Talk or build? Choosing the right format for group sessions
The fast way to pick the right room for the right job
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You’ve probably heard it before: workshops are for interaction, focus groups are for discussion. But if you’re leading a real project, that kind of vague distinction won’t help you design a session that actually works.
What really sets these two methods apart is the kind of contribution you’re asking from participants. Focus groups are structured to surface insights: what people notice, value or question. Workshops are structured to generate progress: a shared framework, a set of options, a draft solution. If you choose the wrong one, you risk walking away with the wrong kind of data, or none at all!
The Core Difference
Focus groups are designed to help you understand how people perceive a topic. Participants respond to open-ended prompts and react to each other’s contributions. The discussion is led by a moderator, but the energy is in the dialogue: you’re listening for themes, tensions and shared language.
Workshops, in contrast, are designed to make progress on something. They rely on structured exercises, like mapping, sorting, sketching or prioritising, where the process itself is the key to generating insight. The facilitator’s role is to both manage the conversation and to help move the group from input to output.
So: one format is geared toward learning from what people say; the other is geared toward what they make together.
Let’s explore them in a bit more detail.
When to Use a Focus Group
Focus groups are ideal when you want to learn how people interpret a concept, respond to an idea or experience a situation. They’re especially valuable when language matters. For example, when you need to understand how your audience talks about something, what terms they naturally use and what meanings they attach.
Suppose you’re working on a public health campaign and you want to understand how different groups perceive the idea of "screening." A focus group will let you explore not just attitudes toward the service, but also associations, hesitations and misconceptions that would be hard to pick up from a survey. You’ll hear people push back, echo each other, shift their position mid-sentence. Those dynamics are part of the data.
Focus groups also allow you to compare how different segments of your audience experience the same environment.
Take an organisation exploring its workplace culture: how do long-tenured employees describe the culture compared to new starters? By running separate focus groups with each group, you can explore differences in tone, vocabulary and expectations without putting anyone on the spot or forcing a shared conversation that might not feel safe.
There are risks, of course. Dominant personalities can skew the tone. Some people may self-censor, especially in hierarchical or sensitive contexts. And if your topic is too broad, you risk collecting vague agreement rather than rich disagreement, which is where the insights often hide.
When to Use a Workshop
Workshops come into their own when the goal is to align, prioritise or create. Your job is to structure a process that helps participants work through complexity together.
Let’s say you’re redesigning a customer onboarding experience. A workshop can bring together different perspectives - say frontline staff, designers, support teams - and have them map the current journey and identify friction points. The conversation matters, but the outputs matter more: sticky notes on a wall, sketches on a template, a shared list of blockers.
This kind of structure is also helpful when the conversation alone won’t surface what you need. For instance, if you're trying to define service principles with a group of stakeholders, a workshop can guide them through provocations, pair discussions and group synthesis. That shared shaping gives you both content and buy-in through a process of collaborative co-creation.
But workshops aren’t just longer focus groups with Post-its. They demand more from participants: time, attention and a willingness to engage actively. They also demand more from you: designing exercises that are relevant and doable, pacing the session to sustain energy levels (we all know the post-lunch slump!) and navigating the tension between structure and spontaneity.
Done well, a workshop can generate clarity and alignment that would take weeks to build through interviews or surveys. Done poorly, it becomes a group activity with no real traction.
Your Toolkit for Successful Delivery
Dos and Don’ts for Focus Groups
🗣️ Do let participants speak in their own words, as your goal is to understand their framing - not impose your own.
🧠 Do use prompts and probes to explore emerging themes rather than sticking rigidly to a script.
🔍 Do run multiple groups when you want to compare experiences across roles, regions or demographics.
🚫 Don’t treat a focus group like a vote: you’re not looking for consensus, but depth and diversity.
👥 Don’t ignore group dynamics. Pay attention to who speaks, who stays quiet and how people influence each other.
⏳ Don’t squeeze too many questions into the session. Fewer, better questions create room for depth.
Dos and Don’ts for Workshops
🧩 Do design structured activities that help people move from broad thinking to specific outputs.
🗂️ Do make the task visible, using templates, canvases, sticky notes - whatever helps people work collaboratively.
🪫 Do break the workshop into manageable chunks to avoid fatigue and keep focus high.
📉 Don’t let the session drift: unstructured discussion tends to lose focus fast.
🧾 Don’t collect ideas for show and only ask for input you’re willing to use.
📏 Don’t assume alignment just because people were in the same room. You will have to test and summarise outputs clearly.
Choosing the Right Tool
If you're still unsure, frame your decision around the type of contribution you need:
Are you trying to understand how people see an issue, or do you want them to help shape the response?
Are you mapping the landscape, or mapping a path forward?
Some projects benefit from using both. For example, you might run a focus group to explore the barriers people face in accessing a service, and then follow up with a workshop to co-design interventions that address those barriers.
The key is to be deliberate. Don’t call something a workshop if you’re just hosting a longer group discussion. Don’t label something a focus group if you’re asking people to generate ideas or solutions.
Workshops and focus groups each have their place. Neither is better, but each is better suited to a particular kind of work. The clearer you are about what kind of insight or progress you need, the easier it becomes to choose the right format.
🚪 If you want authentic, actionable contributions from your participants, it starts by choosing the right room - and the right reason to bring people into it!
I'm Andrea, a management consultant with over a decade of experience across industry and academia. I work with commercial, non-profit, academic and government organisations worldwide, helping them capture meaningful insights through mixed methods research.
I write about practical frameworks to help you discover what others miss. My main goal is to translate complex concepts into techniques that readers can use immediately.
You could say that a focus group is more diagnostic in nature while a workshop is more solution / action orientated. I suppose (I am no expert) understanding the distinction would allow you to decide whether to go with a focus group or a workshop.