Personal Workspace — for facilitators

Samvinas

• Build the workspace template — the sequence of tools each person gets.
• Participants create and open their own; each is a real, private child event, and they move in and out of it with the breadcrumb bar.

The child events hold the work, and nothing flows back into the parent automatically. To harvest, ask people to bring their best item into a shared tool when they return — or open a workspace's own options to export its report if you need what's inside.

Paper and pen

You need: a printed worksheet per person (or a blank sheet with the prompts written up on the flip chart) and a pen each.

• Design the sheet as a sequence: prompt at the top, then the steps you'd otherwise chain as tools — three ideas · pick one · one sentence on why.
• Hand it out, state the timebox, and call silent working time — solo means silent, or the quick thinkers colonise the quiet ones' pages.
• People work at their own pace; wander and answer questions quietly rather than addressing the room.
• Harvest by invitation: each person shares one item from their sheet, or posts a single sticky note to the wall — the sheets themselves stay private.
• Failure mode to avoid: collecting the whole sheet. Promise privacy up front and keep it — that's what makes the writing honest.

When & why

Reach for Personal Workspace for "think alone, then share" patterns — individual work first, group convergence after. Solo thinking produces genuinely independent starting points and widens the field before anyone starts narrowing it.

• Use it when you want everyone to engage deeply, not just the vocal few — quiet, deliberate participants often do their best work here.
• What usually follows: a shared pooling step — a Brainstorm where people post their best items, or Clustering to organise what comes back.