Workshop Experiments That Fail on Purpose
Here's a thing nobody tells you about running a creative workshop: the best moments often come from the messes. Not the big failures, not the kind where someone walks out, but the partial fail—where the paint runs, the clay cracks, the demo goes sideways for forty seconds. Most facilitators spend their energy trying to prevent those moments. They over-prepare, over-rehearse, and over-correct. And in doing so, they kill the one thing that makes a workshop feel alive: the chance for something unexpected to happen. This article is a case for planning your next workshop around the partial fail—not avoiding it. You'll learn what makes a failure worth repeating, how to build space for experiments that might go wrong, and what to do when one does. No perfect formulas here. Just a set of attitudes and practices that have kept my sessions useful for over a decade.