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:

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.

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.)

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