Facilitation Equation - Technique, Technology, Tactic

Tell me, folks, is there any random trial-and-error approach to facilitate a successful session or is there any method to the madness of jargon that one is expected to master to solve this equation?

Fairly sure, there are times when organizing a workshop seems monotonous, attendees’ energy level drops to zero, the brainstorming session falls prey to circular discussions, or the information delivered gets too overwhelming for the target audience. The facilitation equation becomes more complex especially when leading a technical community involving managerial tasks if the same old technique is followed for all sessions.

To clarify beforehand, there isn’t any trick or tactic for running the best workshop or meeting. But if you are searching for riveting tracks to unfasten this twist, then march through the below-mentioned techniques and find out what suits you the best on this quest! 🔍

Put on your thinking cap 💭

Imagine a scenario where you are sitting in a discussion room brainstorming over a new feature that can be implemented in your organization’s latest project. You sweat and slave to prepare a presentation with your teammates only to have been hushed by your superior midway and hear the term “REDO” on D-day. cries in the corner

What if the ideation phase could already have diverse perspectives on the platter at an early stage? What if your pitch could already receive constructive feedback after a SILENT LISTEN (quite a musing anagram)?

• In the Silent Listening facilitation technique, pre-mature convergence or bias is avoided by randomly dividing the attendees into smaller groups to work on proposals, and once done, each group is supposed to appoint a spokesperson. The chosen ones (spokesperson here XD) from each group go clockwise or anti-clockwise to the next group where they give their presentation while everyone listens in complete silence. After the pitch is over, listeners give their feedback while the speaker goes silent without giving any clarifications at all at any point and only be allowed to take notes of discussions. Once the whole process is over and chosen speakers with n responses return to their original groups having n new ideas, then improvise their proposal according to the multiple received opinions.

But what if that spokesperson is your boss? Human psychology does not allow one to express oneself properly when being eye rolled or commanded with any other non-verbal communication. To overcome this issue, Dave Snowden’s creation RITUAL DISSENT comes to the rescue.

• Ritual Dissent is Silent Listening 2.0 where the spokesperson after the pitch falls silent and dons a mask or turns his back to the listeners who in turn attack (dissent) or suggest (assent) their opinions with brutal honesty yet respectfully. The concept behind turning around or donning a mask also lies in the fact that the attack is supportive and not personal.

Snowden beautifully remarks, “Facilitators who prevent dissent or enforce a regime of positive stories are not doing anyone any favours. They are sacrificing sense-making for senselessness.”

Yay, the milestone to implement the new feature has been achieved, and now it’s time to reveal the promotional poster to the world. My goodness, if you have been into tech communities, I am sure there have been times when designing another random poster would have felt like a waste of time, energy, and especially creative ideas. What if your CRAZY design instincts were turned into cool design sprints?

• Crazy 8s is a brainstorming exercise where one page is divided into 8 parts, the countdown is set for 8 minutes, and the participants compete to outline 8 crazy ideas each on a given topic.

Now, which one is the best? Follow the tactic of the DOT AND VOTE technique.

• As simple as Dot and Vote technique sounds, every member has a fixed number of dots that they can stick next to their favorite ideas, let’s say on a paper or sticky note for their vote to count. The final result favors the idea of having maximum dots, thus saving a lot of time in decision-making.

Though, the dot voting technique was perfectly suited to your quest for finding the best design but would it be apt for determining strategies for your next workshop? Well, to utilize the time efficiently in discussion meetings, the facilitator should opt for the IMPACT-EFFORT-MATRIX.

• Lean Sigma projects suggest an Impact-Effort matrix to visualize where best to assign time and resources and classify each activity into quick wins, major projects, fill-ins, and thankless tasks.

But hey there, did you find something creative, what if this plan doesn’t work out, is there any scope for improvisation, and whatnot, these are some basic sets of questions while prepping up for a workshop. To find possible productive answers, SIX THINKING HATS is one of the ingenious approaches.

• The person facilitating the meeting wears a blue hat and can at any moment invites the group to put on any of the following hats fulfilling specific purposes. The white hat symbolizes bringing up facts, numbers, and objective information regarding the session. Red Hat speaks about your feelings and intuitions. The black hat is the one for criticism, difficulties, or pitfalls in the current plan. Yellow provides new ideas and suggestions to improve the proposal and green, the one with creativity allows saying whatever comes up to your mind. This facilitation technique is an effective parallel thinking process that helps the organizing team to be mindfully involved as a whole.

Ah, here we go again. How many times have you questioned yourself, why on God’s green earth am I frittering away my time with another meeting skeptic? Fret not, you are not alone, my friend. According to research, on average, people spend 37% of their time in regular work meetings but up to 50% of that time is wasted. Do POP this ideology when you organize your next meeting or discussion.

• Leslie Sholl Jaffe & Randy Alford’s understanding of the importance of clarification and articulation of every meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes created the fabulous POP model. A simple yet powerful tool for transformations helps to instill in organizations an ongoing discipline of focusing on results rather than an activity by addressing three questions POP — Purpose, Outcomes, Process, before initiating any meeting.

As a facilitator, make sure your agenda is watertight for turning your workshop skeptics into workshop evangelists when adopting any method. Instead of disregarding them, value their opinions by putting them in the PARKING LOT.

• The parking lot method is nothing but capturing those ideas that drifted from the current agenda yet are creative. Just pen that down on a sticky note and put that on your team’s parking whiteboard to be taken care of at a later stage.

Before we dive into the next facilitation technique, let’s go back to elementary school. Do you remember the TEACH-OK — the whole brain teaching strategy?

• In the whole brain teaching technique of ‘teach ok’, the teacher or facilitator first teaches the concept to a class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other.

Interesting, isn’t it? Why not implement the Teach Ok technique, the next time you are running a peer learning or mentorship circle initiative on Data Structures and Algorithms in your community?

But it’s not necessary that everybody in the community is interested in data structures and algorithms, right? What if somebody is interested in open-source, content writing, or another one wants to discuss any other random technology? It’s fun and simple, host BREAKOUT SESSIONS.

• Breakout sessions are small, less-structured, planned segments of larger agendas that allow attendees to engage with others, as listeners as well as, as speakers. The attendees break out into several rooms of their choice to indulge in lightning talks, AMA(ask me anything) rounds, drop-in discussions, speed networking, or just hang out.

Paint a bigger picture 🖼️

Honestly, it is not apt to refer the word “guys” in a discussion room full of boys and girls. As a facilitator do make sure you use more gender-neutral terms like “folks” or “team”.

One of the most important jobs of a facilitator is to maximize diversity and make them feel included and worthy. To go for the common grounds, a Japanese anthropologist invented the technique of AFFINITY DIAGRAM.

• An affinity diagram is a tool used to organize data gathered from a brainstorming session under meaningful categories that are based on common relationships or themes.

So, why not experiment with Miro or Mural boards when creating an affinity diagram for your upcoming hackathon? Being an organizer, along with ensuring productive planning of your sessions, also makes sure that your attendees, even one out of all learn something valuable in every meeting even if it’s how to operate a collaboration tool.

metaphor intended :P

I am fond of one of its kind variation of this Japanese technique by Jay Vogt and his saying,

We shape our meetings, and they in turn shape us.

Here, the discussion starts with two people having their own goals and aspirations towards the agenda which gets shared with a diverse table. The magical patterns are then categorized on common grounds and put forth as themes on a poster which is then repeated over and over to get a beautiful yet insightful photograph of opinions on the wall.

Another planning support method to expose multiple perspectives on a certain issue with its past perceptions and future possibilities is FUTURE BACKWARDS within the cognitive edge.

• The team members are divided into groups and are given seven colored notes for the current state (CS), turning points backward from CS, utopia, dystopia, turning points backward from utopia, turning points backward from dystopia, and accidents on the dystopian or utopian pathway. They write their every view regarding various stages on hexagon-shaped notes. After the writing part is done, descriptions of the current state are found and placed on the wall or butcher paper. Then the immediate event that affected the current state is identified and pasted to the left of CS. The whole process is repeated and all the teams keep moving backward in this manner. Thereafter, the folks are guided to unleash their creative self to imagine the best-case scenario or utopia and worst-case scenario or dystopia in the future and place those notes in the upper right corner and bottom right corner of CS respectively. Here comes the best part, the teams make utopia happen by connecting the past events with the upper right corner and also figure out what might go wrong by laying pathways for dystopia on the affinity diagram created on the wall. A spokesperson is then chosen from each group to introspect various situations.

These are just a few of the many techniques to solve this facilitation equation. But whatever strategy you adopt for your session in engineering management or otherwise try to leverage ice-breakers involving learning, creativity, and brainstorming into it. Keep looking for tactics to enrich your monotonous meetings by planning your sessions well and piquing the interests of your attendees.

“Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” — Albert Einstein