Your skills session is only as good as the cases people bring

Marco van Hout · 4 min read

Practice only transfers if people practise on their own real situations. Design the intake that collects them before you design the agenda.

More sessions now aim to build a skill than to reach a decision. Most are leadership skills, and most run one to four hours. That is enough time to practise, provided the material is right.

A skills session is a manufacturing problem first

Before anyone facilitates anything, something has to be made: a set of situations worth practising on. Invent them and people get good at your invention. Ask a room to role-play a fictional underperformer and they get good at the fiction, then walk back to the real one on Monday and do what they always did. The skill sits in the case it was learned on. If the case is fabricated, that is where it stays.

Recent writing on scenario design says the same from another direction: a scenario works when its decision points match decisions people actually face. The trade press this year is full of the shift from content delivery to practice. What gets less attention is where the practice material comes from. Your participants already have it. Collect it, in a usable form, before the agenda exists.

What a usable case looks like

A usable case is short, specific and unresolved. Four tests:

  • It is 120 to 200 words. Shorter is a headline, longer is a memoir.
  • It names a concrete next moment: a conversation someone is avoiding next month, a meeting where they lost the room last week.
  • It contains a decision the writer owns. "My team lacks motivation" fails. "I have to tell one person their proposal is not going ahead" passes.
  • It is unsolved, or it went badly and will recur.

Ask for one case per participant and an optional second. One is enough to practise on; two gives you spares for whoever brings nothing.

The intake protocol

  1. Ten working days before the session, send the request. One email, under 150 words, with the four tests above as the submission form.
  2. Ask for exactly this: what the situation is, who is involved by role only, what you did or are about to do, and what you want to be able to do differently. 120 to 200 words in total.
  3. Deadline: five working days before the session. Send one reminder at seven working days, to non-submitters only.
  4. On the deadline, count. If 60 percent or more of participants have submitted a case that passes the four tests, commit to the practice format and build the agenda around it. Below 60 percent, switch to the fallback below. Do not build the agenda before you have counted.
  5. Read every case. Reply to any that fails a test with one question, within one working day. Most people fix a vague case in a single reply.

When people send nothing, or send fog

Low submission is information. Usually the request was too open or came too late. Two ways to recover.

First, use the spares. If you asked for an optional second case, half the room may have supplied enough to cover everyone. Cases from colleagues travel fine: the writer plays the counterpart and briefs the practiser for two minutes.

Second, move the intake into the room. Open with a 15-minute writing block on the same four questions, then a 5-minute pair check against the four tests. That is 20 minutes of a 90-minute session, leaving 16 for opening and closing around the 54-minute practice block below. Plan this as a fallback, not on the day.

Vague cases get one question back, not a rewrite by you. "Which sentence do you expect to say first?" turns most fog into a scene.

Designing the second attempt

One attempt is a demonstration. The skill is built in the second attempt, after feedback, on the same case. Run it in triads: one practiser, one counterpart playing the other person from the case, one observer with a two-item checklist. The cycle for one practiser:

  • 10:00 Brief: practiser reads the case aloud and names the moment to practise (2 min)
  • 10:02 Rep one (5 min)
  • 10:07 Feedback: observer first, then counterpart, one thing to keep and one thing to change (4 min)
  • 10:11 Rep two, same scene from the top, with the one change (5 min)
  • 10:16 Debrief: practiser says what was different (2 min)

Eighteen minutes per person, 54 per triad, three real cases each practised twice. In a 90-minute session that leaves 15 minutes to open and 21 to close. In a three-hour session, run a second round: a second case, or the same case with a harder counterpart.

Keep the change small. One instruction between reps, not a list. People can hold one.

If you want help writing the intake question and building an agenda where at least half the time is practice with a second attempt, start from a brief in Session Studio.

Sources

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