Chapter 13 - Facilitation tips

Actions – practice facilitating a meeting that you have designed using the principles in the earlier chapters

Target – shorten a regular meeting and generate much clearer outcomes and decisions

Our favorite definition of facilitation is “any activity that makes tasks easy for others.”

We prefer to use the title facilitator, rather than chairperson or meeting organizer. The title chairperson is used to describe a person who is in charge. The organizer, to us, is the person who books the room. The facilitator is the person who makes the meeting really work.

The facilitator’s role is to lead the group to deliver the planned outcome in the easiest and most effective way possible. Facilitation is a fundamental management skill. If you cannot lead a group to reach an outcome effectively, how can you be a successful manager?

Your OPPT planning has given you several of the tools you need to facilitate effectively.

The first thing the facilitator should do is introduce each meeting topic using the information from their meeting design.

•	What Outcome do we need from this topic?

•	What Process will we use to get there?

•	How do we expect people to Participate in the process? Including, if appropriate: what decision process will we use?

•	It can also be helpful to specify roles and rules.

•	Roles: are there specific roles that need to be carried out during the meeting; who will take any notes or record actions, who owns any outcomes, who will lead the discussion?

•	Rules: are there any guidelines on participation for the conduct of the meeting; for example, will you ask people to turn off mobile phones and avoid multitasking?

To develop your own meeting rules, at the beginning of your next meeting ask participants to reflect on previous meetings they have attended. Ask them to discuss what made particularly good meetings and what made terrible ones.

Ask them to discuss their answers and create a flipchart with two columns, one of their hopes for this meeting (what would make this meeting great – things to aspire to) and the other column for their fears (what would make this meeting terrible – things to avoid).

Lead a short discussion on what you can do as a facilitator and what they can do as participants to deliver the hopes and prevent the fears. Out of this discussion you will come up with some practical guidelines for preventing some of the common problems with meetings in your organization.

During the meeting, you can display these rules on the wall and refer to them as the meeting progresses. As the rules have been set by the group themselves, they are much more likely to be followed.

If at any point people are not following the rules, then the facilitator can simply point out that these are their rules and ask them how they can resume in a more positive way.

It is also the facilitator’s role (unless you have a dedicated timekeeper) to keep focus on time and make sure we are covering the planned agenda.

A survey by Atlassian software in the USA found only 53 percent of scheduled meeting time is spent on the agenda items.

As the time allowed for the topic end approaches, give the group some warning that time is running out and then ask them to make an explicit decision whether the topic needs more time or should be ended.

If the participants genuinely need more time, then make sure they understand the consequences for later topics in the agenda. Something will be compressed or missed from the meeting agenda or the meeting will finish late.

It is a good idea to use a flipchart with a timeline on it and Post-it notes for the agenda outcomes. If you have to change the timings, you can move the Post-it notes around and re-plan the rest of the meeting visibly as you go along.

You can use your meeting tick chart again to check who is participating and who is not.

Go back to your plan on how you wanted people to take part. If you are not getting good levels of participation, then try something different from the ideas in Chapter 8 or ask the group how you could build more participation and energy into the session.

Another good technique is to allocate different roles to different people – have a chairperson, facilitator, content leader for each outcome, scribe, and timekeeper. People with an explicit role naturally feel more engaged.

At some point in most meetings the discussion wanders off into something that is not relevant or is a dead-end. It is hard to stop this happening completely and sometimes it can be fun, but you cannot let this take too much time.

If you have clear outcomes and process you can point to these and ask participants if the discussion is moving them through the process toward the outcome.

You can just ask the question “Is this relevant?” Usually this will bring people back to the topic or you may find out it is relevant in ways you did not realize.

If the distraction is something only of interest to a couple of people, then ask them to continue the discussion after the meeting.

If the discussion is of interest but does not move you toward the outcome of this topic, then capture the issue on a flipchart so you can come back to it later.

As a facilitator, you should capture any outcomes, decisions, or actions from the meeting.

The best way to do this is on a flipchart which keeps the decisions and actions visible. If you are doing this by webinar you can capture actions on screen. In an audio conference circulate these actions quickly in writing afterwards.

If you are not sure whether people are really committed to their actions, ask them to stand up and record their actions themselves on a flipchart. You will see from the type of words they use how committed they are to actually carrying them out. If the words are vague, ask for clarification and check commitment.

When you reach the end of one topic, make sure the meeting does not move on to the next one without recording a clear outcome. If the meeting is unable to reach the outcome planned, make a note of why so you can improve your planning for the next meeting.

At face-to-face meetings you can produce and copy a handwritten version at the end of the meeting or photograph the actions flipchart and circulate it to attendees straight away if you prefer not to type it up.

“At our leadership meeting the CEO writes a handwritten one-page briefing of the results of the management meeting each week. We each take a copy and use it as the basis for briefing our own people – that way messages are always consistent.”

At the end of the meeting, review the outputs on your flipchart and for each one ask:

•	Who is responsible for implementing this?

If it is a small number of individuals who have all the actions, challenge whether this is acceptable.

If individuals regularly do not have any actions at all, then it is worth considering whether they need to be at future meetings.

Set a clear expectation that you will be reviewing their actions at the next meeting; see the next chapter for more on this.

Do not forget to check whether the type and quality of actions generated were a good return on your investment of time and effort in the meeting.

A good final question is “Given what we achieved – was this a good use of your time?” If it was not, then discuss what would make better use of the time at the next meeting.

Meetings can sometimes drift into an apparent decision. After long discussion, people stop talking, they assume a decision is made and move on to the next point. This is usually a recipe for confusion and poor decision implementation.

Ask questions like, “So, have we made a decision?” And if so, “What is it?”

Capture the decision in writing on the flipchart and ask the group to confirm that your description is correct.

If you doubt whether people are really committed to the decision a useful technique is to carry out a commitment check.

Ask everyone to take a piece of paper each and write a number on it that reflects how committed they are to the implementation of this decision. A score of 1 means no intention of implementing it at all. A score of 10 means they are fully committed to making it happen, come what may.

Ask everyone to hold up their paper at the same time. If the average score is less than seven you do not have a commitment. If the score is low for some (or all) individuals you can ask why, and what would improve it for them.

You can also tell you haven’t got a proper decision if no individual will claim ownership or give a completion date.

Trigger an action

Review this chapter and put together a plan for how you will facilitate your next meeting. Do not try to do everything at once, begin by using OPPT, setting up meeting rules and expectations, and recording outcomes.

Discuss this with your team or at your next meeting

•	Discuss with your participants how you plan to run your meeting

•	Try the techniques above and ask for feedback on how they have an impact on the meeting