How do you tap into group wisdom in a facilitation session?

You can quickly foster a trusting environment by recognizing and addressing participants' hesitations. If you observe reluctance in sharing, pause the session to emphasize the significance of a non-judgmental space. Introducing an exercise, such as having everyone share a brief non-work-related personal experience, can be a practical approach to reinforce safety and trust, encouraging genuine sharing.

A mentor once told me that the wisdom in the room is greater than the wisdom at the front of the room, that is, what you can learn and help others learn from facilitating a space where your audience contributes is much greater than what you alone as the facilitator can provide. Truly, becoming the guide on the side is greater than the sage on the stage.

The principle of "Starting strong" covers many of the areas and goes well into setting the mood for the entire workshop. Ground rules are important. What is also important is to set the right expectations. In fact, letting the group know it is not always going to be "high energy", that some parts of the workshop may be exhausting or frustrating, goes in long way to building the rapport. Simple icebreakers - asking random questions like what ice-cream flavour would you invent - brings personality, energy and safety immediately, even the most serious faces get a smile and twinkle in their eyes.

Questions have the power to transform a session. Once, when facilitating a change management workshop, I posed a deceptively simple question: "What does success look like for you personally in this change?" The room was abuzz with deep reflections and diverse insights. This experience reiterated that profound questions could unearth layers of collective wisdom, often lurking just below the surface.

As I run my facilitation workshop in public, the ways to ask question in addition to "open" versus "close" is "How many of you ....?" "How many of you ...?" "How many of you ...?" You will notice that this question repeats three times. It's not the case. It's a way to ask the same point from three different perspectives - the micro, macro, ande globaw. This is a technique I personally learned from my mentor, Alex Mandossian (who is known as the Warren Buffet of Internet Marketing) and he called this the "Power of Three" technique.

"The 'how might we...', 'what if...', 'what options we didn't consider yet...', and many other possible questions are perfect for shifting the mindset from 'problem definition' to 'solution mode.' However, what I have found to be the most effective way to consolidate the best ideas into defining a solution is to apply the so-called 'together, alone' principle. In this way, ideas are first captured individually, eliminating potential bias in advance. Subsequently, the entire group can vote on which ideas will have the most impact. The ultimate idea may therefore be a composition of various ideas from the group, but you are more certain that none have been left behind due to bias or group pressure.

A good facilitator always makes sure that the most introvert and shy participants get to contribute and their ideas are also seen and heard and given equal weightage. This is one of the key aspects of tapping into the group wisdom, that otherwise in traditional meeting settings we don't get access to. A Note and Vote" exercise is a great example of how this could be achieved very easily.

The key is to expect that the person standing in front of the room is not the smartest person who knows all (i.e., having a trainer's mindset). If something goes not according to the plan, the heat is on the trainer. What happens if a person adopts the facilitator's mindset? Well, from being adversarial, the facilitator and the participants are part of the same team. Now, if something is not going well according to the plan, the whole team collectively will find a way to solve it. In other words, a master facilitator can put the heat on the participants instead of shouldering all the responsibility to deliver all the lessons. That's my experience. In fact, I learned a lot of unexpected lessons by using this approach.