The Cross-Team Sequencing Workshop
You are facilitating a three-hour quarterly planning workshop for 28 people from four teams who must agree how to sequence work on three shared components. The sponsor, a Director, opens with "I need a decision by lunch." Two of the team leads have history: six weeks ago one publicly called the other's design "unreviewable" in a company-wide channel, and neither has spoken to the other since. One of them has already messaged you privately: "This will be a waste of three hours." Fourteen of the 28 participants have never attended a cross-team planning session before, and two of the teams are remote. The last attempt at this workshop ended 40 minutes early with no decision and a follow-up meeting that was never scheduled.
1. How do you contract with the Director, and how do you open the session?
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Contract before the room. “A decision by lunch” is a time, not an outcome. Ask: which decision, who owns it, and what happens if the group's recommendation differs from what you expect? Establish whether you need a binding agreement among the four teams or a recommendation to the Director - those require different decision rules and different agendas. Agree the Director speaks for three minutes on the why and then either leaves or sits as a listener who does not steer.
Open with five things on one slide: the purpose, the precise question, the decision rule and who owns the decision, the agenda with times, and working agreements - including how disagreement will be handled (“challenge the idea, not the person; we test proposals with consent”).
Run a check-in where each of the 28 gets 20 seconds. Ten minutes, and worth it: half the room has never done this and silence is the default. Acknowledge the history lightly - “some of you have history here; today's agenda is built so we argue about proposals, not about each other” - and schedule the follow-up date before anyone leaves.
2. Twenty minutes in, the two leads clash and one again calls the other's component design "unreviewable" in front of everyone. What do you do in the moment?
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Interrupt early, at the process level, before it becomes personal. Something like: “Stop - I want to separate two things. There's a technical disagreement about the component design, and there's a history between you two that predates today. The first one we can work with. The second one we are not going to solve in front of 28 people.”
Then change the format to depersonalise: a proposal/concerns structure. Each lead gets three uninterrupted minutes to state their proposal; the room writes concerns on cards; you read and cluster them without attribution. This gets the technical content out while removing the adversarial turn-taking that the open floor rewards.
If it flares again, take a five-minute break and speak to each separately: what do you need in order to work in this room for the next 90 minutes? Consider splitting into two groups examining the two proposals in parallel, then comparing - separating the people is often more productive than reconciling them.
Do not adjudicate the technical merits. You would lose the room's trust in your neutrality, and you probably do not have the context to be right.
3. How do you ensure the workshop ends with a decision the four teams will actually own?
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Fix the decision rule up front and keep it visible. For cross-team sequencing, consent (“can you live with this and support it?”) is more workable than consensus (“do you all agree?”), because consensus hands any single team a veto and rewards the loudest objection.
Flow: diverge - each person writes what their team needs from the three components and by when; converge - cluster needs and identify the three or four genuine conflicts, which are the only things worth the room's time; propose - small mixed groups, deliberately not team-by-team, which tribalises; test - a consent round where each team says “we can live with this” or “we cannot, and here is the specific unmet need.”
Record what was decided, by whom, by when, and explicitly what was not decided. Close with each team stating one sentence on what they will do first.
The last session failed at the follow-up stage, so book the review date in the room before people leave, and circulate notes within 24 hours with decisions marked as decisions.