A primary concern in meetings and information-gathering activities is getting good information—to build the right product the first time—and to make well-informed decisions. Significant trends show that groups are embedding the role of ‘facilitator’ in the culture and health of modern, especially holistic, organizations.  Therefore, take strides to avoid poor facilitation.

“Perversely, organizations with the best human resource departments sometimes have less effective teams. That’s because HR tends to focus on improving individual rather than team behavior.”

— Diane Coutu, HBR, May 2009, pg 99

Successful Meetings Demand Collaboration and Avoid Poor Facilitation

Group decision-making processes are more prevalent than ever. Intellectual capital is critical to the growth and profit of service organizations. Manufacturers are becoming “infomediaries” and sourcing production based on worldwide, not parochial, views. Innovation determines the future prosperity of most organizations:

Meta-trends Demand Facilitative Leadership

• Cultural modernization—the basic tenets of modern cultures include equality, personal freedom, and individual requirements.
• Economic globalization—In developed economies, where formal institutions sustain order and predictability, consensus is critical to survival.
• Universal connectivity—information technology continues to inundate us with capabilities and the “death of distance” when we can find what we need.
• Transactional transparency—ubiquitous computing and comprehensive electronic documentation make leaders and decision-makers exposed.
• Individual limitations—empirical evidence that groups make higher quality decisions and are better at addressing more difficult or complex challenges.

Problems With Poor Facilitation

Decision-making and information-gathering share two problems:

• The first is the communication gap between those who have the information (e.g., information technology) and those who need to use it to build something (eg, business community or product development).
• The invariable power struggle between the players involved exacerbates poor facilitation. Egos make building consensus a significant challenge.

Power Struggles With Poor Facilitation

The power struggles between various departments or business units are often the result of language differences. Frequently, power struggles are not intentional but occur because of differing perspectives around the same issue. Reconciliation may be critical to organizational success, particularly for proactive organizations that want to lead change rather than be changed.

Errors & Omissions Through Poor Facilitation

The most effective way to reduce the cost of reaching objectives is to reduce errors and omissions. Groups recall and remember more than individuals and are capable of using their input to create an integrative response. Consensus helps prevent errors, but more importantly, it helps prevent omissions.

Help Needed to Avoid Poor Facilitation

Numerous analytical methodologies, design methodologies, life cycle techniques, etc., have evolved to address errors in the planning and development phase. While methodologies work well in analysis and design, they have not successfully addressed the information gathering necessary to gather effective and timely input.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.