

If trimming the list turns out to be politically impossible, that's real information about the organisation, not a flaw in your design. Note it, plan for a bigger room, and lean on structures where small groups work in parallel rather than one conversation trying to hold everyone.

12 The pre-mortem question

On screen "It's five o'clock. It went badly. What happened?"

Last thing before you design anything. Sit with whoever asked for this session and ask them one question.

'It's five o'clock. The session went badly. What happened?'

Not 'what are the risks', which gets you a polite list of nothing useful. The pre-mortem works because it's in the past tense.

Ask about risks and people hedge, because naming a risk feels like predicting failure. Tell them it already went wrong and they'll tell you the truth in about four seconds.

And what you get is almost always specific, and almost always about a person.

'Honestly? Dave will relitigate the platform decision again.'

'Marketing will say they weren't consulted.'

'We'll spend the whole morning on the easy stuff and run out of time before we get to the money.'

One practical note: ask the sponsor on their own, not in the group. The honest version only comes one to one.

13 Turning the answers into design

On screen three answers, three design moves

And the answers convert into design decisions almost mechanically, so let's do those three.

Dave will relitigate the platform decision. So you name it in the opening as explicitly out of scope, you write it on a parked list where he can see it, and you tell him privately beforehand that you're going to do that. Most relitigating is someone worried they won't be heard.

Marketing will say they weren't consulted. So either marketing is in the room, or you get their input in writing beforehand and read it out on the day with their name on it.

You'll run out of time before the money. So the money goes first, before lunch, while people are sharp, and the easy stuff goes at the end where it can be cut.

Ten minutes of pre-mortem, three structural changes. That's the return.

0:56 · then: "Ask for the decision behind the request."

One more, because it will happen to you.

Sometimes you'll push, and the sponsor will hold a bad objective anyway. Or what they've actually asked for is a session to announce a decision they've already made.

Don't run it as a workshop. You'd be manufacturing the appearance of a choice, which the room can smell within twenty minutes, and it costs you more trust than an honest announcement would.

Here's the sentence I'd use: 'I think this might be a communication problem rather than a decision problem. If the call's already made, I can help you announce it really well in forty minutes, and give everyone the rest of the day back. If it's genuinely open, let's design the workshop. Which is it?'

That's a fair question, asked kindly, and it lets them tell you the truth. Sometimes the answer is 'it's already made', and you've just saved everyone a day.

14 The practice

On screen five invite lines, one blank sentence

Here's your one thing, and you don't need a workshop booked to do it.

Five invite lines, all real, all already in this module. 'Q3 planning.' 'Talk about the onboarding problem.' 'Get the team aligned on the rebrand.' 'Kick off the project.' 'Customer journey mapping.'

Write the objective sentence each one should have had. By the end, we will have blank. Then run the artifact test over your own answers. Could you hold it up? Could you send it to somebody who wasn't there?

You've seen me rewrite three of those, so cover that column first.

Be hard on yourself, because most people fail their own first attempt, and that failure is the entire point. If what you wrote is alignment, or clarity, or shared understanding, you've written a feeling. Push until you've got something you could photograph.

Two optional extras. If you've got a real session coming up, make it a sixth line. And if you can get ten minutes with a sponsor, ask them the pre-mortem question and write down what they say.

15 Callback close

On screen the car, the road, a booked cottage

We got to Killarney eventually. Found somewhere to stay, it was fine, and my buddy was a good sport about it.

But we'd wasted the best part of a day, and for two hours each of us had privately been imagining a different week.

Neither of us had done anything wrong. We agreed on the car, the day and the playlist. We just never agreed on what the trip was for.

That's what an objective is. Not admin. Not the boring bit before the real work. It's the difference between four people in a car and four people on the same trip.

Write the sentence before you turn the key.

0:44 · then: Next: Module 3 - The Anatomy of a Workshop

You've got a destination. Next: what a workshop is actually made of, because every one is built from the same five parts.

That's module three, and it's the spine of this whole path.

## The practice (recap)

Write the objective sentence that five real invite lines should have had: "Q3 planning", "Talk about the onboarding problem", "Get the team aligned on the rebrand", "Kick off the project", "Customer journey mapping". "By the end, we will have ______." Apply the artifact test to each of your own answers and push until it passes. Optionally add a sixth line for a real session you have coming up, and if you can, ask the sponsor the pre-mortem question and write down what they say.

## Callback

Four people agreed on the car, the day and the playlist, and never agreed on what the trip was for. An objective is what makes it one trip instead of four.