Workshop is a control for running a session with your team: a retrospective, a town hall, a lean coffee, a planning workshop or a quick icebreaker. Turned on, it puts the tools that run a room in front of you (timers, dot votes, polls, reveals, quizzes, stickers); turned off, it keeps them out of the way while you sketch, diagram or make pages.
Workshop is not an editor mode: it works on top of whichever mode the tab is in, Sketch, Structured or Pages, so a team can run a vote on a sketch or a poll over a page of slides. It used to be a mode of its own, Workshop mode, and before that Facilitate mode.
Turning It On
- Press Workshop in the actions group at the top right, before Make a Copy, Present and Share. It is a toggle: while it is on the button is filled, and the Session strip appears. Press it again to turn it off. On a phone it shows its flipchart icon alone.
- One control for everyone: it belongs to the tab, so when someone who can edit turns it on, everyone on the tab gets the session kit together, and Undo turns it back.
- It stays as you switch mode. Switching between Sketch, Structured and Pages keeps it on (or off), and turning it changes no mode, no tool and nothing on the canvas.
- New tabs take it along: a tab added from + › Tab has the control on when the tab you made it from has, and Duplicate keeps it.
What It Brings
- The Session strip, at the bottom left: the Timer, Vote and Poll buttons, right after Undo and Redo, in every mode. See Session Tools.
- The Collaborate categories in the palette: Ask (votes, polls, quizzes, estimates and the Q&A board), Tools (timer, stopwatch, reveal zone, Done check, picker), Record (comment panel, action card, agenda, decision record, roll call), React (the reaction pads), Selection Mode and Navigate (portals, Bring Focus, chairs, desks, fences and link cards). In Structured and Pages the palette's bar shows Ask and Session, which holds the other five down its side; Session's search looks through all of them. See Collaborate.
- Stickers, right after Icons, in Structured (Pages already has them).
- Sketch shows its dock rather than a palette, so there the Session strip is the kit.
- The mode's own tools stay. Structured keeps its Popular, Concepts, Technology and Diagrams, Pages keeps its pages' palettes, and Sketch keeps its dock.
With It Off
- Nothing on your tabs changes. Session elements already on a tab keep working whatever the control: a session button still starts its timer, a reveal zone still reveals and a quiz still takes answers.
- Structured keeps two Collaborate tiles in its Write category, the Comment panel and the Action card, since comments and actions belong to every mode.
- The element search still finds them. Search for "timer" or a sticker with the control off and it is still there, and it is placed without turning anything on. See Toolbar Layout.
- A timer, vote or poll already running keeps running and shows on its own canvas element; turn the control on to watch turnout, end it or keep its results.
- Comments, presence, follow-me, Presentation mode and the facilitator baton have nothing to do with the control: they are always there.
Who Can Turn It On
- Editors of a general tab get the Workshop button. It is not on a locked tab.
- Participants and viewers see no button: they see the tab as it is. Participants take part in everything that is running (they vote, answer polls and add sticky notes); viewers watch.
- Plan tabs have no Workshop button: their strip's Timer and Vote are their own. Event Storming boards always have the session kit.
Starting a Session
- A new document: in the New Document wizard, choose Workshop. The empty tab opens in Structured with the control on, on Start a Workshop: the session templates grouped as Retrospectives, Meetings, Spaces, Quizzes & Games, Ideation, Planning, Strategy and Decisions, with Recommended first. Blank Session (or the ×) leaves one empty tab with the control on.
- Session templates open in Structured with the control on: the retrospectives (Retrospective, Start, Stop, Continue, Mad, Sad, Glad, 4Ls and Sailboat), Town Hall Q&A, Lean Coffee, Crazy Eights, Meeting Agenda, the Workshop Board and the Brainstorm Board, the boards that come with a dot vote (Affinity map, Prioritization matrix and Risk matrix), so the vote is there to run from the Session strip, and the sticky-note boards a group fills in together, such as SWOT, Empathy Map and User Journey. So do the quizzes and games: a Pub Quiz of timed quiz rounds with a scoreboard, Icebreaker Questions spun on pickers, Two Truths and a Lie and Would You Rather on live polls, and Find Someone Who Bingo. So do the spaces to walk round together in Avatar mode: the Virtual Office, a Coworking Space, a Team Pod and an All-Hands Hall. Team Retro is a Plan tab, since it is a board of cards.
- An empty Structured tab with the control on shows Start a Workshop in place of Start Diagramming; Sketch and Pages keep their own starts.
- Any tab: turn Workshop on when the session starts, and off when you are done. Everything on it stays where it is.
Share a Participant pass with everyone in the session, so they can vote, answer polls and add sticky notes, and hand the facilitator baton to whoever is running it, so only they start and end the tools.
Take the Tour
With the control on, press Start Workshop Tour at the top right of the editor, just after the appearance switch, for a short Workshop tour: the Collaborate categories, a timer, a dot vote and a poll, the Session strip and Share. It never starts on its own, and you can take it again whenever you like.
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