Meetings and workshops are so ubiquitous that it’s really quite a mystery why not more people and organisations have invested in facilitative skills – which incidentally is why it’s my mission to help them boost their process literacy.
When it comes to day-to-day meetings, if they’re not facilitated it’s not great. It’s even tiring, boring, confusing etc. at times. But perhaps it’s also not the end of the world, or at least it’s an everyday evil that (too) many people are used to. Let’s say that you can sort of get away with it (I do challenge you to have ‘a meeting about meetings’ though, and to think about properly designing and facilitating them 😉
If you are in this situation, having to host such an event, and you don’t facilitate often or ever; if for whatever reason you won’t be able to call upon a facilitator (whether internal or external) to help, there are a few things you can do. I already touched upon some general ideas as to what you can do to avoid catastrophes with un-facilitated meetings. Of course if you can bring a facilitator in the picture, do it, as soon as possible (or it might backfire BIG TIME).
Then every now and again, you have a bigger meeting coming up, that you’re supposed to host / chair / facilitate. All of a sudden you find yourself a bit naked. Not knowing how to go about it. It usually starts with feeling naked with your empty repertoire of facilitation methods. But as explained before, that’s only the emerged part of the iceberg.
But if you really can’t count on a facilitator to help design your event, here are some notions to approach process design from a sounder place. The idea being to make these bigger events more productive, healthy and enjoyable.
Think carefully about your PURPOSE, together with a diverse set of brains and hearts around the table
That’s the big one!
It’s the number one reason why gatherings fail according to many guests of Myriam Hadnes’s podcast ‘Workshops work‘.
So don’t be shy and spend a solid amount of time unpacking why (your ‘9 why’s‘ might help here) you are having this gathering in the first place. And try doing so not alone but with a diverse group of eyes, brains, hearts. That diversity will give you the full picture, reveal the wicked questions you should be pondering, scan the emotions that your agenda may bring up, and challenge your ideas beyond the platitudes of ‘first draft thinking’ as my friend and mentor Sam Kaner would say.
A couple of tips here, to get to the bottom of things:
- Don’t stay at the level of ‘general objectives’. Chunk down your ambitions in terms of the various topics / conversation you wish to entertain, and what specific outcomes you aim to achieve. The Facilitator’s guide to participatory decision-making is one of many references that helps explain how to go about this fruitfully. This chunking allows you to do better justice to each conversation and to be more realistic about what you can hope to achieve overall…
- Think generally as the outcomes for this event as just ‘stepping stones’ towards a greater goal. Don’t delude yourself thinking you will explore and agree on everything in even one gigantic five-day gathering.
- Think of your topics and outcomes from the perspectives of the people coming. Perhaps you have different conversations to cater for different parts or ‘constituencies’ of your group? Perhaps you can let your participants (acticipants) generate parts or all of your event’s agenda ahead of time or on the spot (e.g. through an Open Space).
- Accept that ‘planning is essential, but the plan is useless’. As another mentor of mine, the talented Thomas Lahnthaler just posted on LinkedIn, sometimes the real purpose of an event becomes clear at its end only. So, be ready to diss your plan and work with what has energy and is coming up in the moment.
Think carefully about who you invite
This is perhaps the second biggest pitfall of meetings: the people turning up are not the right ones.
It could be that they’re not the right ones because… they’re not concerned by the topics… they’re not interested in it… they’re not eager to be there… they’re not in a capacity to make decisions and co-create (because they need prior agreement from a higher authority)… they’re not able to contribute meaningfully (e.g. because of the language being used, their accessibility profile, their personal schedule preventing full participation etc.)… there are various reasons why you may want to think carefully about who to invite.
Priya Parker in The art of gathering, talks about ‘generous exclusion‘ as a cardinal principle behind gatherings. Focus on the people that should be here, and don’t keep the door open to ‘just anyone’. The more people are joining (who may not be really meant to be here), the more the people that are really impacting and impacted by the hosted conversations are going to be lost in the ‘noise’. All that because of politically correct openness, or because technology makes it possible (which is in my opinion the number one flaw of hybrid meetings, but I digress).
Declutter your invite lists, don’t compromise on who should be around and who not. You’re making everyone a favour when you do so.
Balance content and process, sharing and digesting
In the academic world, where I’ve been operating a lot in the past 10 years, this tends to be one of the biggest issues. And it’s not restricted to events with academics.
On one hand there are a lot of (e.g.) scientists who are super eager to share the fruit of their exciting research, and on the other hand the rest of the participants who may not really get what that science is all about, or even be interested in a lot of research details. Bombarding your audience with information – especially dense scientific information – is not the key to action and change.
Sharing some content can be great – even if in the grand scheme of things it’s not the best use of everyone’s time (because everyone can watch a video, a recorded presentation etc. on their own). As it happens, one of the best presentations I got to see lasted an entire hour. But that’s the exception.
The point is to ensure that you give the space and time for people to absorb, digest, and potentially riff off of that content. My rule of thumb here is that every minute of passing information should be matched by at least twice that amount of time to clarify and question it, and even more time if the content shared is an input to a conversation you’re hosting.
This also means that whatever content you’re offering should be matched by a careful process that delivers the best experience for everyone to make that content useful. Starting with how the presentation is put together (my tips about this here). I’m also thinking here about ways to alternate formats, as in the next point below…
Balance formats, senses, experiences
Even with a perfectly clear and agreed agenda, and exactly the right group of people, if you bring your peeps to a 3-hour long open discussion or a well orchestrated ‘death by Powerpoint’, or a series of dull panels, you will have wasted everyone’s time.
The beauty -and spice- of life is diversity.
This also applies to the formats you’re using.
I’m not talking about coming up with elaborate participation formats such as all the great things you can do with Liberating Structures, Open Space Technology and the likes… If you feel naked with your repertoire, even just breaking up the group experience by offering here and there e.g. a one-minute silent individual reflection, or a quick one-on-one buzzing, a small breakout group chat, or even just a walking talk in pairs, trios, quartets instead of just a talk…
There are so many simple ways to diversify the experience: role play, drawing, using embodiment (want some ideas there? Get in touch with my friend Mirjam Leunissen who is an ’embodiment engineer’), preventing people from talking for a while, using a talking object to structure the conversation, changing the setting in which the work is happening etc.
And of course that extends to moving beyond the idea that ‘we should stay as one whole group throughout’…
Fight the FOMO-infused ‘plenary diktat’ and offer multiple experiences
This is related to the previous point, but I want to press the ‘pause’ button here and double down on this pervasive flaw of (crappy) meetings.
It’s a common pitfall that I see in the sponsors and clients that haven’t gone through many different facilitated experiences: they fear that people might be missing out on information in breakout groups, so they impose the diktat of plenary.
Plenary everything: plenary presentation, plenary reflection, plenary discussion, plenary debrief.
I don’t deny the value of plenary moments: If only when a group has to co-create something – be it a ‘solution’, action plan, proposal, list of ideas etc. – it really matters to ensure that the group decides together how to move forward from the ‘world of ideas’ to the ‘world of actions’. And that can only be done in plenary.
But plenary all the way? That’s not helpful.
Here are a few reasons why going full-on plenary may not be such a great idea:
- It’s tired. It’s the convention. It’s what too many people are used to. What happens then is that they automatically switch on to their ‘plenary persona’. That usually leads the over-confident privileged speakers to pontificate, and the shy/less highly ranked/outcast people to stomach that logorrhea as a necessary evil, not as a generative opportunity to bring about real change… You’re not setting everyone up for doing and sharing their best thinking.
- It’s tiring. I find that even a very gracefully facilitated open discussion becomes somewhat tedious after 30 to 45 minutes. I usually try to keep plenaries to even less. There is not as much ‘psychological safety’ in a larger group, so mostly conventional ideas are floated. There is also less diversity in the format of an open discussion than in many other participation formats. And if the discussion is restricted to only a few talking heads, it becomes boring to follow it after a while, no matter how brilliant their points might be.
- It’s potentially toxic. Because of the psychological safety aspect I just mentioned, plenary sessions can be perfect nightmare scenarios to ensure not everyone talks. So we end up ignoring, belittling and even invalidating certain perspectives, ideas, assumptions, values. Of course all that can be mitigated with good facilitation. But in this post I’m focusing on events without a (good) facilitator.
- It’s unnecessary. Not everyone needs to be privy to every bit of information shared – despite what some might say. Again generous exclusion might be a useful cue here. Organise groups based on the energy and (function-related or otherwise) interest they have in this or that conversation. And even if everyone has to contribute to a conversation, having a prior moment in breakouts helps generate more ideas, and then you can leave the converging part of the discussion to the plenary.
Pay attention to values, politics, tensions and sensitive interactions (and think about relationships 😉
Two questions I systematically ask when I process-design are: “Are there any tensions about specific content issues I should be aware of?” and “Are there any tensions between people or institutions that I should be aware of?”.
Events are special moments bringing groups of people together. But they’re not free from all sorts of background noises: the politics of the conversation you’re hosting that exists outside of the meeting; the relationships that are at play; the interpersonal affinities, disagreements and conflicts that are in the background; the values that people in the group bring and that may shape the way they participate…
Being aware of these subtle relationship streams is critical, if you want to anticipate how a certain conversation might play out. And crucially, scanning that relationships-values-politics landscape ahead of the event helps you design in an ever more careful, caring, empathetic, inclusive and balanced way.
Politics is nearly always involved in the grown-up world. Be aware of it, and think about who needs to get their voice amplified (using talking objects or fishbowls to invite certain voices? Writing rather than speaking?) and what you can do to ensure everyone’s voice is heard and included in co-creating something.
When you’re ready to dive into process, use your empathy to ‘jog through the experience’ from the perspective of your participants
Finally, when you’ve done all of that work ahead and you have designed your agenda, try and go through every single planned interaction to anticipate what might be happening for a participant. It will likely reveal some facilitator flaws – that you tend to overlook because you know what your game plan is, but they don’t.
Some points that might be useful to check:
- Do people know each other, trust each other and if not how can you make that easier for them? (quick tip: spending time on checking in and connecting with oneself, each other and the topics at hand goes a long way, it’s not wasted time at all)
- Is everything content-wise and process-wise clear enough for people to engage with each other? Is it simple enough that they don’t get lost?
- Does this feel like enough time for people to express themselves?
- How much flexibility do I have in my agenda to make space for the unexpected?
- Do I have all the props and materials needed for them to engage in the activity I am designing?
- Is the set up (how the chairs are organised) optimal and how well does one activity/conversation transition to another in the space?
- What are the participant needs I can anticipate and what can I do to attend to these needs?
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and an exhaustive set of guidelines for designing your unfacilitated processes, but hopefully it gives you some scaffolding to hold on to.
For the rest, enjoy the interactions, watch the magic unfold, observe what is being said and what is being done, the silent language of people reacting with their bodies, learn your lessons, and next time around make sure you get someone to facilitate your event 😉
Related stories
- 10 advices to dramatically improve your un-facilitated meetings…
- Process literacy perks: The participants, as ‘leaders in the shade’
- Getting to ‘wow’ with public speaking and presenting
- Use quality face-to-face time for synergy, not for logorrhea
- Reducing complexity to a workshop? Wake & step up!
- Stop taking hostages! The ills of poor event design and facilitation
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