A few years ago, I ran a sketching session for a sprint planning meeting. Everyone on the team got a blank piece of paper to sketch the landing screen. The team included a table’s worth of engineers and this one guy from QA. As everyone else started to sketch, the QA engineer pushed his chair away from the table and sat against the wall, arms crossed, and didn’t sketch a thing.

This QA engineer represents one of the scariest participants you’ll ever encounter. The curmudgeon looks surly, doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to participate, and thinks your sticky note, sketching hijinks waste everyone’s time.

I’ve led workshops for close to two decades, and the best way to ensure good participation and collaboration is a good workshop plan. You have a good plan, right? Good plans create safe spaces for discussion. They encourage every participant to contribute in meaningful ways. And when you have a great plan, people still make things more difficult.

That’s not the first lesson. That’s just fact.

Every workshop has a different dynamic. Even if you know everyone in the room, you always have to manage everyone’s participation, so you can make sure you all walk out of the workshop with the outcome you planned for. Even with a room full of curmudgeons like that guy from QA, you want to walk out with what what you want.

Regardless of how many curmudgeons you encounter, there’s one, simple secret to good facilitation:

Don’t manage people. Manage collaboration.

That’s the first lesson. Manage the collaboration, not the people. You’ll watch me apply this lesson again and again throughout this book. Every facilitation tip takes this to heart.