Your goal as a facilitator is to gather a range of techniques for dealing with different kinds of people and potential conflicts within the workshop. Here are ideas for 3 types of situations:

• Redirect: Refocus people's attention if they get off topic. You can do it by restating the workshop's goal and saving their valuable but off-topic ideas for later.
• Balance: Invite non-dominant participants to contribute to balance the voices of dominant participants. Ask participants to share their perspectives in turns or ask for a specific number of ideas from each person (e.g., two aspects of the design that seem to meet users' needs well and one aspect that could be improved).
• Silence: Remove verbal contributions from the group to ensure mutual participation from everyone. A post-up is an excellent activity for this — make participants individually write ideas on sticky notes, then post them up on a wall to be shared and discussed.^[1]