The marketing and communications team of a large UK charitable foundation was running several significant projects in parallel inside a complex organisation. A one-day workshop, joined by their PR agency, surfaced internal communications as the biggest opportunity and the team's biggest collective responsibility, and gave the team lead a clear plan to take into her next director conversation.
The foundation is the City of London's charitable funder, with a large team and a wider organisational context that includes significant brand, comms, and stakeholder complexity. The marketing and communications team was carrying several major projects at once. The brief was to give the team a day together, with their PR agency in the room, to align on direction without losing the texture of the projects already in flight.
Pre-work was a short internal survey across the team, surfacing where each person felt the team was strong, where the gaps were, and what they wanted out of the day. The signal in the responses was clear before the workshop began: a team that liked each other, was working hard on the right things, and was missing a shared sense of where the most important work actually sat.
I designed the day around what I call the 5% approach. Indirect questioning rather than straight challenge, opening up space for people to say things they would not have said if asked directly. With a PR agency in the room alongside the in-house team, the 5% approach was the right register. It kept the agency relationship productive while still letting the in-house team surface concerns about how the work was being done.
Survey data from the pre-work framed the morning. The team worked through the themes that had emerged, ranked them honestly, and named the one or two that mattered most. Internal comms came out of that work as the biggest opportunity, and was acknowledged as the team's collective responsibility rather than something that should be done to them.
Afternoon work moved into stakeholder engagement inside the wider organisation. Internal brand management, demonstrating the team's value to the rest of the foundation, educating other functions on how the team works. I used a roller page framework as the closing artefact: a single page the team lead could come back to after the day to track what had been agreed, what had moved, and what was still outstanding.
A clean written summary of everything covered and agreed was delivered the morning after the workshop. That summary became the working document for follow-up.
In the post-workshop debrief the team lead described it as one of the better workshops she had been part of. The team's feedback was universally positive. The 5% approach was specifically called out as a more effective alternative to direct questioning, and the energy and presentation style as something the team responded to.
Concrete outputs from the day. Internal comms named as the priority, owned by the team rather than blamed on the organisation. An internal brand management workstream defined, with the work of demonstrating the team's value to the rest of the foundation given proper time. A roller page in active use post-workshop to track the agreed actions. An accelerated internal briefing plan ready to go into the next director conversation.
The most important downstream signal: the team lead is recommending the work for a separate team formation engagement. The relationship has moved from one-day workshop to ongoing partner.
Two things stood out from this engagement. First, that a single survey in pre-work can do more to shape a workshop than two hours of agenda design, if the team is honest with themselves before the day. Second, that the 5% approach is the right register for any room where an agency and an in-house team need to work together without the agency feeling exposed or the in-house team feeling unheard.
For teams operating inside complex organisations, the most useful thing I can do as a facilitator is help them notice that the biggest opportunity is usually internal rather than external. This team did not need a new strategy. They needed a clearer sense of how to land the work they were already doing inside their own organisation. Naming that, in the room, was the day's most valuable outcome.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
