Facilitation

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.

How to use this book

The techniques in this book can help you prepare and plan for a meeting. Although there are a number of different meeting formats you can choose to follow, we find most meetings include 4 key parts.

These are:

• Starting
• Diverging
• Converging
• Closing

Starting

Lots of people use the term ‘ice-breakers’ to refer to an activity at the start of a meeting to get people talking to each other. We don’t like the phrase, maybe because we’ve seen people use the phrase for activities that are completely unrelated to the topic of the meeting. We prefer the phrase ‘Check in’.

For us a check-in activity has 3 purposes:

• To get everyone in the room to talk in the first 5 minutes of the meeting. Evidence suggests that if they do, they are more likely to contribute in the rest of the meeting.
• To connect people to the topic of the meeting, and in particular how they feel about the topic, or what they know.
• To connect people to each other and establish some trust or relationships in the room. This is greatly dependant on: who the audience is, if they know each other, and how much trust you need in the room for the meeting you are going to have. All of these are things you need to consider in your preparation.

Diverging

Most meetings require participants to brainstorm a wide variety of things. For example topics to discuss, challenges to address, decisions to be made, etc. For anything like this it is important to include activities that help people diverge. That is to create lots of ideas before they decide which to focus on. The reason for this is that most of our best thinking doesn’t happen immediately. It also helps a group collaborate and create an idea together by building on each other’s ideas. We call this the diverging part of a meeting. Depending on the type of meeting you might have several diverting parts to your meeting.

Converging

While creating lots of ideas is a really useful technique, meetings that don’t bring those together into an agreed decision or action step, are often a waste. Therefore most meetings require a converging phase where participants select which ideas they want to try, or choose the best course of action. A converging phase follows a diverging phase. Again you could have multiple of these in a meeting.

Closing

Wrapping up or closing a meeting is also crucial. Many meetings that run over time neglect this part completely. Closings can help people feel their time was valued. It also gives the facilitator an opportunity to get feedback on their facilitation. Finally it is a great time to wrap up by reminding people of their actions, and agreeing the next steps that will happen.

Below is a list of these 4 phases. Under each we have indicated which techniques that you find in this book could work for those phases. Note some techniques work well in more than one area. You can use this list to quickly find techniques you need to plan your meeting.