Licences can be live while the weekly meeting still runs on the old script. Staff notice which of those two facts their leaders actually live by. A workshop for a leadership team is the room where that gap is supposed to close, and it only closes if the room produces decisions, not a tour.
The notes below are for the person who has to design that room, or who has to brief someone else before they buy it. They cover who should be there, what to do before the day, how to shape the blocks of work, what to leave with, how the weeks after should look, and how a board briefing differs from a staff session.
A leadership room is a different job
An all-staff demonstration can show what a tool does. A leadership workshop has to decide what this organisation will ask of its managers, and what the leaders will do on their own work so the ask is believable. If those two lines are missing, people will hear an announcement and watch the old meeting continue. They will follow the meeting.
The room fails in a familiar way. A vendor shows a polished example on a sample they chose. Leaders nod. Someone asks a question about risk and is told it will be covered in a later policy. The group disperses. The next week, a manager is asked by their team whether a client note may go into the tool. The manager does not know. They either guess, or they tell people to wait. Waiting, with no date, is how shadow use grows.
A useful leadership session starts from that moment and works backwards. Who will be asked. What they are allowed to say yes to. What they must refuse. Who they call when they are unsure. What the leader asking them has already tried on their own documents. Those are outputs. A feeling of confidence is not an output.
Collective Campus has done capability building for teams since 2015. AI work has been part of that practice since 2022, alongside how people test ideas, how they treat customers, and how they run the week. A leadership AI workshop sits inside that longer practice. It is for leaders who are not engineers, and who still have to make ordinary decisions with the tools now on the desk.
Who attends, and who only sends a delegate
The people in the room should be the people whose questions the rest of the organisation copies. In most Australian organisations that means the executive group that already meets, plus the person who will own the rule when someone asks it on a Thursday, plus at least one person who does the work and can say an example is fake.
If the executive group sends delegates, the delegates can take notes and cannot bind the meeting those executives will run on Monday. Staff can tell the difference between a leader who has used the tool on a real document and a leader who has been briefed that other people used it. Design the room for the first of those.
The executive group
Put the leaders in who approve the spend and who run the meetings staff actually attend. Leave a gap if a key person can only do the opening remarks. Opening remarks are cheap. The practice is the part that changes what they will say later, when a draft is on the table and the clock is short.
They should do a piece of their own work in the session. A board paper they are actually writing. A customer letter they will actually send. A decision note their team is waiting on. If the only work in the room is a case the facilitator brought, the leaders will be visitors. Visitors do not change their own meetings.
Risk, legal, and the person who will be asked
Someone who carries privacy, conduct or regulatory exposure should be in the room when the allow and refuse lines are written. If they are absent, the lines will be redrafted later in a way the leaders do not recognise, and the workshop will have produced a souvenir.
This person is there to shape the rule, which is different from being there to stop the work. A session that treats risk as a veto at the end will teach leaders to hide the real use until it is too late to steer. A session that writes the rule with them in the conversation can still move.
A witness from the work
Include a person who handles the live task the leaders are about to discuss. Their job is to say when the example has drifted into fantasy. Leadership groups are good at discussing a customer they have not served this year. The witness keeps the artefact honest. They are not there as an audience, and they should not be the most junior person with the least cover if the conversation gets sharp. Give them an explicit licence to correct the room.
Who can skip
A wide all-staff cohort is a different product. Do not smuggle it into the leadership room to make the day look larger. People who will not make the decisions, and who will not be asked to carry them, will pull the exercises back to whatever can be shown to a mixed crowd. You can brief them later, from the decisions the leadership room actually made.
External guests, vendors with a product to place, and observers who are there to "see the vibe" change the candour of the room. If a leader will not try a clumsy prompt in front of a vendor, take the vendor out. The clumsiness is the point. It is what staff will feel, and the leader needs to have felt it before they tell staff to be bold.
Pre-work that earns the room
Pre-work is how you stop the first block disappearing into scene-setting. It should be light enough that busy leaders do it, and specific enough that the room cannot hide in generalities. Send it with a named owner and a date that is before the session, and have someone read it before people arrive so a blank return is chased.
One live decision
Each leader names one decision or document that is actually in flight. Not a theme. A thing with a recipient and a consequence. The customer response. The investment note. The hiring brief. The risk acceptance. If a leader cannot name one, they are not ready for this room, or their work is so far from the tools that the session should be redesigned around the work they do touch.
The facilitator, or the internal owner, picks a short set of these so the room goes deep on a few rather than skimming a pile. The ones you do not use are still useful. They tell you what the leaders think their work is.
The tools already allowed
Write down which tools the organisation has approved, which are tolerated, and which are banned. If that list does not exist, the pre-work is to say so in one sentence, because the session will otherwise invent a stack. Leaders should know the difference between the tool in the official slide and the tool people actually open. The second one is the one the rule has to cover.
Ask each leader which of those tools they have opened themselves in the last stretch of work, and on what kind of document. You are not collecting a confession for its own sake. You are finding the gap between the announcement and the habit. A leader who has not opened the tool should not be embarrassed into silence. They should be the first to practise, because their team already knows.
The paste rule, even if it is rough
Ask what may be typed into a tool today, what must be stripped, and what must stay out. If the organisation has no answer, write "no answer yet" rather than borrowing a generic line from a vendor. Australia's Voluntary AI Safety Standard is the public set of guardrails for organisations using AI. It is the right document to have open when the room admits it does not yet have a local rule. The session can draft the local rule. It should not pretend the public guardrails are a substitute for the sentence a manager can say on Thursday.
Pre-work should also name who is accountable when a person is unsure. If that name is missing, put the missing name on the agenda as a decision, not as a hope.
The sentence staff have already heard
Ask each leader for the sentence they have already used with their teams about AI. Capture it without polishing. "Have a play." "Do not put anything sensitive in." "We expect you to use it." "Wait for the policy." These sentences are often in conflict with each other across the same executive group. The workshop is where the conflict gets reconciled, or at least seen.
Bring one real question a manager has already been asked by their team. The question is better source material than any case study. It is short, it is local, and someone in the building is waiting on the answer.
Agenda blocks, without the theatre
Think of the session as a sequence of jobs, not as a run of topics. Each block ends with something written that the room can read back. If a block ends with a discussion, it is not finished. The order below is one that works when the pre-work was done. If the pre-work came back thin, spend the first block finishing it in public, and drop a later block rather than rushing all of them into mush.
Open on the decision, not on the future
Start with the live documents, not with a history of the technology and not with a prediction about the labour market. Leaders have heard the prediction. They have not always looked at the draft they are about to send. Put a real document on the table, say who it is for, and say what decision it is meant to support.
Name the constraint out loud. Time, risk, a customer waiting, a board paper due. The constraint stops the room from wandering into a general exhibition. It also gives the tool a job, which is the only way to see whether the tool helps.
Use the tool on the leader's own work
The leaders open the tool the organisation actually allows. They run a piece of the live document through it. They see what comes back. The facilitator does not drive the keyboard for the whole block. A watched demonstration lets people keep their distance. Hands on the keys remove the distance.
The aim of this block is a felt sense of what the tool does well and where it flatters. A leader who has only seen a keynote will over-trust or over-fear. A leader who has watched their own paragraph come back slightly wrong, in a plausible voice, has the experience their staff are already having.
Stay on the organisation's data rule while you do this. Use dummy text or approved text. If the live document is too sensitive to paste, strip it until it is safe, and notice how much of the judgement lived in the part you stripped. That notice is part of the learning. A session that pastes a client file because the clock is tight has taught the wrong lesson with perfect clarity.
Read the output as a critic
Before anyone says the draft is impressive, run a critic's pass. What did it assume. What did it invent. What did it smooth over that the leader knows is sharp. Where did the tone apologise, promise, or accuse in a way the organisation would not sign.
Give this pass a structure so it survives the social pressure to be polite. One person reads for factual claims that need a source. One person reads for the decision the draft is smuggling in. One person reads for what a customer, a regulator, or a staff member would do if they took the draft literally. Then the author of the original document says what they would still refuse to send.
This is the block where critical thinking is the work, not a poster. The note on AI training for executives is a useful companion on what leaders should be able to do afterwards. The standard is the same here: a changed decision and a check with a name, not a memory of having seen a clever example.
Write the allow and the refuse
Turn the critic's pass into rules a manager can apply without calling a committee. What kinds of work may use the tool. What must be stripped first. What must never be pasted. What must be checked by a named role before it leaves the team. What to do when the tool and the expert disagree.
Write the rules in the language of the organisation, not in the language of a framework. Frameworks can sit behind the rules as a reference. They should not be the thing a team leader has to recite. If a manager cannot explain the rule in a few sentences on the way out of a lift, the rule will not travel.
Australia's guardrails are the public backdrop. The local sentences are the product. A leadership team that leaves with a printed copy of a public standard, and no local sentence, has not finished this block.
Write what leaders will ask, and what they will do
Each leader writes two lines. The line they will say to their managers about what is now expected. The line that describes what they will do on their own work so the expectation is visible. The two lines sit together. An expectation with no matching habit is the mixed signal the session exists to remove.
Read the lines aloud. The group listens for contradictions. One leader telling teams to experiment, while another tells them to wait for a perfect policy, will be heard as noise. Reconcile the lines in the room. If you cannot, record the disagreement as a decision still open, with a name and a moment to close it. An unresolved contradiction that is hidden will be resolved by the loudest meeting after the workshop, which is how you waste the room.
Name the check and the owner
For each live document, name the person who checks the output and the moment they do it. The moment might be before a customer sees it, before it enters a board pack, or before a team treats it as the plan. A check without a moment is a value. A moment without a person is a hope.
Also name who a manager calls when the case is not covered by the rule. If the answer is "use your judgement" with no one to call, some managers will freeze and some will freelance. Both outcomes are predictable. Pick a name.
Close on the decisions, and read them back
End by reading the decisions back, slowly, and asking who will carry each one into a real meeting. Capture them in a form the leaders will still open. A long write-up that arrives later, in a different voice, will not be the thing they use. The thing they use is the page they saw in the room, with their own lines on it.
Do not close on a motivational summary. Close on the page. If the page is thin, the session is thin, and the honest move is to say which block failed and what has to happen before anyone claims the leadership team has "done AI".
A worked illustration, not a client story
Picture an executive group in Sydney. This is an illustration of the blocks, not a report about a client. The group has approved a set of tools. In the same month, their weekly meeting still starts with a pack written the old way, and a customer letter is on the list because a complaint has escalated.
In pre-work, three leaders name documents. The chief operating lead names the customer letter. The finance lead names a commentary for the board pack. The people lead names a note to managers about what staff may try. The risk lead writes "no answer yet" next to the paste rule, which is the most useful line in the pack.
The room opens on the customer letter. They paste a stripped version, with names and account details gone, using the tool the organisation has approved. The draft is warm and clear, and it offers a remedy the organisation does not offer. The witness from the service team says so. Because that licence was explicit, the correction lands as information, not as a career risk.
The critic's pass finds two more issues. The draft invents a policy reference. The tone admits fault on a point the organisation is still checking. The leaders rewrite the allow and refuse lines from those catches. Customer correspondence may be shaped with the tool only after the facts and the remedy are written by a person. Policy citations must be opened, not trusted. A remedy the organisation does not offer must not appear, even as a courtesy.
Each leader then writes the two lines. The operating lead will ask managers to bring one draft they refused to send, and will do the same with the next letter that hits their desk. The finance lead will stop putting tool-written commentary into the board pack unless the source figures have been checked by the person who owns them. The people lead will replace "have a play" with the allow and refuse lines, in a note that quotes those lines and no others.
They name the risk lead as the person a manager calls when a case is not covered, and they name a moment in the existing weekly meeting where one refused draft will be shown. No new ceremony. The existing meeting is the test, because that is the meeting staff already watch.
The illustration works if those lines are real. It fails if the group praises the draft, skips the witness, and leaves with a theme called "responsible innovation". The theme will not help the manager who is holding the letter on Thursday.
Decisions to leave with
If you remember nothing else about the design, remember the page of decisions. A leadership workshop that does not produce this page was a briefing. Briefings have a place. They are a different job. Do not spend this group's attention on a briefing and call it a workshop. The attention of this group is the scarce resource.
Leave with a list of allowed uses, written as jobs, not as tool names. "Shaping a first pass of an internal note, after the facts are settled" is a job. A product logo is not a decision.
Leave with a list of refusals. The data that stays out. The decisions the tool does not make. The documents that still require a human source to be open on the desk. Refusals are how the allow list stays believable. An allow list with no refusals will be read as permission for everything.
Leave with owners. Who checks, who is called, who updates the rule when a new tool appears, who tells the managers. Names beat functions. "The business" cannot be telephoned.
Leave with the two lines from each leader, the expectation and the matching habit. Store them where the leaders will see them at the next meeting, not only where L&D can report that the workshop happened.
Leave with the first test. The meeting, the document, or the thread in which the new rule will be visible to people who were not in the room. If you cannot name the test, you do not yet have a decision. You have a mood.
Leave with what is explicitly still open. Unresolved questions should be visible. A page that pretends everything was settled will be caught out by the first awkward case, and the awkward case will be used as evidence that the whole exercise was naive.
The weeks after the room
The announcement is not the change. The change is the next leadership meeting, the next document, and the next time a manager asks a question the rule was built for. Design the follow-through around those moments. A second slide pack is not follow-through. It is a way to feel that something continued.
The next leadership meeting is the test
Put one item on the existing agenda. Which line did we keep. Which document was checked. What did a manager ask that the rule did not cover. What did a leader do on their own work that their team could see. If the item is dropped because the agenda is full, the workshop has already lost to the old script, and you should say so rather than booking a reunion.
The person who owns the item should not be the most junior facilitator in the building. It should be one of the leaders who wrote a line. Ownership by the people who have the meetings is what makes the item survive a busy week.
Managers hear the lines from their own leader
A central email that announces a new era will be skimmed. A manager needs the two lines from the leader they report to, in that leader's voice, with permission to ask about the case in front of them. Give leaders a short brief they can deliver without inventing a new policy on the spot. Then check, afterwards, whether it was delivered. Asking the managers is more reliable than asking the leaders.
When a manager brings a case the rule did not cover, close it quickly and add the answer to the page. A rule that does not grow in contact with cases becomes a relic. A rule that grows in public teaches the organisation that asking is how the rule gets better.
What to review when you look again
Look at artefacts, not at satisfaction. Did a refused draft get discussed. Did a board commentary go out with its sources checked. Did a customer letter avoid a remedy the organisation does not offer. Did a leader's own document show the habit they promised. Satisfaction scores measure the room. Artefacts measure the weeks after.
If the artefacts have not moved, resist the urge to commission a new workshop with a new theme. Repair the decision that failed. Often the failure is that the named owner was not actually available, or the paste rule was still "no answer yet" and nobody wanted to be the person who wrote it. Those are leadership problems. Another demonstration will not write them.
The Leadership Team AI Immersion is the programme Collective Campus runs when an executive team wants this work as a cadence, with briefings that return to the commitments rather than to a tour of new features. Use it when you want the room and the return to be designed together. Use a single workshop when you need the decisions first and you will run the return yourselves. Both are legitimate. Pretending a single enthusiastic afternoon is a cadence is not.
Board briefings, the staff workshop, and the governance programme
These are three different rooms. Mixing them up is how a board gets a tool demo, staff get a policy they cannot find, and nobody writes the allow and refuse lines.
What directors need
Directors need to see the decisions the executive team made, the risks those decisions accepted, and what has moved since the last time they asked. They need to know who is accountable. They need to know what the organisation has refused to do. They do not need a feature tour, and they do not need to leave able to prompt a model, unless a particular director is also an executive with a document to finish.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors publishes a directors' guide to AI governance. It is written for that room. Use it as a public reference for what directors are being told to pay attention to. Then brief your own board on your own page of decisions. A briefing that only recites a public guide, with no local owners, tells the board that management has not started.
A board briefing should be short enough to discuss. Lead with what was decided, what is refused, what happened when the rule met a real document, and what management wants from the board. If you want a decision, ask for it plainly. If you want the board to note a risk, say that. Do not bury the ask under a market overview.
Quarterly is a rhythm many boards can hold, because it matches the way they already meet. The point of the rhythm is the return to the same commitments. A briefing that starts from zero each time, with a new set of slogans, trains directors to treat AI as a standing weather report.
The staff workshop is the everyday rule
Staff need a different session from the board. They need to know what they may paste, what they must keep out, how to challenge an output, and who to call. That is practical, repeated work. It belongs with the people who touch the tools on ordinary tasks.
The AI governance workshop is that staff session. It is where leaders and the people who handle the files sort what can go in, what must be stripped, and what stays out, and where they practise the refusal when someone senior wants a pack summarised in a hurry. It is not a board programme. If you send directors through a staff session and call it oversight, both groups leave with the wrong artefact.
Run the staff work from the decisions the leadership room actually wrote. If you run it from a generic pack while the leadership page is still blank, staff will learn a rule their leaders do not use. They will follow the leaders.
The governance programme is the system around the rule
Boards, executive teams and risk teams sometimes need more than a workshop and a briefing. They need a policy, a register of uses, named accountability, and a way to review the register when a new tool appears. That is a programme of working sessions, and it should be described as such so nobody confuses it with the staff workshop.
The AI Governance Program is that programme. It is for the board, the executive team and the risk team. People leave with a policy, rules for acceptable use, and a framework they can run. It is a different piece of work from the staff workshop, even though both use the word governance. If you are choosing, ask what you need in hand at the end. A manager's sentence and a practised refusal point to the workshop. A register and a policy with owners point to the programme. A leadership team that has not written its own allow and refuse lines is early for both, and should do the leadership room first.
The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is a public map for talking about governing AI risk. It helps a risk team share language with peers and with auditors. It does not name your owner, and it does not know which documents your staff are pasting. Use it behind the local page. Do not let it replace the page.
Australia, and designing for the cities you have
A leadership team in Australia is often split. The chief executive may sit in Sydney, a large operational group in Melbourne, and a specialist function in Brisbane, with others on screens because the week would not allow the travel. The workshop has to be designed for that mix. A script that assumes one long table will lose the person on the screen at the exact moment the decision is made, which is the moment you most need their objection.
Say which city is the hub for this session, and who is remote, before you lock the design. For a group whose centre of gravity is Sydney, AI training in Sydney is the practical place to start the conversation about an in-person or hybrid room. A Melbourne or Brisbane leadership team should ask the same question of their own city. The decisions on the page do not change because the postcode changes. The way you hear dissent does.
In a hybrid room, read objections from the remote people before you close a line. Pause on purpose. A Sydney table will socially decide while a Brisbane screen is still finding the mute button, and the decision will feel unanimous because the dissent arrived as a chat line nobody read out. Assign someone in the hub to read those lines into the room as part of the block, not as an optional extra at the end.
Pre-work matters more when the group is distributed. The live documents need to be in everyone's hands before the session, stripped according to the paste rule, so the remote person is not seeing the artefact for the first time while the hub has already started reacting. A shared page of decisions, edited in the session, beats a photo of a whiteboard the remote people cannot read.
Time zones inside Australia are a smaller problem than time zones across continents, and they are still a design choice. A session that only works for one city will be experienced by the others as something that happened to them. Leadership habits that are only practised in one city will not be the habits of the organisation.
What to demand of anyone you ask to run the room
Ask them to name the documents the leaders will bring, and to say what they will do if the pre-work comes back thin. Ask which tools will be opened, and whether those are the tools the organisation allows. Ask what may be pasted. Ask how a remote city will object before a line is closed. Ask what the page of decisions will contain, and who types it.
Ask how the staff session and the board briefing will stay distinct. A provider who offers one generic day for "everyone from the board to the graduates" has not understood the outputs. The board needs commitments and movement. Staff need a rule they can use before lunch. Leaders need both a habit and an ask.
Ask what happens after the room. If the answer ends when people stand up, you are buying the easy part. The test is the next meeting that already exists. A provider who can only offer a new meeting, with a new name, is adding load to the leaders you are trying to change.
Collective Campus will run the room on a live document, with the organisation's own constraints, and will say so if the group is not ready because the paste rule is blank and nobody with authority will write it. We would rather delay a room than facilitate a performance. The practice is still capability building for teams. The leadership session is one expression of it, for people who set the tone the teams copy.
Questions people ask
Can we combine the board, the executives and all staff in one sitting?
You can put them in one building. You should not give them one job. Directors, executives and staff leave with different artefacts. A combined sitting tends to settle at the level of a presentation, because that is the only level that does not embarrass someone or bore someone. Run the leadership room, then brief the board from its outputs, and teach staff the rule those outputs created.
What if the tools are not chosen yet?
Then the session is a buying conversation, and you should name it as that. You can still practise judgement on a neutral tool, with dummy material, so leaders feel a wrong-but-fluent draft. You should not pretend you have written an allow list for a stack you have not picked. Decide the stack, or decide the criteria, as an explicit output. Do not let a facilitator's favourite product become the organisation's standard by being the only thing opened in the room.
What if leaders refuse to touch the tool?
That refusal is the finding. Their teams will copy it, regardless of the email that says otherwise. The room can spend its time on why the refusal is there. Sometimes it is a reasonable fear about data, and the paste rule is the remedy. Sometimes it is status. A leader does not want to look slow. The remedy is a small, real document and a room without an audience. If the refusal stands after that, do not announce an expectation the leaders will not meet. Change the expectation, or change the sponsorship. A workshop cannot outvote a leader who will not practise.
How do we handle a sensitive document?
Strip it until the paste rule is satisfied, or do not paste it. Use the stripping as the lesson. Often the facts that make the document sensitive are the facts a person must check anyway. The tool can still help with structure and tone on the safe remainder. A provider who urges you to paste the real client file so the demo looks better is teaching a habit you will spend the next year trying to stop.
What should the board see first?
The page of decisions, the refusals, the names, and one example of the rule meeting a real document, including what was caught. Then the open questions. A market narrative can wait. Directors are capable of asking for more depth if the first briefing is concrete. They cannot interrogate a briefing that never lands on a local decision.
How will we know the room worked?
Look at the next leadership meeting and at one document that left the building. The lines the leaders wrote should be visible in both. A manager who was not in the room should be able to repeat the allow and the refuse. If none of that is true, the room did not work yet, even if the feedback on the day was warm. Warmth is pleasant. The Thursday letter is the test.
What to do before you book
Write the names of the leaders who will practise, not only sponsor. Write one live document for each, or admit you do not have them yet and make that the pre-work. Write the current paste rule, including the honest words "no answer yet" if that is the truth. Write whether the board, the staff, or both need a different room afterwards, and do not schedule those rooms as if they were the same product.
Then choose the format that matches the page you are ready to produce. A single leadership workshop, if you will run the follow-through yourselves on the meeting you already have. The immersion, if you want the return to the executive team and the board designed as part of the work. The staff workshop, once the lines exist for staff to learn. The governance programme, once you are ready to leave with a policy and a register, not only with a sentence.
If you cannot write those names and that document, you are early, and the useful move is the pre-work, done properly, rather than a day that performs readiness you do not have. The organisations that get value from this room are the ones that let a real letter, a real pack and a real disagreement into it, and that leave with lines their own managers can say.
