We have learned during facilitated meetings and workshops, that it’s not easy for participants to respond to broad questions like “How do you solve global hunger?”  While meaningful, the question’s scope is too broad (and perhaps vague) to stimulate specific, actionable (ie, SMART) responses like “We could convert eight abandoned mine shafts in Somalia to create temperature controlled food storage areas.” To improve group clarity, use the following.

Extemporaneous leaders have a tendency to transition during meetings with broad questions like, “Are we OK with this list?”,  “Can we move on?”, or “Anything else?”.  Facilitate with structure and precision by modifying your transitions with these three questions, adapted to your own situation:

1. Do we need to clarify anything? (scrub for clarity)
2. Do we need to delete anything? (scrub for relevancy or redundancy)
3. Do we need to add anything to this list? (scrub for omissions)

The three detailed questions make it easier for meeting participants to analyze, agree, and move on.

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Don’t ruin your career or reputation with bad meetings. Register for a workshop or forward this to someone who should. MGRUSH professional facilitation workshops focus on practice. Each participant thoroughly practices and rehearses tools, methods, and approaches throughout the week. While some call this immersion, we call it the road to building impactful facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide an excellent 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 individual class descriptions for details.)

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Related articles

• Punctuation Precision, Humorously Proven by “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” (mgrush.com/blog)
• 40 Proven Questions to Determine and Mitigate Meeting or Workshop Risk (1 of 5) (mgrush.com/blog)
• You Can Effectively Facilitate a Group of People With These Three Principles (mgrush.com/blog)
• SCAMPER is a Mnemonic to Prompt for Excellent, Impromptu Questions (mgrush.com/blog)

Facilitation Expert

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.