10 Facilitation Secrets with Facilitation’s Secret Sauce Explained

10 Facilitation Secrets with Facilitation’s Secret Sauce Explained

by | Feb 19, 2015 | Facilitation Skills

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.

Lunch and Learn: FAST Structured Facilitation Gems or Takeaways

Lunch and Learn: Structured Facilitation Secrets

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:

Facilitation Secret Sauce - Clear Thinking, Active Listening, & Structure

Clear Thinking

  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

Active Listening

Active Listening

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.

9 Components of a Structured Meeting or Workshop

9 Components of a Structured Meeting or Workshop

by | Feb 5, 2015 | Facilitation Skills, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Support

A facilitated structured meeting or workshop provides an environment designed to extract high-quality information in a compressed timeframe. A structured meeting uses visual aids and a team of experts to accelerate projects and increase the quality of decisions, outputs, deliverables, and outcomes.

Therefore, the major components of the MGRUSH structured meeting technique include:9 components of a structured meeting or workshop

  1. A model life cycle and methodology that eases adapting MGRUSH to a variety of planning, analysis, and design methodologies
  2. An intensive educational forum providing the necessary facilitation and communication skills, tools, and an understanding of facilitated meeting roles—not dogma or other inflexible, guru-like perspectives
  3. Collaborative activities designed to encourage discovery and promote innovation
  4. Stress-tested workshop and meeting approaches molded to fit most project situations
  5. Proficient leadership, based on critical skills such as:
  1. Project management and risk analysis support
  2. Expert resources (such as MGRUSH alumni tools and the Professional Reference Manual)
  3. Ten uniquely defined roles including session leader, documenter(s), meeting designer, business partner, technical partner, executive sponsor, team members, participants, coordinator, and observers
  4. Stimulating visual communication aids, used appropriately by a trained and certified professional facilitator.

A Structured Meeting is NOT

A structured meeting or workshop is NOT a replacement for analytical methodologies. Structured meetings and workshops work with methodologies to generate a uniform voice by providing an efficient two-way flow of information, from one person or group to another. Consequently, information developed with a consensual method provides value by becoming the foundation for additional information gathering, development, and decisions.

Session Leader

A neutral session leader (i.e., facilitator/ methodologist) provides the keystone for structured workshops. The session leader understands the preparation requirements, group dynamics, and appropriate methodology. Therefore, the session leader is responsible for managing the approach—the agenda, the ground rules, the flow of the conversation, etc.—but not the content of the discussion, or even necessarily the project(s) being supported by the discussion and decisions.

Effective Facilitator

Various academic research has found that the most effective type of facilitator was one that actively elicited questions and responses from the quietest participants to enable a balance among the players. Consequently, effectiveness is best achieved by building a safe and trustworthy environment, one that provides “permission to speak freely,” without fear of reprisal or economic loss.

Defined Products

Finally, the type of documentation generated drives workshop techniques. Some use templates to organize the notes taken during a workshop. The information collected starts out as raw or draft notes. Draft notes provide formal input to the project process. However, the meeting or workshop is not synonymous with the project, rather it compliments additional tasks and activities performed before and after the meeting or workshop, typically by the project team. A clear and consensually agreed upon path of next steps and “WHO does WHAT by WHEN” becomes the most common deliverable of meetings and workshops.

 

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In a world where everyone can engage in decisions that affect them

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Lead the Change—One Meeting at a Time

Are you ready to transform how decisions are made, problems are solved, and alignment is built in your organization?

True meeting leadership goes beyond setting an agenda. It requires a facilitator who can navigate complexity, balance voices, and drive toward outcomes with clarity and consensus. Our Professional Meeting Leadership Workshop and facilitation training equips you to do just that—blending human-centric methods with structured analytical tools to foster rigor, inclusivity, and results that stick.

  • Practice live.
  • Get expert feedback.
  • Build confidence that lasts.

Whether your meetings suffer from unclear objectives, disengaged participants, or decision fatigue, this workshop will help you identify the root causes, apply proven facilitation techniques, and emerge as the leader every team needs.

Take the first step today—transform your meetings and magnify your impact.

👉 Click here to reserve your seat now.

#facilitationtraining #meetingdesign

Because every meeting should be a catalyst for change—not just another calendar event.

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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we provide the following for your benefit and reference.

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Meeting Impact: Poor Facilitation Leads to Problems, Struggles, and Errors

Meeting Impact: Poor Facilitation Leads to Problems, Struggles, and Errors

by | Jan 29, 2015 | Facilitation Skills, Meeting Support

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

Meeting Impact: Poor Facilitation Leads to Problems, Struggles, and Errors

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.

Dealing with Anger – Only One Letter Short of Danger

Dealing with Anger – Only One Letter Short of Danger

by | Jan 1, 2015 | Leadership Skills

When dealing with anger, first understand that anger is as normal as any other emotion. We simply expect or want things to be different or better.

Most people direct their anger at those who have some control over them. However, anger can be healthy and is different from hostility, which is not healthy. Indeed, anger is often used to hide other feelings such as hurt or disappointment. Learn how to deal with anger in others and in yourself. The term ‘anger’ is only one ‘d’ short of the term ‘danger.’

In Others — Dealing with Anger

Dealing with Anger - Only One Letter Short of Danger

Dealing with Anger

  • Acknowledge and affirm the participant’s beliefs.
  • Anger is seldom directed at you personally. You are just convenient.
  • Encourage the participants to talk about their anger. This helps to diffuse the anger.
  • If you have contributed to the anger, let the participant vent before trying to explain or apologize.
  • Use non-judgmental, active listening. This lets the participant know that you care. Never get hooked yourself.

In You — Dealing with Anger

  • Acknowledge and accept the anger. Do not deny it or it will resurface at the wrong time.
  • Deal with the problem that caused the anger and the anger itself separately. Do not make decisions when your anger is in control.
  • Express your anger when it is safe and appropriate. Find safe outlets. Sometimes it even passes without having to express it.
  • In a meeting or workshop, take a break, take a walk, verbalize calmly, and reprogram yourself.
  • Recognize the cause of the anger and identify the other emotions you are feeling.

Remember that anger can be modified and danger avoided.

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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.

6 Potent Ways to Facilitate Meeting Conflict Response and Manage Conflict

6 Potent Ways to Facilitate Meeting Conflict Response and Manage Conflict

by | Dec 18, 2014 | Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Support

Facilitators must understand and manage meeting conflicts. Therefore, we must first understand our own internal conflict so that we are prepared to serve others. Critically, we should view our meeting conflict response as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Meetings are expensive and mitigating conflict provides one of the absolute best reasons for meetings. However, conflict also comes from the situation, and from you.

Don’t Run from Internal Conflict

Situational Factors

Conflict Response to Situational Factors

Internal conflict is fear, and all people have fears. However, when we allow these fears to control us, we lose our ability to perform. Therefore, the first step is to understand our fears. Once we do, we can control them and begin to manage conflict. Because fears never go away—you simply learn to acknowledge or contain them. Learn to control fears. Below are some typical facilitator fears:

Fly In Formation

Once you identify your personal fears, you can find ways to make them work to your advantage. Remember that the butterflies in your stomach will always be there. Therefore, you don’t want to remove them. However, you want to teach them to fly in formation.

External Conflict

Conflict in your group is natural and not necessarily bad when responsibly managed. Hence, you must channel conflict into productivity. Managed well, conflict leads to expanded information exchange, surfaced rationales, more options, and better group decisions that enable change. Managed poorly, conflict destroys. Effectively managed, conflict leads to positive transformation. However, if left festering in the hallways, conflict leads to chaos.

Conflict provides one of the best reasons for justifying the time and expense of a face-to-face meeting because it cannot be properly resolved with mail, attachments, and messaging. Because society places negative values on conflict at home and at school, we are not taught collaborative problem-solving skills. Therefore, let’s consider the external sources of conflict, barriers you will encounter, and responses that are proven effective.

Facilitative leaders can channel conflict into productivity. For example, look at the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.[1]

“A peaceful, harmonious place can be the worst thing possible for a business. Research shows that the biggest predictor of poor company performance is complacency. Therefore, conflict can shake things up and boost your staff’s energy and creativity.”[2]

6 Potent Ways to Facilitate Conflict Response and Manage Conflict

Conflict Response

Recognizing the Need for Meeting Conflict Response

Recognize that conflict exists particularly when you sense resistance from the group. Therefore, if your intuition tells you that something is not right, you would be wise to listen to the symptoms:

Sources of Conflict

Primary sources of conflict in a typical workshop include the following. However, keep in mind that the two leading indicators are tenure (i.e., how long somebody has been around) and when their jobs, titles, or reporting situation is at risk of being changed:

  • Competition—feeling out of control or the need to control
  • Fears—participant fears as well as facilitator fears
  • Habits—accustomed to disagreeing or arguing, cultural
  • Listening filters—age, background
  • Misinformation—rumors, especially about change
  • Participants’ problems—out of control, unable to excel or bond
  • Poorly defined objectives—misunderstanding of expectations
  • Priorities—similar values, but varying priorities
  • Semantics—understanding of words and intent
  • Situations—business process improvement, restructuring, reorganizations, automating
  • Thinking styles—vertical/ horizontal
  • Ways participants view others—biases, heuristics, prejudices

Barriers to Meeting Conflict Response

The following barriers inhibit your ability to manage conflict:

  • Ability or willingness to listen—yours and theirs
  • Copper or fiber (online meetings)—inability to challenge participants in person
  • Fears—yours and theirs
  • Group norms—culture such as “we don’t discuss that here”
  • Image—inability to save face
  • Lack of skill—a weak or poorly trained facilitator
  • Learned responses—Our past is hard to unlearn
  • Time—consensus is seldom achieved quickly
  • Vulnerability—real or perceived threats                                                                

Paradigm Challenges

Paradigms are established accepted norms, patterns of behavior, or shared sets of assumptions. They are models that establish boundaries or rules for success. Therefore, paradigms present structural barriers to creativity based on psychological, cultural, and environmental factors. Examples include:

  • Flow charts, diagrams, and other conventions that people get comfortable with when presenting information that they rely on habitually (e.g., swim lanes).
  • Stereotypes about men and women and their roles in business, family, and society
  • Where people sit in meetings, when in person—once they find a seat it becomes “their seat” for the rest of the meeting, or meetings if the seat associates with their own desired level of position or power (could be high or low, and a seat up front or far back)

Groupthink

As creatures of habit, we blindly subscribe to our cultural paradigms, unknowingly allowing our biases and prejudices to affect our decision-making, and readily falling prey to groupthink. There is power in large numbers, but not necessarily an increase in quality. For example, voting reflects a method of groupthink decision-making. However, the winner is not necessarily a better decision, it only reflects a bigger number.

Challenge Both

When people raise objectives, discover the cause of the objection. By challenging participants, you convert their subject matter bias into its objective nature. What causes the objection and what is the measurement of the cause? The chili is too spicy (subjective) and may be converted into 1,400 Scoville units (objective).

  • Ask about ‘Paradigm Shift’—“What is impossible today, but if made possible . . . What would you do differently?”
  • Consider using Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats (pg 216) where you impose perspectives such as the different tactics that might be taken by a monastery contrasted with an organized crime syndicate.[3]
  • Force the group to look at a familiar idea or scenario in a new way by changing their perspective. Shifting perspectives frequently helps ‘shake’ paradigms.
  • Have a few tools in your hip pocket, usually visual or riddle-based. Build a tool kit for immediate help and prepare a hip pocket set of Tools and procedures for the unexpected.

Anger and Some Other Stuff

How well do you personally respond to conflict? To effectively facilitate conflict, you must keep the situation constructive and . . .

  • Build a tool kit for immediate help and prepare a hip pocket set of Tools and procedures for the unexpected.
  • Know how to communicate acceptance by promoting integral thinking, a ‘Yes AND attitude’ not ‘Yes BUT . . .’

Anger—One letter short of Danger

Realize that anger is as normal as any other emotion. We expect or want things to be different or better. Most people direct their anger at those who have some control over them. However, anger can be healthy and is different from hostility, which is not healthy. Anger is often used to hide other feelings such as hurt or disappointment. Therefore, learn how to deal with anger in others and in yourself. Remain cautious, however, because the term ‘anger’ is only one letter ‘d’ short of the term ‘danger.’

When dealing with others’ anger:

  • Acknowledge and affirm the participant’s beliefs.
  • Encourage the participant to talk about the reasons for their anger. This helps diffuse the anger.
  • Let the participant vent before trying to explain or apologize.
  • Use nonjudgmental active listening. This lets the participant know that you care.

When dealing with your own anger:

  • Acknowledge and accept the anger. Do not deny it or it will resurface at the wrong time.
  • Deal with the problem that caused the anger as quickly as practical. However, do not make decisions when your anger is in control.
  • Take a break, whether in person or online. Take a walk and reprogram yourself.

When you listen to participants, they become more prepared to listen to each other. Anger often dissipates and trust begins to emerge. Make sure that both you and the participants avoid communicating rejection. Rejection incites defensiveness and blocks listening.

Six Actions for Your Meeting Conflict Response

How do you respond to managing conflict? To effectively facilitate a conflict situation, you must keep conflict constructive and . . .

  1. Understand anger—dealing with yours and theirs.
  2. Know how to communicate acceptance—to promote open communications.
  3. Understand consensus—it is not compromised.
  4. Prepare properly—know if it is coming.
  5. Build a tool kit (see MGRUSH Facilitative Leadership Tools for immediate help and develop a hip pocket set of tools in preparation for the unexpected)—build teams and diffuse problems.
  6. Challenge—When people raise objectives, discover the cause of the objection. With active listening and proper leadership, the objection can be converted into a criterion. What causes the objection and what is the unit of measurement of the cause?

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[1] The penalty for a Federal Mediator who violates neutrality is prison.

[2] Saj-Nicole, Joni and Damon, Beyer “How to Pick a Good Fight,” Harvard Business Review, December 2009, pg 50.

[3] De Bono, Edward “Six Thinking Hats,” https://www.amazon.com/Six-Thinking-Hats-Edward-Bono/dp/0316178314/

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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.