How to Make Training and Workshops Fun (Without Losing the Plot)

People ask me this all the time: how do I make my training more fun? It sounds like a simple question. It isn't. The obvious move is a list of tricks, a game here, some colorful cards there, a bit of music, and none of those are bad ideas on their own. What that list skips is the actual question underneath the question, which is: fun for what?

You can try the clown nose, but it won't make your workshop fun.

Two kinds of fun

In a game, fun is the whole point. Nobody plays Monopoly to learn about real estate. You play because playing is fun, full stop. The fun is the goal, and once you stop having it, you stop playing.

In a training or a workshop, that's backwards. Nobody hires me to run a fun afternoon. They hire me because they need a decision made, a skill built, a plan that survives contact with Monday morning. Fun, in that room, isn't the goal. It's a tool.

This isn't a new idea, by the way. Psychologists have had a name for something close to this since the 1970s: the difference between a "telic" state, where you're focused on a goal and the activity is a means to it, and a "paratelic" state, where the activity itself is the point. So that's the frame I'm going to use here, and the thesis for this whole series: treat fun as instrumental. Every fun element in your session has to earn its place by serving the actual outcome, or it doesn't belong.

What fun actually means

Before going further, it's worth being precise about what we're talking about, because "fun" gets used loosely. The researchers who study this land on something like three ingredients showing up together.

Playfulness

Approaching the moment with curiosity instead of rigidity. It's the state where a weird idea gets a "let's try it" instead of a raised eyebrow, where being a little silly doesn't cost you anything.

Connection

Sharing the experience with other people, not just sitting in the same room as them. A group that built something together, or laughed at the same joke, or sweated through the same tight deadline, walks out with a different memory of the session than a group that sat through the same content side by side without ever really interacting.

Flow

Being absorbed enough that time disappears a little. It needs a challenge matched to what the group can actually do, feedback quick enough to tell you whether an attempt is working, and a long enough uninterrupted stretch for the absorption to actually take hold before something breaks it.

That's worth separating from its cousin, escapism. Scrolling your phone during a boring meeting might feel like relief, but it doesn't leave you energized the way real fun does. If your "fun" workshop activity is really just giving people a break from thinking, it's not doing the job this piece is about.

What I won't give you here

You've read this kind of piece before: add a game, sprinkle on some "gamification," call it a method. I'm not doing that here.

What follows instead is nine levers, each tied to a real mechanism, each aimed at one specific ingredient, playfulness, connection, or flow.

The nine levers

1. The Sandbox

A meeting room that stops punishing you for being wrong.

Ground rules alone don't create this. Standing up and announcing "this is a safe space" changes nothing on its own, I've sat through that line more times than I can count and watched the room stay exactly as guarded five minutes later. What actually builds it is what you do first: model a half-baked idea yourself, thank someone by name for a weird answer instead of letting it hang in silence. Once it's real, every other lever on this list works better, because the room isn't spending its energy on self-protection anymore.

Touches: playfulness, plus flow.

Ways in:

• Prove the ground rule before you name it. Model a half-baked idea or welcome a weird answer in the first few minutes, then say the rule out loud once the room's already felt it.
• Thank someone by name for a weird answer instead of letting it hang in silence.
• Ban the phrase "that won't work" during any divergent phase, and say so before you start.
• Hand out a "beautiful fail" award at some point in the day, for the wrong answer or the flopped attempt that taught the room something.

2. Sensory Richness

More fun to move and hold than to sit and stare.

Color, texture, and physical handling break the flatness of a screen-only room. Watching your hands build something also gives you a kind of feedback loop that pure discussion doesn't have, you can see the thing taking shape as you work on it.

Touches: playfulness, plus flow.

Ways in:

• Run a normally-seated exercise standing, or walking, instead.
• Swap a slide for a physical object passed hand to hand around the room.
• Use a throwable mic, like a Catchbox, for open Q&A or popcorn-style sharing instead of a handheld one someone has to walk over and take.
• Have people prototype an answer with building materials, or draw it, instead of writing or saying it.
• Replace a plain worksheet with colored cards or sticky notes for the same exercise.

3. Variety

Attention doesn't survive standing still.

This one runs on something called the vigilance decrement, a real, well-studied drop in attention over time spent in one unchanging format. You've probably heard that attention drops off a cliff after 10 or 15 minutes. I went looking for the study behind that number and came up empty, a proper review found it doesn't hold up, and one study using eye-tracking found attention rising through the first ten minutes of a well-run class, not falling. What does hold up is simpler: change the format partway through and you measurably delay the drop-off, no exact number required.

Touches: playfulness.

Ways in:

• Rearrange the room at least once during the day, circle to small clusters or back.
• Alternate the medium hour by hour: talking, then writing, then drawing, then moving.
• Plan your format switches into the agenda ahead of time, don't leave them to how the room feels in the moment.
• Vary the specific framework, not just the modality. If you ran a retro last time with 4Ls, don't run 4Ls again this time, and don't reach for multiple choice every time you need a quick check.

4. Surprise

The brain flags the unexpected as worth keeping.

There's a real hippocampus-and-dopamine mechanism behind this, though I'll be honest that human studies are mixed on whether it reliably improves memory. In Stormz, I'll sometimes have a card draw trigger something the group didn't expect, an AI-generated image appearing based on what they just wrote. It works, but only once or twice a session. Repeat the same surprise five times and it stops being a surprise and starts being a gimmick people tune out.

Touches: playfulness, plus connection.

Ways in:

• Hold one reveal back until the end of an exercise instead of showing it upfront.
• Use a random draw, cards, dice, a spinner, to decide something the group expects you to just announce.
• Save your one surprise for the moment energy is lowest, not the opening.
• Have the group vote on ideas, then send them to work on the least-voted ones instead of the winners.
• Bring in an unannounced guest speaker.

5. Content-Relevant Humor

The joke only works if the concept landed.

Instructional humor research is pretty clear that being funny and being remembered are separable things. What actually helps retention is humor about the material itself, not a generic icebreaker joke bolted on top. Done right, it does double duty: understanding the joke proves the concept stuck.

Touches: connection, plus playfulness.

Ways in:

• Turn a common mistake into a running bit you can call back to later in the day.
• Swap a textbook example for an absurd but on-topic one.
• Let the group informally name a concept themselves, then use their name for it for the rest of the session.
• Put a physical stuffed elephant on the table when it's time to name the elephant in the room.

6. The Huddle

Whatever the task, it's more fun with company.

Sometimes the task is big enough that one person genuinely can't do it alone, a poster, a prototype, a decision that needs more than one perspective to hold together. Sometimes the task is small enough that anyone could do it solo, a quiz question, an opinion, but a two-neighbor version of it is just more fun than the solo version, laughing over a guess with someone next to you beats writing it down in silence. Both cases work the same way: hand the outcome to a small group instead of one person, and the moment turns social instead of solitary.

Touches: connection.

Ways in:

• Give a small group one shared artifact to produce, one poster, one prototype, one decision, not individual worksheets side by side.
• Assign roles that need each other, so nobody can finish without the other's piece.
• Take a quiz-style or opinion question you'd normally lob at the whole room, and answer it in pairs or trios instead.
• Add a visible time limit, it turns the moment into a quick, fun race instead of a slow solo think.

7. Light Competition

A shared rival turns a group into a team.

Racing another group turns a task into a game. A little friendly rivalry, who finishes first, who guesses right, makes people care more about the outcome and enjoy getting there.

Touches: connection (amplifier).

Ways in:

• Turn a between-group comparison into a visible tally, not a private one.
• Give the losing round a light, harmless consequence, nothing that follows anyone past the session.
• Use it only once The Huddle is already running, it has nothing to amplify on its own.

8. Matched Challenge

Not too easy, not too hard, and you can see if you're right.

This is a well-documented idea called the flow zone. Too easy, and people get bored. Too hard, and people get anxious. Somewhere in between, matched to what the group can actually do, and this is where they're going to have fun.

That's the whole lever: tune the difficulty to the group in front of you, and give them quick feedback so they know if they're on the right track.

Touches: flow.

Ways in:

• Scope the task so a motivated group finishes with time to spare, not comfortably early and not in a scramble.
• Build in a checkpoint partway through where the group can tell if they're on track.
• Adjust difficulty live if the room is stalling or finishing too fast, don't wait for the debrief to notice.

9. The Bubble

Every interruption resets absorption to zero.

Once people are deep into a fun task, leave them alone. A quick interruption in the middle breaks their focus, and it takes real time to get back into it, way more time than the interruption itself took.

Touches: flow.

Ways in:

• Batch your announcements and questions for the gaps between exercises, not the middle of one.
• Put a "do not disturb" signal on the room, physical or verbal, once a task starts.
• Resist walking around narrating or coaching mid-task, let the group hit their own obstacles first.

Where fun goes wrong

The seductive details trap

There's real research on this, it's called the seductive details effect. Add something interesting but irrelevant to your content, and people remember the actual content worse. The fun stuff steals attention from the stuff that matters.

No traceable purpose

A game that has nothing to do with the content. A colorful activity that's fun in the moment and forgotten by lunch. If you can't say what it's teaching them, cut it.

The cringy icebreaker

Take the classic icebreaker with zero connection to the content, just there to loosen people up, and it usually lands cringy instead of fun. Worth noticing why, because it's actually breaking two rules on this list at once, not one.

First, it's a no-traceable-purpose problem, same as above. It has nothing to do with what the session is actually for.

Second, and this is the part that explains the cringe specifically: it's asking people to be playful, share something, act a little silly, in the first five minutes, before the room has earned the right to ask that of anyone. That's a Sandbox violation. You're demanding the payoff of a safe room without doing any of the work that makes it safe first.

The made-up numbers

Okay, two numbers you've probably heard a hundred times, and neither one is true.

First one: people remember 90% of what they teach someone else, but only 5% of what they hear in a lecture. That's the whole learning pyramid thing. Nobody's ever actually found where those numbers came from.

Second one: attention drops off a cliff after 10 or 15 minutes, the thing I mentioned earlier with Variety. Attention fading over time, that part's true. The exact number isn't.

Go try it

Next time you're trying to make a session more fun, don't start from a blank page. Come back to this list. Pick a lever, and build your own tactic around it, one that actually fits your room and your content, not just the examples I gave you here.

Whatever you land on, run it past the one question this whole piece is really about: does it serve what people actually came here for? If yes, go have fun with it.

And if you try something and it lands, if your group actually had fun and it did its job, tell me about it. I'd love to hear it.