What these skills are
A full workshop practice, as installable Claude skills. Between the framing, agenda math, the materials, the capture, the follow up, workshop preparation takes a lot of time. This pack takes that layer off your plate.
There is one rule the whole pack is built on: Claude designs and captures, humans facilitate. No skill in this set runs the room, reads the room, or replaces the person standing in front of people. They sharpen the intention, design the arc, build the run sheet and the worksheets, structure what the walls produced, and make sure the synthesis exists before memory fades. The craft stays yours; the overhead stops being yours.
Mechanically, each skill is one folder with a SKILL.md file. All seven belong to one person: the facilitator. They work from one Claude Project with one pinned chat per workshop, so every session's history stays in one findable place, and what your rooms teach you compounds from workshop to workshop.
Download all 7 skills. One zip: ready-to-install skill zips, readable SKILL.md files, and the 24-exercise bank. Free, no signup. The same seven skills are open on GitHub: polar-bear-org/claude-skills.
The 7 skills you get
The set follows the arc of a real workshop: before, in the room, after.
Before the room
1. Intention Framer
Use when: Someone said "we should run a workshop" and nobody said what for
Output: A one-page intention brief: project context, the outcome, decide or inform, the room, and the follow-up plan if the target isn't reached
2. Agenda Designer
Use when: The intention is clear and the session needs its shape
Output: Two artifacts in one file: a participant agenda ready to share, and a facilitator agenda with exercises, timings, group splits, and listening tasks, three pages max
3. Pre-Work Drafter
Use when: The agenda is agreed and people need to hear about it
Output: The invitation under 150 words, the optional pre-read built from your real project materials, the reminder, plus the facilitation team's emails, the T-1 sync, and the debrief hold
4. Run Sheet Builder
Use when: The workshop is Thursday and it needs to become runnable
Output: The facilitators pack: the segment-by-segment run sheet with wobble plans, worksheets and canvases carrying your workshop's real content, the room and tools plan, and the day checklists
In the room
5. Live Capturer
Use when: There's a break, or the room just emptied, and the walls are full
Output: Everything the room produced, transcribed in its own words, labeled by block and exercise, with ambiguities flagged while you can still check the wall
After
6. Synthesis Writer
Use when: The workshop happened and it needs to become real within 48 hours
Output: The participant follow-up under 250 words, and a synthesis that answers "did we get what we came for", with every claim traceable to what the room actually said
7. Workshop Retro
Use when: The facilitation team has 15 minutes while the room is fresh
Output: A half-page retro note with the exercise learnings your next agenda will be designed with
How a workshop flows through the pack
One pinned chat per workshop carries the whole arc: intention-framer opens it, agenda-designer and pre-work-drafter build from the brief, run-sheet-builder makes it runnable, live-capturer works the breaks, synthesis-writer closes it within 48 hours, and workshop-retro writes down what the session taught. Your learnings live in the retro notes, and agenda-designer reads them on every new design, so your tenth workshop is designed with everything the first nine taught you.
Setup guide
- Download the pack. One zip: an install folder with ready-to-upload skill zips, a skills folder with the same skills as readable files, and the exercise bank in resources.
- Install your skills. In Claude, turn on code execution in Settings, Capabilities, then go to Customize, Skills and upload one zip per skill from the install folder. Prefer working from files? Add the SKILL.md files to your Project knowledge instead; it works, just less cleanly.
- Create your Workshop Studio. Make one Project called Workshop Studio and add exercise-bank.md to its knowledge: agenda-designer casts every exercise from it, and run-sheet-builder builds the worksheets from its run lists. Then start a pinned chat for your next session ("WS · Acme kickoff") and write "run intention-framer". It will ask what the workshop is for, and it won't let you off with "alignment".
Where to start
| Your situation | Skill to run |
|---|---|
| Someone booked a room and nobody knows what for | Intention Framer |
| A 3-hour session on Thursday with no shape yet | Agenda Designer |
| The agenda exists, the invite doesn't | Pre-Work Drafter |
| Two days out, time to get runnable | Run Sheet Builder |
| Lunch break, walls full of stickies | Live Capturer |
| The session was yesterday, send something today | Synthesis Writer |
| Fifteen minutes with the team after the close | Workshop Retro |
The quality bar
Every skill in the pack holds the same standard, the one we hold when we run rooms ourselves:
- Claude designs and captures, humans facilitate: no skill runs the room or scripts the craft
- No workshop without an intention: an outcome worth a room, or the honest advice that this should be an email
- Blocks get flagged, never cut: visibility and sponsorship are legitimate reasons, chosen knowingly
- Presentations keep the room active: every one comes with a listening task whose harvest feeds the next exercise
- Crisp artifacts: three pages max, readable 30 minutes before the session
- The room's words, not ours: capture is a record, improvement happens in synthesis, visibly
- Capture the work, never the performance: no notes on who dominated or who went quiet
- A workshop doesn't fail: if the target isn't reached, the follow-up plan says what happens next
Who made this
Polar Bear is a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people). Built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. This pack is the free, self-serve version of how we work.
The pack preps one great session at a time. When you want your whole team working this way, AI carrying the overhead so people do the thinking, across workshops, projects, and everyday work, that's what we build with clients.
Meet Pauline. Bring your workshop, your offsite, or just the problem the room needs to solve. Book a 30-minute call · Pauline on LinkedIn