As a facilitator, it’s your responsibility to make sure the time spent in workshops is as productive as possible for attendees, while at the same time ensuring that you get the insights you need in order to move your project forward.
Formative usability testing is best done with a small number of study participants, so that you have time and budget to test more design iterations of the user interface.
Content frames are a tool that can help us make sure we’re not waiting until the end of the design process to incorporate real content into the experience.