How to crack the secrets of facilitation ?
Currently working in the role of a Business Analyst, participating and facilitating meetings is like bread and butter for me. More times than less, I would end up facilitating different meetings whether, for example, it’s with your internal team members or client stakeholders. I feel the same may be true for many others though you don’t need to be BA to understand and connect with this.
Eventually a facilitator is one person who has the weight of the world ( just joking) on their head so that meetings remain effective, upto the point and end with an outcome driven and accepted action items.
I have had frequent opportunities to facilitate meetings and felt that I was doing ok. But I never received any feedback till a year and half back about my facilitation skills. Feedback provided me the opportunity to reflect upon what I am doing well or which are my improvement areas.
In order to improve my facilitation skills, I discussed with my performance partner where she recommended this great book by Michael Wilkinson (want to know the book name, read on). There on, I embarked upon this journey to be a better facilitator and learnt a few secrets which I am about to reveal below
Reflection on definition of Facilitation
A facilitated session is a highly structured meeting in which the facilitator guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result which is created, understood and accepted by all the participants.
Definition above forms the crux of facilitation. To reflect upon this statement, let’s look at key components of the above definition.
Fundamental Secret of Facilitation
While there are numerous secrets of facilitation which make conducting meetings more effective, there is one which is pretty fundamental and needs a special mention. It can simply be stated in a formulaic form.
Effective Decision(ED)
=
the Right Decision (RD)*
Commitment to the decision(CD)
Let’s take an example to understand how both a right decision and the corresponding commitment to the decision makes a decision effective eventually . Otherwise we could well be looking at a stalemate with no real progress made after the meeting.
Consider a business analyst who goes into a meeting without representation from other team members and commits to a timeline for a feature which would drastically change the system architecture.
BA kept the team’s interest at centre and got sufficient time to build that feature (using his wide ranging experience) but eventually the team was not happy with the decision. They felt they were not heard and the decision was made in haste. They had other ideas to share with the wider group.
So in this case while the right decision may have been made in terms of giving the team sufficient time to work on the feature but team felt left out of the decision which impacted their commitment to the feature.
This basically brings home the point that a right decision itself is not sufficient. You need the commitment of all stakeholders involved.
Principles of SMART Facilitation
S.M.A.R.T. refers to Structured Meeting and Relating Techniques. These techniques are guiding steps on how a SMART facilitator would go about facilitating meetings.
- Asking Questions
Making sure that questions are designed in a way that it brings the imagination of participants to the fore very early into the session and they can visualize the problem at hand. It may also be prudent not start with a question which is directly linked with the topic on hand but something similar.
- Preparing for Success
5 P’s to preparing for success
- Purpose — Clear purpose on why we are meeting
- Product — What is produced as an outcome? How do we know we are successful?
- Participants — Understanding participants who need to join and their perspectives
- Probable Issues — Issues that could arise which may prevent us from creating the product
- Process : Steps that should be taken to achieve the intended outcome
- Getting the session started
It is important to set the context upfront so that participants understand why they are here and making them feel important in the decision making process so as to make them excited early about the session.
- Focusing the group
It is important to keep the group focused during the meeting — avoiding long conversations and detours. Make use of the parking lot if necessary.
- Information Gathering
Facilitated sessions tend to generate a lot of information. Select the tools which you are comfortable with as a facilitator.
e.g. For virtual meetings, it may be the software you would be interacting through or one being used for collaboration. Make sure that you are able to drive through the meeting making best use of such tools. Arrange a co-facilitator with you if you need support for the facilitation.
- Using the Pen
It’s important to capture the information from participants. But as a facilitator , one needs to be neutral in capturing notes. Capturing notes in the words of participants brings in the trust factor with the participants and they feel valued seeing their thoughts are being captured.
- Closing the session
Finally it’s important to close out the session even if you can’t complete all items on the agenda. Keep some time to review the meeting outcomes, evaluate against the agenda , plan out next steps and action items before closing.
Group Dynamics
Along with the above, in a facilitated session, group dynamics is also at play. So these 4 principles also play a key role before and during a facilitated session.
- Agenda Setting
While it goes without saying that the agenda is utmost important for any facilitated session. But as a facilitator, it is also important to customize the agenda to address the need of the hour so that it represents the critical things that you would like to achieve through the session.
- Managing Dysfunction
Participants may come with their own agenda, have their own scores to settle, may become disgruntled during the session and much more stuff could unravel. It is important to manage all such dysfunctional behavior as a facilitator.
- Building Consensus
Participants may not come to a consensus on the first attempt. If that’s the case, it’s important to address the concerns of such participants and make sure that everyone gets on board by the end of the consensus building process even though you may have to run multiple iterations for consensus building.
- Keeping the energy high amongst the participants
It is natural for energy to drop off while facilitating an hours-long workshop. As a facilitator it is important to to start on a higher energy level so as to keep your audience engaged.
So while your energy level would drop off during the session. But since you started on a higher note, you would still be able to keep your audience engaged and they can feed off your energy.
60 Secrets
Here is the moment that all the secrets are out. Read through these, employ them and you can gradually see them making an impact on your meetings.
One thing you may note is that you don’t need to employ all these at once. You need to see what works well for you and the situations you are using them in.
Summary
While I learnt a whole lot of new tricks and methods to make myself a better facilitator and still continue to do so. Some of these really stuck with me and I continue to use them on a regular basis.
Eventually reflecting upon these secrets , I can state that by practicing them helped me become a better and confident facilitator. To say the least, it gave me the framework through which I can continue to build and improve myself as a facilitator.
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Reference(s)
- The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson