We often assume the hardest part of facilitation is designing the exercises. But what happens when hierarchy doesn't just shape the conversation — it physically stops it?

That's the story Evelyn van Kelle brought to this episode. She was a few weeks into working with a company going through major changes — uncertainty everywhere, fingers being pointed, decisions being avoided. She and a colleague proposed an EventStorming session. Leadership called it "a wasted day." Participants showed up hesitant, conversations stayed high-level, and there were no disagreements — a red flag for any facilitator. People were asking permission just to move a sticky note. Then there was the CTO. He wouldn't participate, but he'd walk in periodically, arms crossed, sometimes dropping a sarcastic comment. Each time, the entire group froze. But the grand finale came during a sense-making exercise: for the first time all day, someone was sharing something vulnerable. The CTO walked in, listened, and after a few seconds of silence — slow clapped. The room went silent. Everyone looked to the facilitators. Evelyn and her co-facilitator were overwhelmed.

What followed — and what Evelyn learned from it — is a masterclass in what facilitators do when their own physical reactions are peaking, when safety collapses in real time, and when dominant behaviour reveals how fragile the conditions for collaboration really were. This conversation explores the line between being neutral and acting neutral, why understanding destructive behaviour matters more than condemning it, and what Evelyn would do differently if she could go back.

Key Discussion Points

1. [00:01] Physical Reactions as Data: Evelyn explains why intense physical responses during facilitation are a signal to act, not to freeze
2. [00:03] "A Wasted Day": How leadership's resistance to the session set the conditions for failure before it even began
3. [00:05] Working Too Hard: The facilitator heuristic — when you're working harder than the group, something structural is blocking participation
4. [00:06] The CTO's Rounds: Arms crossed, sarcastic comments, no questions — and how the whole group froze every time he walked in
5. [00:08] The Slow Clap: The moment a vulnerable breakthrough was met with the CTO's slow clap, and how it peaked the facilitators' own physical reactions
6. [00:11] Understanding, Not Excusing: Evelyn's one-on-one with the CTO — learning that his behaviour earned him compliments from peers
7. [00:14] The Session That Shouldn't Have Happened: Why making collaborative modeling "business as usual" might have worked better than a big official event
8. [00:18] Acting Neutral vs. Being Neutral: Why facilitators can't truly be neutral, but must avoid setting the emotional tone for the group

Guest: Evelyn van Kelle, Gien Verschatse Hosts: Andrea Magnorsky, Kenny Schwegler

We often assume that once we get everyone in a room and reach agreement on an architecture, the hard part is over. But what happens when the workshop goes perfectly, everyone nods along, puts their sticky note on "Yes, I support this," and then four weeks later... nobody has shipped anything?

That's the pattern Xin Yao encountered twice in her career—separated by seven years and what should have been much better facilitation techniques the second time around. In her first story, Xin orchestrated a multi-day integration architecture workshop for a major financial institution. Cross-functional teams aligned on APIs, event-driven patterns, and walked away with a clear action list. Four weeks later, an engineering manager asked the question nobody wanted to hear: "Did you notice anybody was excited about it?" The answer was no. The work? Also no.

Seven years later, armed with Event Storming and collaborative modeling techniques, Xin tried again. This time it was a DDD workshop during COVID, with real-time collaboration and all the right practices. But the timeline wouldn't merge, participants couldn't walk through the model without Xin taking over, and the board ended up more red (hotspots and conflicts) than orange (domain events). In the retrospective, someone said: "The whiteboard doesn't compile." Another admitted: "We didn't want to ruin it for you—you had so much passion."

This conversation explores the gap between facilitation techniques and the emotional safety required to make them work. We dig into why "success theater" happens, how to invite dissent from the very beginning, and why architects need to remember they're "feeling machines that think"—not thinking machines that feel.

Key Discussion Points

* [00:01] The Flying Squad: Xin's role as an integration architect parachuting into a multi-day workshop for a major CRM integration project

* [06:00] Agreement Without Excitement: Four weeks after a "successful" workshop, the action list sits untouched—nobody shipped

* [08:00] The Event Storming That Wouldn't Merge: Seven years later with better techniques, but the timeline clusters, the facilitator becomes the bottleneck, and the board turns red

* [12:00] "The Whiteboard Doesn't Compile": Why participants stayed silent when the entry and exit events were wrong from the start

* [16:00] Taking the Authority Out: How Xin learned to say "I'm a couple steps ahead, not the expert—trust your own experience"

* [21:00] Inviting Dissent Early: The heuristic of pausing every 10 minutes to ask "What would you say if you didn't have to be polite?"

* [36:00] Connection Before Content: Why breaking into small groups of three creates the safety to surface real concerns

* [38:00] Feeling Machines That Think: The role of emotion in architectural decision-making and why facilitators need to invite emotional language into the room

**Guest:** Xin Yao

**Hosts:** Andrew Harmel-Law, Kenny Schwegler, Andrea Magnorsky

*Part of the Stories on Facilitating Software Architecture and Design series from Virtual DDD.*

We often assume that once we get everyone into a room for a collaborative modeling session, the hardest part is over. But what happens when you discover—just 48 hours before kickoff—that the person signing the checks has a fundamentally different definition of success than the product team?. In this episode, Beija Nigl joins Kenny and Andrew to share a candid story about a legacy migration project where the goalposts moved before the game even started.

Beija recounts her experience facilitating a workshop intended to handle a 20-year-old legacy system where Java 8 support was running out. While the Product Owner wanted to completely "rethink" the broken processes, the sponsor introduced the session as a documentation exercise to rebuild the system's edge cases "as-is". This critical misalignment led to a room full of business experts getting bogged down in technical implementation details—debating status codes like "Status 800" and "nightly runs"—rather than solving the underlying business problems.

This conversation goes deep into the socio-technical challenges of our work. We explore the emotional attachment stakeholders have to legacy complexity and how facilitators can navigate power dynamics when the "ground truth" is uncomfortable. Beija also reveals how this challenging experience became the catalyst for creating the "Como Prep Canvas," a tool designed to surface these conflicting motivations before the sticky notes ever hit the wall.

1. [00:01] The Legacy Trap: Setting the stage for a workshop to replace a 20-year-old system facing end-of-life support.
2. [03:00] The "Rebuild" vs. "Rethink" Conflict: Discovering at the 11th hour that the sponsor wants to document edge cases while the team wants to fix the process.
3. [05:00] When Technical Debt Hijacks the Conversation: How the workshop drifted into mapping status codes (e.g., Status 800 vs. 305) instead of business value.
4. [08:00] Emotional Safety in Modeling: Understanding why experts cling to complex legacy numbers as a form of job security and identity.
5. [13:00] The Facilitator’s Dilemma: Navigating the tension of facilitation when you cannot refer to an aligned goal because one doesn't exist.
6. [16:00] Delivering the "Ground Truth": The consultant's responsibility to present uncomfortable findings to leadership to drive organizational alignment.
7. [19:00] Aligning on Intent: How to prepare mentally to ensure you are solving the right problem for the business success.

1. Como Prep Canvas: The tool Beija developed with the DDD-crew to better align stakeholder expectations prior to collaborative modeling. https://github.com/ddd-crew/como-prep-canvas