We encourage professional facilitators to carry a toolbox. Include some intervention devices when you need to shake up your participants. Be prepared to challenge groupthink if you start hearing things like . . .

• That will never change.

• We don’t do things like that around here.

• etc.

. . . then you may want to jolt your participants. We have covered similar exercises in other Best Practices articles such as “Four Dots” and “Bookworm”. Here is another example that is quick, simple, and effective. Some call it the “Spot.”

Groupthink: Your Goal

To shake up a paradigm, challenge groupthink. Otherwise, get your participants to focus on the CONTEXT of something in addition to the CONTENT.

Groupthink: One Halting Method

Using a large flip chart, or distributing white sheets of paper, place a small, colored spot or a few colored spots on the paper. Ask the participants to indicate what they see on the paper.

Most of them, and usually in sequence, will indicate they see a “Green Spot” (or any color you choose). Consider using the white space on the easel to tally the number of same or similar responses.

While confirming that you also see the spot(s), NOTE that most individuals overlooked a large amount of white space surrounding the dots. Participants frequently miss or under-appreciate the context around us or the deliverable (be it a decision, a plan, etc.). You may point to the importance of interpersonal relationships at work as an example.

Additionally, you may point out that customers tend to identify the blemishes in our products and services, and frequently have a reasonable expectation for them to be fixed. Likewise, management focuses on the “dots” of our projects or personal performance, failing to properly value the vastness of good, solid contributions and effort.

Conclude by sharing that while it may be appropriate to look for the “spots”, we should also force ourselves to consider the large white area of equal importance. If there is any unique contribution or answer besides “dots” emphasize how that voice may have been discounted when the rest of the group focused on the “dots”, when in fact that solo voice may have been speaking about something far more important than the rest of the group combined.

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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.