Prepared originally as a “Lunch and Learn Guide,” you will find twelve MGRUSH Structured Facilitation secrets followed by a thorough explanation of Facilitation’s Secret Sauce. The facilitation secrets are bulleted in alphabetical order, rather than in order of importance. Facilitation’s Secret Sauce provides instruction around leadership, facilitation, and meeting design.

Facilitation Secret — ONE:  

7:59am preparation and interviews 
(i.e., managing expectations and ownership, also true of Facilitation’s Secret Sauce)

• • Comment: There is no ‘silver bullet’ for effective facilitation. If you don’t show up prepared, good luck with that.

Facilitation Secret — TWO:   

Active listening 
(because seeking to understand creates more value than being understood)

• • Comment:  Many understand that reflection is the key. However, reflecting on WHY people make claims is more important than simply repeating the claim.

Facilitation Secret — THREE:   

Annotated agenda
 (i.e., visualizing everything the session leader does or asks in advance)

• Comment:  ‘Right-to-left’ thinking (or ‘starting with the end in mind’) makes demands of the facilitator. You must know what the deliverable looks like for each agenda step, each meeting activity, and each tool. Then write it down, so that you can focus on listening during your meeting or workshop, not thinking about what you should say or do next.

Facilitation Secret — FOUR:  

Common nouns and purpose give rise to natural categories
 (i.e., great tool and inherent rationale that supports grouping or “chunks”)

• Comment:  Neophytes create categories when they probably should dive into the details. Most change occurs with HOW people perform activities, not WHAT they must do. But when categorization is required, building process terms, for example, common nouns are symptomatic or indicative of common purpose, the primary reason for categorization.

Facilitation Secret — FIVE:  

Evaluations 
(i.e., the importance of ongoing feedback to ensure continuous improvement)

• Comment:  Through hours of practice and recorded sessions, MG RUSH five-day professional students receive six pages of individualized, written feedback directed at what they can do differently to be more effective.

Facilitation Secret — SIX:   

Holarchy 
(i.e., interdependent reciprocities—contextual explanation of how it all fits together)

• Comment:  Commonly referred to as the ‘Butterfly Effect’ (mathematically called inter-dependent reciprocities), every action has an impact (positive or negative) on each project or initiative.

Facilitation Secret — SEVEN:   

Life Cycle: Plan ☛ Acquire ☛ Operate ☛ Control
 (i.e., great tool and inherent rationale behind all life cycle methodologies)

• Comment:  While the technology perspective is called CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), here is what the business community does with information. Every process requires four activities, at minimum. Subject matter experts often forget about Planning and Control activities that may be performed less frequently, sometimes only monthly or quarterly.

Facilitation Secret — EIGHT:  

Numeric TO-WS (SWOT) leads to consensual actions [i.e., WHAT]
 (i.e., Easily the best way to prioritize hundreds of items and build consensus around “WHAT” needs to be done to support the purpose)

• Comment: Capable of prioritizing the most complex issues, with dozens of criteria and options, MGRUSH’s proprietary tool and decision-making logic are used in most portfolio and program management offices.

Facilitation Secret — NINE:  

Right-to-left thinking or, focus on the deliverable first
 (i.e., starting with the end in mind—forcing the abstract into the concrete)

• Comment:  Even a lousy facilitator can succeed when they know where they are going and what the group needs to answer and address to get DONE.

Facilitation Secret — TEN:  

“The Purpose is to . . . So That . . . “ (i.e., amazing tool to extract the “strategy” behind something too small for a “strategic plan”)

• Comment:  Easily the favorite new tool for many students and best echoed by an IBM’er with 35 years. “This is the tool I’ve been missing my entire career.”

Facilitation’s secret sauce to leading more effective meetings and workshops reminds us to put a CAP on wasted time and energy by embracing three behaviors:

1. Clear thinking (i.e., yields consciousness)
2. Active listening (i.e., yields competence)
3. Prepared structure (i.e., yields confidence)

Facilitation’s Secret Sauce — Clear Thinking

When you are leading a meeting, it is critical that you know what the group intends to build, decide, or leave with. What was different when they walked into the meeting? The modern leader is a change agent, someone who takes a group from where they are when the meeting begins to where they need to be when the meeting ends. You need to start with the end in mind.

Nobody is smarter than everybody. The modern leader does not have all the answers but takes command of the questions. Through appropriate questions, meeting participants focus and generate supportable answers (or responses).

What does DONE look like? — Leadership Consciousness

Leaders know where they are going. For most meetings, clear thinking and a sense of direction are built in advance. Through preparation, determine and properly sequence well-scripted questions. If you were designing a new home, for example, you would consider the foundation and structure before discussing the color of the grout.

Unclear speaking and writing indicate unclear thinking. Your awareness about where you are leading the group needs to be expressed in writing, for your benefit and the benefit of others. If you are unable to capture the ‘deliverable’ of your meeting or workshop in writing, you are not ready to start your session. Once you can articulate WHY your meeting is important, then you are ready to proceed with the next step. WHAT must you do to be more facilitative?

Facilitation’s Secret Sauce — Active listening

Groups make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group. Why? Because groups, when properly led, are able to create options that did not exist before the individuals walked into the meeting. Input from one participant may cause another to think of something they had not considered before the meeting. For a group of nine people, we are looking for the tenth answer. With strong leadership and a little luck, that answer may also include or instill the spark of innovation.

Ultimately we are not facilitating “words” in a meeting, so much as the meaning behind the words. Obviously, meetings occur without the use of the English language at all. Non-English meetings will still be effective because words are only the tools used by participants to signify their intent, meaning, and relationships behind the words. Subsequently, pictures and models are frequently more effective tools than narrative descriptions.

Be prepared to challenge participants. Active listening is a four-step process that is NOT like having a conversation. In a conversation, we make contact and absorb what the other person is saying. With active listening we need to feed back the reasons for what we have heard, confirm whether we got it right, and challenge for substantive omissions.

Feedback and Confirm

Having a conversation takes less time. Active listening however prevents misunderstanding and can help push the envelope towards options that were previously not considered, thus improving the quality of the decisions made.

Facilitation’s Secret Sauce — Prepared Structure

Ask yourself, would you typically rather attend a two-hour meeting or go to a movie? Most people would rather go to a movie for at least three reasons:

1. Movies include a beginning, a middle, and an end. When did you last attend a meeting without one of those components?
2. Movies embrace conflict. They do not scurry away from conflict; rather they use conflict to make the experience more compelling.
3. Movies do not require involvement. It is easier and less embarrassing to fall asleep at a movie than a business meeting.

A leader should be disciplined and not unstructured. Prepared structure when working with groups, teams, and meetings refers to discipline, or the order of things. The meeting and workshop structure is like a road map for a trip. You can always take the scenic route or a detour, but you need a clear directive to know where to return.

Ironically, the more structured the meeting, the more flexible you can be. Without structure, or a road map, you can never tell exactly where you are, or more importantly, how much remains to be covered. With structure, you can divert from your plan and take the scenic route knowing that if the team runs into a dead end or gets bored with the scenery, you can always return to your map and planned guidance.

Left to their nature, groups tend to start “solving” before they complete proper and rigorous analysis. The leader needs to play the role of a process police person and should never be too nice. Teams do not want a nice leader; they want a leader who will get them where they are going, on time, and within budget. “Nice” can take place after the meeting is over, in a different role.

Naturally, the situation demands professionalism, respect, and common courtesy—but leading is not like having a group of friends, it is a group of associates, bound by a common cause.

Consensus Building

The nature of building consensus mandates that we seek understanding first about WHY we are doing something. If we cannot agree on WHY something is important, it is highly unlikely that you will later arrive at a consensus. We are seeking harmony, or better yet, the harmonization of different notes being played on different instruments—something akin to music, whether a symphony or hip-hop. The leader dictates tempo, volume, and who plays when. The leader does not however pick up an instrument and start playing on behalf of the meeting participants. It is the participants’ responsibility to play their instruments. It is the leader’s responsibility to provide cohesion.

Be a disciplined leader and know your structure before the meeting begins. Once you develop awareness about where you are leading a group, rigorously apply the discipline of structure to decide how you are going to lead them.

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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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