Escape Room Rules: Physical Design Principles for Digital Facilitation

Our facilitation brains have been squeezed into Zoom rooms and Mural boards — it’s time we looked to the physical world to think about how to guide groups through new concepts. Escape rooms solve a hard problem: getting groups of strangers to explore complex, high-stakes situations together in very little time. Their designers have learned through thousands of playthroughs how to focus, excite, and create memorable moments.

This talk presents five escape room design principles as Golden Rules of Facilitation:
1) Establish your bookends: create great beginnings and endings.
2) Design bottlenecks: moments of unified attention where everyone focuses on your coolest techniques and most revelatory quotes.
3) Relish your reveals: Don’t undermine yourself by showing a huge Mural board then making people start in a tiny square.
4) Anticipate off-label use: Attendee-proof your workshop.
5) Diagram your workshop like you diagram your projects.

You may not have lighting design or costumes, but the structural and practical lessons from escape rooms can still make you a stronger facilitator.