by Facilitation Expert | Dec 24, 2015 | Communication Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict
The opposite of being a humane human. Road Rage. Have you been irritated by someone else’s driving? Of course, we all have.
Today I realized however that I am likely guilty of doing the precise thing that others have done to piss me off. However, when I did it, there was justification—of course. When they did the same thing, however, they were wrong, dumb, stupid, and worthy of decapitation. So what’s the difference?
On Being a Humane Human
Have you ever made a right turn in an automobile very slowly, because your grandma was in the back seat, or you didn’t want the pie to spill, or the house number you were seeking was right around the corner? Imagine so. But when someone makes the turn incredibly slowly in front of you, they are being rude and inconsiderate, correct? So what’s the difference?
Become a Humane Human: Understand the WHY Behind the WHAT
The difference evidences itself when you seek to understand WHY. Chances are, the person who upset you had good reason in their own mind and was not attempting to be intentionally inconsiderate. They were not malicious at all. They simply had their own reasons.
We should always stay mindful of the phrase in St Francis’ Peace Prayer—Seek to understand, rather than being understood. The Dalai Lama also has a nice way of expressing similar sentiment when he states (paraphrased)—“When you speak, you are saying something you already know. When you listen, you may learn something new.”
Facilitators Need to Challenge WHY
As facilitators, we cannot afford to let down our guard. Keep the ego in the hallway. Challenge meeting and workshop participants to justify their positions by explaining WHY they are making a particular claim. Chances are, we will discover something new. By active listening through the reflection and confirmation of their rationale, we can begin to build consensus.
Would it bother you if I turned slowly around a corner if you already knew that I had an infirmed occupant or something that might spill? I imagine not, as you would likely have some compassion, not because you liked WHAT I was doing, but because you understood WHY I was doing it.
To build consensus, make sure everyone understands WHY claims are being made. They likely hear what the other person said (or did), but since it upsets them, they fail to understand nor strive to understand WHY. That’s your job as a facilitator. Build consensus around WHY since most WHAT everyone believes is not simply black or white, rather it is conditional. It’s your job to get the group to understand under what conditions someone’s erratic thoughts or behavior may in fact echo the same thing you would do if you were in their shoes.
______
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.
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.
by Facilitation Expert | Dec 17, 2015 | Decision Making, Meeting Tools
With data transformation, each piece of data or single cell might be decomposed into another layer. Amplify this approach even further by splitting your four cells into sixteen.
Therefore, see the chart below. We can now ask, generate, and record sixteen pieces of information on a large Post-It® for each assignment. Note how we take the four basic criteria below and expand them into four additional details (for illustrative purposes only).
Other Best Practices articles instructed that one key to facilitating effective analysis mandates the facilitator to ask open-ended questions, not simple, close-ended (i.e., yes or no) confirmations. For example, and pardon the simplicity, do not ask “Does the sport of curling involve any sweat?” Someone will make a compelling argument that it does, albeit minimal perhaps. The superior question, simply re-phrased: “To what extent does the sport of curling involve sweat? (a lot, little, or somewhere in between)”.
When building a roles and responsibilities matrix for example, the classic approach identifies who is going to be ‘Responsible’ for some apportioned activity or assignment, and the appropriate single cell is given a large, red “R”. At minimum you might ask four questions, such as:
- What role will be responsible for this assignment? (e.g., Business Analyst)
- When will we reach completion? (e.g., date specific)
- How much financial resources will be required to complete it? (eg, $,$$$)
- What is the estimated FTE required to bring it to completion? (FTE = full-time equivalent, such as 0.25 which is one person, full-time, for three months)
Power of the Single Cell
-
What role will be responsible for this assignment? (e.g., RASI Chart)
- What role is ultimately being held Accountable and paying for this initiative? (e.g., EVP)
- What role will be Responsible for this assignment? (e.g., Business Analyst)
- What roles will be Supporting this assignment? (e.g., Project Manager)
- What roles need to be Informed about this assignment? (e.g., Customer)
-
At what estimated point in time will we reach completion? (e.g., date specific)
- When does concerted effort begin? (e.g., date specific)
- What is the projected halfway point? (e.g., date specific)
- At what estimated point in time will completion be final? (e.g., date specific)
- When will the effort be reviewed such as Retrospective or Look Back? (e.g., date specific)
-
How much financial resources will be required to complete it? (eg, $,$$$)
- What are the estimated research costs? (e.g., $,$$$)
- What are the estimated acquisition costs? (e.g., $,$$$)
- What are the estimated operational costs? (e.g., $,$$$)
- What are the estimated termination costs? (e.g., $,$$$)
-
What is the estimated FTP required to bring it to completion? (FTP = full-time person, such as 0.25 which is one person, full-time, for three months)
- What maximum number of people work at the same time? (e.g., Quantity)
- Call on which special subject matter experts? (e.g., Title[s])
- How much FTP will bring it to completion? (e.g., FTP)
- Codify any special issues not described above. (narrative, perhaps coded)
Having left a meeting can be comforting because the amount of detail described above is substantial, but knowing that it was consensually built and is now owned by the meeting participants is reassuring. When applied to a project plan, using questions similar to the ones shown above, you will deliver a more detailed GANTT chart than most people build in their cubicles alone. Hand this off to an intern who claims to be an “expert” with Microsoft Project Manager® and tell them to bring you back a full resource-allocated project plan so that you can go on to your next meeting.
______
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.
Related video
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.
by Facilitation Expert | Dec 10, 2015 | Meeting Structure
A decision matrix supports both decision-making and decision quality at the same time. A decision matrix can be viewed as the ‘logic’ behind all decisions, providing the rationale for both the support and reasons to de-select or de-emphasize one of the options.
Method to Create a Decision Matrix
First, determine and agree upon the “Purpose” of the object or topic being decided. Then separately list and define your options. Follow up with a detailed and objective understanding of the decision criteria. Copy them into a simple X-Y grid as shown below.
Use the “Creativity” tool or narrative “Brainstorming” to develop lists of both the options being considered and the criteria to be used to evaluate the options. By applying “PowerBalls” and carefully wording our questions, we can now assess the impact of each criterion on each of the options with a simple decision matrix. For example, if we want to know which sports to target in a marketing campaign, we might develop two lists and populate the decision matrix as shown below:
Basic Decision Matrix
- At the intersection of each criterion and option, ask precisely the following at the start of your analysis effort.
“TO WHAT EXTENT DOES ‘X’ IMPACT (OR RELATE) TO ‘Y’?”
- From the example above we might determine that from the perspective of a sports drink company, ‘Basketball’ is a more desirable option than ‘Curling.’
CAUTION: AVOID THE CLOSE-ENDED QUESTION “Does ‘X’ involve ‘Y’?” There is always a subject matter expert who can draw the correlation. Conceding ‘Relativity’ we are not after “Does it?”. Rather, we are focused on the degree, intensity, level, or to what extent does it.
Benefits of a Decision Matrix
Always provide your executive sponsor or steering team with a decision matrix to back up your decision. This simple but highly effective visual tool preempts their common question, “Why did you select ‘X’?” The decision matrix provides a visual display of your rationale and trail of logic. Furthermore, if the decision changes, it forces the team to adjust their logic. Once documented, it enables your team to be consistent with subsequent decisions.
______
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.
Demonstration Video
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.
by Facilitation Expert | Dec 3, 2015 | Decision Making, Meeting Structure
Western society, and to an increasing amount, the rest of the world, depends on the voting method of decision-making.
Various levels of government including federal, state, and local elections rely on plurality voting, whereby one person equals one vote. While some will argue that a benevolent autocrat provides a fairer form of governance, most democracies rely on a multi-level system for its checks and balances. For example, tripartite arrangements normally allow separate voting for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Democracies frequently refer to this method as “Plurality Voting.” Experience shows that voting leads to lower-quality decisions and many conclude, voting sucks.
Voting Results in Winners and Losers
There are other methods of voting, to avoid lower-quality decisions, and arguably none of them are as effective as consensus-based decision-making. Note for example . . .
Approval Voting
Method: Voters are provided one vote for each option they deem acceptable.
Examples: Numerous not-for-profit organizations use Approval Voting to select their board of directors and officers.
Results: The approach does little to distinguish between acceptable options and outstanding options. Results have been known to be highly erratic.
Borda Count
Method: Voters ordinate all options from top to bottom, where more is better. With ten options, the best is assigned a value of ten while the least favorite is assigned a value of one. The highest score wins.
Examples: The method used by the Associated Press for its college football and basketball rankings.
Results: The favorite method of promoters for voting, unfortunately, does little to help distinguish the mid-range and lower-tier options. As voters know less or become more ambivalent (e.g., fourth versus fifth), final tallies can become quite skewed.
Cumulative Voting
Method: Voters are assigned a batch of votes (i.e., units of value). They distribute them across the options as they see fit. With a batch of ten votes, for example, you may assign seven votes to your favorite and three to your second favorite.
Examples: Texas and Arkansas use this method in some legal jurisdictions along with some corporate board rooms.
Results: There are bound to be winners and losers—much gaming is involved when, for example, your second favorite is more likely to be the victor, yet each unit assigned to your second choice, reduces the chances of your first choice being selected. Reportedly, many “second favorites” win with this method (see the Abilene Paradox).
Electoral College
Method: Winners of the presidential election in each state get all of the pre-assigned electoral votes (equal to the number of seats in Congress), regardless of the margin of victory.
Examples: Only in America, where most states assign their marginal winners, all of their electoral votes.
Results: Since it is possible to “win” the popular vote but “lose” the election, some have suggested that the Supreme Court of America will rule on its legality. Look at the Gore versus Bush election in 2000.
Instant Runoff
Method: Voters rank their options and if the top pick does not generate a simple majority (i.e., greater than 50 percent), the option with the fewest votes is dropped, and members vote again until a winner emerges.
Examples: Jurisdictions worldwide, from Australia to San Francisco rely on this method.
Results: While arguably a stronger method than simple “Plurality Voting”, mathematical models have shown that sub-optimal (i.e., initially secondary or tertiary options) options rise faster than the primary option and frequently “win”.
Our MGRUSH alumni have experienced the weakness of voting with the Goethe demonstration during class. Unlike consensus building that yields a win-win result, voting represents bigger numbers, not better decisions. Plus, there is always a loser.
______
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.
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.
by Facilitation Expert | Nov 26, 2015 | Communication Skills, Leadership Skills
The evidence is overwhelming—those who have more gratitude, or an attitude of gratitude — are happier individuals.
Although you won’t hear the term ‘happy’ very frequently in one of our meetings or workshops (because the word is both subjective and fuzzy), it seemed appropriate as people of the United States are celebrating their Thanksgiving period to provide a quick reflection.
Few, if any, would argue that gratitude is not a positive attitude. Positive attitudes, or an attitude of gratitude, provide a leading indication for the opportunity to galvanize consensus. Therefore, groups who have more gratitude are more likely to agree.
Mandate vs. Gratitude
Of interest are the following trend lines extracted from Google’s Ngram. As the use of the term ‘mandate’ has increased in recent decades, the use of the term ‘gratitude’ has decreased. While the relationship does not prove that people have less gratitude today than in the past, it does suggest that the frequency of the term and reference to its positive meaning has been on the decline.
Mandate vs Gratitude
Facilitation vs. Gratitude
Although use of the ‘facilitation’ in a business sense is relatively new (over the past few decades), since we started teaching facilitation there has been a steady and positive slope increase in the use of gratitude. Not coincidentally, we would argue.
Gratitude vs Facilitation
Implications?
Get your group to be more thankful for what they have, rather than dwelling on what they do not have. Use what they have (e.g., skills, strengths, etc.) to focus on WHAT they could do to further extend what gives them gratitude.
You will benefit personally as well. Harvard Medical School reports that “In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” (emphasis is ours)
People in the United States take so much for granted, it can make outsiders incredulous. Perhaps less than one percent of the people on this planet have some money in the bank, a few coins in their purse, a stocked refrigerator at home, the ability to read, at least one parent who remains alive, the skill to read, and the liberty to attend the place of worship at their choosing.
If you do, if your meeting participants do, then we suggest that you begin your meeting or workshop by first stressing the gratitude to have the opportunity to make things better for your business and its stakeholders. Most people are not so fortunate.
______
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.
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.
