The Art Of Facilitation: Tenets
Facilitation, be that of workshops or conversations, can be a daunting task. While it is a practiced skill, it is also in large part, a mindset.
Be Prepared
At the very least, this involves three things:
Pick the right process: Facilitating sessions requires having structure. Your structure may be fixed in some parts and fluid in others, but having structure is imperative to staying on the rails. Facilitating ideation may require a more flexible structure, while doing so for specific problem solving or troubleshooting may have to be tighter and more iterative.
Prepare yourself: Do your homework – Often, designers will be called in to facilitate collaborative sessions between stakeholders from different domains. A facilitator needs to inspire trust in their audience. Study key ideas and principles relevant to the domains represented in the room, so that when compounded with your objective, outside-in view, you may leverage this understanding to make informed interventions.
Prepare your audience: The truth is that often, a significant proportion of participants come into workshops expecting to have fun. This causes even the most upright of participants to engage in frivolous and unproductive behavior. While having fun should be part of the process, it is not the objective. Counteract this by setting expectations categorically. Explain to each participant why they are being included, in what ways they are expected to contribute, and what the desired behaviors are that will make the workshop a success. This may be done in the form of a pre-read document, or through one on one conversation.
Facilitate the Right Thing
Don’t facilitate ‘sense’ or ‘solution’. Simply facilitate the process.
As facilitators of workshops we often feel pressure to deliver outcomes that make ‘sense’. While ‘sense’ is the objective, the onus of generating sense does not lie with the facilitator, but with the whole team. Constantly trying to play ‘sense-maker’ puts undue pressure on a facilitator, and may even lead them to hijack the session. Remember that you are not the expert, but one who manages the experts.
Encourage your audience, and yourself, to accept chaos and ambiguity, while trusting the process to generate sense.
Facilitate the Right People
Perhaps the only thing more important than ‘how’ you facilitate, is ‘who’ you facilitate.
Trusting the process is all well and good, but it only works if the right stakeholders are involved in the process. Facilitated sessions, among other things, are equalizers. Places where each stakeholder has an equal voice. In large part, this equalization is brought about by the fact that no one in the room is an expert in the workshop process. They are all equally at sea. This is the most valuable aspect of workshops. Be highly intentional about ‘who’ is in the room.
Pivoting and Controlled Deviation
Expect to be surprised. Expect to get stuck.
This is not things going wrong; it is just the nature of workshops. Be prepared with intermediate devices to help discussions become un-stuck, or to break thought patterns. This could be something as simple as calling a time-out or introducing arbitrary constraints.
Roger von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack is a particularly useful resource for this.
Know When Not To Facilitate
In general, to facilitate is not to control, but to manage.
And while it is important that a facilitator remember this at all times, at certain times, it is more critical. While we must trust and ensure, largely, adherence to the process, it is important to remember that one of the most valuable features of collaborative working is the element of discovery. Sometimes, participants have moments wherein they are simultaneously inspired and empowered, entering a creative flow. Be intentional about sensing this, and when you do, let it happen.
