Last month, during a strategy sprint for a global client, we hit an unexpected moment.
It wasn’t a dead silence. It wasn’t polite avoidance. It was the opposite: a sudden, joyful mess.
We were midway through a session designed to map future opportunities. The plan — at least the one I had written — involved some structured prioritisation exercises: neat grids, timelines, logical frameworks.
Instead, the room exploded.
Post-its were flying. Tables were dragged. Conversations splintered, then re-formed. Someone started diagramming an idea on the wall using a coffee stirrer dipped in leftover pastry icing. (Okay, I may have made that bit up!)
It was chaos. It was glorious.
For a split second, I caught myself instinctively reaching for the agenda. The part of me that likes neat process — the facilitator with the laminated plan — panicked quietly.
But then I looked properly.
They weren’t flailing. They were building. Improvising. Accelerating.
The strategy was happening. It just wasn’t following the recipe.
Facilitation often teaches us about containment: holding space, managing flow, creating safety.
But sometimes, the real skill is knowing when not to rein it in.
When the energy is authentic — when the group is genuinely doing the work, even if it looks messy — the right move isn’t to tidy it. It’s to widen the canvas.
That day, we scrapped the next two exercises. We threw open the whiteboards. We captured the emergent structures instead of imposing pre-baked ones.
And what they built — fast, raw, imperfect — held more life than anything we would have diagrammed in four neatly timed steps.
Facilitation isn’t always about restoring order. Sometimes it’s about letting the room outrun you — and then helping them read the map they just made.
When’s the last time you let a session run joyfully off-script?
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Note: All stories are adapted and anonymised to protect client confidentiality.
