Introduction
Welcome to our book on Facilitation. This book is a collection of facilitation techniques we continually use in workshops, training courses, meetings and retrospectives. Although we will use the term meeting as a general word in this book, it applies to all of the above.
It’s taken us several years to master the skill of facilitation, and it continues to amaze us how few people learn the skill, or even understand what it means. People spend much of their lives in meetings, and yet so many meetings lack facilitation. We hope this book will inspire you to grow your own facilitation skills and improve the meetings in your organisation.
Who is this book for
Anyone who attends meeting can benefit from this book. However we are specifically aiming the book at people who regularly run meetings, workshops or training sessions. You might call yourself a facilitator or trainer, but more likely you have another title and meetings are just how you interact with others to get things done.
We have used these techniques in many contexts:
- In person training sessions
- Remote phone based group coaching calls
- One on one coaching sessions
- In person team planning meetings
- Large group feedback sessions
- Conference organising committees
- Large conference workshops of over 100 people
- Executive strategy sessions at a board room table
- Distributed retrospectives for teams to improve
- Online video training courses
- Keynote talks to more than 300 people
Obviously not every technique works remotely as well as it does in person, and some techniques work better for smaller groups than larger ones, but most techniques can be adapted to your context given a bit of creativity.
About Facilitation
When training others in facilitation we like to use the following definition from Mindtools.
What a facilitator does is plan, guide and manage a group event to ensure that the group’s objectives are met effectively, with clear thinking, good participation and full buy-in from everyone who is involved.
From this definition you can see that there would be many benefits to a well facilitated meeting. Here are some of our favourites:
- Everyone is clear on the purpose of the meeting
- The time box of the meeting is respected: it starts and ends on time (or early).
- All participants have an opportunity to contribute.
- Clear decisions are made in the meeting.
- Everyone stays engaged throughout the meeting: no one checks email, or plays with their phone.
- Concrete followup actions are agreed and assigned owners so that they actually get done.
- Everyone leaves the room on the same page.
- No one feels the meeting was a waste of time.
The importance of planning
One of the most important things you need to do as a facilitator is prepare for and plan the meeting. This is an often overlooked activity. According to Jean Tabaka in Collaboration Explained, it can take twice the length of the meeting to prepare adequately for a meeting. We believe this can be less (about the same length as the meeting) with lots of experience and a well developed toolkit.