Facilitating for-profit business plans and requirements captures substantially different challenges than facilitating a Kum-Ba-Yah community forum or other volunteer-based meetings. While active listening serves both scenarios, decision-making that supports most business initiatives differs from win-lose voting methods.
Frequently, business facilitators are not seeking agreement, but rather harmony. The difference follows. Agreement suggests that everyone is singing the same note, perhaps even with the same instrument. Boring. Reminiscent of the railroad industry trying to protect itself, rather than redefining its role as transportation and logistics.
Harmony implies we are seeking an outcome where everyone’s musical note or expression is heard, from whatever instrument they play. Successful facilitation provides appropriate structure so that the deliverable captures all instruments and all tones, like a symphony. The sound of cicadas every few years represents agreement. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky reflects a symphonic movement.
Structured Decision-Making
When seeking consensual understanding, as in decision-making, for example, the right structure makes it easier for your participants. Consider the PowerBall approach when you can help drive a group toward a simple decision surrounding a well-articulated question (e.g., What should we buy?).
For complicated situations, use the Scorecard approach that separates fuzzy from SMART criterion. By applying weightings you generate a quantitative score to compare your options. For highly complex situations like portfolio management, always embrace the TO-WS (SWOT) analysis (introduced to the MGRUSH workshops in its quantitative form in 2004). In the facilitator’s world, our approach to TO-WS is like comparing a Tchaikovsky composition to playing the same note over and over on a kazoo.
Structured Decision-Making Matrix
Harmony Over Agreement
As facilitators, our business constraints rarely afford the time and luxury of sitting around the campfire singing Kum-Ba-Yah and building trust. Therefore, build your structure in advance. Then lead the method best suited to reconcile the business challenges and trade-offs you expect. Everyone agreeing will keep you in the box, suffocating innovation. But with harmony, you don’t even see the box, as you lead to the creation of a solution that no single participant envisioned when they entered your workshop.
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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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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.
