Guidelines for Selecting Appropriate Structured Facilitation Tools
Facilitators rely on hundreds of tools to gather information, support decision-making, encourage innovation, build camaraderie, strive for higher quality, or guide a facilitator through an unplanned pathway. Therefore, your selection of the “best”...
Why We Need Professional Facilitators Who Guard Against Bias
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,...
How to Facilitate Business Process Improvement Projects
If you or your group recognizes the opportunity to improve, you'll benefit from Change or Die - The Business Process Improvement Manual (available on Amazon and other fine bookstores.) Co-written by Maxine Attong and Terrence Metz, it details a...
Holarchy: The Discipline of Structured Facilitation Contrasted to Kum-Ba-Yah
The discipline of structured facilitation differs from what we respectfully refer to as “Kum Ba Yah” or “warm and fuzzy” facilitation which frequently begins by co-creating ground rules. Most corporate environments simply do not afford enough time...
How to Help a Group Decide the WHY WHAT HOW — Purpose, Criteria, and Options
To facilitate consensus around simple decision-making, consider the following scenario and do not forget to help the group articulate the purpose of the project your meeting supports. Let us say for example that four of us are taking a trip from...
How to Build a Consensual Message for Project Updates in 30 Minutes
Purpose of 30-3 Project Updates: Time is precious. Stakeholders want and need project updates. But, do not want to over-invest. Dashboards are a fine example, relying on green lights, yellow lights, and red lights to highlight the status of project...
Effective Facilitators Remember to Remove Distractions to Provide More Focus
Getting participants to focus on the same thing at the same time represents one of the hardest thing to accomplish with a group of people. Therefore, learning to remove distractions reflects a core skill and primary responsibility of the meeting...
15 Facilitation Guidelines Followed by Professional Facilitators
In the role of facilitator, you can be worth your weight in gold by following these fifteen simple, yet critical facilitation guidelines. 15 Facilitation Guidelines Session leaders must observe and listen to all that the group says and does. Be...
Facilitators’ Overview of the HBR Book Executing Your Strategy
Executing Your Strategy was published by Harvard Business School Press and written by two MGRUSH alumni. This tightly woven book provides a formula and clear instruction on how to transform strategy into projects and activities. Authors Mark Morgan...
Three Precise Questions that Improve Group Clarity and Build Consensus
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...
Punctuation Precision, Humorously Proven by Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Eats, Shoots and Leaves Our bias about the importance of rhetorical precision has been discussed and emphasized in other blogs. Hard to believe it took us almost ten years to read Lynne Truss’s book, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”. Her primary chapter...
Estimate and Mitigate Meeting Risk — A Proven Formula
The MGRUSH meeting risk assessment method comes from answering a series of questions about a project, its stakeholders, and meeting participants. Our meeting risk assessment method is based on project risk assessment work completed by F. Warren...
SCAMPER is a Mnemonic Prompt for Excellent, Impromptu Questions
SCAMPER provides a ‘hip-pocket’ tool; i.e., an unplanned method of developing appropriate questions on an impromptu basis. With SCAMPER, you may also take raw input (i.e., first-cut ideation lists) and challenge participants to calibrate their raw...
How to Facilitate Vision Using the Creativity and Temporal Shift Tools
It’s hard enough to get a family of four to agree on where to go out to eat much less getting a group of executives/ managers to agree on where they want to take their organization. To facilitate a vision for an organization—where it wants to go,...
16 Valuable Tips and Considerations when Chairing Meetings
Chairing meetings requires many of the skills to facilitate effectively Success begins with vision and meeting vision comes alive by articulating the purpose, scope, and objectives in advance. Other considerations that support successful...
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