Meet Shannon Varcoe
With Women Facilitating is an interview series about what shapes our facilitation practice.
Today we’re chatting with Shannon Varcoe, founder of The Team Together and co-founder of Women Facilitating She designs and leads experiences that help teams and communities connect, collaborate, and make real progress together.
When did you first call yourself a facilitator?
I’ve been facilitating my whole life, long before I knew what to call it. As a kid, I was the one rallying the neighborhood crew to build snow forts, run scavenger hunts, or make up new games in the backyard. My family jokingly called it “Camp Shannon.” I just loved getting people together and creating something fun.
In high school, that same energy showed up in the theatre department. I joined the stage crew and eventually became a stage manager for plays and musicals where I was coordinating the various moving pieces, keeping everyone on cue, and making sure things ran smoothly. It’s a saying in my family that “the world needs more stage managers” aka facilitators.
In college, I was highly involved on campus (no surprise there) which meant leading large meetings and planning some major events. This is when I really started honing my experience design and facilitation skills without fully realizing it, but absolutely loving it. A friend introduced me to the concept of facilitation, and everything just clicked. It gave language to what I’d always been doing. Facilitating seemed to describe the way I naturally approached leadership and bringing people together, and the rest is history.
What types of experiences do you facilitate now?
I’m so grateful that a lot of my life these days is facilitating experiences! A majority happen through my business The Team Together where I design and lead custom sessions for teams who are trying to move their work forward, make big decisions, or design something new.
I also am a part of the dream team designing and facilitating for the Women Facilitating community. Facilitating for facilitators with my facilitator co-founders is the actual best.
Beyond that, I’ve hosted local events in the Raleigh and Durham (where I live!) which include the Unconference for nonprofit leaders and Singles Pitch Night, an event series where friends pitch their single friends to a crowd. It’s chaotic, funny, and I have so much fun bringing ideas like that to life.
And then newest to me is my work as a birth doula. It’s such a different modality but is definitely its own form of facilitation. Connecting the birthing person, their support partners, and the medical team in this incredibly meaningful, high-stakes container of time. It uses every facilitation skill I have and fills my cup in a completely different way.
Describe your facilitation style in three words.
Inventive, Human-Centered, & Sprezzatura
I was trying to find my three words and nothing felt quite right! Maybe I should have gone with perfectionist… but after way too much research, I stumbled on the Italian word sprezzatura. It means ‘the art of maintaining a nonchalant demeanor while performing complex tasks’. which totally resonated with me and my facilitation style.
What’s a surprising or unexpected skill that makes you a better facilitator?
Designing for play!
My career background includes being a toy inventor and game designer. I created my own building toy called ZYX Sticks and launched my first business through Kickstarter. I used to run workshops with organizations using the toy as a tool. I’d have teams from all kinds of industries building structures and talking about what collaboration, communication, and success looked like for them. It was so much fun to see how play could open up conversation and reflection in participants.
I also worked as the Head of Product for Crated with Love, designing date night games and activities for couples to learn about each other, have fun, and connect. It was such a joyful role and taught me a lot about pacing activities, writing clear instructions, and designing experiences that are genuinely fun. I learned what “fun” actually needs in order to happen. Those learnings show up constantly and in everything I design as a facilitator.
I spoke on the topic of play and facilitation at a conference back in 2022 (we threw streamers and paper airplanes during my talk… it was a lot of fun!) and it’s a goal of mine to bring play and game design back into the focus of my facilitation practice this year.
What’s always in your facilitation bag?
An endless supply of Post-its, PaperMate Flair pens, Expo markers for whiteboards or paper, and my favorite very fine 0.38 pen for my own notes. Lately I’ve been trying out small whiteboards and reusable notecards to be a little more sustainable which have been fun.
My secret favorite item, though, is dice. I think I have over 500 dice. They’re such an easy, fun way to bring play into a workshop. I can come up with so many different ways to use dice in a session and maybe one day soon I will host a session on “50+ Ways to Use Dice in Your Next Workshop.”
Also in the bag: My Owala water bottle, wintergreen mints, chapstick, and an unreasonable number of chargers, clickers, and dongles.
What’s a go-to song for your facilitation playlist?
The background music from The Great British Bake Off. It immediately sets the tone for focus but with a touch of whimsy! It’s cheerful, light, and weirdly motivating. Plus, I love the joy that shows up when the fellow Bake Off fans in the room realize what they are hearing.
Power outfit — what makes you feel confident as a facilitator?
This has taken me a while to figure out, and I am always experimenting with my outfit choices! I want to feel good and confident, and most importantly I don’t want to be fussing with my clothes while I’m facilitating. My go-to right now is probably dark wide-leg jeans, a flowy shirt or sweater, fun earrings, and boots or sneakers. And I almost always have a pair of glasses on my head like a headband to keep my big curly hair out of my face.
What’s one resource you couldn’t live without?
Design Thinking.
Design thinking has been foundational for my facilitation toolkit and my understanding of strategy and creative work (and life) in general. I first saw that OG IDEO shopping cart video when I was in 9th grade, and this is maybe dramatic, but my life changed! The idea of exploring the full experience of a product and the human interaction around it, to then redesign it with intention and empathy for the user spoke to me on such a deep level. Design Thinking in many ways led me to pursue my engineering and design degrees and has been a core part of my career in so so many ways.
The design thinking mindset is so embedded in how I approach problems, and I return to the activities and methods time and time again because they’re both incredibly adaptable and effective. It never fails to get people thinking, building, and taking action. I could go on and on.
Who’s your dream co-facilitator?
Kelsey Kates! She’s part of Women Facilitating and has great ideas and things to say about play and work. I attended one of her virtual talks and loved everything she shared. I think we’d have so much fun co-creating something together. This is me officially putting it out into the universe, Kelsey!
Who is a woman you admire for the way she leads or facilitates?
If you know me, or have ever known me, you know I love Brene Brown. I love how she simplifies and puts clear language to the experiences we all have. The voice and approachability of her materials, the way she talks about how she leads and builds her team, I’m such a fan girl! I’ve read every book, listened to all the podcast episodes of both of her podcasts (some episodes many times over), seen the HBO and Netflix specials, and always laugh so much at her cameo in the movie Wine Country, because same. Her newest book, Stronger Ground, has been a major source of inspiration and ideas recently. I highly recommend it for anyone working with teams.
Women Facilitating helps women own rooms and drive conversations that matter.