Facilitating
This post is part of the upcoming book Agile Coaching Survival Guide, co-authored by Marie Lord and André Dhondt.
What is Facilitating?
Facilitating helps people with different opinions get a chance to contribute to a conversation and helps groups make decisions together. If everyone agrees, there’s only one path forward. Or if we don’t want a group to influence a decision, we don’t need facilitation!
At its best, facilitation is silent and unobtrusive: if you’ve ever been in an unfamiliar grocery store and couldn’t find anyone to ask where to find something, what did you do? There are signs posted throughout the store--all it takes is walking around a bit and you’ll find a sign for what you need. This structure was prepared in advance of your arrival and helped you make decisions on where to go in a new place. Instead of guiding an individual through a store, think of facilitation as a way to guide your group through a conversation.
There’s a natural arc to a facilitated discussion. We gather people together for some stated goal, we list out options, we consider those options, and we decide what to do. A facilitator will slow these steps down when participants are struggling to get aligned and may skip some steps when everyone’s ideas are being heard.
Facilitators are often expected to take notes, but from my perspective this is yet another meeting role, Scribe (see below). It’s often best done by someone familiar with the local vernacular. When facilitating for a new client, it can be challenging to keep up with the acronyms and? technical jargon without slowing down the whole group.
Convening Participants
When you’re asked to facilitate a session, ask your client: why do you want time from people? Help them verbalize a compelling reason to attend. Make sure you’ve explained what problem we’re trying to solve and what kind of participation we’re looking for, e.g.:
Physical Space
Consider the difference between a large lecture hall with a dais and microphone versus a small circle of chairs in a small conference room. The physical setup of a room greatly influences? our expectation of participants--either to sit down, shut up and listen; or to have an equal say in how things proceed. See Open Space by Harrison Owen for an in-depth explanation on what to do with your space. If you haven’t yet attended an un-conference, do so! BarCamp, Lean Coffee, and Open Space events are happening every month in large cities around the globe.
Hybrid Space
Even one remote meeting participant introduces complexity and potential delays. How many times have you asked a remote participant if they were trying to speak when you see their mute is active? How long does it take to find the meeting invite and to connect? It’s great that we don’t have to commute as much when we have hybrid meetings, but I like to treat hybrid meetings as purely virtual/remote so everyone is using the “least common denominator” communication technology.?
That is: in-person is more rich than video conferencing which is more rich than voice conferencing.
Virtual Space
Virtual meeting space can be very effective, but it requires more structure to get the same level of engagement from participants. I like to use multiple monitors so that one is dedicated to sharing videos, and a second monitor for?chat and/or shared collaboration tools like a whiteboard or document
For example, I’ll type something in the chat window every few minutes and ask for people to react to it using emoji.
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Keeping Everyone Engaged: Meet Differently to Think Differently
Change the format of your meetings. Keep them interesting to get people to think differently. I’ve seen people take this to an extreme by bringing food, dressing in a theme, and playing games which can be fun, but if it doesn’t help participants become more productive, some participants will grumble. To keep it relevant, stick to serious games and meeting formats like those from Tastycupcakes.org and RetroMat.org.
Keeping Everyone Engaged: Divergence and Convergence
There’s a natural arc to a facilitated discussion. We gather people together for some stated goal. We list options. We consider those options and decide what to do. A facilitator will slow these steps down when participants are struggling to get aligned. Additionally,? a facilitator may skip some of these steps when everyone’s ideas are being heard. Use silent writing activities to help people that need quiet time to think. Then review what was written by reading it aloud to help people that prefer to think out loud.
Keeping Everyone Engaged: Acceptance
In the Improv Theater world, there’s a “yes and…” attitude where we keep playing along with another’s suggestion no matter how absurd. This often leads to funny insights--both in theater and in a workshop. Rather than fighting what someone says, find the ways in which it is true, or let the other participants help you do so. Find the situations where it doesn’t apply. The main objective is to keep accepting what people say as they’re more likely to stay engaged.
Timing
The first rule of timing is to remember your client’s time is more important than your agenda. If you suggest an activity that generates a lot of resistance, it’s OK to ask whether participants think we should skip it or replace it with something else. It’s their time and their meeting--you’re just there to help keep it productive.
There’s never enough time to get everything done, but even with a small amount of time we can make surprising amounts of progress. Normally, if you help the group break down the work into steps, start several steps on time and wrap up without rushing, your client will be pleased with what you did. If you run out of time for some steps or don’t wrap-up thoroughly,? attendees will be disappointed.
Normally, I use harsh limits on group activities. I tell people how long they have, and I set an audible timer. When that timer goes off, I immediately bring everyone’s attention back to the agenda and say it’s time to move on. If there are portions of the meeting where one person is sharing information, I’m more inclined to use soft boundaries and/or to prompt them with 5-, 3-, and 1-minute warnings.
Wrap-Up
Good facilitation gives participants time to reach closure. It’s good to look back at what we’ve covered, what’s left, and to assign an owner and deadline for any follow up items. This topic is addressed beautifully in Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. There's also a new edition of this book released in March of 2024 that I haven't reviewed yet so let me know in the comments what you think.
A Note about Scribes
For many meetings, someone needs to document decisions. For routine team-level meetings, the Scrum Lead can do this easily and at the pace of the meeting itself. For example, in Sprint Planning the Scrum Lead can move items from the backlog into the new Sprint using your online backlog management tool (like Jira, Rally, and Azure DevOps), and often that’s all that is needed. During the Daily Meeting, if someone wants to update the User Story description, they can also do that live so team members have a chance to comment.
For more complicated meetings, I recommend asking for a volunteer to Scribe. Let them know it will reduce their ability to contribute, so ask for someone who’s not as passionate about the topic. Find a way to write where everyone can see the notes.
When scribing for a group, capture verbatim what speakers say. It's ok to omit connector words, but otherwise stick to the same word choices so that the participants feel heard. If something's unclear, the audience will say so.