 One of my favorite simple tools for dealing with people who try to derail your workshop is having a parking lot. And this is the most basic thing you can possibly imagine. So you basically just have a, you know, a whiteboard or a flip chart somewhere in the room with parking lot written on it. And when people ask you questions that are not relevant to the workshop or somehow are challenging, but not worth addressing in the moment, this is what you use the parking lot for. So let me give you an example. If I'm running a design sprint workshop or if I'm running a strategy workshop and someone says to me, Hey Jonathan, we have this problem in our organization that our software is really crappy and really old. So you know, it's going to be really hard to implement some of these things. And I'll say, okay, by the way, there's two ways of dealing with this, okay? One way makes the person angrier. One way is me saying, oh, okay, so we're not really going to talk about that in this workshop. That doesn't really, this is about the, the, the, and then they'll say, yeah, well, if we don't do this, if we don't talk about this, then there's no point in doing this workshop. Right. I've had that so many times. What I do now is I say, Oh, okay. So you're saying that software. Okay. So this is not something I'm going to deal with now, but we're going to have a section at the end where I'm going to be able to go through, answer some rapid fire questions. So what I'm going to do is add this to the parking lot. So I'll write it down on a post-it or just write it here and I'll say software issues. Then someone might say, Hey, look, I don't think this type of workshop is going to work in our company. You know, we don't have time because our schedule is all over the place. We'll never be able to block two days. This doesn't really make sense for us. I don't even know why we're in and I'll be like, all right. I really understand where you're coming from. I have a lot of things to say about this. If you don't mind trusting the process for now, I'm going to come back to that. So what you said to me is that you don't believe this is going to work because the schedules of your company will never fit with that. Okay. So I'm going to put that down. Okay. I'm going to come back to these questions. I'm going to come back to these topics later in the day or tomorrow at a designated time, or if it's a shorter workshop, I'll say, So these questions, I'm putting them up on the board at lunchtime. Let's have a one on one about these talks, about these topics, because you don't want to have these things exploding in the room and derailing the entire workshop. Really, honestly, having a parking lot is one of the simplest ways to mitigate long, open conversations that might break out in your workshop. I know a lot of you people who've done facilitation before are like, yeah, Jonathan, obviously a parking lot. We all do this, but it was something that actually took me quite a few years to start implementing. So if you want to save yourself, if you want to weigh out of a conversation that you're not ready to have right now, create a parking lot, make it clear to people from the very start of the workshop that this is what it's for, and capture conversations and questions that you don't want to deal with right now that you think could disrupt the workshop, stick them on the board and make it clear when you will address these questions. And the crazy thing is, you might never address them. Honestly, I do it even if I, even though I know they won't have these questions by the end of the workshop, I still write it down and tell them I'm going to address them just so that they can get it out of their head. Really, the goal of having something like a parking lot is like for me, that's two things, help people feel heard. That's often, like often the reason people cause trouble in a workshop is that they don't feel like they've been heard. They don't feel like they are getting what they want. And a parking lot, if you write their thing up here, sometimes I even go further and I write their name next to it so that they really feel heard. The other thing is you need to help them let go of it, right? You need to help them let go of this thing that's in their head. If you can help them do that, then this person will be more relaxed in the workshop as well. So get yourself a parking lot in every workshop so that you don't have to disrupt the entire workshop when someone tries to challenge you. A parking lot is really the perfect way to do that.