Popular Event Storming facilitation tips you need to know

5 minute read

8 popular tips that will improve how you facilitate Event Storming workshops. Apply these tips to ensure participants engagement, and actionable outcomes!

Drawing of three Event Storming participants thinking in the same "thought bubble" containing a shared brain titled "shared understanding". There are also the words "So What?" written to the right of the participants. Without proper facilitation and follow up, Event Storming can really fall flat!

The Event Storming crowd is an enthusiastic and creative community. With time, fixes to common facilitation challenges emerged as consensus. Armed with all this knowledge, it’s as if you are facilitating Event-Storming on the shoulders of Giants!

Here are the tips we will cover:

  • What do you do if things are slow to start?
  • What to do if there is a single discussion bottleneck?
  • How can you avoid being a PITA when stickies are poorly written (Post-it twist)?
  • How do you make decisions explicit?
  • What does “Make the Design Space Infinite” mean in practice?
  • How do you make sure to always leave with actions?
  • Whatever your issue, adding special stickies is usually a bad idea!
  • How do you represent Event Loops in the design?

Learn from the experience of veteran facilitators in the community, apply these proven tips, and avoid common pitfalls that any new Event Storming Facilitator falls into!

What do you do if things are slow to start?

The workshop can be slow to start. Participants can get lost in the chaotic nature of Event Storming.

A typical symptom is when people discuss in small groups and don’t stick domain-events.

In this case, go to the groups to trigger action. Make sure they understand the instructions. Kindly ask them to stick events as soon as possible. You might even add a bit of pressure by explaining that we’ll be doing a first event review in 10 minutes.

What to do if there is a single discussion bottleneck?

Sometimes, all participants become the audience to a central dialog.

Schema of a bottleneck road-sign. Having a discussion bottleneck can really slow down the workshop. Here is an Event Storming tip to speed this up.

It’s often because a unique person knows some crucial information. In this case, you have no choice but to wait.

Sometimes, though, it happens for no reason. Intervene and split the group into two groups to work on two halves of the board. This implies merging and synchronizing at the end, but it’s a small price to pay to keep everyone engaged.

How can you avoid being a PITA when stickies are poorly written (Post-it twist)?

Here’s one from Alberto Brandolini. Stickies, in particular domain events, are often of poor quality initially. People need a bit of time to distinguish an event from a command.

Harassing them to rewrite their stickies won’t work!

Here is Alberto’s trick: whenever you notice a low-quality sticky, flip it 45°. When people ask why it is flipped, repeat event-writing best practices and ask someone to rewrite the faulty domain-event sticky. With time, people will learn how to write good domain events, and the quality of what’s on the board will improve.

How do you make decisions explicit?

A significant strength of Event Storming is that you will make many decisions during the workshop. Given the large audience, some people will ‘miss’ some decisions. It’s also a good idea to keep track of these decisions to avoid forgetting them.

I tried using special sticky notes to track decisions but to no avail. In the end, Alberto shared his trick.

The simplest and most effective thing is to keep a flip chart close to the design board and record decisions there. At the end of the workshop:

  • Take a photo of the board
  • Save it somewhere
  • and share it with a broader audience

Drawing of a flip-chart titled 'Decisions' where we stick post-its for decisions made during the Event Storming.

What does “Make the Design Space Infinite” mean in practice?

💡You’ll need even more infinite design space for Design-Level Event Storming 😉

Stickies are great because we can move them around many times. During Design-Level Event Storming, participants often insert new stickies between existing ones. They’ll need a bit more design space every time they do this, and that’s when ‘Infinite Design Space’ takes all its meaning. Another situation is if stickies start to be aligned vertically rather than horizontally. Remember that Shared understanding relies on common metaphors.

As the facilitator, you need to be proactive:

  1. Pause the workshop
  2. Explain the need for more space
  3. Add more design space by claiming more of the wall (left, right, or even above or below)
  4. Move the stickies to keep the design clear. It’s quick if you ask everyone to contribute.

A photo of Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear

To Infinity and Beyond! By Michele M. F., under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0), original on Flickr

How do you make sure to always leave with actions?

Here is one thing you don’t want:

  1. Run your Event Storming,
  2. Build some shared understanding…
  3. …and do nothing with it!

It’s crucial to leave the Event Storming with actions.

During the workshop, you used pink stickies to capture subjects you could not solve on the spot. These might be questions, quick fixes, or problems.

A pink Event Storming post-it. These post-its represent problems, questions or hotspots. They usually require extra work after the session, either to clarify, to explore or to fix ASAP

Before closing the session, take 30 minutes to agree on the next steps. A good way is to go through all these pink stickies. There might be homework for a follow-up workshop, tickets to add to the team’s backlog, or experiments to run. Make sure these items are actionable tasks with an accountable person for each.

Whatever your issue, adding special stickies is usually a bad idea

Before getting Alberto’s advice about logging decisions, we tried using custom “decision” stickies. That did not work well. Event Storming already has an extensive color code for stickies; adding more is too much. (Note: It’s almost impossible to find a sticky color that is not already used, anyway!)

Picture of a guy in front of a wall full of sticky-notes and with a large sticky on his head too! Event Storming already has a complex post-it bestiary, adding a new one is not a good idea.

When we tried this, people would make decisions but forget to record them with stickies.

💡If you are considering adding a new kind of stickies, look for another idea!

How do you represent Event Loops in the design?

Any real-life domain contains some feedback loops. Drawing arrows on the design board won’t work as it prevents us from moving the stickies around later. Instead, you can model loops with duplicate stickies:

  • A classic event sticky to where the event happens (usually to the right)
  • A duplicate sticky with an arrow where the event feeds back into the system (usually to the left)

Drawing of a loop post-it for DDD Event Storming. Duplicating event post-its with an extra arrow to model loops in the domain flow.

Your turn now

These practical and down-to-earth facilitation tips will give you confidence!

You are now well-equipped to avoid the most common pitfalls of Event-Storming Facilitation. In the next post, we will continue to explore more tips about Event Storming.


This blog post is part of the 1h Event Storming book that we are currently writing.

This post was built from 3 posts originally published on Philippe’s blog 7 tactics that will make your DDD Design-Level Event Storming pay-off, 21 More Event Storming Tips, and Detailed Agenda of a DDD Big Picture Event Storming - Part 2

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