I Redesigned an Insights Workshop for Accessibility. It Changed How I Facilitate.
I’ve facilitated plenty of Insights Discovery workshops.
Slides. Colour energies. Team wheels. Profile extracts.
They are normally part of the furniture.
Then I was asked to design and facilitate an Insights Discovery team day for Sight Concern Bedfordshire, where several participants were blind or partially sighted.
I had to rethink much of what I would normally rely on.
What I didn’t expect was that the changes I made to create a more accessible workshop would make me question how I facilitate Insights Discovery altogether.
Designing an accessible Insights Discovery workshop
Insights Discovery is an inherently visual framework.
We talk about colour energies. We use graphs and wheel positions. We show people where they sit in relation to colleagues and often use visual material to bring the model to life.
That immediately created a challenge.
How do you deliver a visually rich framework when vision cannot be the primary way people access the learning?
Simply reproducing my usual workshop and adding a few adjustments around the edges didn’t feel right.
So I stripped it back.
To make the Insights Discovery workshop accessible for blind and partially sighted participants, I:
reduced the reliance on slides and visual charts
used spoken exercises rather than relying on written worksheets
created the Team Wheel physically in the room
replaced colour cards with verbal descriptors and tactile anchors
described behaviours rather than expecting people to interpret visual material
anchored the exercises in real workplace situations.
The biggest emphasis was on what people actually experienced from one another.
What does your communication look like when things are going well?
What happens when you’re under pressure?
What does the person on the receiving end experience when that happens?
And what might they need from you instead?
What changed when I removed the visual reliance
Something unexpected happened when I reduced the visual content.
The room slowed down.
People listened more carefully.
They had to describe behaviour more precisely rather than pointing at a graph or referring to a position on a wheel.
The conversations became less about understanding the Insights model and more about understanding one another.
It made me question one of my own facilitation habits.
How often do we use slides, diagrams and visual tools because they genuinely improve learning, and how often do we use them simply because that is how we have always delivered the session?
Accessibility had forced me to remove some of those shortcuts.
In doing so, behaviour became the focus.
From personality preferences to behavioural impact
One of the most useful conversations came from exploring Good Day and Bad Day behaviours.
The team considered what different Insights colour energies might look like when someone was under pressure.
Fiery Red energy might become abrupt.
Sunshine Yellow might lose focus.
Earth Green might avoid a difficult conversation.
Cool Blue might retreat further into analysis.
But identifying the behaviour wasn’t really the important part.
The question that shifted the conversation was:
“When this happens, what does the team, or the person you are supporting, experience?”
That moved us away from:
“That’s just my style.”
And towards:
“What does this situation need from me?”
For me, that is where tools such as Insights Discovery become genuinely useful.
Self-awareness shouldn’t simply give us an explanation for our behaviour.
It should give us greater responsibility for its impact.
Inclusive facilitation isn’t about lowering the bar
Another important conversation emerged around empathy and accountability.
Sight Concern's work is rooted in empathy, support and understanding.
Those qualities came through strongly when colleagues talked about the value others brought to their team: quiet stability, calmness in a crisis, technical rigour, empathy and lived experience.
But empathy can sometimes make difficult conversations harder.
We explored situations where being understanding had tipped into avoiding challenge or allowing an issue to continue for too long.
One question cut through much of that complexity:
“Help me understand, why isn’t this being done?”
It isn’t aggressive.
It doesn’t assume intent.
But nor does it remove the expectation.
For a team where kindness and empathy matter, that distinction was important.
Support and accountability aren’t opposites.
High-performing teams need both.
And accessibility doesn’t mean reducing challenge or expectations either.
Inclusive facilitation is about removing unnecessary barriers to participation, not removing the responsibility to participate.
Turning Insights into practical team behaviour
The team day wasn't intended simply to help people identify their Insights colour energies.
Sight Concern was already thinking about communication, collaboration and how the team would work together through future change.
So we connected the Insights work to specific behaviours the team wanted to practise.
Their emerging Team Charter included simple commitments such as:
making email subject lines clearer about urgency
picking up the phone rather than assuming someone’s intent
creating more purposeful face-to-face interaction
reflecting on their own communication style before reacting to somebody else.
None of those actions is revolutionary.
That is rather the point.
Team effectiveness is rarely transformed by an impressive statement on a flipchart.
It changes through small behaviours repeated consistently.
By the end of the session, people were beginning to use the language of colour energies in real conversations, challenge one another more directly and connect the framework to situations they actually encounter at work.
Whether those behaviours continue is the real test.
A team workshop can create the conditions for a different conversation.
It cannot do the work of the team afterwards.
What accessibility taught me about facilitation
I went into the day thinking I needed to adapt an Insights Discovery workshop so that everyone could participate fully.
I came out questioning some of the assumptions I make when designing workshops in the first place.
When I removed some of the visual crutches:
language became more precise
listening mattered more
behaviour became more important than the model
participants had to engage with one another rather than with material on a screen.
That doesn’t mean I’ll never use slides, colour charts or a visual Team Wheel again.
It does mean I’ll ask a different question before I do:
Does this genuinely help people learn, or is it simply how I usually facilitate?
Five principles I'll take into future team workshops
There are five things I’ll think about differently when designing accessible and inclusive team development in future.
1. Ask about accessibility at the start, not at the end.
Accessibility shouldn't be a final check once the workshop has already been designed.
Understanding how people need to participate should influence the design itself.
2. Never make one format the only route to the learning.
If the exercise only works when somebody can see a diagram, read a card or process information in one particular way, there is probably another way to design it.
3. Describe rather than point.
“Look at this part of the wheel” is easy facilitation.
Explaining what it means forces greater clarity from the facilitator too.
4. Keep bringing personality back to impact.
Understanding a preference is interesting.
Understanding how that preference affects colleagues, clients and performance is useful.
5. Question the things we do out of habit.
Sometimes a constraint exposes something we should have challenged anyway.
That was probably my biggest learning from the day.
I thought I was adapting an Insights Discovery workshop for accessibility.
Instead, accessibility made me rethink how I facilitate Insights Discovery.
Perhaps accessible learning isn't something we should bolt onto an existing experience.
Perhaps designing for different ways of participating from the outset simply makes learning better.
Siobhan Godden is the founder of High Performing HR and a fractional HR consultant, leadership coach and team development specialist.
With more than 20 years’ experience in HR and organisational change, Siobhan works with growing businesses to strengthen leadership, build effective teams and create people practices that support both performance and culture.
She is a Fellow of the CIPD, an ICF-accredited coach and a licensed Insights Discovery practitioner, and also works with tools including the GC Index and Emotional Intelligence.
Her approach combines practical HR experience with coaching and behavioural insight, helping leaders move beyond personality labels and turn greater self-awareness into better communication, stronger accountability and more effective teams.