ORID 101 : a beginner's guide to facilitating conversations

Some of you might already learn about the attitude and benefits of a facilitative mindset from the last edition. But we all know that's not enough. We also need methods to put it into practice.?

The first method I would recommend to newbies is ORID, an acronym of ToP Focused Conversation method developed by ICA, one of the international associations for facilitators. I like ORID because it's easy to understand and apply in daily life, making it more natural to use in facilitation.

Four levels of thinking

ORID is a a way to strucuture conversation that uses four levels of thinking to arrive at an informed decision. These levels are Objective, Reflective, Interpretative, and Decisional, focusing on revealing Facts, Feelings, Implications and Decisions, respectively.

Now, let's use a work conversation as an example to understand what each level means:

Peter: “Good morning everyone, let's brainstorm three innovative ideas for next year's planning!”

Mary: “Shall we build a chatbot?”

Peter: “Ummm...That won’t work...we have tried it before.”

Sam: “Actually, which business plan are we referring to, the product one or the marketing one?”

Dennis: “What's the business impact of chatbot development?”

If we match these dialogues with the concept of ORID, that will be:

• “Good morning everyone, let's brainstorm three innovative ideas for next year's planning!” (D-level, because Peter is thinking about the action items)
• “Shall we build a chatbot?” (D-level , because Mary is suggesting next step)
• “Ummm...That won’t work...we have tried it before.” (R-level, because Peter is expressing his feeling)
• “Actually, which business plan are we referring to, the product one or the marketing one?” (O-level, because Sam is clarifying the agenda)
• “What's the business impact of chatbot development?” ( I-level, because Dennis is hoping to understand the deeper meaning of Mary's suggestion)

Think together and move forward with a focus

So you can see here that each person is coming from different levels. When this situation happens, the conversation would go unfocused easily, not flowing smoothly or leaving us going into circles without meaningful meeting outcome. Participants could feel being pulled into different directions, instead of a forward force of making progress.

That's how ORID, when applied, becomes a guiding sequence that helps people to:

1. First, focus on the facts to create a shared understanding of reality (Objective)
2. Based on the facts, understand the associated experience, emotions (Reflective)
3. After that, the group can make further analysis based on the facts and experience (Interpretative)
4. Finally, to arrive at better, informed decisions or next steps with the suuport from step 1 to 3. (Decisional)

The approach ensures the conversation flows with one focus at a time, and the discussion is based on the information from previous levels

In facilitating an unfocused or chaotic conversation, what we could do is to identify what people are saying, and how scattered the group is on different levels aka talking about different things different focus.

If there are missing levels in the conversation, for example, the group only focus on making decisions and suggestions (D-level) and we felt there's a misalignment on the topic, we could ask the questions to bring the group to that specific focus; for instance, in the above situation - asking below O-questions can reset the focus to build a more solid foundation and shared understanding of the meeting.

• What is the purpose of brainstorming?
• What do we need to get out of this conversation?
• What innovative means?
• When do we need to get the ideas executed?

As a newbie, a good way to start practicing is by listening to dialogues in meetings, chitchats, or phone calls, and matching them with ORID. It is an excellent practice to improve our listening - an important skill to develop to facilitate conversation better.

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Previous article

#1 Facilitation Snippet : Bite-sized insights, methods, and learnings to develop a facilitative mindset

#2 How a facilitative mindset can help you and your team collaborate

Further reading

ORID as an Underlying Structure for Effective Meeting Design (ICA Associates, Jo Nelson)