What do you do if your facilitation session ends in a major failure?

The first thing is not to forget to breathe! These things happen and as disappointing as it is, you're going to learn a lot from it on lots of different levels. Some will be related to the participants, some to you. From your perspective, it's really important to show humility, but also kindness to yourself. You might have got too caught up in the whole agenda and without realising it, lost yourself and ended up loving what you've created, but forgetting to recognise that it's the attendees/sponsor etc that need to love it. It might be that your flow, content, activities, questions etc just didn't quite hit the mark. Embrace the 'failure', acknowledge what it feels like, and then move on and learn from it.

I'm so curious who decides if the session is a "failure" and based on what criteria? More often, parts of it went better than others. Were at least some of the objectives met? Have you decided, as the facilitator, that it 'failed' because you are being hard on yourself and/or because it didn't turn out the way you anticipated it might? Before "acknowledging the failure" I'd suggest digging into who gets to call it that.

Someone once said 'there is no failure, only learning'. So let's start with removing the word "failure". This isn't helpful and makes significant inferences about what's happened in a meeting/conversation. Not every conversation/meeting will go as planned, and the important muscle to build is clarifying 1)what occurred that was unplanned, and 2) aligning on what can be learned from this event to inform how the group/team might collaborate on the next occasion. Note I've not referred to 'who did what'. This isn't helpful either. A helpful approach is to encourage those in the meeting to describe what happened almost as if they were looking down into the room from above. This approach encourages objectivity rather than judgement.

Acknowledge it and find out why it is considered a 'failure'. You need to take feedback from the participants and the client. Never deflect - it shows weakness. Always be transparent and open - it shows integrity.

Absolutely. It's better to acknowledge the problems earlier in the session though and to seek the group's help to fix things.

Once you know why the workshop failed, identify what caused it, e.g., if it was because you didn't prepare properly, change your practice to ensure adequate preparation.

I think reflective cycles are a really useful tool for supporting analysing how a session has gone. There are lots of models out there, so it's about finding one that works for you.

If you have had a huge facilitation failure and haven't been able to tackle the issues and adjust as you go through, then I'd say that it would be very helpful to develop your facilitation skills. A very practical course in the UK is found at facilitation.training.

Implement changes is a good step but I think more facilitators need to think about having delivery options on facilitation plans that can be decided on the fly to meet the needs of the group. I've had sessions that turned around by acknowledging an activity wasn't working and pivoting mid session to something more effective. Feedback isn't just something we can collect at the end of the session, we can use it throughout to help action changes that make our sessions more learner led.

Facilitators work with thousands of people and in different events. Some days are simply not your days. A growth mindset can help a facilitator to work on the areas of improvement, reflection, and learning. There is nothing called absolute failure in facilitation. You learn every day, improve yourself and become a better version of yourself.

Never give up, never surrender. Always learn from workshops - good and bad. Incorporate those learnings into your practice and keep going.