The Masterful Facilitator

Welcome!

Welcome to the Masterful Facilitator!

This blog is dedicated to all business professionals interested in holding better meetings that yield better decisions leading to better results.  Over the coming months, we'll be talking about the various kinds of group faciltiation and how to choose a professional facilitator, as well as sharing tips for improved facilitation and reviewing books and other resources to hone your facililtation skills.

I'm passionate about helping groups reach synergy and am always eager to share thoughts, information, ideas and resources with others who share this passion.  Please join us and share your questions, concerns, and ideas.  You can email me at Cynthia@MasterfulFacilitator.com.

I look forward to getting to know you!

This week's question:  What are the things you find most challenging about meetings in your organization? 

I'll feature top challenges and respond with suggestions in a future post.

Warm regards,

Cynthia Waisner

http://www.masterfulfacilitator.com

When Ground Rules Hinder Instead of Help

Most people are familiar with a pretty standard set of ground rules used somewhere near the beginning of each facilitated session.  These will talk about participation, electronics, and -- often -- how to disagree.

Something I've noticed with growing alarm is what I consider to be the OVERuse of disagreement ground rules in certain kinds of sessions.

Often, the reason you go to the time, trouble, and yes, expense, of bringing in a facilitator is because you've been unsuccessful in resolving an issue on your own.  Ground rules which provide too many artificial controls on the free and even unpleasant expression of conflicting points of view are not likely to get you very far.  I would even go so far as to suggest that this level of control is often for the facilitator's comfort, not for the purpose of getting the best outcome.

If there is deep conflict, forcing everyone to pretend to "play nice" only encourages taking the conflict further underground and driving it into highly unproductive -- but much more familiar -- political channels.  A better approach: make sure your facilitator will, first and foremost, manage and take ownership of his or her own anxiety.  Then (s)he can work to provide an environment where the unpleasant "truth" is expressed -- and everyone survives.

If you're trying to negotiate the boundary between family and the business in a family business, pay particular attention to this.  Most practitioners I've seen use all kinds of rules and controls to ensure that things don't get unpleasant -- but unpleasant is, in my opinion, often what you need to make progress.

A client of mine likes to tell people the organization chose me over other consultants because I promised to "kick the sleeping dogs."  Consider -- is this what your organization really needs?  If so, be sure you choose a facilitator who is willing to face into the tough, emotional issues and encourage others to do the same.

Facilitator Tools and Techniques: What to do when people are "talking past" each other

Here's a technique you can use when those with conflicting points of view get caught in the "yes, but" trap and just won't listen to each other.  It's also useful for helping to neutralize a strong leader in the conflict by creating some cognitive dissonance.

Have people break into small groups according to their points of view.  Give the small groups a short period of time to identify and document their strongest arguments and evidence.  Tell them each group must also appoint a leader.

AFTER the time is up, tell the appointed leaders to switch groups.  Give them a few minutes to be briefed by their "new" group and review the arguments, then tell them they will have 1-2 minutes to present their most cogent and compelling argument for the point of view of the "new" group.  If the conflict is not too acrimonious, you can even have the groups vote on how well their spokesperson did, with a small prize for the winner.

As with ALL facilitation tools, the exercise is only as good as the debrief.  Debrief the spokespersons first:  How did it feel?  What new insights did they gain?  Which point is most compelling or interesting?  What hadn't they fully considered before?  Then debrief the larger groups along the same lines. 

Move into actual problem-solving that looks at the points of view on their merits (make sure criteria are clearly defined and agreed to) and explores creative ways of combining solutions.

Does Your Left Brain Know What Your Right Brain Is Doing?

Any other fans of the WSJ's Weekend Journal out there? If so, you may have seen Dr. Iain McGilchrist's excellent article "The Battle of the Brain." Dr. McGilchrist traces the evolution of Western culture's overreliance on left hemisphere thought processes -- and points out the problems with this overreliance.

This overreliance is extremely common in facilitated sessions, and leads to suboptimal outcomes. There is often strong pressure to rely on left hemisphere processes, because they are comfortable and familiar. They are comfortable because they reduce the world to clearly defined and predictable patterns, lists, and details. This is important, but only after the larger context is understood.

That's where right hemisphere processes are needed. Often messy, contradictory, and paradoxical, information gleaned through right hemisphere thinking will establish context, free intuition, and allow connections and relationships to be defined that are ignored when left hemisphere processes alone prevail. This messy, organic information is a far more "real" reflection of organizational life than neatly constructed, reductionist realities.

What to do? Make sure your session provides opportunities for each hemisphere to do what it does best. For planning sessions, this may mean constructing a trend map in addition to (or even instead of) a more traditional SWOT analysis. For focus groups, storyboards, card sorts, and/or cartoon "thought bubbles" can allow the right hemisphere to function -- you get the idea. A valuable tool for most organizations is Edward de Bono's parallel thinking, which encourages participants to understand the various types of thinking and encourages facility in each.

Finally, make sure your facilitator is well-versed in processes catering to each hemisphere, knows how to design a session to make the best use of these processes to achieve your desired outcomes, and will challenge you and your organization constructively to move beyond what is familiar into what is most effective.

Happy New Year to all and may your next meeting be your best meeting!

Facilitators, Consultants and Trainers -- Oh, My!!

When I find myself with a group of my peers -- others who devote their professional lives to working with groups for the betterment of the organization -- the discussion inevitably turns to parsing whether each of us thinks of herself as a consultant, a facilitator, or a trainer.  Recently, I overheard one party in such a conversation tell another:  "Then you're not really a facilitator -- you're a facilitative trainer."

My reaction to these conversations is always the same:  an immediate, loud, internal "WHO CARES?"

Those of us in this type of group work may be the last bastion of those who define themselves professionally in terms of what they DO, rather than in terms of what they DELIVER.  Anyone who has ever taken an Intro to Marketing class can tell you this is a huge error -- products and services are best defined from the CUSTOMER point of view.

Do any of us seriously believe that our clients CARE whether, at any given moment, what we are doing is most accurately classified as facilitating or training?  I doubt it.  Which makes me wonder why we devote so much time and energy to it. 

The irony, of course, is obvious, if you look at the title of this blog.  I have yet to come up with a better way.  What I HAVE learned is that each of us can best serve our clients by being proficient in the tools and techniques of ALL practice areas engaged in group work for organizational improvement, in so far as we are personally able.  The more complete our tool kit, the more inclined we are likely to be to searching for the BEST solution for our client's organizational issues.  If we overidentify with our processes, rather than with our client's desired outcomes, we run the risk of seeing varied and complex issues through only one lens.  The old saying is true:  "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."