A Review of the Voltage Control Facilitation Lab Summit 2025

Everybody knows that the best conferences are all about the attendees you meet, not the talks from people on stage. When I attend a conference, I focus on meeting others: I flex my extravert muscles and chat people up towards making good connections. This yields huge rewards—people I’ve met at conferences have changed my life. But it’s exhausting. After some conferences I just want to sit in a dark room and vegetate. 

Voltage Control’s Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 was different. Despite having to exert zero effort at meeting people, I left with a boatload of valuable connections. And this is why I’m calling it now: this is the best thing I will attend in 2025. 

Why I Went

My work is running business education, startup accelerators, and corporate innovation projects. People in this space never invest enough in facilitation. They focus on methodologies, frameworks, and theories but rarely on the actual craft of getting groups of people to achieve something incredible together. Facilitation is an underappreciated art, which gives me an edge. 

Think about it like basketball. Saying LeBron James is great because he’s tall and fast is technically true, but it’s a shallow read. What makes him a genius is everything else—the positioning, the anticipation, the ability to make his teammates better. That’s how I think about facilitation. It’s more than great speakers and good topics—inventive exercise design, session sequencing, and goodhandedness (explained below) are some of the ways a conference blows people’s minds. And that’s what I got: a peek at new techniques and a deeper understanding of what the best facilitators do that others don’t even notice.

If you want an edge, if you want to master a skill that’s widely overlooked but deeply impactful, learn facilitation and go to this conference.

Humble Spaces Beat Glamorous Venues

The event was held at an unremarkable community college in Austin. The setting wouldn’t have looked out of place hosting a high school talent show. But just like the best startups start in humble garages, some of the best conferences happen in venues that don’t care about looking fancy. What matters is what happens inside.

The space was designed for connection. Round tables made eye contact easy. Markers and post-it notes everywhere signalled that sessions would prioritize participants taking action, not speakers giving talks. 

What struck me was a small but hugely underrated detail: the signage was on point. Higher education campuses are usually a nightmare to navigate, but here, everything was clear. Good signage is more than logistics—it signals that the organizers care about your experience. It’s a sign of what I call “good handedness,” meaning you’re in good hands. The Voltage Control team nailed this.

The Sessions

The conference featured eight facilitators, all alumni of Voltage Control’s certification program. The group was small—125 attendees—which made for deep, meaningful interactions. 

A key moment for me was realizing that, in a world where every conference I go to is obsessed with AI, no one here even mentioned it. That was refreshing (aside: when AI takes everyone’s jobs, the value of facilitation skills will go up).

One downside: there was a bit of an anti-business sentiment in the room. Facilitation leans toward the touchy-feely, and sometimes that means people look skeptically at business and entrepreneurship. That rubbed me the wrong way because I believe business is one of the most powerful tools for making change in the world. Minor gripe in an otherwise stellar experience.

Walking the Talk

A lot of conference talks are about concepts that sound good but aren’t demonstrated in practice. JJ Rogers’ session on delighting users stood out because he didn’t just talk about radical delight—he created it for the audience through carefully designed exercises. The first way he accomplished this was through a collaborative drawing app called Piccles. He prompted the room to sketch a pig and proceeded to psychoanalyze what various drawings said about their creators. Obviously this got laughs, but it also meshed technology, non-verbal communication, and interaction in an elegant way. The audience was in fact delighted.

Other highlights: Skye Idehen-Osunde orchestrated her session like a master facilitator. Dr. Karyn Edwards shared the parallels between executive coaching and facilitation. Dom Michalec (Stanford’s BJ Fogg Behavior Design Lab) shared an embarrassing but effective habit building technique. Cat Rodriguez gave a crash course on nonverbal communication. Elena Farden shared an exercise that glued the room together in a way I’d never seen.

Elena Farden’s Exercise

She divided the room into two groups, forming an inner and an outer circle. The inner circle faced inward with their eyes closed, while the outer circle stood behind them, waiting for instructions.

The facilitator then explained the process: she would ask the outer circle a series of questions. If their answer was “yes,” they were to gently tap the right shoulder of the person in front of them—someone from the inner circle who had their eyes closed.

The first prompt was: If you met someone during this event who you were glad to meet, tap their shoulder. The outer circle then moved around, tapping the shoulders of those who fit this description. This simple gesture made those in the inner circle feel appreciated and valued.

The second prompt followed: If there was someone you didn’t get the chance to talk to, but you still valued their presence and were glad they were here, tap their shoulder. Again, the outer circle moved through the space, offering silent acknowledgments. This round was especially meaningful for quieter attendees who may not have engaged in as many conversations but still contributed to the energy of the event.

For the final round, the facilitator gave the most impactful prompt: If you met someone with whom you felt a strong connection—someone who made you think, “These are my people. I’m in the right place. What a great community to be part of”—tap their shoulder. As expected, this one carried a special weight, reinforcing a deep sense of belonging.

I felt warm during this exercise. When she wrapped it up and we opened our eyes, more than a few people wiped away tears. 

The Closing Exercise: A Message to the Future

In the final exercise, we wrote messages to our future selves on postcards embedded with seeds—literally designed to grow over time. It was a beautiful metaphor for everything the conference represented: learning, evolving, and carrying insights forward. Sometime in the future, I’ll receive a postcard from my past self, carrying the thoughts and momentum of this experience.

Voltage Control’s Facilitation Lab 2025 was an incredible experience—one that set a high bar for every other event I’ll attend this year. If you want to truly master the art of getting groups of people to do amazing things together, this is where you need to be.

Learn more about the summit and Voltage Control.

Get weekly tips on entrepreneurship, video, and shooting your shot in my newsletter: camhouser.com/newsletter

Thanks to early readers: Coco Liu, Matthew Beebe