The most expensive thing in a workshop is the facilitator trying to be useful. Join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-most-expensive-thing-in-a-workshop-is-activity-7426910001493008384-z2Re
The most expensive thing in a workshop is the facilitator trying to be useful.
Not because ‘helping’ is bad, but because the urge to be of immediate use is usually a bid for safety. And status. Relief from the quiet terror of being in a room where nobody knows what happens next, but everyone knows whose responsibility it is — yours.
So we ‘fix’. We ‘summarise’. ‘Move on’. ‘Park that for now’. We ‘land the plane’. We smuggle our anxiety into the process as momentum.
In public services, this is petrol on a bonfire. The system already rewards premature certainty. A workshop that rushes to answers just makes the future more brittle.
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Here’s the alternative, and it’s annoyingly hard.
Treat connection as the content; stop instrumentalising people as resources to optimise.
Hold the tension long enough for the real question to show up.
That means a disciplined kind of neutrality. Not ‘I don’t care’. More like ‘I care enough not to steal your agency’. You can take responsibility for the quality of attention in the room without taking ownership of the outcome.
And yes, it’s power. The facilitator always has power. The work is to shift it from power over, to power with, to power within.
A practical test I’m trying on myself: when I’m about to speak, ask ‘am I serving the group’s inquiry — or my own status anxiety?’
These are some thoughts from a wonderful session of Myriam Hadnes’ Podcast Club, with Jo Nelson as a featured guest. I’ll share the link below.
What question do you wish you’d asked in a meeting, but didn’t — because it would have made things awkward in exactly the right way?
The link to the podcast club: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/p/podcast-club-february-2026
chosen path 