The Case for Loose Ends

Is our obsession with neat little bows on workshops and projects actually diminishing the impact they have? The long-term impact. The impact we hope they have beyond our involvement?

I've been designing and running a fair few workshops recently. Structure is important. How we start, how things flow, and how we end. I've been thinking about learning and application of ideas, I've been thinking about what happens in the room and more importantly what happens outside the room, beyond your control as a facilitator. And I've been wondering whether in our efforts to show a workshop 'works', we close off deeper learning, and how sometimes we need to intentionally leave open threads and open questions.

The problem with resolution

Most of what happens in a workshop or a session is only ever useful if people can take it back into their own context and make sense of it there. A good facilitator will create rooms and spaces that support the workshop. But however well designed, the room is artificial. The real work happens when someone is back at their desk on a Tuesday morning trying to figure out what any of it means for the decision they're actually facing.

If we resolve everything in the session with neat actions, clear conclusions, a satisfying arc, there is the potential we've artificially done the sense-making for them. We've removed the productive friction of trying to figure out what it means to me in my context outside the room. We've made it easy to file the experience away.

But what if we leave a question hanging, one that is genuinely & intentionally unresolved, not because we ran out of time but because we chose to? One that forces them to contextualise, to test an idea against their own reality, to keep thinking after the room has emptied.

Maybe the loose end isn't a failure of facilitation. In some cases maybe it's the mechanism.

We design too linearly

I think part of the problem is that we default to linear workshop design and I need to wrap up neatly. Input, discussion, activity, action plan. It feels productive. It maps well to a session plan. But sometimes it skips the slower, harder cognitive work — the sitting with ambiguity, the divergent thinking, the wrestling with contradiction — that actually changes how people see and operate.

I've written about this in two frameworks — the five modes of thinking and the modes of problem solving. Both make the same core point: these aren't linear steps, they're modes you move between. But most workshop design treats them as a pipeline. We skip sensing and imagining, jump straight to designing and acting, and wonder why nothing sticks. We rush past the modes that require sitting with not-knowing because they're uncomfortable and hard to report on.

We're essentially optimising for what's legible in the room rather than what's transformative beyond it.

Honesty about complexity

There's a deeper issue too, particularly in systems change work. If we're genuinely working on complex, adaptive problems, the kind that don't have neat solutions, then wrapping a session up tidily is a kind of dishonesty. It implies that the problem can be bounded by a two-hour slot and a set of post-it notes.

The open question is the honest response to complexity. Saying "we haven't resolved this, and that's OK, and here's why" is more respectful of the work and of the people doing it than pretending we've cracked something we haven't.

Intentional, not accidental

I do want to be clear though; this isn't an argument against structure, or for vague, meandering sessions where nothing happens, in fact I am a BIG advocate for structure and get a bit annoyed if I'm in sessions where this doesn't happen! There's a world of difference between a loose end that exists because someone didn't plan properly and one that exists because a facilitator made a deliberate choice to leave space for ongoing sense-making.

The skill is knowing what to close and what to leave open. Naming it. Being honest with people that some things are meant to stay unresolved, that the discomfort of an open question is intentional and feeling comfortable with that. It's not always easy. People like certainty.

And to be clear, not every workshop or session needs this. Sometimes things can be neat, things do need resolving. The skill, and the bravery, is in knowing which one and designing for it.

What I'm trying to do differently

In the organisational resilience work, and the TechFreedom sessions we are creating, I'm experimenting with this. Designing sessions that explicitly don't resolve. Ending with questions rather than actions. Creating arcs that span weeks, not hours, so that the space between sessions becomes the real learning environment, not dead time between the important bits.

It's harder to justify. It's harder to evidence. It looks less impressive on paper and it feels uncomfortable, uncertain. But I think it's closer to how change actually works — slowly, messily, in the gaps between the things we can point to.

Maybe the best thing a workshop can do is send someone away with a question they can't stop thinking about, a niggle that they need to resolve in their time, in their context. Maybe that's not a loose end, but actually the whole point of it all. Maybe this is the thread worth following.