Designing a Workshop in Under 24 Hours

How JFDI Became My Planning Framework

It’s Monday morning. Rebecca and I are loading the car for World of Learning. An email comes through.

One of the roundtable sessions has pulled out. Could we step in?

The session in question wasn’t a straightforward panel or a presentation I could wing with a few slides. It was a highly interactive, game-based roundtable about learning campaign design. The kind of session that, under normal circumstances, you’d spend weeks developing, testing, and refining. They needed it tomorrow. Thirty minutes. No budget. No plan.

I said yes, obviously. Not because I’m particularly heroic or because I have some unique ability to conjure workshops from thin air, but because sometimes the only sensible response to chaos is to lean into it and see what happens.

What followed wasn’t a masterclass in instructional design. It was a masterclass in stripping away everything that isn’t essential and getting back to first principles. By the time I crawled into bed at 1:30am on Tuesday morning, I’d built the session, created the resources, and made my peace with the fact that this was how I’d be spending my Monday evening. But I’d also been reminded of something valuable about how we work when we don’t have the luxury of time to second-guess ourselves.

Going Back to Basics

When you’ve got less than 24 hours to design and deliver a workshop, you don’t have the capacity for complexity. You can’t afford to get lost in the weeds of pedagogical theory or spend hours debating whether your learning objectives are sufficiently SMART. You need a framework that’s simple, functional, and fast.

I started with the audience. World of Learning attracts L&D practitioners and leaders, but these events tend to draw practitioners who are hungry for new ideas and practical approaches they can take back to their organisations. That knowledge shaped everything else, it meant I could assume a certain level of baseline understanding and focus on giving people something they could use rather than something they needed to learn from scratch.

Next, I needed to be clear about what people were coming for. Core offering sounds like marketing speak, but it’s a useful way to frame the question: what do people want from this session? In this case, it was insight into campaign design and a chance to share their ideas and get feedback from others doing similar work. That combination of input and interaction became the backbone of the session.

Then came the constraints. Thirty minutes. Roundtable format. Team-based game. Some kind of feedback loop to make it feel purposeful. Those constraints weren’t limitations, they were clarifying. They told me what I couldn’t do, which made it much easier to figure out what I could.

With the structure taking shape, I needed to document the knowledge inputs, everything I knew about campaign design that could be useful to participants. This wasn’t about writing a comprehensive guide, it was about capturing the key insights I could offer in a format that would be accessible during the session.

The functional side of the session, the game loop, came together quickly once the other pieces were in place. Teams would receive data about a mock company, design a learning campaign based on that data, pitch their approach, and receive a score. Highest score wins. Simple, repeatable, and easy to facilitate even if the room was chaotic.

The final piece was support resources. How could I deliver content to people in a way that was useful in the moment but also gave them something to take away afterwards? Paper handouts are fine, slides work, but I chose to build mobile-friendly web pages using Loveable.dev. One page with the game rules and company data, another with a playbook for creating high-performance learning campaigns. This meant participants could reference the materials during the session on their phones and keep them afterwards as a lasting guide.

The Principle of JFDI

I don’t recommend this approach as a general rule. I don’t advocate for doing this regularly, or probably ever, if you’ve got a choice. But I do think there’s something worth saying about what happens when you strip away all the safety nets and just have to make something work.

Sometimes we get to take our time. We get to research, experiment, confirm our assumptions, iterate based on feedback, and refine our approach until it’s as close to perfect as we’re likely to get. That’s good work, and it matters. But other times, we just need to JFDI. Just fucking do it.

There’s a particular clarity that comes from not having time to overthink. When you’re working under pressure, you stop worrying about whether your approach is theoretically sound or whether it aligns with the latest thinking in your field. You focus on what works. You trust your judgement. You build the thing and you ship it, and you deal with any problems as they come up.

I finished the session plan and resources at 1:30am. Was it the best workshop I’ve ever designed? No. Was it good enough to deliver value to the people who turned up? I think so. More importantly, it was done, and it was ready, and that’s what mattered in that moment.

On Being Easy to Work With

Here’s the thing about saying yes to last-minute requests: it tends to lead to more opportunities. Not because people are trying to take advantage of you, but because being easy to work with makes you someone people want to work with. When you help people whenever you can, when you don’t make everything more complicated than it needs to be, cool opportunities tend to come your way.

They don’t always arrive neatly packaged with plenty of notice and a clear brief. Sometimes they show up as a phone call while you’re loading the car. Sometimes they mean working until half-past one in the morning and hoping you’ve made the right calls. But they’re still opportunities, and they’re still worth taking.

I’m extremely lucky to get to do this kind of work. I know that. But there’s no reason you can’t do the same if you want to. It’s not about having some special skill or being uniquely qualified. It’s about being willing to say yes when something interesting comes up, even if the timing is terrible. It’s about trusting that you know enough to figure it out as you go. And it’s about being comfortable with the fact that not everything you make will be perfect, and that’s fine.