How can you steer a Facilitation session back on track?

I agree, questions are the answer! Asking questions can increase engagement by 4 times. Finding out why the participants aren’t engaged comes by way of additional questions.

Before any facilitated session, clear communication about the agenda is crucial. In my experience, setting expectations early and providing a detailed outline of the topics to be discussed helps prevent confusion. Ensuring that participants understand the purpose and flow of the meeting beforehand fosters a focused and productive environment from the start. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of going off track and enhances the overall effectiveness of the session.

Any group activity and facilitated process has natural ebbs and flows. The first consideration, especially for novice facilitators, should be: "Is the session really going off track, and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?" Try to discern whether the session is off track in timing, progress to planned outcomes, tone, or something else in a detrimental way, or just not in line with your initial expectations. Diagnosing and intervening too fast may actually hurt trust, engagement, and your overall process. Two soft checks to consider if you fear your session is veering are an informal check-in with a couple of participants, or waiting to see if the drift continues after your next break.

In addition, if the session is in person, you can use body language to help redirect a class. Standing with your back to someone who is disruptive or directing the class back up front to a presentation can change the class energy. A well placed break or activity an also get the class back on track.

In my experience, rewarding engagement with excitement and treating the participant as an “expert” will encourage others to participate. Of course not all participants are extroverted personalities, so it’s important to watch the expressions and body language of all your students to see if there might be an opportunity to call on them as well.

It can feel very lonely if you are a solo facilitator with a cohort that is close and collectively not engaged. Leaning into more participatory style can be a good option in these cases. Pulling challenging or disruptive participants into co-facilitation/responsible roles can also be a good judo/jedi move. This moves them out of the critic on the sideline role. If you have multiple sessions with the same group, having 1:1 conversations with particularly critical or disruptive participants can help surface and address the underlying issue(s). Asking a trusted mentor/coach/facilitator or client leader/sponsor to observe or participate might also help to give you perspective on what and how to adjust the next and following sessions.

The hardest part is knowing when to intervene and when to let a process or detour unfold, as premature intervention can actually stifle engagement, trust, creativity, and good but unplanned outcomes. However, if you get the sense that things are really heading off track in a detrimental way, pausing the session to regroup or check in with a few participants is often a better bet than just ploughing on. In the past I have paused a session to check in with the participants through informal and open discussion to get their perspectives on what was happening. This does require trust and the confidence to be able to adjust based on the feedback, or stay the course. Checking in with the sponsor or breaking early are also considerations.