Last week I facilitated two long days of review and planning sessions for a client. From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days our small group of about six focused on business and HR strategy and process relative to their employee portal. We did process mapping, role identification, metrics planning and more. By the end of the two days the conference room was papered with flip charts, the whiteboard completely covered, and my camera full of earlier images from the whiteboard.
Our client is really excited about the content and work that came out of this session. I debriefed my team and during that discussion had several aha’s:
- So much of facilitation success is about the planning you put in before — a well-planned agenda, with exercises and techniques identified makes all the difference
- Planning to the group size, the setting, the desired outcomes is crucial — a small group in a small room can succeed with less formal approaches
- Adjusting to the ebb and flow of such a session is important — judge the value of the tangential conversation before redirecting
The last one proved to be really important last week. We didn’t use every approach I planned to use and we didn’t stay exactly on the agenda. Sometimes, the group wandered into valuable discussion and I let them go for a while. The results were really useful decisions and information that we may not have reached if I’d been too strict to the agenda.
Sometimes this is a tough call. Is what we’ve arrived at for this moment more important than what we’d planned to address? Can we still get to everything on our agenda? In anticipation of such a situation, I usually plan in some wiggle room. Using a parking lot also ensures you can move off the irrelevant topics fast.
What techniques do you use to keep your facilitation flexible?
Stacy Wilson, ABC, is president of Eloquor Consulting, Inc., in Lakewood, Colorado
