How the MGRush FAST Facilitation Technique Helps You Succeed

How the MGRush FAST Facilitation Technique Helps You Succeed

by | May 5, 2016 | Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support

One of the many approaches taught by MGRUSH in our Professional Certified meeting leadership training includes the FAST facilitation technique. The FAST facilitation technique ensures that meetings and workshops will be more effective in building consensus and producing quality decisions. As the facilitator, it helps make you a more successful leader and meeting designer.

Numerous academic books, classes, and courses focus on the individual; individual beliefs, values, and behavior. Most studies on ‘Critical Thinking’ for example, strive to make the individual participant a better thinker. Courses on ‘Marketing’ for example, emphasize individual sensitivities and choice. “What is FAST“ provides the group view.

When dealing with groups, leadership styles have been so ineffective that many methods rely on voting to make critical decisions. The voting method yields more significant numbers but not necessarily higher-quality decisions. In corporate, government, and NGO (i.e., non-governmental organizations) cultures, complex decision-making usually involves three discrete voices:

The FAST Facilitation Technique is perfect for facilitating complex issues

FAST Facilitation is optimal for facilitating decisions around complex issues

  1. Budget approver
  2. Brand selector
  3. Requirements specifier

HOLISTIC

FAST facilitation provides a holistic technique for structuring the input of various and complex perspectives. The method creates a consensual outcome that every participant owns and supports. With consensus, as opposed to voting, you develop a win-win situation. The FAST facilitation technique is designed to help you win and it begins by teaching groups HOW TO THINK. The curriculum focuses on the tools and methods that generate results an entire group will support.

LEADERSHIP

We begin with leadership, defined as having line-of-site, to know where you are going. If you are going to run a meeting, you first need to know ‘what done looks like.’ Specifically, before any meeting begins, you need to spell out the meeting deliverable (i.e., be able to describe what success means before your meeting begins). Even lousy facilitators succeed when the deliverable has a clear and direct impact on the quality of life of its meeting participants. Participants will help a poor facilitator get results for their benefit or gain.

FACILITATIVE

Leaders can be doubly effective when they embrace a facilitative style. This means taking their subject matter expertise and putting it in the form of questions rather than answers. The facilitative style is the opposite of control and command. Modern leaders appreciate the existence of more than one right answer, so they seek the best answer given current conditions, from the group they are leading. If the leader already has the answer, they should not conduct a meeting, as meetings are a very poor form of persuasion.

MEETING DESIGN

However, even a leader who knows where they are going and what it takes to be facilitative still requires one more skill to be effective. They need to know HOW TO build what ‘DONE’ looks like (i.e., HOW TO make the deliverable). The FAST facilitation technique emphasizes the HOW TO and calls it meeting design(or, methodology).

When you take a trip for example, first you need to know WHERE you are going (and of course, WHY you are going there). HOW you get there reflects various options and criteria. For short-distance trips, for example, most of us could take a car, walk, ride a bicycle, etc. FAST facilitation optimizes HOW you get from the meeting introduction to the meeting conclusion, on time and with results everyone will support.

FAST Facilitation Mission

To vitalize consensual planning, prioritizing, and problem-solving.

FAST Facilitation Values

  1. Integrity (Trust)

  2. Vibrancy (Energy)

  3. Acumen (Talent)

FAST Facilitation Vision

Supporting a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive world. In a world where everyone can engage in decisions that affect them.

Building on the FAST technique, MG RUSH has provided the foundation for successful meetings and workshops around the world by supporting:

  • Applications such as JAD, OLAP, SAP, SOA, and UML
  • Business agility, analytics, architecture, intelligence, decision support, portfolio alignment, and process improvement models
  • Life-cycles such as DMAIC, Kaizen, Lean, RUP, SCRUM, Six Sigma®, SCM, and SDLC
  • Our most popular deliverables include gap analysis, planning of all sorts, prioritization with six levels of complexity (and an appropriate tool for each), and project charters and product vision
  • Work products such as Daily Scrums, Data Models, Product Backlogs, QFD, Requirements Gathering, Retrospectives, Root Cause Analysis, SIPOC, Use-Cases, and User Stories

The FAST facilitation technique refines the governance of information and decision-making with proven results:

  • Capacity building for nonprofits, NGOs, and management support organizations
  • Clear and traceable assumptions and decisions
  • Documented governance and ownership of information and decision-making
  • Fewer omissions resulting in less costly changes
  • Up to 400 percent reduction of total resources compared to using individual interviews

Primary features of the FAST facilitation include:

  • Reference manual that covers the life-cycle of meetings and workshops. Topics include facilitator skills, group dynamics, meeting agendas and preparation, project planning, and visual aids.
  • Five-day FAST Professional Facilitation Training—called “THE boot camp” for facilitators, producing some of the finest facilitators in the world.
  • Dozens of hours of practice and daily feedback, including five written pages.
  • Commitment to continual improvements and updates of our content. Electronic access to hundreds of templates/ support materials to conduct your meetings, workshops, and presentations.
  • Continuing professional development, enabling experienced facilitators to expand their abilities and continue to grow.
  • Continual fine-tuning and improvement of our technique through our own (and alumni) in-field applications as regular, practical facilitators—we practice what we preach!

MGRUSH created the FAST technique for running more effective meetings and workshops that require consensual planning, problem-solving, and decision-making.

You should care about What is FAST if you lead meetings, teams, and groups of people because the FAST technique will make you more successful.

What is FAST, Why You Should Care, and How FAST Can Help You

What is MG RUSH FAST? — How to Build Consensus

FAST structures the input of various and complex perspectives by enforcing a consensual outcome that everyone owns and supports. With consensus, as opposed to voting, you develop a win-win situation. FAST helps you win and it begins by teaching you HOW TO THINK, not so much about individual behavior, but the tools and methods that generate results for an entire group, results they will live by.

Proven Career Boost

FAST facilitation works, and based on alumni feedback, it works great. Read some of the testimonials, including those from recent classes (by our standards, the most important). Every day we are helping thousands of alumni run more effective meetings, thus helping them exceed personal and project objectives faster than they would have without us. Participants derive from various cultures with multiple beliefs and values that seem to yield contrary choices and behaviors. While not for the faint-hearted, you will leave our training competent and adding more value than ever for the benefit of your career and your organization.

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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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.

3 Review Meetings: Operational, Strategic, and Strategy Renewal

3 Review Meetings: Operational, Strategic, and Strategy Renewal

by | Apr 21, 2016 | Meeting Agendas, Meeting Support, Meeting Tools

3 Review Meetings: Operational, Strategy, and Strategy RenewalDeliverables should drive meetings, even review meetings.

Meeting time is too expensive to conduct unstructured discussions and hope some of it sticks. Here you will find three strong reasons for conducting review meetings. Moreover, you will better understand the different types of deliverables, frequency, and structure for each.

 3 Review Meetings

Operational
Review

(HOW)

  Strategic
Review

(WHAT)

Strategy
Renewal

(WHY)
Meeting Purpose To review the performance of products, projects, or operating departments and build the next steps Review performance indicators and initiatives to assess progress and barriers to strategy execution Review the strategies and modify or supplement as required
Deliverable Actions and activities for quick fixes and solving short-term problems Plans for a product or project acceleration or deceleration and other adjustments such as personnel assignments New, improved or transformed strategies, targets, and authorization for expenditures
Frequency From daily to monthly . . . monthly to quarterly . . . quarterly to annually
Topics
  • Operating dashboards
  • Sales, bookings, shipping, and inventory reports
  • Customer complaints
  • Late deliveries
  • Defective production
  • Knowledge gaps
  • Equipment or process breakdowns
  • New opportunities
  • Departmental specific (e.g., resource balancing)
  • Scorecards
  • Strategy map
  • Workforce development
  • Brand identity
  • Product innovation
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Business process improvement
  • Strategic objectives and themes
  • Focused theme(s) that are rotational
  • Strategic assumptions
  • Strategic targets
  • Budgets and allocation balance
  • The strategies themselves
  • Shaping curves
  • Analytic reports (e.g., correlations)
  • Market analysis (e.g., industry updates)
  • Technology developments
Agenda Construct Use the “Facts, Implications, Recommendations” tool; aka “What, So What, Now What” Use the “After-action Review” tool; aka “Hotwash” Consider Quantitative TO-WS and other portfolio prioritizing methods (e.g., Perceptual Mapping)
Comments Avoid discussions about strategic issues or put them in the Parking Lot Avoid discussions about operational issues or put them in the Parking Lot The approach and procedures for renewal can be substantially modified, even going back to Mission, etc.

 

Make Review Meetings Participatory

Participants should NOT spend their time listening to report presentations during review meetings. However, they should have become familiar with the main topics through their pre-read and preparation, and have developed some input for consideration. Build your agenda for review meetings around discrete deliverables from each step, and make sure the deliverables can be documented. If your deliverable is too abstract (e.g., ‘shared awareness’), then it is inappropriate for these three types of meetings. Remember that a world-class strategy is impotent if it is not converted into operational plans that are executed against the agreed-upon performance targets.

The role of session leader (aka facilitator) is frequently filled by the same person who also provides the role of meeting designer. Since there is usually more than one right answer (or meeting design, that leads to the deliverable), how do you determine the optimal approach?

As you may know from MGRUSH structured facilitation, a robust decision-making method suggests creating your options and then separately evaluating them against a set of prioritized criteria; including SMART criteria, fuzzy criteria, and other important considerations.

Additionally, the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) encourages you to “select clear methods and processes that . . .

  • Foster open participation with respect for client culture, norms, and participant

    blank

    How To Direct Review Meetings

  • Engage the participation of those with varied learning/thinking styles
  • Achieve a high-quality product/outcome that meets the client’s needs”

Foster Open Participation

Support the plurality goal of the IAF’s first point by carefully selecting and blending your meeting participants. Keep in mind the type of change effort you are leading. If your deliverable contributes evolutionary advances to the project cause, you may want to get done quickly, with people who know each other and work together effectively. If your deliverable contributes toward revolutionary advances, then invigorate your blend of meeting or workshop participants. Remember, if you want the same old answer, then clone yourself. If you need something truly innovative, then invite people who may be viewed as outsiders or confederates, and depend on them to help stir things up. We know empirically that more options correlate strongly with higher-quality decisions.

Engage participation

Support their engagement and participation (second bullet above) with the frequent and extended use of break-out teams and sessions. Groups get more done as their sizes are reduced. Breakout teams give quiet people permission to speak freely. Provide creative team names (e.g., stellar constellations or mountain names) and appoint a CEO for each breakout team (i.e., chief easel operator). Be well prepared with your tools or your supplies and handouts.

Achieve

Manage breakout teams closely by wandering around and listening. Keep the teams focused on the question(s) as you would with a larger group, preventing scope creep that yields unproductive time. When you pull the teams back together, use our Bookend Rhetoric (tool) to aggregate and collapse the perspectives into one, unified response.

Next, the International Association of Facilitators encourages you to “prepare time and space to support group process

  • Arrange physical space to support the purpose of the meeting
  • Plan effective use of time
  • Provide effective atmosphere and drama for sessions”

When confined to one room, typically arrange easels in different corners. With virtual meetings, convert local call-in centers (e.g., a group conferencing in from another city) into discrete sub-teams. If possible, plan on separate rooms for break-out sessions, pre-supplied with easels, markers, handouts, etc.

Minimize the allotted time. It’s shocking what teams can complete in three minutes with clear instructions. Even with a three-minute assignment, by the time you have appointed CEOs (Chief Easel Operators), instructions, and participants have assembled and then returned; a three-minute assignment quickly turns into five minutes, five minutes turns into ten, etc.  Again, minimize the allotted time, but be flexible and afford more time if the teams remain productive and need more time that adds value.

The more you do in advance to prepare your instructions and the physical space, the more you can expect back in return.  If you are blasé and assign team numbers, and randomly assign participants 1,2, 3, etc.—then expect blasé results. If you are creative and involved, you can expect creativity and engagement from your participants.

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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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.

Influences through Eight Group Decision-Making Styles

Influences through Eight Group Decision-Making Styles

by | Apr 7, 2016 | Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills

We have applied modern research about decision quality with material found in Vroom and Yetton’s robust volume, “Leadership and Decision-Making”. Here they identify eight group decision-making styles.

Research proves that groups make higher-quality decisions than the smartest person in the group (i.e., individuals). Therefore, it is relatively easy to picture the relationship as shown in the following array of potential group decision-making styles:

Influence Upon Styles of Group Decision Making

Influence Upon Group Decision-Making Styles

 

Next, understand the eight styles and then watch what happens when we array them against a new chart, with the “X-Scale” representing how much time is invested by group members and the “Y-Scale” representing the tendency from authoritative decision-making to completely collaborative decision-making.

First the eight styles:

  • Ai        Autocratic or directive style:  The leader defines the problem, diagnoses the problem, generates potential solutions, evaluates the options, and selects among the best options.
  • Agi     Autocratic with group input:  The leader defines the problem and conducts some diagnosis. They look to the group for the cause and potential solutions, and then unilaterally select among the best options.
  • Arf     Autocratic with group review and feedback:  The leader defines the problem, diagnoses probable causes, and selects a solution from among the best options. The leader presents their plan to the group for understanding, review, and feedback, and frequently to transfer ownership.
  • Ci        Individual consultative style:  The leader defines the problem and shares it with the individual members of the group. The leader solicits ideas around probable causes and potential solutions. After obtaining information, the leader selects among the best options.
  • Gc      Group consultative style:  Similar to the Ci described above the sharing occurs with the group as a whole, rather than as segmented individuals.
  • Gd     Group decision style: The leader shares the problem with the entire group. The group diagnoses probable causes, generates options, evaluates against criteria, and selects among the best options.
  • Ps       Participative:  The group as a whole identifies and agrees on the problem. They continue to diagnose probable causes, generate options, evaluate against criteria, and select among the best options. The role of the leader serves as a true facilitator.
  • Lt       Leaderless team:  The group has no formal leader, but assembles. Often a leader emerges and may bias the problem or solution. However, the group still The group diagnoses probable causes, generates options, evaluates against criteria, and selects among the best options.
Styles of Group Decision Making

Actual: Styles of Group Decision-Making Impact on Decision Quality

Implications

Having arrayed them in the chart above, it becomes apparent, that critical decisions demand more group time while simple and tactical decisions should be managed by individuals and not macro-managed by groups or supervisors. The next time you are faced with a critical decision, demand the time to take a facilitated group approach, and you will be amazed at what a solid group of subject matter experts can generate when properly facilitated as defined by the Ps style above.

______

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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.

Unstructured Meeting Costs Rise: Use a Proven Structured Technique

Unstructured Meeting Costs Rise: Use a Proven Structured Technique

by | Mar 31, 2016 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Agendas

Meeting costs to American businesses as a result of poorly run meetings (typically unstructured) continue to rise. Surveys indicate that on average managers waste:

  • 8.5 hours per week for low-level management
  • 10.4 hours per week for middle-level management
  • 11.5 hours per week for senior-level management

As a strong and effective facilitator, you need to use a structured technique such as MGRUSH that wraps around RAD (Rapid Application Development), Lean, Scrum, and all other structured methodologies to reduce meeting costs. In Joint Application Development, Jane Wood and Denise Silver cite the following testimonials on the benefits of structured meetings and reduced meeting costs.

Structure Minimizes Meeting Costs

Unstructured Meeting Costs Rise: Use an MG RUSH Structured Technique

Structure Your Meetings to Reduce Meeting Costs

  • Capers-Jones states,

“A study of over 60 projects … showed that those projects that did not use structured meetings missed up to 35% of required functionality resulting in the need for up to 50% more code.”

  • The Capers-Jones study determined that projects using structured meetings missed only 5 percent to 10 percent of required functionality with minimal impact on the code and overall reduced meeting costs.
  • A survey conducted by the Index Group of Cambridge Massachusetts concluded that

“Systems developers are operating amid turf battles, historical bickering, low credibility and the difficulty in pinning down ever-changing systems requirements.”

  • Their survey of 95 information systems development directors found that:
    • 64% say that they cannot get users in different departments to cooperate in cross-functional systems projects,
    • 78% say that coordinating efforts between end-user developers and professional systems developers is a major challenge even though the number of end-users developing their own systems is on the rise,
    • Less than 29% say they have any long-range plans for retiring obsolete systems.
  • David Freedman states,

“How do you design a system that users really want? … You can’t. What you can do is help users design the systems they want.”

“The successful use of structured meetings has pushed its use beyond traditional applications of the process. Structured meetings are being used successfully for strategic systems and data planning, as well as for projects outside the information technology community.”—General Electric

  • In The Data Modeling Handbook, Michael C. Reingruber and William W. Gregory stress the importance of involving the customer, stating the following:

“If you do not engage business experts, your modeling efforts will fail. While there is no guarantee of success when business experts get involved, there is no chance of success if they do not.”

Secondary Sources Stress the Rise of Meeting Costs

  • Numerous articles, case studies, and studies have shown structured meetings to be “best practice.” Published benefits include:
    • Avoids bloated functionality, and gold-plating, and helps designers delay their typical “solution fixation” until they understand the requirements better [Whi].
    • It prevents the requirements from being too specific and too vague, both of which cause trouble during implementation and acceptance [Str].
    • By properly using transition managers and the appropriate users, typical cultural risk is mitigated while cutting implementation time by 50% [Eng].
    • Cultivate ownership, easier acceptance (buy-in), and stronger commitment by users. The involvement of business end-users is no longer advisory or consultation. It is the participation and contribution in the project development life-cycle. The more users contribute to the system, the easier for them to accept it and commit to it.
    • Enhanced communication and relationships between business end-users and information technology personnel.
    • Enhanced education for participants and observers. By participating in structured meetings and being the medium between other users and information technology, the business end-users will be kept fully informed about the progress of the system development.
    • Improved system quality and productivity. Much of the system’s quality depends on the requirements gathered. Structured meetings involve users in the development life cycle, let users define their requirements, and thus ensure that the system developed satisfies the actual activities of the business.

Tertiary Sources Stress the Rise of Meeting Costs

    • Lays the foundation for a framework of mutual education, productive brainstorming, binding negotiation, and progress tracking [Whi].
    • One of the best ways to reduce function creep, most of which results from incomplete initial requirements [Ant]. Capers Jones states that structured meetings reduce function creep by 50%, and when used with prototyping, creep is reduced by another 10-25% [Str].
    • Reduced system cost. Most of the system development costs are man-hours for both system developers and business users involved. Reduced development time reduces the labor cost for developers, as well as users. Important steps like requirement gathering compel the involvement and commitment of business area experts. The cost of taking them away from their daily operation is very high. Structured meetings can reduce the involvement time of these business experts and hence reduce the cost further. Reduce costs by catching errors, misunderstandings, and mistakes early in the development phase. Studies show that a majority of system errors result from early analysis errors, and the earlier these errors get corrected, the less they will cost.  Structured meetings let designers and users work together in the very early of the development cycle, defining the scope, and requirements of projects, and resolving conflicts among different user groups. Structure puts efforts early in the life cycle in order to improve the quality increase productivity and reduce cost.
    • Reduced system development time. In structured meetings, information can be obtained and validated in a shorter time frame by involving all participants (or at least a representative set of participants) who have a stake in the outcome of the session. Structured meetings eliminate process delays and reduce application development time between 20% to 50%.
    • Saves time, eliminates process delays and misunderstandings, and improves system quality [Hol].

Here are some of the sources:

  • [Eng] Engler, Natalie. “Bringing in the Users”.
  • [Fin] Fine, Doug. “Information Technology Staff Move into Business Units”.
  • [Gar] Garner, Rochelle. “Why JAD Goes Bad”.
  • [Hol] Hollander, Nathan, Naomi Mirlocca. “Facilitated Workshops: Empowering the User to Develop Quality Systems Faster”.
  • [Kno] Knowles, Anne. “Peace Talks: Joint Application Development”.
  • [Lev] Leventhal, Naomi. “Using Groupware Tools to Automate Joint Application Development”.
  • [Str] Strehlo, Kevin. “Catching Up with the Joneses and ‘Requirement’ Creep”.
  • [Whi] Whitmore, Sam. “Readers Shed Development Woes”.

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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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.

Stop Meeting Scope Creep with Precise Questions

Stop Meeting Scope Creep with Precise Questions

by | Mar 17, 2016 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict

Scope creep kills a lot of projects. Scope creep kills many more meetings. The hardest task to accomplish in leading a group of people is to get them to focus. Their minds drift, twist, and become partially selective.

When the right group of people is assembled, they can accomplish nearly any task at hand if the leader can get them to focus. Yet they continue to drift, and even begin to discuss and argue about issues that are not within the scope of the meeting as they impose their own scope creep.

Stop Meeting Scope Creep with Precise Questions

Understanding Meeting Scope Creep and Precision of Your Questions 

Secrets to Prevent Meeting Scope Creep

There are two secrets to prevent scope creep in meetings. First, the session leader or facilitator needs to make the meeting scope clear when the meeting begins, as well as secure agreement from the participants about the meeting scope. Frequently meeting scope is limited by geography, duration, or situation—frequently it represents only PART OF the project scope.

When people argue about the validity or purpose of a project, for example, the discussion is usually NOT within the meeting scope. Only a conscious facilitator can police scope creep carefully.

Secondly, the facilitator needs to know the precise question that the group should be addressing. When the facilitator does not know the question, ANY answer is appropriate.  Most meeting facilitators should focus on context before meetings rather than content, by knowing the right questions and the proper sequence to ask them. They also cannot afford to ask for the meeting deliverable, as that question is so broad as to be DUMB (i.e., Dull, Ubiquitous, Myopic, and Broad).

Ask Precise and Detailed Questions to Prevent Meeting Scope Creep

If a product marketing plan is the deliverable, you cannot ask “What is the product deliverable?”  For example, a marketing plan is a function of segmentation, targeting, positioning, market mix, message, medium, etc. If the question is “What are our top three market segments?” the facilitator cannot allow arguments over social media, as such content is out of the scope of the question at hand.

The holarchy above illustrates the narrowing of the scope of the enterprise through the question being discussed in a meeting. The facilitator’s role is to know the precise questions that support the completion of agenda steps that support the completion of the meeting deliverables that support the completion of the project, etc. When the facilitator does not know the right question to ask, all hell breaks loose, and rightfully so, scope creeps . . .   Do not let that happen to you.

______

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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.