Individuals and groups can frankly be wrong when they think they are right. Professional facilitators get groups to focus on the conflict of the issues and ideas rather than the conflict between the people advocating those ideas. At the same time, they need to guard against meeting bias.
Guard Against Meeting Bias
The chance of error when making complex decisions is amplified by the amount of data required to support the decision Properly facilitated, groups of people can see through the fog clearer than those biased with the information they bring to a meeting or workshop.
Note the following impactful biases cited by the World Future Society in its March-April 2013 edition of “The Futurist.”
Bias Factors Affecting Group Decision-Making and Meeting Bias
- Confusing desirability and familiarity with probability
- Cost of detailed primary research, leading to shortcuts
- Distortion of data by media through selection and repetition
- Forecaster’s bias which involves a preference for change or patterns
- Homogenization of distinct multiple data sources (for cost savings)
- Lack of clear confidence intervals (how clean the data is)
- Mistaking correlation for causation (a very common error)
- Organizational biases
- Over-immersion in local social values or perceptions
- Political research sponsorship
- Preconceptions—framing complex issues in a skewed fashion (selective perception)
Professional facilitators help objectify the subject matter experts’ points of view with challenges and structured discussion. They help depersonalize issues from people, so that ideas can stand on their own merit and value, not inflated by the charisma of persuasive participants.
Guard against selective perception
As their session leader, remember that everything heard in a meeting or workshop is interpreted and filtered differently by participants. They will hear or see differently based on their individual biases, or colored lenses. To illustrate the point, the vastly different pictures below are all from the same area in space using different lenses including radio, infrared, visible light, x-ray, gamma ray, and others.
NASA Public Domain
Parallel or Sloped?
Or, consider the following where we discover the horizontal lines below are truly parallel and not askew. Some will claim that “no way” are the lines parallel, when in fact they are perfectly parallel.
Same Height?
Additionally, look at the people in the picture below and understand that they are the exact same height, although appearances deceive. Be on guard always against biases that disrupt consensus building, and embrace the effective presentation tips discussed elsewhere.
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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.
