Your Workshop Isn’t Enough
Great facilitation isn’t enough. If you're not translating it, you're losing trust by the day.
This week, let’s name a tough truth:
Your MIRO board? No one’s looked at it since the workshop.
I know that stings. You built it with care. The session felt high-energy. You left thinking alignment had landed.
And then… nothing.
No follow-up.
No references.
No decisions anchored to the work.
Let me share where I’ve been burned by that same blind spot.
The Beautiful Board No One Used
A while back, I facilitated what I thought was a breakthrough session.
Everyone participated. Insights flew. MIRO was buzzing. We wrapped with clear priorities and shared next steps.
But a week later, when I referenced the board in a review, the silence was deafening.
The strategy hadn’t stuck.
The story hadn’t traveled.
The board had become a souvenir, not a shared tool.
And that’s when I realized:
Facilitating the conversation isn’t enough. You have to make the story durable.
"But Isn’t That Their Job?"
You might be thinking:
“If we aligned in the room, it’s on them to follow through, right?”
Here’s the reality:
If the story isn’t being reused, it never landed.
Alignment doesn’t end when the meeting does. It begins the first time someone uses what you shared to make a decision.
If they can’t remember where your insight came from — or don’t trust it — they’ll ignore it.
That’s not because they’re checked out.
It’s because the signal got lost in the noise.
“So You Want Me to Narrate Everything?”
Yes — but not in the way you think.
You don’t need a TED Talk. You need five-second framing.
A single sentence like:
“In our last session, we prioritized X, which led to this tradeoff. That’s why today we’re focusing on Y.”
That’s not overhead — it’s how you turn meetings into memory.
That’s what influence sounds like.
Because here’s the brutal truth:
If no one sees you model strategic behavior, they assume no strategy exists.
"Why Should I Keep Citing the Workshop?"
Executives don’t want origin stories — they want results.
But results without memory are vulnerable.
Organizational memory builds trust. Trust builds runway.
When you visibly connect today’s decisions to last week’s conversations, you show your work.
You’re not just saying, “Here’s the roadmap.”
You’re saying, “Here’s how we got here, and here’s how it serves you.”
“Isn’t This Just Making Things ‘Clearer’?”
Not quite.
Clarity isn’t cosmetic — it’s currency.
When you clean up a messy MIRO board or distill a whiteboard wall, you’re not just making it legible.
You’re making it reusable.
Reusable artifacts travel.
They scale the story.
They anchor decisions.
If you don’t translate what happened in the room, it doesn’t leave the room.
What Great Product Leaders Actually Do
They don’t just run great workshops. They operationalize them.
They:
✅ Distill artifacts into simple formats
✅ Use those formats to drive decisions
✅ Reference workshop moments aloud
✅ Make strategy a visible, living thread — not an isolated event
They Clarify, Empower, and Deliver.
This Week’s Move
☕ Pick one insight from your last workshop.
🗣 Reference it explicitly in your next meeting.
Say it aloud. Show the throughline.
Give people a chance to trust that their input mattered — and that it still does.
Because if your team never sees their fingerprints on the strategy, they’ll stop showing up.