A facilitator guide from a deck somebody else built
You have 60 slides and a room in three days. Turn it into a guide with timings, discussion prompts, and a plan for when the session stalls.
What you’re making
A guide you can actually hold while you facilitate. Timings for each segment, the point of each section in one sentence, discussion prompts that aren’t “any questions?”, the lines you use to move between sections, and a plan for the two ways this session tends to fall apart.
The situation it solves is very specific and very common: you’re facilitating something you didn’t design. An expert built the content, they may or may not be in the room, and you’re responsible for making ninety minutes work. Nobody wrote down the facilitation part, because the person who built the deck had it in their head.
What to have open
The deck, or the outline, or the last facilitator’s notes. Whatever exists.
Plus three things you have to know and the tool can’t guess. How long you have. How the room works (round tables? theatre style? fully online? part in the room and part online, which is the hardest one). And who’s in the seats: mixed seniority, one department in the majority, people sent by their manager rather than people who signed up.
That last one can materially change how you facilitate, and it is easy to leave out of the prompt.
The prompt
I'm facilitating a session I didn't design. Help me build a facilitator guide. THE CONTENT: [paste the slide titles and key bullets, or the outline, or upload the deck] THE CONSTRAINTS: - Length: [90 minutes] - Room: [round tables of 6 / theatre style / fully online / part in-room with 12 people joining remotely] - Participants: [number, roles, mix of seniority, whether they chose to be there] - My role: [I'm facilitating; the content expert is / isn't present] - What success looks like for me: [for example, "they leave with one thing they'll do differently"] BUILD ME: 1. A TIMED RUNNING ORDER. Every segment with a start time, a duration, and what I'm doing (presenting, prompting, listening, moving people around). The total must equal my actual length, including a real break if it's over 75 minutes. Don't plan to the last minute. Leave 10% slack. 2. THE POINT OF EACH SEGMENT, one sentence, written for me rather than for them: what has to be true in the room by the end of this segment. 3. DISCUSSION PROMPTS. Two per discussion segment. They must be answerable by someone who hasn't prepared, specific enough that the first answer isn't a platitude, and suited to the mix of seniority I described. Nothing answerable with yes or no. Not "any questions?" 4. TRANSITIONS. One line I can actually say out loud to move between segments. 5. THE TWO WAYS THIS FALLS APART. Given this content, this room and these people, name the two most likely ways it goes wrong, and for each one a specific move I can make in the moment. Be concrete: what do I say, what do I change? 6. WHAT I NEED TO KNOW COLD. The three things in this content I'm going to be asked about and must not fumble. Write them as questions I should be able to answer without the slides. 7. CUT LIST. If I'm 15 minutes behind at the halfway point, what comes out, in order? I want this decided now, not improvised.
Sections 5 and 7 are the ones you won’t find in a template, and they’re the reason to bother. The cut list especially. Deciding in advance what gets dropped is the difference between a session that ends cleanly and one that runs over and loses the last ten minutes to people packing up.
What good output looks like
Judge it on the discussion prompts.
Weak output gives you “What are your thoughts on this framework?” That produces silence, then one senior person talking for four minutes. Good output gives you something with a foothold:
“Think of the last time you had to give someone feedback you knew they wouldn’t accept. Without naming them, what did you do in the first thirty seconds?”
Anyone in the room can answer that. It’s specific enough that the answer isn’t a platitude. And it’s pitched so nobody has to admit a failure in front of their manager.
Prompts are where facilitation actually lives, and they’re the quickest way to tell whether the output understood the room you described.
Then check the arithmetic. The timings should add up to your session length, with slack. They often don’t.
How to check it
Add up the timings. Out loud, on your fingers. Durations that don’t sum to the session length are the single most common fault here, and the guide is no use if the numbers are wrong.
Read the prompts as a participant. For each one, ask yourself: could I answer this cold, in front of my boss, without preparing? If not, it needs rewriting.
Check the content claims against the deck. If the guide asserts something the deck doesn’t say, it’s filled a gap. Cut it, because you’re the one who’ll be standing there defending it.
Test the cut list. If you drop those segments, is the session still coherent? Sometimes the suggested cut is the thing everything else was building toward.
Where it goes wrong
The timings may be optimistic. A table discussion with report-back also needs transition and sharing time. Add up the full running order and test it against your room format rather than accepting generated timings.
It ignores the room. Ask for a guide without saying that a dozen people are joining remotely, and you’ll get one that assumes everyone can hear each other. That’s exactly the thing that fails. Mixed in-room and online needs spelling out: who speaks first, how remote people get a word in, what’s on the shared screen while the tables are talking.
Generic prompts. Without a real description of who’s in the room, prompts default to safely bland. Describe the room honestly, including the awkward bits, like “three of them manage the other nine”.
It invents content. Give it a thin outline and it will confidently elaborate on the substance. Anything in the guide you can’t trace to the source is yours to defend in the room. Cut it or check it.
Afterwards
Spend ten minutes after the session marking up the guide with what actually happened. Where you ran over, which prompt fell flat, what got asked that you weren’t ready for.
Feed that marked-up version back in next time as your starting point. This is the loop nobody closes, and closing it is worth more than any prompt on this page.