Facilitation

Three truths about your body language

• You do not know what signal you are giving off until you hear other people say it.
• When something feels unnatural, it is because you have not done it often enough.
• You can influence other people’s behaviour by changing your own body language.

Be conscious of your body language

You do not always realise yourself just how much space your habits, stature and position take up in relationships. Therefore, it is necessary to get some feedback, because you only know what signals you are giving off when you hear other people telling you. We all have ingrained and unconscious habits when it comes to how we behave in different situations. That is also true of how our body behaves. As a facilitator, it is therefore helpful to be aware of any tendencies you may have in the way you use your body when you stand in front of the room. Your legitimacy in the room depends very much on your body language and affects the relationship between you and the group. The more aware you become of the effect of your own signals, the more legitimacy, power and credibility you will have.

Our participants should feel seen and heard, sensing that they are playing a key role in the process. We can do this by using open or closed body language. An open body language simply means thinking of yourself as a spotlight: The people to whom you open yourself up physically are the people you illuminate. They get attention and space to develop and grow. The people you physically shut out, you leave in the dark. They do not get attention and will feel that they have to tone themselves down a little. So, when you are facilitating, you should move around in the space, because then you can include all groups and individuals.

Tasks to consider before the meeting starts

• Check the AV equipment
• Distribute materials
• Find out about the practical arrangements (wi-fi, bathrooms, catering etc.)
• Put up posters
• Turn music on
• Distribute name badges
• Make up flipcharts or other aids for the first part of the programme
• Talk to the people who have a role on the day (presenters, managers etc.)

Decisions the group were able to reach, and how I or the “client” feel about them

• Can we expect any kind of ( negative) reaction (from whom and how)?
• Where in the programme could I take more time?
• Where in the programme can I cut down?
• What do I do if I need to turn the energy among the participants up or down?

Be at the forefront

The best thing you can do for yourself is to feel that you are at the forefront with the process and the group. You will automatically have more headroom to pay attention to what is happening in the room and with the participants. The simplest trick for being in the forefront is to arrive in very good time before your meeting or workshop. It seems almost trivial to say it, but it will make a big difference for yourself to get to the venue and have time to make the practical preparations, so you have time and space to say a proper hello to the participants. For the participants, it will also signal importance and control if they come into the room where everything has already been made ready and the facilitator has the time to look up.

Use breaks and group work sessions to get ahead with the next practical elements, unless the breaks or group work sessions have to be used to handle more important things in order for you to achieve the objective (more on dealing with resistance later). It may be helpful to make up flipcharts for the next element, distribute materials, put up displays, move tables etc. while they are doing other things. Some of these tasks will probably be written down in the script already.

Make active use of the script

The script is a good tool for being in the forefront on the day, because you will have thought ahead about how you can make the day go well. This also means that you will have thought about how long the individual agenda items should take, and how they should be addressed. It does not mean that you should keep strictly to your plan without noticing what is going on in the room; quite the opposite. When you facilitate the different parts of the programme, you will quickly be able to see from the script whether you are ahead or behind compared to your own expectations. Hereby, you can start to consider early on in the programme whether you need to cut something out, shorten discussions or prepare some extra tasks or questions.

Take the lead with your own energy

Another very simple thing you can do to perform all day is to take the lead with your own energy. If you do not think of this, you can easily be so preoccupied with the participants, the content, your progress etc. that you use up all your physical resources both in the actual process and in the breaks and forget that you also need to recharge. So, consider when you should not just give off energy but also take it on board.

Physically, this means anything from eating during the day to sitting down from time to time. If you know that your breaks will be used for preparations, bring an energy bar and some fruit so you have an alternative to the afternoon cake that could destroy your blood sugar balance and take away your energy. You may also consider how to recharge mentally – either by going off somewhere for a little peace and quiet or by sitting down to lunch with others and talking about something quite different. You should also think about how to deal with emails, mobile calls and private matters, so they are not a stress factor during the day.

The task

The skilled facilitator focuses on content and process at the same time. We will now drill down into the general areas you can work on to keep on top of the “task”. In the appendix, you will find more on various process methods and how you can use specific methods to guide things towards your objective of the day.

In order to succeed in the task, you must:

1. Communicate simply, both in your presentation of content and in your instructions on tasks.
2. Create progress and meaning for the participants, so they are all on board, fully focused and can see that they are making a difference.
3. Be able to listen and ask good questions.

The American psychologist and jazz musician Frank Barrett 8 often uses the expression Say yes to the mess to describe what a good manager should be able to do. The expression comes from the world of jazz where a skilled jazz musician simply has to accept and go along with what happens as the music unfolds, rather than opposing it by going his own way or egotistically playing his own instrument and chord sheet. With this quotation in mind, it is easier for a facilitator to accept that we cannot control everything. So, say yes to the mess and get good at navigating through the unpredictable things, which processes that involve people will always be. As with good jazz musicians, this demands a lot of training and a clear idea of the underlying melody you are improvising on. Transferred to a facilitation context, it is then your basic design in the form of the script that sets the tune, and success in the facilitation task depends on your ability to generate interplay and fine music on the day.

Tips & tricks

1. Start by considering what is the fundamental message and idea in the presentation – what do you hope to achieve with it, and what will the participants find especially interesting?
2. Produce an overall storyboard – what is the conclusion from the individual slides/flipchart pages? You can do this with Post-It Notes or by taking a piece of paper and dividing it into nine boxes.
3. Put active headings on each slide to support the conclusion.
4. Build up each slide/page with a logical flow from left to right and top to bottom. Use as few words as possible – pictures and figures say more than a lot of words. Keep your slides as simple as possible without talking down to the participants. 

Communicate simply

To complete the task, all participants must be fully focused. Two of the most essential areas to ensure that the participants are on board with the process are when to communicate content and when to issue instructions.

In almost all meetings and workshops, there is a need to communicate some content for the participants to use in the subsequent process. In the strictest sense, other people will be responsible for this part, but if you have no content presentations to give in the course of the day, you can use these tips and tricks to encourage your speakers, so they deliver tight presentations that the participants find meaningful and appropriate.

Issue clear and simple instructions

To prevent misunderstandings and confusion among the participants, it is important to issue precise instructions for tasks or exercises. A precise instruction will increase the participants’ motivation to do the exercise and ensure that it hits its target in terms of learning. We always advise you to start by explaining the purpose of the task. This gives the participants time to switch on to why we are doing it before you explain how. Apart from ensuring that the participants are ready to listen, it will also help to increase their understanding of how important the coming task is. You should always explain the task orally and have something written down to support your instruction (PowerPoint instructions, flipchart or flashcards), so people can see visually what you are explaining and have something to refer to later as they tackle the task. As a general rule, a good instruction will answer the following questions to the right.

You should also consider the order within your instruction to maximise the chances of people following. Most people cannot remember more than three instructions at a time, so give out a written instruction sheet to the group for more complex tasks. But always have in mind to try to make a logical flow and row order in your instructions.

Create progress and meaning

Creating meaning means being crystal clear about the purpose of the process and being able to communicate it to the participants so they can clearly see the sense and relevance behind their own participation. This requires you to put yourself in the participants’ place and to have thought carefully beforehand about “what’s in it for them?”. Why have these particular people been invited today, and why is this process relevant to them as individuals?

Look at the facilitator’s checklist below for ways of making clear sense of the process to the participants. It is not only important to create meaning for the participants at the start of the session; it is equally important to make a relevant connection between the present process and the overall purpose of the session, so the participants are led by the hand all the way through the various subprocesses and can clearly see the relevance. It is also essential as a facilitator to make sense of the participants’ different views and attitudes, so they gain fresh insights into each other and the content they are working on.

With your introduction, you should:

• Tell the participants about the purpose and deliverables from the session – what is to happen at the meeting or workshop, and what is the programme of the day?
• Generate enthusiasm among the participants in relation to the benefit to them of taking part in the session – what is the overall objective to be achieved, and how does it affect them?
• Empower the participants by making it clear that their presence is important if you are to achieve the right result. Why were they chosen, and what role are they to play in the process?
• Who can take decisions, and how will we do this?

A facilitated session will often be broken down into different miniprocesses (from one programme item to another on the agenda) where the participants work with different methods. Each mini-process starts with an update on where you are in the programme and the aim of the new process which is about to start. You can do this by establishing regular checkpoints:

• Review: Brief review of what has been done so far.
• Next step: Brief description of what is to be done in the next session in relation to the agenda.
• Explain the big picture: How do the next session and task fit into the overall purpose of the process for the day and the organisation’s goals?

As the facilitator, it is also your responsibility to help the group through the various subprocesses, so the right decisions are taken, and everyone has a sense of ownership of the decisions that have been taken. To this end, we have produced a number of good tips that facilitators can usefully consider in relation to their role on the day.

• Be inclusive – give everyone a chance to speak or explain why they cannot if that is the situation.
• Only ask one question at a time.
• Ask open questions. They (mostly) start with “wh-“ and cannot be answered with “yes” or “no”.
• Ask questions for which there is no single right answer.
• Ask focused questions that direct the discussion towards the objective.
• Preserve your neutrality – keep a sharp eye on your own interpretation and use of emotive words.
• Give the participants time to reflect and answer.

As participants, we cannot always answer very direct and “upfront” questions such as: “What has been your best experience of our internal collaboration in the department?”. This question is OK, but we can do more to get the group to associate, for example, by applying the approach above.

Every facilitated session needs to start with a good opening question which puts an image in the participants’ heads and prepares them to be able to answer and reflect on the question that you are asking.

Let’s take an example:

“Think of the last time you were on holiday and had a really good time. Think about the activities you were involved in: what did you do? Who was involved in the activities? What were the things you enjoyed most? Let’s write a list of things we like to do when we are on holiday.’

What you can do:

• Start with an opening question that produces an image: Think about …/Imagine …/What if …
• Expand the image so the participants can see the answer for themselves. This will normally take 2-3 follow-up sentences.
• End with a direct question.

Ask good opening questions (Source: Wilkinson, 2004)

Listen and ask good questions

The good question – the facilitator’s most important tool to help the process along.

The facilitator should have an arsenal of good questions to help the process along. Opening questions, processgenerating questions and follow-up questions. The facilitator should also be aware of the kind of answers these questions generate. The answers are only as good as the questions being asked. Be clear about the aim of your question – where do you want to take the group?

Asking good questions is a training discipline in itself, and there are many different theories you can apply that take us over into more of a coaching tradition.

Below we have selected a number of question types which will take you a long way in your facilitation practice. Let us start with the opening question.

• A good opening question will start the group off in the right direction.
• A good opening question is important for the group to be able to head in the right direction. You can work at framing your opening questions to raise various ideas and associations.

Ask questions that reveal different perspectives (preferences)

The HBDI’s Whole Brain model is a preference model. Nevertheless, we find it essential to use the model as a framework for a number of good, generic process questions. Precisely because it covers the four very different preferences, the questions that we ask on the basis of these preferences will also be different, with different objectives, so they can be used to ensure that we have “asked around” the problem.

• Questions for the rational preference are aimed at revealing facts. These relate to the situation right now and also to what happened earlier, what facts we have about the present, and what we hope to achieve. Questions based on this preference will therefore be “what” questions.
• Questions for the practical preference are aimed at identifying practical details. Here, we are looking for answers to the question “How?”. How the plan, the implementation and the organisation should look, and how we propose to do things in practice.
• Questions for the experimental preference are aimed at examining possibilities. Here, we are concerned with finding fresh solutions, ideas and alternatives to what is in place and hence challenging the status quo and asking “Why?”.
• Questions for the relational preference are aimed at examining similarities and differences. The questions will try to bring out different views and attitudes and identify areas of agreement and disagreement in order to gather them into a collective solution. The typical questions will then be “Why?”.

Asking good process questions is a discipline in itself and does not come without a good dose of training so you have a lot of different questions at hand. A good tip is to be curious about what the participants are saying, get them to expand on their ideas and respond to them.

The art of listening

As a facilitator, you need the ability to listen if you are to ask probing questions. You should be able to reformulate what has just been said, and you should be able to take the discussion forward by asking fresh questions. Being a good listener means focusing on the message as a whole, not only the words, AND being able to be quiet, not take the focus and be genuinely interested in the topic.

GROUP

At the end of the day, both you and your planned process could be irrelevant if the participants are not on board, because they are the people it is all about and who need to create something through the process. We will now focus especially on how you, the facilitator, can help the group to manage the energy in the group and handle resistance/power in the room.

Help the group

Group composition for optimum collaboration

You can deliberately place the participants where you think it is most advantageous. In smaller groups, for example, you can make place cards for the participants if you want them either to sit in special groupings or to be spread out. For larger processes with multiple tables, you can ask them to take a table number when they come into the room. This gives you the maximum mix of participants at each table, while they themselves know that the allocation has not been managed. You may also consider who can usefully work together in the course of the day, and you can plan the breakdown of participants into groups beforehand. Apart from helping to produce good co-operation, this can also be a way of preventing resistance.

Check in with the group

When a group has been set to work on a task, you should go and talk to them within the first 15-20 minutes. You should allow enough time for them to get into the task, but not so long that they might have gone too far in the wrong direction. If there are several groups, and particularly if they have been sent to other rooms, it is especially important for you to go out to them and see how they are getting on. It is quite a defeat for the group to realise that they have not understood the task, or that things are not working, if they have to send a participant out to look for you instead of you coming to them. When you come out to them, your job is just to listen and observe, unless they themselves ask you for help. Note how they are getting on as a team and whether you need a small intervention to push them in the right direction or to move forward, possibly with a little appreciative comment.

The group’s ground rules as guiding principles for co-operation

It can be a very good idea to draw up some ground rules at the first meeting in an extended series of meetings or workshops. This will invite the participants into the process and give them a share of the responsibility for the success of the process. The ground rules are also there to quickly establish a group standard to be upheld by all participants. In other words, the facilitator will have greater legitimacy from being able to refer to a set of shared ground rules, and, better still, the group will often establish sanctions against each other on their own initiative if these rules are broken.

Examples of ground rules defined by the group at the first meeting under your skilled facilitation might be:

1. When we are here, we are here – mentally too. This means that we read emails and texts and answer calls in the breaks.
2. We arrive on time and return from breaks on time.
3. We come prepared to the meetings.
4. We respect majority decisions. This means backing the decisions taken in a democratic manner, even if we do not agree with them.
5. We accept that the facilitator may cut us short to keep us on track.

These ground rules will help to keep everyone on track, particularly if conflicts arise along the way. If you have a long series of meetings or workshops, it may be good practice to display the rules in the room and revisit and evaluate during the process. Are they still the right rules, or should they be added to and amended slightly, and how well are they being complied with?

Decision-making power

You can help the group by making it clear how decisions are taken in the workshop. Is it the manager who takes the decision, does the manager have a veto, is it the majority that decides, or does there has to be consensus? The format will depend both on the organisational culture and norms and on the nature and status of the project.

Manage the energy in the group

It is your responsibility as facilitator to ensure that the energy is at the right level. This does not mean that the level has to be high all the time, but that you are responsible for matching the energy to the content and the tasks the group is to work on.

Turn the energy level up and down

You can turn the energy level up and down in many ways. The most common is to use little energizers: small tasks with or without any technical content which generate energy in the group in 5-10 minutes. Our experience shows that you can get most people engaged in (almost) all sorts of processes and energizers, provided that the objective is well-defined and clear to the group and you yourself believe in what you are doing. So, you should always have a battery of energizers in your back pocket which you are comfortable with and which you can easily pull out when you need to change the energy level in the room.

The process methods that you planned in your preparatory phase can also help to turn the energy up or down by creating variation in content or form. A classic example is the café method or carousel where people are divided into small groups, go off to small workstations and, after an agreed time, rotate to a fresh task, a new table lead and perhaps even a new way of tackling the task. There are many methods of this kind to ensure that people move around and get a fresh focus by tackling different tasks.

If you sense that there is a need to change the energy level, back your intuition and do something about it. Apart from an energizer, you can also call a break, air the room, alter the format (get them to stand up more or go for a walk), or make up new groups to produce the necessary change in energy. However, this may not always work, most likely because of something other than tiredness in the participants.

When the energy in the participants turns negative

Negative energy (or resistance from the participants) in processes manifests itself in many ways. Part of the negative energy comes from us as facilitators, and part of it is down to the participants’ mutual relationships, culture and values, or it may be due to the pace of change in the organisation.

You can be sure that quite a lot of your processes will involve one or more difficult participants who challenge either you or the process or otherwise make life hard for you or the group. If you are aware of this fact, it may be easier to accept. When we bring people together on topics that mean something to them, we will experience reactions that may seem more or less appropriate or rational from the facilitator’s point of view. Our advice is therefore to accept difficulties and resistance from the participants as a fact of life in many processes and to have the will and skills to handle them, so they do not destroy the process for yourself or for the group. Remember the definition: Helping groups do better. You are there to help a group to achieve a result, so they need your ability to lead the meeting and hence also your ability to handle any conflicts that may arise along the way.

The expression of negative energy may be both passive and active:

Passive negative energy: Participants who do not engage with the process are generally silent, do other work, say one thing and do something else, do not take part in the discussion either verbally or in their body language etc.

Active negative energy: Participants who challenge your facilitation directly, talk a lot and at length, check their emails or leave the room early, talk on the phone, speak out of turn, talk to their neighbour etc.

It is important to be aware that this sort of negative energy (passive or active) can arise both consciously and unconsciously, and that it is always a symptom of an underlying problem (the root cause). It is the underlying problem that we need to react to rather than its expression in the form of negative energy.

The most important thing for us is to see that the negative atmosphere may reflect both energy and engagement, that it is often natural, and we need to be curious about it if it disturbs our process or the participants.

There is always a good reason why people act as they do

Many workshops and meetings are held as part of large change activities or projects where the participants in the process are also the target group most affected by the change – both positively and negatively. By their nature, change projects mean that when the project is implemented we will be doing something different from what we did before and that we have to change our behaviour or work in new ways. This can provoke quite natural resistance in the participants, and it is often in workshops and meetings that this resistance is able to come out into the open. So, it is our responsibility as facilitators to handle this resistance.

Our brains are liable to perceive external changes as threats

To examine the reasons why negative energy manifests itself, we will use the SCARF® model developed by David Rock and Christine Cox. This provides a number of answers to what purely neurophysiological events take place in our brains when we are subjected to external changes.

The SCARF® model was developed from brain-based research and can make us more alert to emotional reactions to things like change processes. The model can therefore help you to understand what lies behind the resistance or negative energy and/or reaction you are experiencing from the participants in a process.

The model describes five fundamental emotional reactions, which are activated to a greater or lesser degree when we are subjected to an external influence, and which have a crucial bearing on whether we associate the new with acceptance or aversion.

• Status: This concerns the effect of the process on a person’s status in the organisation. If the process causes a person to lose prestige or to surrender some tasks to others or causes some areas to be downgraded etc., you may experience reactions in your process that are related to this.
• Certainty: This concerns the extent to which one can predict what will happen as a result of the process and the change. If it entails lay-offs, transfers, new work activities, new organisation structures etc., you may experience reactions related to this factor in your process.
• Autonomy: This is about the degree of influence people have on changes that affect them; whether they have a say in things, and whether they are involved in decisions and consultations. If the change does not allow any autonomy along the way, you may experience reactions linked to this factor in your process.
• Relatedness: This concerns the degree of trust in others involved in the process and who a person has faith in. If the process challenges this sense of relatedness, for example, manager/employee or employee/ employee, you may experience reactions linked to this in your process.
• Fairness: This is about whether a change is seen to be fair or unfair. If the process means that someone feels unfairly treated or thinks that the conditions are unequally shared out, you may experience reactions to this factor in your process.

The SCARF® model is thus a good framework to have in processes to help you understand why some participants are reacting as they are, whether consciously or unconsciously. Asking yourself during the workshop, “Will this process provoke one or more SCARF® reactions, and how can I prevent or handle them?”, will help you a lot. If your process is part of a change project in which the participants are expected to change their behaviour, you may like to use the diagram below to analyse and be more aware of their reactions and form an impression of what you can do to address these (figure 16).

Handle resistance and power

– Handle the negative energy (resistance) in processes

The participants who express negative energy or create difficulties in a process always have a reason to do so. The resistance may not always relate directly to the facilitated session or to you, but it may be due to other factors triggered by the process which cause the participant to react in a particular way. As the facilitator, you are the professional and therefore the person who has to ensure that the negative energy does not prevent the group from achieving its objective. The all-important thing is therefore that you do not allow the disruptions to grow too much but react and behave in a way that generates more positive energy for the process.

In figure 17, we have tried to show how you can prevent resistance from arising and also to offer some techniques to use in the process when you experience negative energy.

Prevention

As the facilitator, you have major influence over the group process, including the way in which you facilitate the flow of discussion and the work of the group. Here, the design star and your script are two preventive initiatives that can help to ensure that you have planned and thought about possible difficulties or resistance from the participants.

You should obtain all the information you can about the group and its attitude to the subject of the workshop.

In your preparation, you can anticipate a lot of things that could later disrupt the process. You can prevent resistance by actively using the objective of the process, preparing or returning to agreed ground rules or by reminding people of the agreed role you have in terms of leading the process.

Finally, you can establish a “parking lot”, which is a good way of forestalling possible disruptions. A parking lot allows the facilitator to “park” topics or questions and take them up later. In this way, you acknowledge the input and show the participant that you have listened and are happy to note it down for another occasion. Remember to follow up on the point, or it will be seen as a tedious diversionary manoeuvre.

Radar

As a facilitator, you must be able to operate at two levels while the process is under way: in the process and above the process.

In the process is when you are actively facilitating and focused on running the meeting.

Above the process is when you are focused on decoding energy, atmosphere and changes (figure 17).

This means that while you are facilitating the process, you need to drive it forward, guide, listen and ask questions to the participants (i.e. be in the process) while also placing yourself above the process. This is where you can watch and relate to the process from the outside or from above and reflect on whether it is going as intended: “Is everyone engaged?”, “Are we on the right track?”, “Do we need to change anything?”, “What about the person with his arms folded?”, “Should I react, and how ...?”. It is complicated to be in both places, but nevertheless this is what a skilled facilitator must be able to do.

If you have several facilitators, you can help each other to pick up the energy in the room. The person who is not “on” can more easily sit above the process, observe the participants and notice the atmosphere in the room.

Before you take action in response to perceived negative energy, it may be helpful to direct your radar inwards at yourself and outwards at the participants. Are you yourself (unintentionally) causing something? And what about the participants: what are they making you feel? Needless to say, it will never be your intention to create resistance, but you may be there representing a particular department or project or as “one of those people from central management”, and this in itself may provoke resistance from some participants. In this case, a systematic approach to looking at ourselves and the reaction that we as facilitators may provoke in others can be beneficial as we believe that resistance arises in relationships, and the trust equation can help you to create more trusting relationships in the longer term.

Action

Even if you have taken preventive action based on a good design star and a detailed script and followed all the rules of conduct that you can, unforeseen situations are still likely to arise in the process. Resistance that you did not know existed may rise to the surface or be triggered by the process.

Below are a number of examples of different types of resistance and suggestions for how to handle them. However, it is always important to be careful when you react to resistance. There is no single answer to whether you should always react and take action on a few folded arms, for example. You have to weigh up whether it is a passing thing, and how much it disrupts your process or the other participants. However, we would sooner recommend that you take action rather than leaving things as they are. This will create respect for you as a facilitator, and it may make it easier to manage the process, provided that you do it in a constructive way. If you find that one or two participants are checking emails during the process, it is not certain that this should be seen as resistance. There is no reason to create problems. It is worth noting, however, that any disruption attracts and diverts attention. If the disruption is noticed by a few people for a short time, we recommend letting it pass. A good tip is always to listen to your gut feeling. To prevent resistance, you could:

• If the energy level is low, throw in an energizer.
• Take an extra break and air the room.
• Let the participants move around the room. Physical changes also produce mental changes, so start up plenum or breakout sessions or send the participants out on a walk and talk exercise.
• Address the resistance 1:1 in a break rather than in front of all the other participants; this is the most respectful way.

Be curious and “go along with” the resistance rather than stand against it

When you encounter resistance in processes, we firmly believe that you should be curious and questioning rather than confrontational. A curious approach to what you are experiencing is more respectful and is less likely to make the resistance worse. You may often want to defend yourself and start to explain and argue against direct resistance. However, the risk in defence and counter-argument is either that you will merely shut the participant up temporarily or that you will invite further discussion, which is not always helpful. One of our colleagues refers to going with rather than against resistance when you take a curious attitude.

Be aware of and handle the power in the room

To ensure that the process achieves its objective, it is essential to be aware of and to handle the power in the room, so it does not provide a basis for resistance. Most obviously, it is vital to handle formal power by being clear to the group about the decision-making process and authority and confirming progress with the manager in the breaks or by involving the manager in the process. As a facilitator, you may quite unconsciously look too much at the formal power, which is something you should try to avoid as it is easy to make the others in the group feel (even) less important.

There will often be participants with informal power in the room too who need to have more or less chance to speak. Sometimes you know in advance who they are and what they will say, while there will be other situations where you can see it in the group dynamics – some of them command more attention when they speak, take the lead in the exercises (or take it from others in the group) etc.

A third area in which you may handle power is the “power to set the agenda”. As a facilitator, you can determine the order of the items on the agenda. This is an implicit power, which you need to exercise fairly and be aware can provoke resistance.

The last type of power in the room is the “power of the pen” – the power held by the person wielding the pen. This lies in the fact that you have power when gathering points on a flipchart and when you write up the notes afterwards. If you are gathering points on a flipchart, be careful to use the same words as the participants. If you write different words, you can easily encounter resistance, because the participants feel that you have your own agenda or are interpreting their words. If you disagree with what they say, ask good questions or write it up and ask the other participants whether they agree – then you can cross out or elaborate afterwards. If you think a participant is being unclear or long-winded, ask them for help: “How can I write down your point in one sentence?”. You can then write down verbatim what was said, and, as a side effect, it will be clear to all what the point is.

The “during” phase, i.e. your actual facilitation, will only be successful if it works in conjunction with a thorough “before” phase (design and planning) and a properly considered “after” phase (implementation and effect). You will be well on the way to becoming an excellent facilitator if you have already mastered the “before” and “during” phases. But the crucial thing in order for your facilitation to produce the desired effect – in the longer term too – is the “after” phase. This is described in the next chapter.

AFTER Implementation and influencing behaviour

The “after” phase is designed in the “before” phase. Implementation and follow-up should be designed right back in the “before” phase. Here, a set of good checking questions may be a help:

• What happens after today?
• How do we make use of the results of the workshop?
• Who should be involved in the process from here onwards?
• Who should be presented on the day as the person to take this forward?
• What decisions have a go or no go, so the participants do not spend time on something that cannot be changed?
• What should be the format of the documentation? Minutes, film, posters?

Sometimes the purpose is not to reach an actual decision at a workshop, but for the results of the workshop to serve as input to further decisions. This is true, for example, of many idea development processes where the participants provide input to a group or a project leader who proceeds to qualify the ideas. This further work has to be planned, and it should be clear to the participants who have contributed their ideas and what they can expect to happen with their input.

We may be inclined to surrender the responsibility when we get this far as the great expenditure of energy happens “during”, i.e. as you facilitate your process. We believe you should work not just to conserve energy and momentum but also to ensure that the energy level rises after the process, so the process itself is not the high point. This is illustrated in figure 18.

We believe that if your workshop or meeting is to have a real effect and deliver value, your facilitator role has to continue into the “after” phase. In the “during” phase, you helped the group to reach a specific objective. In the “after” phase, you have to help the organisation to realise the effect of the process, so your role is to facilitate the implementation of the solutions kick-started by the process. Of course, not all processes call for implementation plans and major changes of behaviour, so you need to assess and adapt the follow-up work according to what is needed.

As a follow-up to the good workshop or process you have helped the group with, it is therefore especially important to think of what is to happen “after”. If you do not follow up on “the good day”, you will not get the desired effect, and “the day” will remain at best “an event”. In the worst case, failure to follow up will undermine trust in the management and/or the project, which in turn will make it even harder to get the participants to contribute in the next workshop.

We believe that there are two “after” processes that you need to be very firm about in order to take the process to its final conclusion.

1. Immediately after
2. 1-3 months after

We always recommend incorporating the “after”/follow-up perspective into your design in your “before” phase. This is to target the process at your follow-up activities and to be aware of what should be communicated to the participants immediately afterwards. The participants will often have a role to play in the follow-up activities too, so it is important to communicate this to them on the actual day.

Immediately after the process (1-3 days)

• Documentation of the process via, for example, decision documents, notes, pictures, interviews etc.
• High speed of follow-up – so you preserve the atmosphere and energy you had in the process. Display output, put up pictures and upload video documentation from the process to the intranet.
• Obtain feedback on your process from the participants and any co-facilitators. How did they find it? What worked well? What could have been different? What should be changed for the next time?

1-3 months after the process

The individual process will often be part of a prolonged procedure with activities before and after it. The idea of a series of workshops and meetings taking place over an extended period can be illustrated with the figure that was introduced in the beginning (figure 4). Here, we see a circular process where the “after” phase takes us into a new context-defining phase, which then continues into a “before” phase, etc.:

By planning what is to happen after your workshop, you can communicate clearly to the participants what they can expect from the subsequent process. This will give the participants a feeling of time well spent, and the sense that their contribution has had an effect. These are all important elements if you need to involve them again. Things you need to consider are:

• Formal organisation of the follow-up, continuation and possible implementation of the results. What is the division of roles? Who is to do what and when? Mobilisation of the key players who are to support the implementation, such as managers and employees, often takes place in the “before” phase, and they will often have a role on the day as table facilitators or presenters.
• Visual plan showing the way forward.
• Short and intense implementation rather than a lengthy process with the resources spread thinly, so you maintain momentum and energy.

Rapid actions

A study by the journal “Arbejdsglæde Nu” shows that just 25% of people attending meetings feel that action has been taken on the decisions taken at these meetings.

This is shocking, and it is dreadful when you consider how much time we spend in meetings and workshops. Your participants will definitely have busy lives with lots of tasks and meetings, and the pace will certainly be hot, with one task overlapping with the next. When the participants leave your workshop, they will probably have moved on to another task in their minds or be on their way to another meeting. The fact that employees and managers live hectic lives and almost always have limited time is something you therefore need to consider as a basic condition when you design the follow-up to the process.

Ensure that the quality of the documentation is satisfying

One element that can enable people to act is that you have provided for good documentation of the process. This is a particular challenge in processes where we have the participants working on a topic in small groups, so that, as facilitators, we cannot listen everywhere at once.

All too often, the documentation of group tasks and breakout sessions, for example, is in the nature of succinct key words and notes that do not make sense, unless you took part in the discussion yourself. The purpose of involving the participants is then lost, as the material that is meant to provide a basis for the rest of the project or work is quite simply too scanty. So, it is your responsibility as facilitator to assure the quality of the documentation, so it can be used afterwards.

What you can do

Design templates (posters, sheets, A3 pages) for the participants to make notes in. This will enable you to control the questions that the participants are answering as you can put a question at the top and specify that they should write full sentences, indicate how much to write and ask them to put their initials on the paper so you can refer to them afterwards if you need to clarify their points.

Nominate table facilitators/table leads who should be invited to a preliminary meeting at which they are equipped for the role and told how the documentation should be set out to deliver the right quality.

Ensure that the suggested solutions are prioritised (quickly)

If your process ends up with a number of suggestions, ideas or input which you need to take a view on quickly, it may be a good idea to prepare how this is to be done and by whom. A manager or project leader who signs off input throughout the day and finishes the day by communicating which suggestions are to be taken forward will have a powerful effect in terms of action and implementation. If this is not possible, be sure to have these things resolved as soon as possible after the process. “As soon as possible” means the next day, or no more than three days later. This is especially important if you have participants who are to do more work on the input from the process and so depend on decisions and priorities in order to move forward. You need to keep the (hopefully) good energy from the workshop alive in them by reacting quickly. The most important thing to bear in mind here is that a lack of feedback, priorities or communication from you, the manager or the project leader is also a signal that can cause the project to stagnate.

Influence new behaviour

Change with impact is what we are after in all the projects and processes we are involved in with our clients. We take this phrase seriously in relation to facilitating processes too. Producing change with impact does not happen by itself. There are many ways of doing this, and we recognise that in projects that are concerned with training and learning new skills there are plenty of other methods, including technology and apps, online learning and work on habits as the key to influencing behaviour.

As the facilitator of the process, you should always agree with the organisation on how long your responsibility for implementation is to continue. If it ends with you sending out the plan for the way forward, we recommend that you insist on being involved in deciding how the organisation can proceed with the implementation for your process to deliver real value. There is no doubt that many processes do not achieve the intended effect, precisely because this important “after” phase is overlooked or handed over to the local departments and managers in the organisation who may not have had any sense of ownership of the process and may now feel like hostages forced to implement a solution they do not feel equipped for.

When the documentation is in place and the follow-up has been communicated to the participants, there is thus still work to do to influence, maintain or bring about new behaviour or new ways of acting, which your process has helped to kick-start. Particularly in processes which are part of a programme, a project or a change process, you need to help the organisation to realise the effect of the programme. If you generally facilitate ordinary meetings, some of them will also call for the participants to do something different or new afterwards, even if it is not the really big transformation.

What you can do

Implementation plans are good for providing an overview and common direction for a change, and we believe that they are necessary to a successful implementation of new behaviour. However, we should be aware of the inadequacy and rigidity of plans when we have to deal with people and their behaviour. Here, we cannot always count on a dead straight process where everything goes as planned; rather, we have to adapt the process as we go along and look for alternative ways if we want to make genuine changes. Your plans should therefore contain more than just the traditional deliverables where the change is communicated via managers, ambassadors or the like.

Consider making use of the informal organisation as the key to implementing changes rather than the formal one.

The idea is therefore:

1. To make much greater use of the people in the organisation that others trust and who can influence other people. This group is not always large, but far more effective. You could also call them the informal opinion formers or influencers, and they can be found in almost all departments. The point is that small changes among few employees will quickly spread to many.
2. To produce stories in collaboration with the informal opinion formers. The stories of change will produce themselves anyway if we as a project group or as managers, for example, do not step in, and it is not always the positive stories that arise of their own accord. On the contrary, they often contain misunderstandings of the communication the project has disseminated, with speculations and sometimes unnecessary concerns.
3. To use distributed (shared) management to handle communication and training of new behaviour in preference to classroom training and large-scale meetings. It could also take the form of “elevator talk” about the project, “homework exercises” where people interview others in the organisation or gather knowledge or statements about the project etc.

When you look ahead to a new “before” phase, a number of elements that you need to address will automatically announce themselves:

• Feedback and learning on the “before-during-after” cycle. You can ask for feedback from the participants and your partners. This may be done more or less formally. Either at the end of the meeting or via an email requesting feedback, or via an evaluation meeting where you facilitate a dialogue about learning and improvements.
• Communication and reporting on status and results: How do we communicate the follow-up from the last workshop and the actions that were initiated?
• Production of a new design star for the next workshop.

Good preparation is essential – the rest you just have to plunge into

This article has provided a number of suggestions on how to prepare and handle in practice different types of group processes and meetings carried out in organisations today. Everybody who has conducted group processes knows that it is an art in itself to get a group to become the best version of themselves. However, when it is successful, it is a fantastic experience. Both for the group and the results delivered as well as for the person helping the group in this process. Facilitation is a craft that must be learnt, and it takes more than one shot. Becoming a skilled facilitator calls for training and patience. Facilitation is not something you can learn from a textbook. The best advice is to simply plunge into it, gain experience with what works and does not work and get feedback on your role, style and methods.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: A group process is defined as a meeting between a group of people with a work-related purpose. The process result or end deliverable may be determined in advance, for example: ”We are to generate at least five ideas for implementation of a new salary model”. The specific content of the deliverable, i.e. the five ideas, will be created during the process and in the interaction between the members of the group.

Footnote 2: Facilitation can with great advantage be thought into a number of everyday meetings, for example, the weekly departmental meeting, sales meetings at customers, information meetings, job interviews, workshops (300-500 people), project team meetings, steering committee meetings, conferences and other events. For information about other meeting types that can be facilitated (see appendix).

Footnote 3: For further information about the role of trainer or adviser, please refer to the articles ”Projektlederen som forandringskonsulent” by Henrik Horn Andersen and ”Effektfuld træning” by Cecilie van Loon.

Footnote 4: A large number of tools and methods exist for identifying and understanding the participants’ and the organisation’s ways of thinking and acting, for example, Whole Brain, DISC, FIRO-B®, MBTI®, Dunn & Dunn, Insight or Belbin.

Footnote 5: For further elaboration on the involvement techniques (see appendix).

Footnote 6: Experiments with stand-up meetings show, however, that the meetings will be shorter, but that the quality of the decisions made will not be better when standing instead of sitting (Ravn, 2011).

Footnote 7: Find out more from samtalekunst.dk or lenekobbernagel.dk. We would especially recommend her article “Activate your non-verbal language” – an article on the conscious use of body language and space to master interaction at meetings and workshops and on training days (Implement Consulting Group, 2014).

Footnote 8: Frank Barrett, PhD is Associate Professor of Management and Organization Behavior at the Naval Postgraduate Academy.