by Facilitation Expert | Dec 2, 2021 | Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support
Our last article launched a method for managing new product ideas called Catalyst or PCM
Now we take a step back before explaining the activities (next article) to tackle some of the myths and gremlins associated with new product concept management and development.
New Product Concept Development Disciplines
Product Concept Management requires numerous disciplines, including technical, information systems, creative, marketing, and financial management. Cross-functional demand frequently becomes a point of failure for many organizations in their attempts to maintain a fertile pool of new product ideas. The PCM process comprises three major steps: “SOURCING” ideas, “MANAGING” ideas (into concepts), and “USING” concepts for further evaluation and possible development.
Three major steps of the PCM process: “SOURCING” ideas, “MANAGING” ideas (into concepts), and “USING” concepts for further evaluation and possible development.The act of ‘deciding’ represents the most important activity of PCM; deciding whether to USE or publish a concept for further development. Without the movement of a concept onto final development, no useful work gets accomplished. At the same time, most investment today focuses on the SOURCING or authoring activity. Namely, the source volume and “creativity” of the ideas placed for consideration.
With Catalyst, the bulk of the work occurs during QUALIFYING. PCM holds that raw ideas represent slight notions of a product or business need. Most new product people have enough “good” ideas. In truth, most ideas are “good,” but suffer from a lack of certainty about their future viability.
In our view, their degree of certainty distinguishes good ideas. The QUALIFYING step in PCM requires activities that convert raw ideas into polished concepts. Then polished concepts become available for consideration and additional investment.
Product Concept Management (PCM or Catalyst) and Development Overview
PCM specifies each step as multiple, discrete activities. In practice, often compressed in time, they look like a single step. For example, when a salesperson suggests an idea to a product manager. In that discussion, the product idea takes partial form in terms of its function, customer benefits, competitive situation, and future sales opportunities. The product manager evaluates the idea for fit into the product line, corporate marketing strategy, and the organization’s appetite for funding new products. In this example, the bulk of the PCM technique occurs in a matter of minutes.
Typical Idea (Instant) Evaluation Process
The Many Product Concept Management Myths
Many myths perpetuate the practical and academic field of New Product Development and Ideation. We don’t purport to disrupt the belief system of these fields but do wish to add to the excellent progress made in recent years in improving the management of Ideation and New Product Management.
MYTH: There are good ideas and bad ideas, but only a few really great ideas.
FACT: All ideas are good as long as they are sound in their construction. An idea seen by a business manager (or “reviewer” in our parlance) may be a poor fit for the business conditions of that day and for his/her specific purposes. But fit does not equivocate to the quality of an idea. PCM frees ideas from judgments of “good” or “bad.” The “goodness” of an idea depends on two characteristics of the reviewer: (1) the fit of the idea with the needs of the company, and (2) certainty about the future performance of the product in the market, in the hands of a specific company, through specific channels, to specific customers, at a specific time. These two characteristics do not depend on the idea but on the owner of the idea. The burden of finding “great” ideas, therefore, falls into the hands of the organization.
MYTH: We don’t need more ideas, we need “home runs.”
FACT: An organization and its management may want “home runs.” They seek the eventual impact of new product ideas, not whether the idea becomes a “home run” or not. A home run for one company could be a dud for another. A home run this year could be a dud next year. With slight changes in material specifications, the dud could become a cash cow in a different division. The burden is not on the idea of being great. The challenge of greatness belongs to those who handle the idea.
MYTH: We don’t have enough ideas. We’ve run out.
FACT: Zillions of new ideas develop every day. Each of us probably develops a handful of new ideas for products, product attributes, packaging, and so on. Many take shape before we arrive at our offices, based on our morning routines. Frequently we envision ideas, but perhaps not for our own business. Those ideas might be availed to whomever is willing to invest to gather them. Ideas arise in our heads continuously, for untold numbers of products and applications. Most of these ideas evaporate soon after they form.
MYTH: Our new product development process is terrific. We need better filters at the ideation stage to keep the bad ideas out. (Or, more filters are better.)
FACT: We don’t argue that your NPD process may be functioning well, or that ideas pass through development and flop in the market. However, more and better filters do not assure better product market performance. The perfect filter would be needed only once. Therefore, “more filters” implies low-quality filters at each stage of their application. More ideas indicate more success, with better information about their prospects, rather than fewer with tighter filters. If the profitability of an idea exceeds thresholds with 100% certainty when conceived, it would be pushed through development and launch with no filters. The defect in NPD and launch is not “bad” ideas or necessarily poor filters. The quality of information about the prospects for a new idea or the “certainty” of an idea’s prospects drives improved decision-making.
MYTH: We can’t afford to invest in many new product ideas.
FACT: Again, we don’t take issue with the notion of allocating scarce investment resources. However, we believe that if proper investment is not made at the earliest stages of idea management, poor-performing concepts will make it through NPD and into launch (for eventual failure) without sufficient success to pay for the failures.
MYTH: We can’t afford a product failure.
FACT: No one wants product failure, but some failures cannot be avoided. To eliminate new product failures, the only complete solution prohibits new product development. To accept a reasonable degree of risk, investment is required to reduce the uncertainty around a new idea.
MYTH: We don’t need a process of new product ideas, we need a champion.”
FACT: A “champion” provides prima facie evidence that your approach remains hostile to new product ideas and new product success. Perhaps not by intent, but by behavior. A champion is only needed when one or more of these conditions exist:
- The existing new product idea and development process has low/no credibility within the organization (or doesn’t exist) and the “champion” acts in a vacuum;
- “Certainty” appears only to the champion and not to the people involved, and the champion provides the lone supporting voice.
Popular business management lore converts folk heroes into “champions.” Champions reflect a failure to create a viable system that transcends individual fortitude and charisma. When you find an aggressive “owner” of a neutral method, then you’ve found your true “champion.”
MYTH: There isn’t enough money to support more new product ideas.
FACT: Money abounds. With a decent idea and reasonable certainty. you can attract a virtually endless supply of money. An idea with a certain payoff will attract investment with ease. Certainty provides the key. Money stays away from ideas it doubts. Venture capitalists knowingly invest in incredibly risky ideas: they invest in ideas they feel have a reasonably good chance of success after researching the opportunity. Venture capitalists accept different risks than the average corporation, but not necessarily more risk, and certainly not less well-researched ideas. The more certainty in the performance of your idea, the easier the money will be found.
Product Concept Management Gremlins
Many “gremlins” also arise in Product Concept Management. By gremlins, we mean the attitudes, behavior, policies, and cultural norms that tear at the fabric of successful new product ideation and development. Gremlins operate to hinder PCM at any time, in many ways, and with frightening effectiveness.
Gremlins range from apathy to “championing” a product through to launch. Our observation of the greatest gremlins suggests:
- Apathy – When the motivation to share new product ideas with those who can make use of them diminishes the apparent idea flow.
- Arrogance – When a participant in ideation and/or new product development demonstrates the arrogance to diminish ideas from other sources. Thus, they discourage the prolific exchange of new ideas that hamper the new idea process.
- Under Investment – The critical investment in a new idea demonstrates the assessment of its commercial, technical, and financial viability, especially early in the life of an idea.
- Lack of Direction – Do not build your PCM to be ad hoc. Catalyst requires clear direction to focus scarce resources toward the most productive sources of new product ideas that support the organization’s strategy.
Before we explain the various agendas supporting the primary steps in Catalyst, a forthcoming article provides some excellent and practical tips on “Teams and Team-Building Techniques.”
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[1] The term “service” can be freely substituted for the tangible concept of “product.”
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The following provides you with a Holiday Gift. Below are links to sites found in our Best Practices articles, but seldom recognized. No doubt you’ve seen a few already. However, a few of them will cause a WOW reaction:
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
by Facilitation Expert | Nov 4, 2021 | Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support
The purpose of this article is to prepare you with a workshop approach, including the method and tools you can use to increase product innovation in your workshops — to speed up product development based on structuring the voice of your customer. If you have suggestions about how we can improve this or other Best Practices, please reply or contact us at (630) 954-5880, or by email at info@mgrushfacilitation.com.
PRODUCT INNOVATION RESULTS
Below you’ll find the guiding principles, structure, theory, and practical advice for leading product innovation results in your organization. We hope you beg, borrow, steal, and modify heavily from our benchmark method called Product Concept Management (Catalyst). Catalyst is our method for clarifying the “fuzzy front-end” in product development. The “fuzzy front-end” represents the time and space between a thought (problem or solution) and the transformation into action by first converting the thought into a tangible concept.
What is a new product “idea”?
We are defining a thought as only a fragment of an idea. To have a complete idea to develop a new product with the Catalyst technique requires five elements. We’ll cover them in greater detail in our next article (part 2 of 3). For now, the five fragments include:
- Statement of the problem, pain, want, or improvement that needs to be solved
- Description of the solution that creates value including some of the technical descriptions and functional specifications
- Explanation of the customer’s options, choices, and competitive alternatives
- An estimation of how large the solution or opportunity is measured by currency over time
- Narrative description of the value proposition created by the new product idea — both economic and emotional benefits
Prerequisites
The prerequisites for developing and applying product innovation within your organization are few but important:
- Desire to improve the quality and quantity of new product ideas emerging from your organizational network
- Desire to improve the new product lifecycle by increasing the quality and reducing costs by structuring valuable new product ideas
- Hunger to reduce the waste from lost and abandoned new product ideas
- Desire to increase the enthusiasm, productivity, and creativity of your new product “ideators”
- Desire to “win” in the market, win with your employees and colleagues, and win by increasing the wealth of your company.
PRODUCT INNOVATION WORKSHOPS
We recommend the use of facilitated workshops that bring stakeholders, thought leaders, and implementors together with key designers and planners, under the guidance of professional facilitators. The network of individuals required in the analysis, design, and implementation of new products can be overwhelming. The guidance of a trained professional facilitator in Catalyst, new product development, and voice-of-the-customer assures the highest integrity with this proven method that should be adapted to your organization when seeking to support your mission and objectives.
Catalyst Product Innovation Method The Catalyst product innovation approach provides substantial benefits (when compared to traditional interviewing and internal team analysis and design):
- Early leadership involvement
- Early customer (user and owner) involvement in the evolution of the design
- Business analysis that reflects a broad understanding of the market as well as the intricacies of each segment, technology, and economic climate as appropriate
- Sharing and socialization of intent about strategic direction, product development capabilities, and supply and demand chain structure and value, thus creating stronger group and individual ownership
- Common commitment to persisting in the design of the process through to completion
Within MG Rush, workshops are more than just a generic term. Each workshop aims to achieve specific results and to further the design and implementation method through a structured sequence. This article guides you when planning, conducting, facilitating, and managing the design and implementation of product innovation results by applying a flexible structure.
WHEN SHOULD INNOVATION RESULTS WORKSHOPS BE USED?
We recommend that workshops be used in situations guided primarily by
- The number of participants,
- The complexity of the market and product information,
- Disparity (or diversity) of participant backgrounds and knowledge, and
- The visibility desired for the design process.
The basic structure for the sequence of product innovation workshops is:
- Orientation & Planning
- Business Purpose
- Design Process
- Catalyst NPD (New Product Development) Introduction
- Team Building and Optimization
- Design and Workshop Protocols
- Process Schedule
- Workshop Approach & Structure
- Internal Situation
- Focusing
- Visioning
- Business Requirements
- Organization Structure
- Product Inventory
- Product Commercialization Process
- NPI (New Product Ideas) and NPD Experiences and Lessons Learned
- Organizational Best Practices
- External Situation
- Market Strategy(ies)
- Customer Segmentation
- Sales and Service Channel Structure & Performance
- Competitor Behavior
- Process Design
- Implementation Design
- Measurement, Monitoring, and Control
WHEN SHOULD WORKSHOPS NOT BE USED?
Workshops should not be used when:
- There is only one business user;
- The available participants do not understand the business, typically due to inexperience overall, inexperience in their function, or inexperience within the Organization;
- Participants are not able to garnish resources to support the function of self-organizing teams;
- Commitment to the design outcome is not clear from necessary senior management, including the lack or availability of resources to implement;
- Lack of availability of participants’ time, facilities, or the inability to complete tasks and assignments;
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
Here are the factors critical to the success of your workshops and to the completion of product innovation results:
- Appropriate facilities
- Belief in the relevance of the organization’s mission and initiatives
- Experienced and prepared facilitator or facilitation team
- Focus on design (initially) and less on implementation
- Management commitment
- Participants with knowledge, availability, interest, and availability
- Time and resources for preparation, task and assignment completion, session attendance, and follow-up
(WHEN) SHOULD PRODUCT INNOVATION WORKSHOPS BE USED INSTEAD OF WORK SESSIONS?
The Catalyst design typically requires a multi-functional, stratified team and is thus most often best served by workshops. However, work sessions are an acceptable substitute when:
- Are less formal, but no less disciplined in analysis, information exchange, and documentation.
- The work session involves a few participants
- The work session involves participants from a particular discipline
- The workgroup is focused on a narrow issue(s) and is working in support of the broader design-team objectives
- There are logistical (such as geographic distance) issues that are best served by discrete teams working apart from the general group
- Work product, including deliberations, notes, and input information, can be reasonably summarized and disseminated to the broader NPD design team – and reported on during workshop sessions
PRODUCT INNOVATION RESULTS TECHNIQUES
For each workshop during product innovation design, and for each step in the workshop agenda, decide on the particular technique to support the appropriate introduction, discussion, and completion of the agenda item. Workshop tools supporting product innovation include:
SESSION LEADER RESPONSIBILITIES
A successful product innovation method depends on the effectiveness of the person assigned as the facilitator – for team management, workshop management, and content delivery. The assignee is more than a facilitator; they are also the quality control officer for the NPD design process. Successful workshops require special support and a special temperament from the facilitator. Participants must feel comfortable, valued, safe, respected, and motivated if they are to contribute fully to the overall Catalyst design during each workshop session. Their motivation will continue over to the assigned tasks when they feel that their efforts will be valued when returning back to the team in subsequent workshops. The facilitator’s role requires the following responsibilities to gain participants’ respect, following, trust, and cooperation:
- Be flexible to meet clients’ schedules
- Behave without ego, and be non-defensive
- Demonstrate respect for each individual, be fair in dealing with each participant, and in the interplay between participants
- Facilitate group consensus, while seeking the best overall output
- Monitor session agenda and time constraints
- Provide an environment for each participant to have an opportunity to contribute
- Provide for document exchange of the inputs, in-workshop work product, and post-work product follow-up, including workshop notes, assignments, and agenda
- Remain open and self-disclosing
- Seek and work with the sponsor(s) to provide continuous commitment
- Stick to the agreed-upon plan regarding deliverables, scope, timing, and MG Rush Facilitation stipulated leadership responsibilities (in and out of the workshops)
FACILITATOR TECHNIQUES SUPPORTING PRODUCT INNOVATION
Conducting successful product innovation workshops requires a combination of skills, techniques, and content knowledge. A successful facilitator requires high, sustained energy, intense concentration, and a good disposition. A sense of humor is useful, too. A facilitator is non-defensive, absorbs barbs of all descriptions, and stays focused on the challenge of delivering on the objectives of the workshop and goals of the product overall. There are many skills and tools used by skilled, successful facilitators. A few are mentioned below but are not intended to be a comprehensive inventory. Other techniques may evolve outside of the view of our Best Practices for Catalyst and product innovation and may also be useful for you.
FACILITATOR SKILLS
- Ask and give clarification
- Avoid ambiguity
- Be alert to differences in information as provided and information as received
- Document, clarify, and expand the information exchanged in the workshop
- Explain the structure behind the flow
- Identify, communicate, and demonstrate decision-making methods
- Legitimize participants’ comments and contributions
- Practice active listening
- Provide “structural flex” and adapt the task, workshop, and overall process as needed
- Provide traceability – Adopt a retrospective perspective, that is, construct plans and documentation so that they are understood in the present and in hindsight
- Recognize opportunities to intervene – Be prepared to prevent or change an activity or event to improve the quality or productivity of the workshop procedures.
- Use guiding questions; provide sample answers from a metaphor or analogy
Examples of Preventions to Secure Innovation Results
- Confirm agreement on purpose, scope, deliverables, and agenda
- Follow-up workshops with accurate and comprehensive documentation
- Involve and utilize client workshop experts (such as trained facilitators, Product Owners, and Master Black Belts)
- Pre-determine work groups and breakout teams
- Prepare materials in advance
- Provide advance information to inform, educate, and normalize participants’ knowledge
- Respect client protocols, practices, and workshop traditions
- Utilize subject matter experts to leverage outside (of the workshop) knowledge to the benefit of the workshop participants
Examples of Interventions to Secure Innovation Results
- Observe and reverse retreats or aggression by participants. Most people have a “primary style” of discussion, debate, and persuasion, however, when a person’s primary style is ineffective (that is, they feel challenged, frustrated, or embarrassed), that person will often retreat into a secondary style that is either aggressive or sullen.
- Prevent attacks on an individual or organizations, including those not participating in the workshop. Work to inhibit attacks and, in particular, abuse during the workshop on any participant or group. As necessary: physically move between speaker and target of any “attack”; or, interrupt attacks by calling for a break, or attention back to the agenda, or summarize a key point; or, turn the situation with appropriate humor.
- Some comments or questions are unclear to all but the speaker. Restate comments or questions that you perceive as unclear by one or more of the participants. If appropriate, ask the speaker to clarify their comment or question without embarrassing the speaker or recipients.
- Watch for impatience with progress during the agenda. Periodically, highlight the progress made during the workshop by physically indicating the current agenda item and upcoming items. Remind participants of the important progress made during the day and workshop, especially during transitions.
In our next article, we’ll provide the product innovation workshop design support tools and work products for the Catalyst method (or other NPD phases), such as:
- Facilitating Internal Environment Assessment
- Facilitating External Environment Assessment
- Converting Ideas Into Product Concepts
- Consensual and Co-Owned Implementation
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Oct 12, 2021 | Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support
Activities and Basic Agenda Approach for Meeting Preparation
In an ideal world, you have ample time for meeting preparation. But in the real world, you’re swamped. Too much work, too many meetings, not enough time. What you need is a quick reference for building your agenda steps, and that’s what we’ve provided below, along with some additional scripting to consider.
Optimally, you also have time to get your participants prepared. So, we’ve added some bonus material on conversational questions you might use for your meeting preparation. Chapter references below are from the new facilitator’s guide, “Meetings That Get Results.”
Quick Reference Guidelines: Nine Activities for Your Meeting Preparation
Use the following guidelines for every significant meeting you lead. Below you’ll find the requisite Introductory and Wrap activities to lead these meetings.
- Codify the purpose and scope of the meeting: What project or product are you supporting? Stipulate what the project or product is worth in currency and FTP (full-time person): Why is it important? How much money or time is at risk if we fail?
- Articulate the deliverables: What specific content represents the output of the meeting and satisfies what DONE looks like? What is your analogy for explaining it? Who will use it after the meeting?
- Identify known and unknown information: What are the goals and objectives of the organization, business unit, department, program, product, or project? What information is needed to support activities that will fill the gaps?
- Draft Basic Agenda Steps: Compose a series of steps from experience or other proven approaches that would be used by experts to build the plan, make the decision, solve the problem, or develop the information and consensus necessary to complete your deliverable and get DONE. See “Meetings That Get Results” for frequently used agendas.
—Gestation—
When possible, sleep on it. Go back and review your meeting purpose, scope, deliverables, and Basic Agenda to ensure it will yield the deliverables you need to get DONE.
- Review Basic Agenda for logical flow: Walk through the Agenda Steps with someone else to confirm that they will produce the desired results. Link your analogy to each of the Agenda Steps. Rehearse your explanation of the white space, why the steps exist, how they relate to each other, and how they support the deliverable to get DONE.
- Identify meeting participants: Determine the optimal subject matter expertise you require, the meeting participants who can provide the information required or both. Share the meeting purpose, scope, deliverables, and Basic Agenda and invite them to the meeting.
- Detail the procedures to capture the information required: Gather and assemble specific questions that need to be addressed. Time permitting, consider including questions for which subject matter experts are also seeking answers. Sequence the questions optimally. Build yourself an Annotated Agenda that focuses on the appropriate Tools, methods, and activities to produce the information for each agenda step.
- Perform a walk-through with business experts, executive sponsors, project team members, and anyone else who will listen to you (grandmothers are good for this and you might get a delicious, home-cooked meal).
- Refine: Make changes suggested or developed from your walk-through, edit your final Annotated Agenda, firm up your artifacts, fill out your glossary, complete your slides, distribute your handouts, and rehearse.
Quick Reference: Basic Agenda Framework
Use this Launch and Wrap for every meeting—whether your meeting lasts 50 minutes or multiple days.[1]
- Introduce yourself: stress neutrality, meeting roles, and quantify the impact.
- State the meeting purpose and get an agreement.
- Confirm the meeting scope and get an agreement.
- Show the meeting deliverables and get an agreement.
- Cover the “administrivia” (for example, safety moment); have the attendees introduce themselves.
- Walk through the meeting agenda (preferably using an analogy).
- Explain the Ground Rules (Chapter 4), emphasizing duty (fiduciary responsibility).
Middle Agenda Steps (Chapters 6, 7, and 8):
Insert an Annotated Agenda that details activities and procedures for each Agenda Step and include:
-
- Agenda Step name
- Deliverable from each Agenda Step
- Estimated time for each Agenda Step
- Purpose scripting for each Agenda Step (and analogy)
- Procedure for each Agenda Step (tools, methods, questions)
- Graphical support required (such as legends, screens, definitions, and so on)
- Closure scripting for each Agenda Step (and analogy)
- Review the final output and deliverable: Restate or summarize what the group got DONE.
- Parking Lot (Open Items): Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
- Guardian of Change: Determine what meeting participants agree to tell their superiors and other stakeholders about what happened or what was accomplished during the meeting.
- Continuous Improvement: Use Scale It, Plus/ Delta, Where Are You Now or a more comprehensive meeting and facilitator assessment form.
Structuring Meeting Preparation with Mindful Conversations
The time it will take you to prepare the Agenda Steps between Launch and Wrap takes longer than the meeting itself. Plan on a ratio of preparation time to meeting time of 2:1 or 3:1 (or more) to thoroughly prepare yourself and others. For online meetings, experts suggest to double that amount of time. For standard 50-minute meetings, allow at least another 50 minutes to organize, invite, and prepare. A few hours may be more prudent if you are seeking exceptional results.
Conversations with Participants
Optimally you will speak with participants in advance to learn about them, the people they work with, and their pain points. For workshops, allow 15 to 30 minutes for one-on-ones. Meet face-to-face when permitted, or at least by videoconference, so that you establish eye contact before facilitating them in a meeting.
Sequence of Conversations
In sequence, meet the executive sponsor, business partners, project team, stakeholders, and meeting participants. Conduct conversations privately and assure participants that their responses will be kept confidential.
Objectives of Conversations
These conversations have the following aims:
- Familiarize yourself with each subject matter expert’s role and competencies
- Confirm who should, or should not, attend and why
- Help participants show up better prepared to contribute
- Identify potential issues, hidden agendas, and other obstacles
- Transfer ownership of the meeting output, beginning with the meeting purpose, scope, and deliverables
Mindful Questions to Ask
For structured, stress-tested, and well-sequenced questions, use the ones below. Begin by explaining your role and asking for permission to take notes.[2] Use the following open-ended questions, sit back, and listen—discover the participant’s value and the value added by the participant to the initiative you are supporting.
Get to know participants’ subject matter expertise and attitude toward workshops with openers like “Tell me, what do you do?” and “What has worked for you in the past?” Then continue with questions in this sequence:
- What do you expect from the session?
- Who or what will make the meeting a complete failure?
- What should the output look like?
- What problems do you foresee?
- Who should attend the meeting? Who should not? Why?
- What is going to be my biggest obstacle?
- Does the deliverable and agenda make sense to you?
- Will you silence your “electronic leashes?”
- What questions do you think we should answer?
- What should I have asked that I didn’t ask?
The precision and sequence of the questions are important. They are all open-ended. They help manage “right-to-left” thinking; i.e., ‘expect’ and ‘output.’ Next, they focus on the hidden politics; i.e., ‘failure,’ ‘problems,’ and ‘obstacles.’ They end with a strong, closing question that emphasizes humility in the role of facilitator.
Workshop Preparation Includes Building a Participant’s Package
After structured conversations, send participants a pre-read package, especially at the kickoff of major events. If you happen to provide printed packages, place the spiral edging across the top to make the package both unique and easier for left-handed notetakers. Try to include the first five items listed here in every Participant’s Package. The other suggestions are supplemental:
- An articulate workshop purpose, scope, and deliverables along with the Basic Agenda Steps
- Glossary for terms used in the workshop purpose, scope, deliverables, and Basic Agenda Steps
- Organizational and business unit strategic planning support—especially Mission, Values, Vision, and performance Measures such as objectives and key results
- Product, project, or team charter and detail about the value being supported by the session
- List of questions to be addressed during the meeting or workshop
- Relevant reading materials gathered from others during your conversations
- Responsibilities of the participants, including any overnight assignments, reading, or exercises that may be included in a multiple-day workshop
- Sponsor’s letter of invitation—organizational strategic plan
- Team members’ contact information
Sequencing and Personalization
The sequence of the items above is listed in order of priority. No meeting or workshop arrives at a consensual agreement if the participants do not agree at first on the purpose, scope, and deliverables of the meeting. Next, a consensual understanding of what those terms mean must be controlled and not facilitated. Third, to create a sense of importance and urgency, show how the balance of the organization depends on the success of this meeting and its contributions (i.e., deliverable).
We also recommend that you provide each invitation with a cover letter. If assembling “relevant reading material” that contains too much bulk, many participants won’t look at it. Some will perhaps when the meeting commences. Rather, attach a cover letter to each participant. Stipulate which pages are essential for them to read based on their ability to make significant contributions.
Meeting Preparation Completion
If you can answer yes to the following questions, you are ready to proceed:
- Can you describe a potential deliverable from each Agenda Step?
- Is your Annotated Agenda comprehensive and scripted?
- Does a walk-through of your Annotated Agenda provide the right deliverable?
- Can the participants answer the questions for each Agenda Step?
- Have you had conversations with stakeholders?
Tooling for Each Agenda Step Requires Scripting
Scripting furnishes an anchor during workshops by telling you precisely what to say to be clear, helping you when you forget where you are going, and providing additional support when you have trouble getting there. We all need help at one time or another. Therefore, for every Agenda Step, in every agenda, a well-scripted Annotated Agenda compels you to anticipate and visualize the tools, activities, and procedures you need.
An Annotated Agenda provides tremendous predictive power. From reviewing the rigor and thoroughness of an Annotated Agenda, I can easily predict how well your session will progress, regardless of your talents and skills (or lack thereof, because someone not highly skilled but thoroughly scripted will outperform anyone not well-scripted but relying on their “natural” talent).
Do not rush your effort. Skimping on the Annotated Agenda ensures suboptimal performance. Next—please use it. Do not build it, set it down, and forget about it. We prefer a leader who is holding a piece of paper, reading to us, and being clear over one who speaks extemporaneously and leaves us a bit confused.
For workshops and significant meetings, some facilitators include details about real estate management (where they are mounting their large format paper, legends, grounds rules, and so on) and online technology instructions such as which type of screen share to use.
When you have completed the procedures above during your meeting preparation, your confidence and ease will rise. According to Amy Cuddy, confidence plus ease increases executive presence, and meeting preparation may be the best way to demonstrate executive presence during meetings and workshop facilitation.
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[1] A few exceptions might include daily Scrum sessions, regularly conducted staff meetings, and meetings conducted using Robert’s Rules of Order, such as meetings of boards of directors, community governments, and so on.
[2] Please do not tell someone that your conversation is confidential and then take copious notes without asking permission. I have had two people say no, they would rather I not take any notes. I’ve had dozens compliment me on the question itself because rarely have others extended the courtesy to ask for permission to take notes.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Sep 23, 2021 | Meeting Structure, Meeting Tools
The Purpose
There’s nothing more frustrating than an unproductive meeting—except one that leads to another unproductive meeting. Which is why I wrote Meetings That Get Results. Developed from over 17+ years of research, delivery, and practice, including 15,000+ hours providing live instruction using a certified curriculum, this practical, comprehensive facilitator’s guide is for the millions of people right now who are out there leading meetings without any training in facilitation or meeting design. Within the book’s pages, you’ll learn how to ensure your meetings produce clear and actionable results—meetings that are profitable and productive—and that ultimately lead to fewer meetings.
In addition to basic information-exchange meetings (such as staff meetings and board meetings), “Meetings That Get Results” focuses on three important forms of meetings:
- Decision-making—focusing on prioritization and ranking
- Planning—that is, consensual agreement and shared ownership (who does what by when?)
- Problem-solving—for example, focusing on innovative solutions during the meeting
It’s All About You
I understand that in a world of back-to-back meetings, you barely have time to find the right resources and training to become a better leader. Yet, while you would not attempt to build a boat without the proper training, equipment, and support, every day millions of people are conducting meetings without a critical understanding of or formal training on how to be an effective meeting leader in person or online. Meetings whose deliverables affect tens, hundreds, or even thousands of jobs, or determine the success or failure of a department or company, regularly cost organizations more money than all the boats, ships, and skyscrapers being built today. This book gives you a significant edge:
- Empowering you to help your groups create, innovate, and break through the barriers of miscommunication, politics, and intolerance.
- Making it easier for you to help others reach consensus and shared understanding, while never yielding to the easy answer.
- Providing you with specific Agenda Steps and Tools to avoid the worst possible result of any meeting: another meeting.
MAKING IT EASY
Facil in Latin means “easily accomplished.” The word facilitaera evolved from the Latin verb facilius reddo, meaning “easily accomplished or attained.” When a group of subject matter experts manages to stay focused, miracles can happen. Therefore, I define business facilitation as a method that removes all distractions, making it easy or attainable for a group of experts to gain traction by focusing on the same question at the same time, led by a meeting facilitator who knows how to sequence questions, ask questions with precision, and guide consensual understanding and agreement around optimal solutions for that specific group of experts.
THE TOUGH PART
Rarely do events, meetings, or workshops proceed in a linear fashion. They don’t just “start here” and then “end there.” Rather, they continually loop and twirl—for reasons such as these:
- Someone joins the meeting late, online or in person.
- A subject matter expert gets called away unexpectedly and upon return discovers some critical information missing.
- You are asked to go back and add something.
- Someone changes her mind because her introspection has found a connection between a few things previously not considered.
- Someone comes back from break with added information obtained from an outside subject matter expert or from the internet.
- You are asked to substitute or combine something.
- Someone wakes up and cannot understand something decided earlier.
- Two people start arguing because they refuse to agree with each other based on “principle.”
- You need to fully define something.
- You do a poor job handling participants’ electronic leashes (cell phones, laptops, etc.) and when everyone wakes up, they quickly unravel what has already been accomplished.
Sound familiar?
If so, the remedies in this book are meant for you. I cannot promise you a method to resolve everything you encounter in meetings. But this book does provide a method and additional confidence to manage anything that develops or erupts during your meetings.
When you see the term “meetings” you might substitute the generic term “sessions.” Meeting leadership skills allow you to pivot among ceremonies, conferences, events, meetings, and workshops—wherever groups assemble in session to decide, plan, prioritize, and solve problems. I want to make it easier for you to be a credible meeting leader and meeting facilitator[♠] when leading diverse types of meeting sessions, for all types of groups, organizations, teams, and tribes.[♦]
RELAX
The style of this facilitator’s guide supports quick reading and cross-referencing. Conventions include the following:
- Lists of items (such as bullet points) are typically alphabetically ordered. If not, lists are sorted by chronology, dependency, frequency, or importance (impact).
- Meeting Approaches, Agenda Steps, and Tools appear in italics, with cross-references to the chapters or sections where they appear.
LEGACY
Like you, I know how it feels to sit in a meeting and think, “What a waste of the organization’s time and money.” To solve this problem, I’ve spent years improving a structured method to design and lead better meetings. Once you have read this book, you will have the knowledge I wish I had earlier in my career. The book is the result of more than 15,000 hours invested in training thousands of people on four different continents. These people now plan and run better meetings using disciplined, holistic meeting design, based on proven techniques such as structured conversations, with an ever-vigilant eye toward decision quality and collaborative ownership.
Facilitator’s Guide Chapters
How to Navigate This Facilitator’s Guide to Meeting Design
- Read the first four chapters to understand and reinforce meeting leadership; the core skills and discipline of effective facilitation; and how to manage group collaboration, meeting conflict, and personality dysfunction. When you need a refresher, refer to the table of contents to isolate the topic you need to reinforce, such as “How to Manage Arguments.”
- For your meetings and events, use the Quick Reference sections and Tool selection guide at the end of the book to remind you about suitable activities for structuring your agenda and meeting design. The Quick Reference sections prompt you with detailed instructions to use when building your Launch, Agenda Steps, and Wrap (fully detailed and scripted in Chapter 5).
Facilitator’s Guide Chapter Summary
- For specific agendas, tools, and procedures to use repeatedly when conducting meeting sessions, turn to these chapters (also see the summary table below)
- Planning sessions—Chapter 6
- Decision-making and prioritization sessions—Chapter 7
- Problem-solving and innovation sessions—Chapter 8
- Online sessions and differences—Chapter 9
- Staff meetings and other information-exchange sessions—Chapter 9
- Board meetings and “Robert’s Rules” situations—Chapter 9
- After identifying your situation and locating the appropriate Agenda Steps, adapt the prescribed procedures to your personal taste and environmental constraints by considering the following factors:
- Duration or amount of available time
- Monetary impact of your meeting deliverable on organizational objectives
- Number of participants, expected and optimal
- Physical space or online ease of using breakout rooms
- Your ability to adapt the tools to both in-person and online settings
- Your experience and confidence with the recommended tools
Facilitator’s Guide Scripting and Support
- Script your Annotated Agenda (chapter 5) from start to finish. For best results, follow the seven activities of a professional Introduction (Launch) using the prescribed sequence. Script them and follow your script. According to New York Times best-selling author Daniel Pink,[♣] the four activities of a professional Conclusion (Wrap) are even more important than a smooth Launch. So thoroughly prepare for your four concluding Review and Wrap activities, which ensure clear and actionable results.
- Prepare your participants. For major initiatives or workshops, send out a Participants’ Package (chapter 5). For 50-minute meetings, prepare a one-page description of the meeting purpose, meeting scope, meeting objectives, and basic agenda.
- Once your Annotated Agenda (Chapter 5) is complete, and even while you are working on it, prepare supplementary material and visual support such as a glossary, slides, legends, posters, and screens (illustrated throughout this book) to help you explain the tools and procedures you will use to build deliverables and get DONE.
[♠] The meeting facilitator represents one of four roles performed by the meeting leader; the other three roles commonly performed by the meeting leader include meeting coordinator, meeting documenter, and meeting designer.
[♦] Teams reassemble every season with new players. Tribes stay together through thick and thin, over the long haul.
[♣] Daniel Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018).
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Aug 12, 2021 | Analysis Methods, Communication Skills, Decision Making, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support, Meeting Tools, Planning Approach, Problem Solving, Scrum Events
For over ten years, we have consistently posted articles on Facilitation Best Practices. Articles are written to help you lead better meetings.
Throughout, we have updated these articles to keep them fresh, current, and vibrant. Some Facilitation Best Practices articles include links to valuable downloads, such as our one-page meeting template agenda and business model canvas. Below is a list of 27 highly useful posts based on viewer popularity and the current needs of our volatile and ever-changing business climate. Read, learn, and enjoy—and don’t forget to share!
Facilitation Best Practices Acknowledge Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
When weighing agile vs. waterfall benefits, consider how the Stacey Matrix arranges projects from the simple through the chaotic.
Avoid these eight meeting killers that can destroy your meeting and your professional reputation . . . do not penalize people who are on time . . .
Agendas should include a beginning, a middle, and an end. To conduct a professional meeting introduction, complete these five activities.
Meeting Wrap — How to facilitate four important closing activities: 1-Review, 2-Next Steps, 3-Communications, and 4-Assessment.
Leading online meetings effectively requires more skills than facilitating meetings in person. Here are dozens of tips for technology and participant challenges.
It is not your responsibility to GENERATE CONFLICT RESOLUTION. However, here are four activities that show you how to MANAGE meeting conflict.
Always empower your participants, but learn to control challenging personality types to avoid problem meetings and problem people.
Nobody wants more meetings or more time in meetings, so use this meeting agenda template to add your own agenda steps to get DONE faster.
Meeting problems are indicative of resistance during a meeting. Resistance can be prevented and mitigated. Here’s what to do about them.
Every meeting leader needs a simple tool to facilitate prioritization and build consensus quickly. Combine our PowerBall method (MoSCoW) with BookEnds for a robust approach.
Active listening requires facilitators and other servant leaders to reflect on WHAT was said. Highly effective active listeners also reflect WHY.
Quantitative SWOT analysis was developed by Metz at Kellogg because qualitative situational analysis provides a poor method for building consensus.
Presenting a brief, yet powerful, list of Facilitation Do’s and Don’ts for reference before and during meetings, sessions, and workshops.
Deliverables should drive meetings, even review meetings. Here are the deliverables, frequency, and structure for the three review meetings.
Use ground rules and ideation rules to manage individual and group behavior during meetings. A bit of structure will help get you DONE, fast.
A robust action plan answers ten planning questions. They aggregate to build consensus with participants agreeing on WHO does WHAT by WHEN.
A poor question by facilitators asks “How would you like to categorize these?” Learn the secret that drives natural categories of raw lists.
Detailed Scrum facilitation events/agendas, inputs required, and comments about the skills required to facilitate Scrum events effectively.
The Business Model Canvas uses a one-page primer and template, providing a general scan. The specific questions you can use are detailed here.
To ensure your participants are prepared and responsive, provide 4 documents: Pre-Read, Annotated Agenda, Slide Deck, and Meeting Output Notes.
To build consensus, you and your teams require three clear and critical behaviors, namely: Leadership, Facilitation, and Meeting Design.
Problem-solving demands structure and focus to get more done quickly, especially with many symptoms, causes, and mitigations to be considered.
How to facilitate speakers and get the most out of speaker and conference presentations. Some call this the WHAT, SO WHAT, and NOW WHAT.
Real-Win-Worth: To what extent an opportunity is real, we can win compared to competitive options, and to what extent an opportunity is worthhttps://mgrush.com/blog/real-win-worth/.
You will not change quiet people into extroverts, yet there are steps to increase the amount of meeting participation from all people.
Edward de Bono: Six Thinking Hats instructs on HOW TO think rather than WHAT TO think, making it easier to generate more ideas and increase decision quality.
When meeting participants are professionals, meetings are NOT just an opportunity to speak up, but an obligation to contribute.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Jul 8, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure
You may not think there’s a difference between being proficient at organizing meetings versus being able to lead meetings. There is!
Some people can do both. And if well trained, can do both well. However, many organizations discover too late—which is once the meeting has begun—that the person who has so efficiently organized their meeting does not know how to be an effective leader. A leader who knows how to guide the group to a clear deliverable; a concise plan of action (not just another meeting) for all to follow. A meeting that gets results!
With that said, increase your meeting success by increasing your “Executive Presence” — being someone who knows how to lead meetings.
Strengthen your credibility, Increase your ease, Curtail your ego According to research by Northwestern’s Dr. Amy Cuddy, three factors will increase your “Executive Presence” (think respect).
- Strengthen your credibility
- Increase your ease
- Curtail your ego
By improving your ability to lead meetings, you and your organization nourish vibrant meetings that produce effective results everyone can own.
So, let’s take a closer look at each of these factors.
The formula to strengthen a speaker’s credibility extends back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and before. Aristotle presents three leadership factors of persuasive success: ethos, logos, and pathos. Aristotle’s leadership factors are closely related to Dr. Cuddy’s three actions. So, if you want to increase your “Executive Presence” when you lead meetings, you might want to pay close attention.
1. Lead Meetings by Strengthening Your Credibility (ethos)
In Greek, ethos means ‘character.’ Ethos captures the credibility and refers to the trustworthiness of the speaker (or, meeting leader). Ethos expresses itself through the tone and style of the message, transforming the speaker into an authority on the subject.
Ethos lends itself to the creation of reputation and exists independently from the message. The impact of ethos refers to ‘ethical appeal’ or the ‘appeal from credibility.’
Dr. Cuddy on Credibility
Foundational Factors
Three foundational factors sustain all the other factors that strengthen credibility. They include integrity, expertise, and preparedness.
- Integrity represents honesty, forthrightness, and ethical business practices and behavior. Many executives have demonstrated stellar “Executive Presence,” but ethics became their undoing as they lost their credibility and, in many cases, they’re still working to regain that over time.
- Expertise requires getting good before you worry about looking good to other people. Early in your career, intellectual, horsepower is essential, but it does not replace “Executive Presence”. “Executive Presence” doesn’t measure your merit, intellect, or horsepower. “Executive Presence” measures your capacity to translate your creativity, your good ideas, and your deep expertise for the benefit of other people.
- Preparedness simply means showing up prepared. Foundations are built upon showing up prepared for something that’s important to you. Perhaps you’ve done a talk-through, a walk-through, or a run-through. If so, the non-foundational components to be covered next won’t harm you. For example, filler words decrease just by the nature of being prepared. When someone challenges you if you show up prepared, you are less likely to get caught off guard.
Vocal Factors
Vocal factors also strengthen credibility and include inflection, cadence, resonance, fillers, and props. Inflection and cadence capture the two most important factors.
- Inflection refers to the amount that your voice changes in pitch and amplitude, over time. We all know how it feels to experience complete monotone or absence of inflection. For example, with customer service call centers, two variables were strongly associated with successful calls.
- The ratio of listening to speaking. People who listened more were seen as being more attuned more helpful, and more interested.
- The second was the variable of inflection. People with higher rates of inflection demonstrated stronger interest, and stronger responsiveness, and even their levels of expertise were rated as higher.
- Cadence or speed may convey urgency. So, sometimes speed needs to be dialed down, especially if you’ve been told consistently, you speak too quickly. Your fast rate of speech may mean that your audience cannot track and keep up with you. Your levels of expertise are so high that your cognition can’t catch up and process what you’re saying at the rate at which you’re speaking. Some listeners suggest that fast speaking indicates nervousness or a lack of confidence. Slow down a bit by inserting pauses, especially when you’re making a particular point. Pauses signal that you are comfortable with silence. They can signal that you’re making an important point. Pauses can also signal your willingness to be challenged at a specific point in time.
Three Other Factors to Consider
- Resonance or vocal power, knowing that when a voice is low to average in range (of the assumed gender), people will most frequently describe that voice as being successful, sociable, and smart. Those are the adjectives that do not describe when someone’s voice is really high with the assumed gender. They will say it’s grating, annoying, or too young. As we age, our voices get deeper, and increased age is associated with higher credibility. Thus, research suggests lowering your pitch. Additionally, control your vocal power (volume) and breath control.
- Filler words become a distraction when used more frequently than normal speech. We all use filler words, including American Sign Language. Filler words represent a part of normal speech. However, beware when they start to become excessively measured by the fact, that they have become a distraction.
- Props or fidgets such as your phone may detract from your credibility. It could be clicking a pen or a marker. Remember, anything that causes a distraction removes traction from getting DONE. And nobody wants longer meetings.
Aristotle on Ethos (Credibility)
Aristotle tells us that appeals from ethos should not come from appearance but from a person’s use of language. Advertising relies much on ethos and takes the form of credible spokespeople, such as Michael Jordan selling underwear. The historical view holds that three characteristics fortify ethos. Effective meeting leaders embrace all three, namely:
- Good moral character,
- Good sense, and
- Goodwill
2. Lead Meetings by Increasing Your Ease (logos)
Dr. Cuddy’s Foundational Factors on Ease
Four foundational factors sustain the other factors that increase your appearance of ease and strengthen credibility. For instance, diet, sleep, exercise, and social support increase ease and credibility.
- Diet – “Is there any food in your food?”
- Sleep – “Is there any rest in your sleep?”
- Exercise – “Do you move routinely and develop stress resilience?”
- Social support and friendships make us stronger, more stress resilient, and more capable when we’re under fire from any number of things that we cannot control.
Other Easing Factors
Additionally, easing factors also strengthen credibility including stability, congruence, connection, and authenticity.
- Stability (emotional) refers to how we navigate our inner world of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. You tame and develop emotional regulation by recognizing, even naming the emotion, to create space between you and the challenge. Called “labeling,” a descriptive mode brings us into the present moment and can regulate the brain’s amygdala from overtaking our response. You could say internally, my heart is racing, my face is getting flushed, my hands are getting sweaty, etc., and your central nervous system will calm down. Therefore, expressing the emotion prevents it from taking over.
- Congruence implies alignment of your words with your body language.
- Connection includes strong eye contact, although it varies by culture. Do you know how to listen to people, do you maintain a connection with them over time? Above all, they want to know that you are at ease connecting with them.
- Authenticity signals the ease of self-assurance. What are your strengths, what are your values, what are your needs? What is your vision and what are you striving for in the world? In other words, authenticity creates self-assurance and a clear purpose that anchors you over and over.
Aristotle on Logos (Internal Consistency)
Aristotle tells us that appeals from logos refer to internal consistency and reasoning of the message—clarity of your claims, logic of your rationale, and effectiveness of your supporting evidence. Aristotle’s favorite approach above all, logos captures the logic used to support claims (induction and deduction) with facts and statistics.
- The impact of logos may be called an argument’s logical appeal.
- A meeting leader supports inductive logic by requiring facts, evidence, and support. They allow participants to develop a general conclusion. Or they lead deductive logic by challenging participants with a general proposition and then eliciting specific facts, evidence, and support.
3. Lead Meetings by Curtailing Your Ego (pathos)
Dr. Cuddy’s Foundational Factors on Ego
Dr. Cuddy’s equation on “Executive Presence” Ego as a denominator in Dr. Cuddy’s equation on “Executive Presence” means we are dividing our credibility and ease to get a final quotient (where more is better). So, when you divide a number for credibility plus ease with an exceedingly high number, you erode your quotient. What participants want is true confidence and true humility. Therefore, an effective leader may hold back their point of view until they hear from others to be sure that they’re getting the information that they need from other people. For example, from CS Lewis we have the following:
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking about yourself less often.” — CS Lewis
Aristotle on Pathos (Audience Focus)
Pathos (Greek for “suffering” or “experience”) refers to an “appeal to the audience’s sympathies and imagination.” The persuasive appeal of pathos focuses on your participants’ sense of identity, their self-interests, and emotions. Therefore, many consider pathos the strongest of the appeals.
Be cautious as appeals to participants’ sense of identity and self-interest exploit common biases. They naturally bend in the direction of what is advantageous to them, what serves their interests, or the interests of the groups to which they belong.
Finally, to improve one’s “Executive Presence,” continue to minimize or avoid using the first person singular “I” or “me.” Substitute the integrative “we” or “us” or refer to the collective and pluralistic “you.” The fewer times you say “I,” the more respect you will gain as you get viewed as the one who leads meetings that create clear and actionable results.
~~~~~~~~
NOTE: These three appeals are used to describe rhetoric, which we define as “the art of adjusting ideas to people, and people to ideas.” Fortify yourself with a deeper understanding of rhetoric and argumentation if you want to lead challenging meetings more effectively by becoming a better facilitator.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | May 6, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure
FEAR: F#©% Everything And Run
If the thought of change instills the FUD factor in you (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) you’re not alone. Fear of change keeps people in relationships they’ve outgrown, jobs they don’t like, and even hairstyles that no longer suit them. Likewise, organizations suffer fear, uncertainty, and doubt over change, even when they understand that change is necessary if they are to add value and remain competitive. Fear that they may fail. Uncertainty about how to change, or rather, what actions will lead to successful change. And, finally, doubt about whether all the time, money, and effort it takes to implement the change will be worth it.
That’s where you come in. The truth is people don’t change their minds, they make new decisions based on new or added information—and sometimes frequently. This new and added information accelerates change by influencing decision-making in both individuals and groups.[i]
The Servant Leader
With that in mind, a servant leader (like you) does not change people’s minds, but rather, makes it easier for people to choose appropriate change supported through more informed decisions. By speaking with people rather than at them, servant leaders create environments that foster breakthrough solutions. The problem is, in most organizations this change begins during meetings. Yet, meetings often fail for one of three reasons:
- The wrong people are attending (rare)
- The right people attend but are apathetic and don’t care (rarest)
- The right people care but they don’t know how to conduct an effective meeting (bingo!)
We know that groups can make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group, so why don’t we invest in learning how to run better meetings? Part of the problem can be found in our muscle memory.
When part of a group or team, we are more attuned to taking orders than creating collaborative solutions.
The Servant Leader Solution
As the workplace transforms, leadership techniques change. Today, instead of dealing mostly with individuals (one-on-one conversations), servant leaders work frequently with people in groups (ceremonies, events, meetings, and workshops). Instead of supervising hours of workload, they help their teams become self-managing. Instead of directing tasks, they motivate people to achieve results. Facing consecutive days of back-to-back meetings, meeting participants value the importance of well-run meetings that stay focused on aligning team activities with organizational goals. Professionally trained facilitators solve communication problems in meetings or workshops by ensuring the group stays focused on the meeting objectives while applying meeting designs that lead to more informed decisions. Yet, while modern leaders exhibit many of these positive traits compared to traditional or historic leaders, a further shift is required to be truly facilitative, so that teams and groups realize the full potential of their commitment, consensus, and ownership.
Characteristics of the Servant Leader Difference
| Modern Leaders |
Servant Leaders |
| Communicate and receive feedback |
Structure activities so that stakeholders and team members evaluate them and each other |
| Content experts, based on position and power |
Context experts, based on credibility, genuineness, and inspiration |
| Effective interpersonal skills |
People savvy, but also group-focused |
| Have some meeting management skills |
Skills that use groups to build complex outputs by structuring conversations based on a collaborative tone |
| Involved in directing tasks |
Facilitate plans and agreements based on group input |
| Remain accountable for results |
Transfer ownership so that members are highly skilled and accountable for outcomes |
| Value teamwork and collaboration |
Focus on removing impediments while providing procedures that fortify self-organizing teams |
Have you ever led a meeting? I’m going to assume you have. So, ask yourself, when the meeting was over, what changed from the moment your participants walked into the meeting? As a servant leader and meeting facilitator, you become the change agent, someone who takes a group from where they are at the beginning to where they need to be at the conclusion. All leaders must know where they are going. They must know what the group is intending to build, decide, or leave with when the meeting is done. Effective servant leaders also start with the end in mind.
A Servant Leader Takes Command of the Questions
The servant leader does not have answers, but rather, takes command of the questions. These optimal questions are scripted and properly sequenced. If you were designing a new home, for example, you would consider the foundation and structure long before you decide on the color of the grout. By responding to appropriate questions, meeting participants’ focus, and generating their collective preferences and requirements. A neutral, meeting leader values rigorous preparation, anticipates group dynamics, and designs the meeting accordingly. The meeting leader becomes responsible for managing the entire approach—the agenda, the ground rules, the flow of conversations, etc., —but not the content developed during the meeting. Therefore, effective meetings result from building a safe and trustworthy environment, one that provides “permission to speak freely” without fear of reprisal or economic loss. Ironically, the more structured the meeting, the more flexible you (the meeting facilitator) can be. Without structure, meeting design, or a road map, you can never tell exactly where you are, or more important, how much remains undone. With structure, you can take the scenic route because you have a plan that references your original design.
Whereas groups without structure who take the scenic route get lost, or worse, cannot agree on where to go next.
Benefits of Embracing a Facilitative Leadership Technique
When organizations support skilled and facilitative leadership for product development, project management, and others, they are allocating human capital to ensure the success of their single most expensive investment—meetings. They do this by ensuring that when . . .
- Context is carefully managed, and teams are free to focus on higher quality and value—quality being defined as satisfying customer expectations and value being defined as exceeding customer expectations.
- Staff are treated like partners and collaborators, and commitment and motivation increase.
- Stakeholders’ ideas are sought, and meetings become collaborative, innovative, and vibrant.
The value of embracing the servant leader, facilitative leadership technique extends beyond meetings to benefit a widening circle of people:
You Benefit By . . .
- Earning respect and recognition for being one who leads better meetings.
- Increasing your leadership consciousness, facilitation competence, and meeting design confidence.
- Learning how to modify and adapt proven agendas, procedures, and various information-gathering, analyzing, and deciding tools.
Your Organization Benefits By . . .
- Expediting the output of highly sought deliverables.
- Improving the culture and team spirit while enabling outstanding individual performances.
- Reducing the cost of omissions, issues subject to normal oversight.
- Reducing the cost of wasted meetings and wasted time in meetings.
Your Community Benefits By . . .
- Encouraging shared planning efforts to improve the distribution of resources.
- Improving volunteerism.
- Increasing decision transparency.
- Solidifying shared ownership.
All Society Benefits By . . .
- Increasing eco-effectiveness when reducing wasted time and resources.
- Improving the likelihood of win-win scenarios.
- Motivating hitherto unused or underused intellectual capacity.
“Meetings That Get Results” aims to shift your thinking from facilitation (as a noun or a static way of being) to facilitating (as a verb or a dynamic way of doing)—truly making it easier for your meeting participants to make more informed decisions. Leading is about stimulating and inspiring people, and facilitating skills epitomize the DNA of servant leaders.
Facilitation Liberates Leaders
In the past, leaders needed to be content experts. Today, organizations already employ and engage a wealth of subject matter experts. What they need are leaders who know how to be facilitative while managing context. In the past, leadership was about giving answers. Today, leadership is about leading with precise and properly sequenced questions while always providing a safe environment for everybody’s response. Imagine the following scenario. Your team needs to develop a plan that will solve employee burnout in the cybersecurity department. To assess the value of proposed solutions, they’ll need to know the purpose of the cybersecurity department, and why it exists.
Which of the following makes better sense . . .?
A ‘presenter’ might access the cybersecurity department charter from HR (Human Resources). In most organizations, this would take from fifteen minutes to five hours or longer. Then spend another fifteen minutes building their PowerPoint slides. Then take five minutes to present the slides and another ten to twenty minutes managing Q & A (questions and answers) about the content on the slides. Call it one hour total (minimum). At the conclusion, the presenter still owns the content they showed on the slides.
Alternatively…
You, as the meeting leader, can use a procedure, such as our Purpose Tool. The Purpose Tool distills a consensual expression about the purpose of the cybersecurity department directly from the subject matter experts who understand both the purpose and the problems within the department today. In fifteen minutes or less, you can lead the team to build an expression of shared purpose using the Purpose Tool.
Most importantly, at the end of the fifteen minutes the meeting participants, not you, own the results.
A structured technique bestows your participants with ownership right from the beginning. But here is the real joy—once you understand how to use a tool (i.e., how to manage the context), you can use it repeatedly. Additionally, you don’t need to have detailed expertise on specific content. You only need to have a conversational understanding of the terms being used. “Meetings That Get Results” will raise your consciousness around the roles of meeting designer, meeting facilitator, and meeting leader by helping you understand how to . . .
- Apply facilitator skills such as precise questioning, keen observing, and active listening to improve meetings
- remain content-neutral, passionate about results, yet unbiased about the path
- think separately about facilitation and meeting design, and
- understand that the roles of meeting coordinator, meeting documentor, meeting facilitator, and meeting designer are not persons, but rather, positions, that are frequently performed by the same person
~~~~~~~~ [i] For the past thirty years, most ‘changes’ have been both digital and dynamic, constantly shifting—based on stuff that is ‘in-formation‘. With ‘in-formation,’ change is both inherent and inevitable—only growth is optional.
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Apr 1, 2021 | Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure
Regardless of their personal style, experts and professionals who lead effective meetings rely on a simple, one-page meeting agenda.
(Templates for which we’ve included .docx and .rtf links for you to download below.)
Taking a few minutes before every meeting to prepare your simple meeting agenda can prevent wasting another hour in yet another meeting. This meeting agenda template focuses on what DONE looks like for all meeting agenda steps. It’s all about getting DONE because nobody wants more meetings or, especially, more time in meetings.
If completing this meeting agenda template only gets you to think clearer about your meeting purpose, scope, and deliverables, your preparation will have been rewarded. Once you revise the style of your meeting agenda template, you can modify or repurpose your future meeting agendas in a few minutes. Always stay focused on ‘“right to left” thinking, which means keeping the end in mind by knowing what DONE looks like.
Add Content to Your Meeting Agenda Template
Develop your meeting agenda template by adding your own content. Modify the picture below of the meeting agenda template or download a DOCX or RTF document.
Start with a clear statement of your meeting purpose. Then articulate your meeting scope, both what is included and what is excluded (IS NOT). Carefully spell out your meeting objectives, frequently called “deliverables.” For standard business practices, Steven Covey refers to the objectives as “the end in mind.” In Agile communities, you are expressing what DONE looks like. The Lean and Six Sigma communities may refer to it as using “right-to-left thinking,” where you go to the end of the written line and work backward (in the English language), from “right” (ending) to “left” (beginning).
While the first and last two agenda steps (Introduction and Wrap) repeat themselves from meeting to meeting, modify steps two through XX with content, questions, and activities that complete your meeting objectives. Two secrets for building a compelling, one-page agenda template include:
- The best meetings generate some type of action or follow-up, so make sure that all activities are assigned to someone in the meeting, and
- ‘If it wasn’t documented, it didn’t happen,” so be sure to distribute thorough meeting notes soon after the meeting concludes.
NOTE: We are very careful of rhetoric here. We do NOT ask “Who is going to do this?” Rather, we ask, “Who will take responsibility for reporting back to this group on the status of this?” As we all know, many volunteers re-assign the tasks to somebody that works for them.
Make it a 50-minute Meeting, Not 60
Learn to keep your meetings to fifty minutes by starting five minutes after and ending five minutes before the hour or half-hour. Stop treating your one-hour meetings too lightly with little or no preparation. Statistically, we waste more time and money in briefer meetings than full-day or multiple-day workshops.
All in, you cost your organization at least USD$150 per hour. With eight of you in a one-hour meeting, your “burn rate” will be around $20 per minute. Therefore, some organizations encourage meeting participants to NOT attend if there is no agenda because meeting time represents a high probability of wasted time. For optimal productivity, here is the framework for a field-tested meeting agenda template, which you can quickly modify for your fifty-minute meetings.
Meeting Agenda Template
Download .rtf file Agenda Template
Meeting Experts Note:
- All agendas, even a one-page agenda, should include a beginning, middle, and end. Do not skip the beginning or end. See other MGRUSH Best Practices for how to manage robust introductions and wraps.
- Capture participants in advance to anticipate modifications or additions. Since we expect our participants to own the meeting output, they should provide some voice as to HOW the output is derived.
- Crafting a simple, one-page agenda around the deliverable makes it easier to create the agenda steps required. For example, a “Wedding Plan” might include decisions about food, music, and ceremony. A project plan might include objectives and key results, situation analysis, alignment, and assignments.
- Distribute your completed and written meeting agenda before the meeting. Earlier is better, preferably as part of a “read-ahead”.
- Keep in mind that simple agenda steps ought to reflect WHAT, the objective (i.e., noun) of the step. Do not detail HOW (i.e., verb) you are going to facilitate the activity. Save the details, method, and tools for your private, annotated agenda or notes (see supporting rationale and more thorough explanation in the next section).
- Observe in the picture above that each agenda step should stress a discrete outcome (i.e., a condition) or output (i.e., something that can be documented).
- Time box strategic discussions unless you are hosting a strategic planning session. Strategic issues bog down many tactical and operational meetings. Defer strategic issues to a separate meeting time and place. In other words, most meetings waste time discussing stuff not related to the deliverable of the meeting or the agenda; i.e., scope creep within a meeting. And scope creep begins in meetings.
Nobody Wants More Meetings or Longer Meetings
Yet many of us find ourselves in meetings a few dozen hours per week (or more). Why do we meet so frequently since seldom do meetings remove stuff from our “To-Do” list? On the contrary, most meetings normally lead to more work. How do we fix this? Start with your agenda steps.
Your meeting participants do not want any more work, and verbs are work. We perform verbs so that our actions yield results, frequently called objects (hence the term objective). Objects are also known as nouns: persons, places, things, or events about which we need more information to make more informed decisions. Label your agenda steps as nouns because verbs add no value for participants.
Agenda Steps Too Frequently Stress Work (i.e., Verbs), Not Results (Objects)
Verbs like “identify” and “define” add no value to a simple agenda. Verbs shown on meeting agendas only help meeting leaders and facilitators who need to know what method they plan to use for delivering results at the end of agenda steps. Therefore, keep the verbs to yourself. Put them on your annotated agenda (i.e., play script for you only) or private notes, but spare your participants the burden of doing your work. Most participants seek less work, not more, so use an object or noun for describing agenda steps.
Note, for example, that an agenda step may deliver a “definition” but it cannot deliver a “define.” An agenda step may deliver a “decision,” but it cannot deliver “deciding.” Be precise with your rhetoric.
Our business units, departments, and activities are organized around nouns, not verbs. Everyone performs the same verbs, such as Plan > Acquire > Operate > Control (MGRUSH) or Plan > Do > Check > Act (Deming). Look at organizational design. People get organized around things (nouns), such as treasury (Finance), regulatory (Legal), human capital (Human Resources), products (Marketing and Engineering), customers (Sales and Service), etc. Everyone performs the same verbs that describes WHAT they do. However, they are performing or adding value to different resources or objects, thus HOW they do it varies.
Meeting Deliverables are Also Nouns
Therefore, view your meeting deliverable as an object and exclude verbs. Always keep your participants focused on “what DONE looks like.” Begin with the meeting deliverable and describe the object you have in your hands when your meeting is complete. Do the same for each agenda step, so that everyone stays focused on the end in mind. Observe the two agendas in the table for modifying a simple agenda.
Agenda Steps Should Describe What DONE Looks Like
Verbs Belong on Your Annotated Agenda
Place the verbs in your annotated agenda where you should include detailed instructions for your procedure. For example, if using break-out sessions:
- What are the team names?
- Who are the team CEOs (i.e., Chief Easel Officer)?
- What question(s) do you want teams to answer?
- Which method(s) for analysis will yield consensual understanding and agreement?
- What media support do you need to explain a tool (e.g., PowerBalls)?
Most people include verbs in their basic agendas to remind them what to do as the facilitator. However, the instructions they provide themselves are devoid of the painstaking detail required to keep groups clear and engaged. If, as a participant, you have an elevated level of confidence that your facilitator knows what they are doing, most assuredly you would rather participate with the agenda on the right (e.g.,”Prioritizing“) because it’s clear and simple. Its agenda steps denote chunks of progress—objects that have been created, not work that is forthcoming.
Three Basic Agendas and Agenda Steps for Frequent Deliverables
Here are three basic agendas you can use for the most common deliverables from meetings: plans, decisions, and solutions. Of the hundreds of Best Practices articles you can access, many explain the specific tools and procedures for facilitating each of the agenda steps below. Use the magnifying glass on the web site to search for the term you want to learn about more.
- Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
- Mission (WHY are we here?)
- Values (WHO are we?)
- Vision (WHERE are we going? How do we know if we got there or not?)
- Success Measures (WHAT are our measurements of progress?)
- Current Situation (WHERE are we now?)
- Actions (WHAT should we do?—from strategy through tasks)
- Alignment (Is this the right stuff to do?)
- Roles and Responsibilities (WHO does WHAT, by WHEN?)
- Guardian of Change (WHAT should we tell our stakeholders?)
- Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)
Basic Decision-making Agenda Steps[**]
- Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
- Purpose of the Object (e.g., any object such as the acquisition of another product line)
- Options (for the Objects)
- Criteria (about the Objects)
- Deselection and Decision (prioritization)
- Testing (for decision quality)
- Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)
Basic Problem-solving Agenda Steps[**]
- Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
- Purpose of the Solution (Description of Ideal)
- ‘Problem’ (Problem Definition)
- Symptoms (Externally Observable Factors)
- Causes
- Actions
- Preventions [x-axis, Timeline 1]
- Cures [x-axis, Timeline 2]
- IT Service Department Personnel (y-axis, Persona A)
- Management (y-axis, Persona B)
- Testing
- Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)
[*] I have ‘greyed out’ the less important terms because they signify or trigger meaning about the more important questions in black that should be the focus of the Agenda Step.
[**] Terms that are ‘greyed out’ are for your eyes only and not to be shown on the plain agenda you share.
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Mar 9, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support, Problem Solving
Many articles talk about getting meeting participants involved. Seriously? If the meeting output impacts participants’ quality of life, how much money they make, who works for them, etc., rest assured, they will add their point of view, if asked.
However, if the meeting output, frequently called a deliverable, does not affect them, they should not be attending.
Meeting participants should be engaged before they show up. If not, why are they attending? If their attendance is based on your mandate or a boss’s edict, then stop it. Your meeting has lost before it begins.
The point is when meeting participants are professionals, meaning paid employees who add value to an organization. Meetings are NOT simply an opportunity to speak up, meetings are an obligation to contribute as part of the implied contract of being a professional.
In-person or online, meeting participants have an obligation to participate. We are not talking about unstructured community discussions and volunteer settings we refer to them respectfully as Kum-bah-yah. Rather, we are talking about the vast majority of business meetings where the meeting output becomes input to help advance initiatives such as products, projects, departments, business units, and organizations.
Meeting Participants Called Subject Matter Experts [SMEs]
Professional meeting participants are made up of members from the business and technical communities who contribute their subject matter expertise, also known as content. Once they feel ‘safe’ to speak up and are engaged with clear and pertinent questions, they develop ideas and thoughts that are shared as content.
Do not let their ideas evaporate in the ether. Remind participants that the facilitator has an obligation to protect them from harm, and they have an obligation to share their thoughts and input. Also, frequently remind your meeting participants that their…
Professional meeting participant responsibilities include:
- Preparing and actively taking part.
- Representing the voice of their business needs and goals.
- Owning the results of meetings in which they participate, if they imply or suggest consensual agreement.
- Communicating meeting results to others, as appropriate.
Notice the underlying demand that you expect meeting participants to invest time before and after their meeting. This may be a big surprise for people accustomed to only showing up, going to the next meeting(s), and eventually going home until their next round of meetings ‘tomorrow.’
Why We Need Meeting Participants (Power of Plurality)
Plain and simple—decision quality. Nobody is smarter than everybody because groups of people can develop more ideas (options) than individuals on their own. Any person or group with more options at their disposal will statistically make higher-quality decisions. By leveraging one another, we are capable of breakthroughs and innovations not realized when working alone.
Professional meeting participant characteristics include:
- Arriving with a clear understanding of the meeting’s purpose, scope, and deliverables.
- Coming prepared, having read the pre-read BEFORE the meeting, not AT the meeting.
- Striving to be present and focused, and to not be a cause of distractions (e.g., texting).
- Preparing input and responses for the dialogue that concerns them most.
- Willing to listen during the meeting.
- Understanding that there is more than one right answer.
How You Can Help Your Meeting Participants Become Better Listeners
As the facilitator, help your meeting participants become better listeners. Dr. Ralph Nichols, “Father of the Field of Listening”, notes three behaviors that perfectly align with the role of facilitator. Begin to exhibit these behaviors yourself, and meeting participants will follow you, making them better listeners during meetings.
1. Anticipate
First, strive to anticipate the speaker’s next point. As they tend toward additional content, clarifying existing content, trying to understand the context, etc. As the facilitator, your anticipation helps shape your direction and participants will follow you. For example, should you be walking closer to the speaker to understand them or closer to the easel to write down their contributions? Meeting participants will take your cue and focus on the information being shared or the uncertainty that needs to be cleared up. If they anticipate correctly, their understanding has been reinforced. If they anticipate incorrectly, they wonder why, and the cognitive dissonance will further increase their attention and focus to understand why.
2. Identify
Another method to improve participants’ listening is to identify the supporting elements a speaker uses in building points. Here is the primary role of the facilitator, to help extract the most significant contributions. Next, ensure that you capture and record the supporting elements so that all the meeting participants can view the same information. Build understanding among all participants by challenging their thoughts, or as we say in the MGRUSH curriculum “Make Your Thinking Visible.” Participants, as speakers, rely on three actions to build their points:
-
Characteristics of speakers
- They explain their point,
- May get emotional and harangue the point, or
- They illustrate the point with a factual example or illustration.
-
Sophisticated listeners know that . . .
Attitudes are frequently subjective and specific to the speaker or contributor who “feels” a certain way. While other factors that motivate behavior include values and beliefs, sophisticated listeners hope to better understand what evidence, facts, examples, situations, or other objective information may have shaped the attitude or caused the feelings.
For example, we know that the preferred spice levels in foods we eat vary from person to person. When a certain threshold or pain level is exceeded, we might label that bowl of chili we’re eating as too spicy. However, someone sitting next to us, eating the same chili, might choose to add additional spice because they have a different threshold of pain or sensitivity to capsicum. Therefore, the level of capsicum measured by Scoville Units provides an objective basis for understanding the claim, “This chili is too spicy.” Consequently, participants increase their listening efficiency when they accept the ‘subjective’ point of view and seek an objective reason for it that everyone understands.
3. Reflect
A third way to improve the listening skills of your participants is to consistently reflect the points that have been recorded. Good listeners take advantage of short pauses to summarize and absorb what has been said. Periodic summaries reinforce absorption and understanding.
Listening is Hard Work
Most of us are poor listeners for a variety of reasons. We have had little training and few training opportunities exist (although the MGRUSH Professional Facilitation class is a significant exception). We think faster than others speak. Plus, listening is hard work and requires complete concentration. It is a challenge to be a good listener, but good listeners get big rewards.
Guard Against Selective Perception
Participants interpret and filter everything they hear in meetings and workshops. They hear or see differently based on their individual biases, or colored lenses. To illustrate how lenses operate, note 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.
Varied Perspectives, One Reality
NASA Public Domain
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.
Parallel Lines, or Not?
Look at the people in the picture below and understand that they are the same height, although appearances deceive.
Same Height, or Not?
Finally, A Meeting Participants’ Credo as an Obligation, Not an Opportunity
The closest thing to a silver bullet for making facilitators more effective is to get your meeting participants to show up prepared. To that extent, we offer you the following meeting participants’ credo. This credo, or a statement of the beliefs, aims to guide participants’ actions, has been modified from “The Ethics of the Management Profession” Harvard Business Review and is often reprinted as the “Hippocratic Oath for Meetings” by many business organizations around the world.
Meeting Credo:
As a participant, I serve . . .
. . . as society’s fiduciary for_______, an organization that brings people and resources together to create valued products and services. My purpose is to serve the public’s interest by enhancing the value my organization creates for society. Sustainable value arises when my organization produces economic, social, and environmental output. Output is measurably greater than the opportunity cost of all it consumes.
Ethically Responsible
In fulfilling my role. .
I Recognize . . .
. . . that any enterprise is at the nexus of different constituencies, whose interests can diverge. While balancing and reconciling various interests, I seek a course that enhances the value my organization can create for society over the long term. This may not always mean growing or preserving current ways and may include such painful actions as restructuring, discontinuation, or sale if these actions preserve or increase value.
I Pledge. . .
that considerations of personal benefit will never supersede the interests of the organization I am supporting. The pursuit of self-interest is the vital engine of a capitalist economy, but unbridled greed can be just as harmful. Therefore, I will guard against decisions and behavior that advance my narrow ambitions but harm the organization I represent and the societies it serves.
I Promise . . .
to understand and uphold, both in letter and spirit, the laws and contracts governing my conduct, that of my organization, and that of the societies in which it operates. My behavior will be an example of integrity, consistent with the values I publicly espouse. I will be equally vigilant in ensuring the integrity of others around me and bring to attention the actions of others that represent violations of this shared professional code.
I Vow . . .
to represent my organization’s performance accurately and transparently to relevant parties, ensuring that investors, consumers, and the public at large can make well-informed decisions. I aim to help people understand how decisions that affect them are made so that choices do not appear arbitrary or biased.
I Will Not Permit . . .
considerations of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, party politics, or social status to influence my choices. I will protect the interests of those who may not have power, but whose well-being depends on my decisions.
I Will Participate . . .
diligently, mindfully, and conscientiously by applying judgment based on the best knowledge available. I will consult colleagues and others who can help inform my judgment and will continually invest in staying abreast of the evolving knowledge in the field, always remaining open to innovation. I’ll do my utmost to develop myself and the next generation of participants so that our organization continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.
I Recognize . . .
that my stature and privileges as a professional stem from the honor and trust that the profession as a whole enjoys, and I accept my responsibility for embodying, protecting, and developing the standards of our profession, to enhance that respect and honor.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Jan 5, 2021 | Analysis Methods, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Planning Approach, Problem Solving
Poor requirements don’t impede projects, missing requirements do.
Experience has taught us that one approach stands above all others when you want to scour for missing requirements—consider ‘dry runs’ by using various scenarios found in scenario planning. Strive to build a range of understanding from the sunny and optimistic “sunny skies” (best case—rare) through the calamitous “stormy skies” (worst case—rare). For robust analysis, include partly sunny and/or partly cloudy conditions (most likely or frequent cases).
For example, recently a vendor offered us a twenty percent discount for making a second purchase. However, without cookies and screen history, their site defaulted to their ‘new customer’ discount of ten percent. Thus, we were unable to use their ‘special offer.’ They had gathered the initial requirements properly (i.e., ten percent discount for new customers) but had not considered the occasional exception (special twenty percent discounts). Scenario planning built around functional requirements helps you anticipate and identify ‘exceptions’ while building more rigorous acceptance criteria.
User Story Procedure
A familiar format for compiling User Stories completes the following procedure but does not anticipate exceptions or conditions. For example, what alternative story develops when a customer’s electricity is interrupted? What might customers do differently if they suddenly realize a financial windfall such as a tax return? Standard approaches create a baseline but do not leverage structure to understand or extract requirements under ALL conditions.
As a _____________________ (persona)
I want ____________________ (functionality)
So that ___________________ (I get business value or benefit)
Gherkin Syntax
Gherkin Syntax
For others’ User Stories, some people prefer using the Gherkin Syntax. Complete the Gherkin Syntax from each persona’s perspective. However, it also lacks the rigor to explore or prompt for specific exceptions rather than baseline standards.
- GIVEN [and] <precondition>
- WHEN [and] <user action>
- THEN [and] <user action>
The INVEST Test
INVEST represents a mnemonic for testing the thoroughness of each User Story by discretely testing against each of its six components. While INVEST helps validate (or not) a User Story, it also fails to provide a clear and stimulating means to test for what may be missing.
- I = Independent (self-contained)
- N = Negotiable (not overly specific)
- V = Valuable (accompanied by acceptance criteria)
- E = Estimable (relative sizing)
- S = Small (optimally completed within two days, maximum)
- T = Testable (from a user perspective)
The Epic Exception
Commonly you will see flows from a product development perspective that look something like this (except for the red line). While this displays a myopic, developers’ point of view, the customers’ perspective also includes special activities at various times during the year, such as the requirements of creating a budget versus requirements when reviewing or modifying a budget:
Scenario Planning: From Vision Through Acceptance Criteria
While the baseline flows above mostly capture the developer’s perspective, the customer also has acceptance criteria (associated with tasks) that occur irregularly, illustrated above as something that may occur every month or so.
Continue to establish your baseline, as you would today, but take it a step further. To avoid missing occasional features/stories/tasks, test your baseline using the principles of scenario planning. Whether you use structured and sequenced interviewing or build collective understanding through facilitated meetings and workshops, applying the logic and questions appropriate to scenarios improves the likelihood that you won’t miss substantive or critical requirements that rarely occur.
What is Scenario Planning?
Forward-looking deliverables such as five-year plans and shaping curves rely exclusively on the concept of probabilities since no future state is certain. Probabilities consist of shared assumptions, beliefs, and outlooks about some future state or condition.
You help isolate potentially missing requirements by exploring probabilities, particularly when evidence supports multiple outcomes. Scenario planning implies creating ranges and not relying on fixed numbers.
Use Scenario Planning to Create Ranges
Probabilities consist of commonly held assumptions, beliefs, and outlooks about some future state or condition. Forward-looking deliverables such as five-year plans and shaping curves rely exclusively on the concept of probabilities since no future state is certain. How can a facilitator help resolve arguments around conflicting probabilities, particularly when evidence supports multiple outcomes? Create ranges and not fixed numbers.
Strive to avoid building one set of ‘answers.’ Rather, build multiple answers—such as five answers based on perspectives suggested below. Facilitate mutual understanding around potentially different requirements that support five discrete scenario types.
Sunny Skies:
Dare your participants to think positively. Ask them to relieve themselves from concerns about risks and other exogenous factors. Strive to build and agree on a ‘best likely’ scenario, akin to Sunny Skies and Clear Sailing. Don’t allow impediments or other negative throttles. While probabilistically unlikely, the Sunny Skies scenario provides a bookend, number, or set of numbers that would unlikely ever be exceeded.
Stormy Skies:
Take your participants in the opposite direction. Allow for every conceivable catastrophe or injurious situation. Try to fall short of ‘bankruptcy’ or ‘going out of business’ (but relent if your participants make an urgent claim that complete “death” is one potential outcome).
Partly Sunny Skies:
Having built the two prior scenarios, take a closer look at the Sunny Skies scenario and toggle some of the less likely occurrences. Strive to make this view and set of numbers positive, but not extreme. If necessary, use the PowerBall tool to rank the importance of assumptions and only toggle the most important assumptions, leaving others untouched.
Partly Cloudy Skies:
With our Bookend rhetoric, move again in the opposite direction by taking a closer look at the Stormy Skies scenario and toggle some of its less likely occurrences. Here you want to lead to a set of negative numbers, but not in the extreme. Have them study past performance and downturns for reliable percentages. Again, if necessary, use the PowerBall tool to rank the impact of assumptions and only toggle the most impactful, leaving the others untouched.
Probable Skies:
Take the four scenarios and potential sets of numbers to derive discussion and consensus around the most likely. Force participants to defend their arguments with an appeal to the prioritized lists of assumptions and revisit the prioritization if necessary. Along the way, Scenario Planninglisten and note the most extreme numbers being suggested as ‘most likely’ because they can help establish the final range.
Further analysis can take the final range and establish targets and thresholds for on target performance (e.g., green lights), cautionary performance (eg, yellow lights), and intervention performance (e.g., red lights). The value of a facilitator is rarely greater than when serving as a referee for future conditions.
Most critically to your success, avoid unstructured discussions. Carefully and extensively document and define all assumptions. Remember to use your Definition tool, since frequently you will discover participants in violent agreement with each other!
NOTE: The value of a meeting facilitator is rarely greater than when serving as a referee for future conditions that cannot be proven, even when using evidence-based support.
Scenario planning approaches and questions unveil missed requirements and help provide more detail around user acceptance criteria. The approaches also provide value in general business situations, such as establishing thresholds for scorecard inputs and dashboards. Perhaps most importantly, as a facilitator, you will find they are fun and engaging. Arguing about prior performance can get heated. Arguing about potential futures keeps your situation much more lighthearted.
National Intelligence Council Support for Facilitating Scenario Planning
The MGRUSH Professional Facilitative Leadership training explains the importance of meeting design and facilitating scenario planning. Therefore, if you find yourself in that role, consider purchasing the USD$2 Kindle version of “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” to support your meeting design and preparation.
Future Scenarios
For instance, Robert Moran’s excellent summary can be found in “The Futurist” March-April 2013 issue, sponsored by the World Future Society.
Peering into the Future
- Fusion: an interconnected East and West collaborate to address global challenges and innovation blossoms as nearly everyone prospers.
- Genie out of the Bottle: gaping extremes describe the global environment and within countries and communities as the best positioned to reap most of the benefits of the new world order.
- Non-State: cities, NGOs (ie, non-governmental organizations), global elites, terror groups, and multinationals derive global change and chaos.
- Stalled Engines: the Pacific Rim engages in nationalistic brinkmanship and amplified conflict ensues. Global growth slows and the United States turns inward as globalization unravels.
Additionally, the report covers a forward view towards individual empowerment, diffusion of power, aging populations, mass urbanization, and accelerating change such as:
- 3-D printing and robotics revolutionize manufacturing
- America’s domination begins waning
- Economic power shifting East and South from the West and the North
- The global middle class continues to expand
- Hydraulic fracturing could make the USA energy-independent
- The threat of a pandemic looms
In other words, the scenarios provide your planning session and decision-makers with valid considerations. Therefore, to borrow directly from Mr Moran:
“With technology empowering the individual, the battle for the twenty-first century could be the battle of the self-organizing swarm against the command and control pyramid.”
In conclusion, let us know how your session turns out.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
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by Facilitation Expert | Dec 3, 2020 | Leadership Skills, Meeting Support, Scrum Events
While an attitude of gratitude promotes more powerful facilitation, you won’t hear the term ‘happy’ very often in one of our meetings, sessions, or workshops, as the word is both subjective and fuzzy.
Yet a positive attitude, such as an attitude of gratitude, is a leading indicator of powerful facilitation and the opportunity to galvanize consensus. The bottom line is—groups with more gratitude are more likely to agree, and to agree quickly! So while an attitude of gratitude extends far beyond powerful facilitation, it seems appropriate, and useful, to provide a quick reflection during this holiday season in particular.
Gratitude vs. Mandate
Of interest are the following trend lines extracted from Google’s Ngram. As the use of the term ‘mandate’ has increased in recent decades, the use of the term ‘gratitude’ has decreased. While the relationship is a correlation and not causal, it does indicate that people have less gratitude today than in the past, as frequency of the term “gratitude” (and reference to its positive meaning) has been on the decline.
An Attitude of Gratitude Has Been Declining
Gratitude vs. Facilitation
However, there has been a recent uptick in the use of the term ‘gratitude’ since 1990, correlating with an increase in use of the term ‘facilitation.’ Although the use of the term facilitation, in a business sense, is relatively new, since we started teaching facilitation there has been a noticeable and positive slope increase in the use of the term ‘gratitude.’ Not coincidentally, we would argue.
An Uptick of Gratitude Correlates with Facilitation
How Does Gratitude Promote Powerful Facilitation?
By encouraging your group to be thankful for what they have, rather than dwelling on what they do not have, you’re encouraging them to focus on what they have (eg, skills, strengths, etc.) and on what they can do. People respond to a meaningful challenge, and powerful facilitation will fortify their gratitude for what they have and what they have accomplished.
You will benefit personally as well. Harvard Medical School reports that…
“In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” (emphasis is ours)
People in the United States take so much for granted that our attitude can make outsiders incredulous. Less than one percent of the people on this planet have some money in the bank, a few coins in their purse, a stocked refrigerator at home, the skill to read, at least one parent who remains alive, AND the liberty to attend a place of worship of their choosing. Yet rather than gratitude, many Americans take these freedoms and benefits for granted.
If you exude a sense of gratitude, then your meeting participants will empathize. For powerful facilitation, begin your meeting or workshop by first stressing the gratitude for an opportunity to make things better for your business and its stakeholders. Most people are not so fortunate. So be glad, not mad.
Let’s Be Thankful — Where We Are Winning
Using a Delphi panel and research method lasting over 15 years, the Millennium Project identified hundreds of indicators of humanity’s progress or regress. Since you are no doubt exposed to many of the negative factors by reading or listening to the “news”, consider these following vectors as positive, documented further by the World Future Society. Humanity is experiencing substantial increases with . . .
- Access to clean water (percentage of people with)
Powerful Facilitation Equals Servant Leadership
- Adult literacy rate
- Enrollment in secondary school (percentage of people)
- GDP per capita
- GDP per unit of energy consumption
- HIV prevalence among all age groups (decreasing)
- Infant mortality rates (reduction)
- Internet access and use
- Life expectancy
- Physicians and health care workers per 1,000 people
- Research and development expenditures (percentage of national budgets)
- Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries
- Undernourishment
- Women in parliamentary governments (percentage of)
So be glad, not sad.
Scrum Guide 2020 and Considerations Providing and Participating in Training
For the first time in fifteen years Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland have updated The Scrum Guide (The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game), which you can now download HERE. The result is crisper and clearer than the original, and we are providing the link to you as a benefit of being in our community. Please remember as you seek additional training in 2021 and when budgets are tight, the following:
Seek knowledge, not degrees.
An MBA provides general management knowledge, but not the specific knowledge required for immediate implementation. Focused topical training such as HOW TO LEAD BETTER MEETINGS, provides a quicker return on investment and can be applied immediately after successfully completing the curriculum.
Value Outside Experts.
There is no substitute for quality interaction with expert instructors. If you hire from outside, you can call upon training as you need it, rather than require full-time staff for every business topic.
Seek Knowledge, Not Degrees
Provide feedback.
Mentoring has a tremendous impact within organizations, so ensure that your employees get the feedback they need to take the training they need most. Strive for impact — powerful and immediate. Every person has opportunities to leverage strengths and shore up weaknesses. They don’t always prioritize them correctly, however. Depend on a mentor or an outsider (eg, coach) who can provide honest, neutral feedback. Always default to leveraging strengths and improving core competencies over patching up weaknesses.
Make it easy.
If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right. Consider hosting private classes that pull together teams and help develop esprit de corps (ie, teamwork) that amplifies and compliments individual learning. Effective training provides physical, emotional, and intellectual relief. When budgets are tight and work demands per employee productivity increases, do not forget the importance of your people’s needs and the opportunity for win-win by providing them with effective training on immediately relevant topics.
10 Excellent Guidelines for Students and Teachers: Justice, Peace, and Delight
We had to share Sr Corita Kent’s ten rules below, especially Rule Eight. In 1968, she crafted the lovely, touching Ten Rules for Students and Teachers for a class project. Since most of us play many roles in life, all of us at one time or another are student, teacher, parent, child, etc, we thought you would appreciate them as well. Her ten superb guidelines include:
Sr Corita Kent
- Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
- General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
- General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
- Consider everything an experiment.
- Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
- Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
- The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
- Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
- Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
- We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules.
HINTS:
- Always be around.
- Come or go to everything.
- Always go to classes.
- Read anything you can get your hands on.
- Look at movies carefully, often.
- Save everything, it might come in handy later.
As an unlikely ‘regular’ in the Los Angeles art scene, Sister Corita Kent was an instructor at Immaculate Heart College and a celebrated artist who considered Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller, and John Cage to be personal friends.
John Cage, was an avant-garde musical composer who inspired Sister Corita Kent. While quoted frequently for Rule #10, Cage did not develop the list, as some website sites claim. By all accounts, though, John Cage marveled at the list.
Be glad.
And finally, a large portion of the world celebrates holidays around December. Since one traditional greeting in the English language is “Merry Christmas”, it begs the question, HOW.
While the thought may be genuine, and the words rich with historical precedence, HOW DOES a facilitator go about making today (and tomorrow) merry? The solution begins with attitude, and letting go of our own egos will positively impact attitudes that shape our behavior. How do you do that?
We began this article stressing an attitude of gratitude. For ‘letting go’, follow the sage advice of Mother Teresa’s Holiday Message below and you will find it a lot easier. After all, she facilitated nourishment for tens of thousands of people by simply being of service.
Removing the Weight of the World
Holiday Message – Letting Go
Treat today as if you won’t exist tomorrow.
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
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Don’t ruin your career or reputation with bad meetings. Register Now for a class or forward this to someone who should. Taught by world-class instructors, MG RUSH professional facilitation curriculum focuses on practice. Each student 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. #meetingresults
Our courses 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.) #facilitationtraining
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Signup for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four others of our favorite facilitation tools, free. #meetingdesign
______
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by Facilitation Expert | Nov 9, 2020 | Analysis Methods, Decision Making, Meeting Structure, Meeting Tools, Problem Solving
Searching for a problem solving approach proven to work in a variety of situations?
Whether you’re a group of highly paid nuclear physicists designing a new multimillion-dollar scanner or a group of unpaid volunteers supporting the growth of a children’s choir, you need to know how to move collaboratively from where you are to where you need to be.
So How Do You Get There?
There’s more than one right method for effectively leading groups and teams down an optimal path. First, however, be extremely cautious and avoid beginning your meeting or workshop with analysis, unless you have already clearly agreed on a purpose (i.e. Why do we need a solution?)
Most approaches to problem-solving assume a common, pre-existing purpose—but an effective meeting facilitator presumes the opposite. They work with the assumption that most groups lack a clear, coherent, and consensual purpose, the WHY before the WHAT. Yet secondary research shows that most problem-solving approaches include only the following steps (parenthetical comments reference the paragraph below):
- Problem identification (frayed collar)
- Problem diagnosis (socially embarrassing)
- Solution generation (click or brick options)
- Solution evaluation (apply preferences)
- Choice (selection)
Using a simple example in our private lives, we may identify (1) a frayed collar on our favorite shirt or blouse. (2) The collar scratches and could potentially be socially embarrassing to wear. (3) One solution would be to go a click or brick store where we can find assorted options on the screens and shelves. (4) Applying our preferences for brand, color, price, size, etc., (5) we make our selection.
Yet even a Frayed Collar Requires Purpose When Problem-Solving!
It’s just a collar–right? True, and if you were purchasing the shirt for yourself you would already know the purpose. However, imagine you hear your dad complaining that he needs a new shirt because his collar is frayed and he’s embarrassed to wear it (steps 1 and 2). Wanting to please him, you ask him what his favorite clothing store is, what size he needs, short sleeve or long sleeve, and what color he prefers (steps 3,4, and 5). Then, armed with this knowledge, you purchase a new medium white shirt from his favorite store, but when you hand it to him he frowns and says, “Thanks, but I can’t wear this white golf shirt to my best friend’s formal wedding.” What did you forget to ask? The purpose!
Although our purpose strongly influences our selection, consensually articulated purposes are usually omitted from problem-solving methods. Why? Because most educators lack experience leading meetings. Bottom line: As the meeting leader, or facilitator, you must build consensus around WHY we are doing something before you analyze WHAT should be done (and eventually, HOW to do it).
Conflict in Problem Solving
We have seen meetings begin to unravel until we re-direct or help the group build common purpose. Without common purpose, there is no common ground managing arguments and, with limited resources, making the necessary trade-offs or exclusions.
Common Purpose Sets Up an Integral, Win-Win Result
Every problem-solving method yields different consequences when measured by team ownership (risk) and decision quality (reward). Risk-reward is optimized when you first establish common purpose. If you fail to facilitate agreement about purpose before you tackle the problem, you risk compromise, voting, or withdrawal. The different methods of solving problems include:
Problem-Solving Starts with Problem Definition
- Compromise (lose-lose),
- Forcing (voting; i.e., win-lose),
- Integrative (win-win), or
- Withdrawal (quit)
Use the problem-solving framework below and you will discover that ownership and decision quality begin with a common purpose. Please keep in mind that leading a group from ‘here’ to ‘there’ posits more than one right answer. Therefore, facilitation strives to articulate the best answer for each group of participants, given their situation and constraints.
Integrative Problem Solving Framework — Many to Many Meeting Design
This Problem-Solving Approach facilitates groups by enhancing focus when there are many symptoms, causes, preventions, and cures that might be considered. This will also help you keep certain participants ‘on track,’ especially those who tend to jump around, or love to opine.
Many meetings waste time because they lack structure, not because they fail to generate some promising ideas. Meetings are challenged by the fact that teams never know when they are done, how they can measure progress, or how much work remains to be done. They don’t know what they’ve missed. And because they don’t know what they don’t know, it takes a disciplined approach to structure activities and ask precise questions that unveil hidden solutions.
Problem Definition
The first part of meetings should not actually try to solve the problem but find diverse ways of looking at and describing the problem situation. The more general the expression of a problem, the less likely it is to suggest answers.
NOTE: The problem definition remains far more critical than most people understand. For example, an automobile traveling on a deserted road blows a tire. The occupants discover that there is no jack in the trunk. They define the problem as ‘finding a jack’ and decide to walk to a station for a jack. Another automobile down the same road also blows a tire. The occupants also discover that there is no jack. They define the problem as ‘raising the automobile.’ They see an old barn, push the auto there, raise it on a pulley, change the tire, and drive off while the occupants of the first car are still trudging towards the service station.
Although Getzels does not mention a third option, note how another group might push the vehicle to the side of the road and using their hands, rocks, sticks, or other implements, dig a hole around the bad tire. Their problem statement reflects the need for clear access to the axle and surrounding area, rather than lifting the vehicle. No doubt there is a fourth or more problem definitions as well.[1]
Two Highly Effective Problem Definition Methods
The surest way to create divergent solutions is to diverge descriptions of the problem. When focused on describing the problem, using mountaineering as an analogy, consider:
- Re-writing or versioning diverse ways of stating the problem.
-
- Broaden focus, restate the problem with the larger context
-
-
- Initial: Should I keep a diary?
- Broadened: How do I create a permanent memory of our ascent?
-
- Paraphrase, and restate the problem using different words without losing the original meaning
-
-
- Initial: How can we limit congestion around the base camps?
- Paraphrase: How can we keep the congestion from growing?
-
- Redirect focus, consciously change the scope
-
-
- Initial: How do we get all our supplies to 16,000 feet?
- Redirected: How do we reduce our consumption and need for supplies?
-
- Reversal, turn the problem around
-
-
- Initial: How can we get people to go to a different mountain?
- Reversal: How can we discourage people from climbing this mountain?
- Changing perspectives to stimulate worthwhile aspects that further help detail and describe problems. Examples of mountaineering perspectives might include the climber, sherpa, legal authority, other climbers, etc. Your own questions may be toggled among thirty or more established business perspectives found detailed HERE.
Structuring Your Problem-Solving Approach
You need to structure and focus discussions to get more done quickly, especially when there are many symptoms, causes, preventions, and cures that should be considered. Therefore, with a complex problem, I’ll use the following as an example.
Illustrative Example
Let’s use the example of an organization that has determined that a problem of ‘Burnout’ exists in their IT Service Department. We will use the Problem-Solving Approach to draft a solution.
Workshop Deliverable
A solution built around proposed actions that will prevent, mitigate, and cure the causes of ‘Burnout’ within the IT Service Department.
Fundamental Problem-Solving Agenda
- Introduction
- Purpose of the IT Service Department (Description of Ideal) — Confirm the purpose of the solution state or the ideal condition. Describe the way things ought to be when there is no problem, and everything is working properly according to design.
- ‘Burnout’ (Definition of Problem) — Fully define the problem state or condition, building consensus around the way things are at present.
- Symptoms (Externally Observable Factors) — Identify all the potential symptoms that make it easy to characterize the problem or issue. Consider symptoms to be factors that can be seen and observed objectively, such as “tardiness.”
- Causes (Conversion) — For each symptom identify one or many possible causes or consider Root Cause Analysis (aka Ishikawa Diagram).
- Actions — Populate a matrix with the agents against a timeline as shown in the Solution Stack below. The simplest way to approach the ‘x’ dimension is to separately cover actions before and after causes (such as what can be done to prevent each cause and what can be done to cure for each cause, by each agent).
-
- First note WHO participates in the solution — Identify persona: people, agents, or actors that will participate in the solution or plan (eg, participants, management, contractors, etc.).
- IT Service Department Personnel (y-axis, Persona A)
- Management (y-axis, Persona B)
- Using a timeline, identify WHAT actions to take — With the group at large or assigning breakout teams, develop potential responses and actions with each persona across the timeline using each cause, one at a time.
- Preventions [x-axis, Timeline 1]
- Cures [x-axis, Timeline 2]
- See below for questions to ask to generate actions.
- Change Management
- Review and Wrap
Questions to Ask to Generate Actions
If you embrace this structured tactic, you know exactly what to do and what four questions you must ask for EACH cause (e.g., fatigue):
-
-
- What can technicians do to prevent fatigue?
-
-
-
- (e.g., Improve their diets, etc.)
-
-
- What can management do to prevent fatigue?
-
-
-
- (e.g., Provide ergonomic furniture, etc.)
-
-
- What can technicians do to cure fatigue?
-
-
-
- (e.g., Get to bed earlier, etc.)
-
-
- What can management do to cure fatigue?
-
-
-
- (e.g., Hire more resources, etc.)
Which one of these four questions can you afford to skip? None of them of course because you don’t know which ones, if any, you can afford to skip.
Solution Stack
Problem-Solving Solution Stack
I know this table gives a lot of people headaches. However, to be thorough, participants must answer all four questions about each cause. Sometimes the reaction is “Screw it. Let’s just have a meeting and discuss it.” But how are those unstructured discussions working out for you? Don’t forget that the terms discussion, percussion, and concussion are all related. If you have a headache when you depart a meeting, it’s because the meeting was not structured and you’re not sure what, if anything, was accomplished.
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[1] Getzels, J.W., Problem Finding and the Inventiveness of Solutions, Journal of Creative Behavior, 1975, 9(1), pp 12-18.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Oct 8, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Support
In life, there is usually more than one right answer, but there is always a wrong attitude—the unwillingness or failure to collaborate.
As of this writing, the 2020 elections will be here in less than four weeks. While, like most Americans, you’re probably focused on November 3rd, you should be more concerned about November 4th —and beyond. If ‘the powers that be’ cannot collaborate in the coming weeks and months, expect some very rough times.
The ability to collaborate is critical to homo sapiens’ survival (see Harari). And, if we didn’t need to collaborate, we wouldn’t need facilitation. We could survive by obeying someone else’s commands. But that doesn’t work, not in the long run.
Rather than artificial intelligence (AI) or global warming, the stubbornness to appreciate and value our differences, the unwillingness to explore reasons behind our disagreements, and the obstinance to remain inflexible may be our ultimate undoing. Because if we lose our spirit to collaborate, we’ll be dead long before the oceans rise as high as predicted by scientists.
Unstructured discussions are not working[1]
The world needs structured facilitation more than ever to develop solutions that are owned and shared by ALL stakeholders. A friend of mine in the facilitation profession claims that one of the following three reasons describes all disagreements,[2] either:
- People are in violent agreement with each other. Unfortunately, they define key terms differently—or, they use different terms to define the same thing—and don’t know it, or
- People have different values and can’t agree. For example, an organization that stresses “safety and the principle of no harm” may take a slightly less profitable road in the short run in order to save lives and improve health in the long run. Another organization may not choose safety, preferring the quick win NOW, not later, or
- Some people refuse to collaborate because of age-long animosity that began before they were even born. Goofy. Who cares about the past when our present is being jeopardized and we are facing an impending future with unmanageable hazards, menaces, and risks?
Collaborate and Avoid DoA (Display of Attitude)
I heard recently from Dr. Alphonsus Obayuwana, an expert on ‘happiness’, that at the very least we all share one thing in common—we were all born ‘unhappy’. Thousands of babies were delivered, and this obstetrician never once saw a baby exit the womb smiling. We all begin with a frown, usually accentuated with a cry.
We continue to cry as adults when we don’t get our way. Each of us, at times, is guilty of our own DoA (Display of Attitude) characterized by one of the following characteristics:
- adamant
- bull-headed
- difficult
- headstrong
- recalcitrant
- uncompromising
- uncooperative
- unyielding
Collaborate = Stop Fighting, Start Arguing
People run their lives like they have the only right answer. They forget that words carry more than one definition, or that different words may be used to describe something similar. They lose sensitivity to anything beyond their immediate vision. While different procedures or remedies address each DoA, solutions begin with the attitude and willingness to collaborate.
People need to be challenged to supply evidence, facts, or feelings that justify their unwillingness to collaborate. The best challenges come from a neutral source, a referee of sorts. In meetings, that role belongs to the facilitator.
The facilitator’s first responsibility is to protect participants from harm, perhaps from each other, but not to protect them from their personal reasons for choosing DoA. After protecting participants, facilitators are responsible for challenging every point of view so we can build consensus, beginning with an attitude to collaborate.
When you collaborate you serve all stakeholders of your community, benefitting the interests of the whole.
Recently, I spent a few days with some amazing people and learned about four organizations that, regardless of your political affiliation, you should support or at least tell others about:
- In This Together
- Leadership Now Project
- Future 500
- Bridge Alliance
1. In This Together—PROBLEM-SOLVING, NOT POLARIZATION[3]
Although research indicates that “7 in 10 Americans are ready to solve problems together,” two-thirds of Harvard alumni believe that democracy is at risk. By identifying the biggest fears and deepest prejudices of specific voter segments, strategists can trigger such repulsion of one candidate that voters will readily support the lesser of two evils. This increases voter turnout among those with extreme and hardened ideologies, but divides and marginalizes the 70 percent broad middle — the seven in ten voters who are partisan but pragmatic.
On April 24, the day the US death toll from coronavirus topped 50,000, a dozen billionaire political donors gathered by video with business leaders, foundation chiefs, scientists, advocates, and political strategists, and laid out a bold plan called In This Together, to transform the business of politics. Convened by the Republican conservationist Trammel S. Crow, In This Together intends to reduce political polarization and work across partisan lines to solve problems like climate change.
Objective: To reduce the spend on political warfare and redirect billions toward solutions that unite a governing majority of Americans from the left to right.
“We can’t meet this crisis or any future one as a divided nation,” Crow reminded his guests. “We’re not enemies. We’re a family with differences to work through. Polarization is our real enemy.”
Polarization undermines those who would rather solve problems than sow discord. Additionally, polarization supports candidates beholden to vested interests for dollars and ‘blind-believers’ (extremists) for votes. Thus, constrained by these two forces, bipartisan agreements are mostly off the table.
DoA makes genuine problem-solving difficult and expensive. Consequently, evidence-based reform — protecting climate, improving schools, or preventing pandemics — requires massive investments by foundations and individuals willing to outbid interest groups and offset ideologues to get a fair hearing.
E Pluribus Unum — From Many We Are One.
With brilliant and renowned supporting partners such as Harvard’s Michael Porter, Berkeley’s Bill Shireman, General Colin Powell, and many others, In This Together released their Declaration of Interdependence:
Declaration of Interdependence
Become part of the Solution by going HERE and Providing Your Assent
Be sure to sign the Declaration for Interdependence, as five million signatures are needed to influence holistic legislation. They currently have two million signees, so your signature is critical.
2. Bridge Alliance Members Need to Collaborate
The Bridge Alliance members have embraced research data, making it evident that 3.5 percent of the people in this country, when demanding or supporting social change, have ALWAYS succeeded (i.e., eleven million USA citizens). The Bridge Alliance represents over one hundred organizations who seek to collaborate and advance healthy self-governance as the United States transitions to a multicultural, pluralistic society over the next two decades, promoting . . .
“ . . . pilot projects will range from facilitator training to practice groups to participation in reviewing policy and engaging with elected officials.”
Aspiring to upgrade our current political system to a modern, democratic republic, The Bridge Alliance members agree to adhere to the Four Principles. Their broad coalition dedicates itself to engaging citizens in the political process, working with civic leaders, and promoting respectful, civil discourse.
Four Principles of The Bridge Alliance
- Collaboration: Our country is stronger when we work together constructively to meet the challenges we face.
- Citizen Voice: Our country is well represented when informed citizens are active in the political and social processes.
- Solutions-focused: Genuine, good-faith problem-solving will lead to the best solutions to address our great challenges.
- Open-minded: We explore and learn from each other, seeking aligned efforts to raise visibility and effectiveness.
The Bridge Alliance organizes planning and tactics around membership categories including:
3. The Leadership Now Project Encourages Us to Collaborate
The Leadership Now Project represents a membership organization of business and thought leaders taking action to remedy American Democracy. Backed by substantial data, analysis, and reports, its founding principles include:
- We must protect democracy while renewing it
- Facts and science matter
- Our economy should work for all today and for future generations
- Diversity is an asset
Leadership Now Project members invest in high-impact organizations and candidates to advance a modern, effective democracy for all Americans. Their priorities for 2019-2021 include:
- Voter participation and protection
- Competitive, fair, and secure elections, particularly through combating gerrymandering and promoting ranked-choice voting
- Data and transparency in politics
- Innovation and ideas for a modern democracy
Today, the Leadership Now Project recommends five concrete actions for businesses to support successful and democratic elections throughout the United States.
- Encourage employees, clients, and consumers to make a voting plan
- Give all employees paid time off to vote on or before Election Day
- Encourage employees to register as poll workers
- Contribute funds to support election operations
- Publicly support a safe and secure election
They also provide a Pledge for Business Leaders for Racial Equity that can be accessed HERE. MGRUSH Facilitation Training has signed the pledge.
Focusing on sustainability trends, Future 500 is a non-profit consultancy whose core mission build trust between unusual allies––like business leaders, activists, and philanthropists––to advance business as a force for good. They offer companies concrete pointers on how they can minimize risk while finding opportunities to lead the most important social and environmental issues facing the world today.
“We envision a future in which business and civil society work as equal partners and responsible stewards of a clean, just, and prosperous world.”
Their Force for Good Forecast 2020 is available as a one-hour webcast. An organization launched by Bill Shireman, they have an articulate, powerful Theory of Change:
“We believe that forging better relationships is the first step toward solving our most pressing environmental and social challenges. By helping companies and their stakeholders step out of their respective echo chambers and seek common ground in uncommon places, we aim to catalyze innovative, systemic solutions that enable both our planet and society to thrive.”
Collaborate — “You Are Either Part of the Solution or You’re Part of the Problem.” (Eldridge Cleaver)
If we do not collaborate, thus jeopardizing the stability of the USA, we are putting the world at risk. YOU should actively contribute and promote these organizations and their causes while embracing the following sans DoA:[4]
- Facilitate, facilitate, facilitate — volunteer pro bono effort, they need YOU because you can lead structured meetings that deliver clear and actionable results.
- Never forget—“Leaders are motivated by improving the well-being of people, communities, AND the planet in ways that have real, lasting intrinsic value.”
- Always seek to abolish class systems and subject everyone to the same rules of behavior and reward systems
- Share information openly and transparently — no secrets
- Never exclude stakeholders—ensure that ALL groups participate together in planning solutions for changes that affect them
———
If you agree, please like and forward this message to others.
For live and online world-class facilitation training, click HERE to register.
[1] For substantive proof and additional evidence about the negative effects of “lobbying” click HERE
[2] See Michael Wilkinson’s “Secrets,” pg 211.
[3] In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists are Uniting to Tackle Climate Change and More.
[4] Strongly influenced by “The New Leadership Paradigm” crafted by Steve Piersanti, President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Sep 8, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support
Is it easy for you to build collaboration, commitment, and participation in meetings? Then feel free to walk away from this article.
If, however, you’re like most people, leading groups and teams toward a common goal, either remotely or in person, is challenging. For many leaders, it is their biggest challenge. While we can’t solve all your leadership problems in one article, these next four topics are easily worth five minutes of your time.
- Build collaboration while satisfying individual needs
- How to create and sustain a participatory environment
- Securing collaboration among multi-discipline workgroups
- “The distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided . . .”
How to build collaboration while satisfying individual needs
In the song, Garden Party, Ricky Nelson wrote, “You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.” Yet in meetings, in order to build collaboration, you must also satisfy individual needs. So how do you accomplish this? Below are some tried and true suggestions/rules (Along with links to more in-depth articles on tools and techniques, when appropriate.) which, in our own leadership experience, we’ve found helpful. Feel free to compare these suggestions with your own experience. Let us know when you identify some things that work particularly well at building collaboration, or some things that fail. (Listed not in order of importance or chronology)
- Avoid personal attacks or comments by keeping your critiques and challenges about the entire group.
- Make the reasons behind differing views more evident. Conflict is healthy when you know how to manage it.
- Encourage cohesiveness with more group activities permitting richer interaction among participants.
- While lookbacks, after-action reviews, or other reviews of group performance generate healthy learnings that improve future performance – if you want to alienate an individual, be sure to mention him or her by name. (i.e. DO NOT mention individuals in look-backs or after-action reviews.)
- Limit your meeting size to five to nine people, large enough to accomplish anything but not so large as to waste an individual’s time.
- From the outset, ensure that everyone understands and values your meeting deliverables.
- At the wrap, ensure that all roles, responsibilities, and next steps are clear and acceptable to all.
- Maintain neutrality. As the leader or facilitator, maintain vigilant neutrality and avoid introducing personal thoughts or claims.
How to create and sustain a participatory environment
To build collaboration, the facilitator must first protect the participants. Secondarily, the facilitator must help drive the group toward its desired deliverable. Thus, both people and issues are managed by creating an environment that is participatory and conducive to productivity. Easier said, than done. It’s tough to build collaboration unless you:
- Demonstrate effective communication skills
- Develop rapport with participants
- Practice active listening
- Demonstrate ability to observe and provide feedback
Since there is no ‘silver bullet’ to be an effective facilitator, show up prepared. Apply a variety of preparatory devices including conversations with your participants before the session starts. How else will you understand them and the best method to serve them?
Once they are valued and understood, improve your selection of tools to use. Make it easier for them to reflect on what you have captured so that they can easily confirm the accuracy or make corrections and additions as appropriate.
When in-person and providing feedback and reflection, scan the room (or, if it’s a virtual meeting, the participants on your computer screen) and observe reactions, typically non-verbal. Determine if the group understands and agrees, or if there is resistance due to misinterpretation or misunderstanding that you can help clear up.
The “zen” of the experience advises us that participants respond to stimuli differently. Not everyone responds effectively to a strictly “verbal” (i.e., narrative) environment. Psychologist Howard Gardner identified multiple types of intelligence. He claims that all humans have the spark of genius buried within, but they manifest differently among us. The original types include:
- Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”)
- Interpersonal Intelligence (“People Smart”)
- Intra-personal Intelligence (“Self Smart”)
- Linguistic Intelligence (“Word Smart”)
- Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (“Number/ Reasoning Smart”)
- Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”)
- Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”)
- Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”)
Securing collaboration among multi-discipline workgroups
Groups separated by geography are but one challenge. So, here are tips for how to build collaboration among multi-discipline work groups. Apply these tips when facilitating among work groups that are widely separated by geography.
Frequent Interaction Among Multi-Discipline Work Groups
Very often, a workgroup comprises several small teams, each in separate locations. Successful teams require cross-functional support, integrating their efforts frequently. Regular and frequent interaction across functions provides numerous benefits. Interaction establishes mutual commitment among multi-discipline work groups. Integration also creates a common repository of knowledge.
Exchange People Within Multi-Discipline Work Groups
Typically, a team in one country has all the necessary technical capabilities, but their “requirements” come in large batches of written documents developed many time zones away. Predictably, when an application is finished several weeks or months after the arrival of the requirements, it isn’t what the customers really want. Large separations between customers or analysts and the implementation team seldom work very well. Therefore, consider relocating a couple of people from one team to the other team for extended periods of time, preferably on a rotating basis. One or two team members who understand customer needs could be located with the development team, or alternatively, one or two people who are part of the development team could be located closer to customers. Rotating people through these positions proves to be highly effective.
Daily Proxy For Multi-Discipline Work Groups
Sometimes dispersed teams communicate through a single person. Someone from each site becomes a member of the core team and serves as a proxy for the remainder of their remote team members. The proxy assumes responsibility for a large amount of well-defined work and sends it to the remote team, calling them daily to describe what needs to be done, answer questions, and retrieve completed work. Thus, the remote team maintains rich communication with one person on the core team, and the core team considers the remote team an extension of this proxy, who can help manage work for several people.
Traveling Leader Supporting Multi-Discipline Work Groups
Consider an oobeya or “war room” with big visible charts showing project status and issues. Maintain identical status charts in each of multiple rooms around the world. The program leader should travel from one room to another, holding regular status meetings at each location. Other locations may call into where the leader is hosting the meeting. Leadership commitment reinforces the mutual commitment of all teams to their common objective.
Caution Among Multi-Discipline Work Groups
Participants may develop the perception that one group is better than the other. For example, when part of a team relies heavily on a different language, when one group represents subcontractors while another represents the contracting company, or when one group clearly has higher pay or status than the other. Such perceptions quickly destroy the respect, trust, and commitment that are essential for true teamwork. To avoid the perception, or fix the situation, enforce the suggestions above with more people on rotation, more rotations, daily updates, and a leader who facilitates frequently at all locations, not solely the home-based site.
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“The distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided . . .”
Success in complex organizations depends increasingly on the leadership’s ability to build collaboration. No one person has all the answers. Yet according to Harvard Business Review, over the past two decades, the amount of time managers and employees spend on collaborative work has ballooned. At many companies, people now spend about 80 percent of their time in meetings or answering colleagues’ requests.
Imagine that we could improve the productivity of meetings by only five percent.
In other words, reduce meeting time by three minutes per hour, with comparable outputs. What would that be worth in your organization? What would that be worth to you personally over the future of your career? For the average individual, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Seven tips to build collaboration and collaborative work:
- Demand an articulate and written explanation of the meeting purpose, scope, deliverables (i.e., objectives), and simple agenda BEFORE the meeting begins. If someone needs you to attend, then you have every right to show up prepared.
- Encourage the use of ground rules. A group of people multitasking on laptops and cell phones will waste more of YOUR time, than anything else.
- Keep the leader on task. Don’t allow the leader or group to ramble on without focus. Once focus is established, do not permit scope creep. Remind everyone about the question or topic at hand. Most scope creep involves discussions outside the scope of the meeting, such as “Why are we doing this in the first place?”
- Capture solid notes, especially about decision points and outputs. Make the outputs clear, especially when the leader is doing a poor job of writing things down, and presumes to be relying on memory after the meeting to set up a record.
- Challenge other participants to make them defend themselves. Request examples, evidence, and proof of their claims. Discover under what conditions they may be right, and under what conditions they may be wrong.
- Seek out the objective measurement for modifiers (e.g., adjectives and adverbs). If someone wants “quality”, seek a better understanding of how to measure it. To one person, a bowl of curry may be spicy but to another person, it’s not. Seek out the unit of measurement (Scoville Units) to help them reach agreement.
- Ask people what they are going to tell their supervisors and peers when the meeting is over about what was accomplished during the meeting. Strive to ensure that it sounds like all the participants were in the same meeting.
Chief Collaboration Officers
Granted, much of the suggested material above is the responsibility of the session leader. But if they won’t do it, you better. Remember, it’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars to promote more collaborative work. Harvard Business Review states further that collaboration may answer many of your biggest business challenges. They encourage leaders to promote collaborative work and teamwork, and suggest . . .
“. . . we believe that the time may have come for organizations to hire chief collaboration officers.”
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Aug 11, 2020 | Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Tools
Most have you have seen the hilarious, but oh-so-real “A Conference Call (in Real Life)” by tRIPP and tYLER (22 million views) that mocks dozens of common online meeting problems. While most of us now use video conferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, the problems are remarkably similar.
Whether you have seen it or not, the humor wraps around online meeting problems we’ve all had, continue to have, and will have again . . .
Online Meeting Problems — and Solutions!
THE PROBLEMS
Online Meeting Problems . . . the First Minute
- Uncomfortable small talk responses and inability to “connect” over copper.
- Being interrupted by participants arriving late.
- Echo and shrieking feedback from the audio give participants headaches.
- Discussion about the source of the echo.
- Notification sounds and other audible alarm distractions should be silenced in advance.
Online Meeting Problems . . . the Second Minute
- Interrupted again by more participants arriving late.
- A file link that becomes inoperable for those who are “required to download a plugin.”
- Uncomfortable and delayed pauses waiting for the other person to speak again.
- Participants talk over one another in an attempt to help.
- Inability to determine the Operating System version, required to match up with the correct plug-in version.
- Everybody then jumped in at once—again.
- Voice and video get jumbled and no one understands the content contribution. or admits it.
- Participant gets bumped offline and keeps talking because they don’t know it.
Online Meeting Problems . . . the Third Minute
- Screen sharing causes the presenter to lose non-verbal feedback from participants.
- Participants cannot see the speaker well because they have not “pinned” the speaker.
- Group discussion spent on whether the contributor has been “lost” or “frozen” (again).
- Participants made a significant contribution, only to discover they were on mute.
- Others going adrift because of checking email, playing solitaire, etc.
- Participants shout one set of fix-it instructions for Windows when they participant is using Mac OS (or vice versa).
- Loudly barking dog (really loud that is, not a whimper or quick bark).
- Interruption while the dog owner shouts disciplinary instructions to the dog.
- An espresso machine in the background drowns out important content.
Online Meeting Problems . . . the Fractional Final Minute
- Participants depart before the meeting ends.
- Unsuspecting participant speaks up, previously unacknowledged, but attending the entire session.
- Eager to add content, they discover key personnel now gone or missing, and therefore unable to share valuable content.
THE SOLUTIONS
You and your organization will NOT be able to do everything required. Most cultures simply won’t allow disciplined behavior, such as preventing meetings from going overtime. However, if you don’t try, the problems above will repeat themselves, and slowly become seen as “normal”, thus expected and tolerated by most employees.
Incredibly, most of your solutions have little to do with specialized business expertise. Rather, the discipline required derives from basic communication skills and interpersonal respect. There is no federal law, or ethical standard for that matter, that demands employers treat employees with respect. For most “at-will” employees, they have the liberty or option to simply quit if they don’t like the way they are being treated.
In addition to some basic online etiquette such as silencing your Notifications and No Hiding (turning off the video), here are some other solutions.
Communication Basics
- When listening, do not assume. Rather, confirm. All too often we proceed as if everybody else understands the same words and situations as we do. Prudently, assume the opposite. There is typically at least one person in any meeting who views the meaning of terms or interpretation of the situation differently. Probably caused by different backgrounds, upbringing, and other life experiences, we should embrace and leverage the alternative point of view. Breakthrough and creativity are with new thinking. Innovation results from plurality, incongruity, seemingly unrelated, and other patterns of perception that represent the opposite of cloning yourself.
- Structured icebreakers and warm-up exercises have proven the value of discipline. Simple structure such as having everyone answer an icebreaker question can create value and strengthen connections among employees. Small talk will not increase productivity like structured introductions, such as some form of an icebreaker. Studies are showing that icebreakers are particularly valuable when meetings are consistently held online, such as mandated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Active listening mitigates many of the problems mentioned. By providing consistent and reliable reflection, everyone gets heard, and everyone hears what the other person said. With luck, the facilitator has also reflected WHY they said it. Remember, people speak about symptoms, not causes. You build consensus at a causal level, not by focusing on symptoms. People think “stink”, not prevailing wind. Likewise, people think “spicy”, not Scoville Units. And people think the “cost of living”, is not disposable income after all the bills have been paid.
Leadership Requirements
- Meetings require leaders and the very best embrace a servant-leadership mindset that reflects the skills necessary to be an effective facilitator. Facilitators above all protect the participants. Someone needs to interrupt the interrupter. While it remains both unavoidable and acceptable for some to speak briefly about items not within the meeting scope, when the talk becomes a distraction, nuisance, or puts the meeting objectives at risk, the side conversations need to be effectively reined in by the facilitator.
- Proper documentation should precede meetings. While difficult to imagine, participants should never agree to attend a meeting without a deliverable and an agenda. How many completely unstructured discussions have been worth your time? If so, then your time might not be worth as much as it should. Meeting invitations should include the meeting purpose, scope, objectives, agenda, and other necessary information such as access numbers, passcodes, PINS, SharePoint, file attachments, etc.
- Virtual seating arrangements can be leveraged to ensure more effective “Round-Robins” so that all participants are afforded an opportunity to speak. Always provide participants with permission to say “pass.” Facilitators also need to be more effective and frequent with their use of Breakouts to stimulate and keep people moving. A multitude of activities, auditory, and visual stimulation adds to the Zen of the online experience, providing valuable texture in an otherwise flat world of flat screens.
Cultural Factors
- Punctuality, time management, and respecting others’ time should become commonplace within your culture, rather than the exception. In team sports, much like team businesses, if players arrive late or miss the spot they should occupy, the team scores less often or yields itself to its competitors. Is business that much different? Extensive studies have correlated innovation, eco-sensitivity, and other factors with increased growth and profitability. We’re willing to bet that timeliness also correlates highly with profitability.
- Effective facilitators enforce ground rules. Whether policing electronic leashes or challenging participants to make their thinking visible, ground rules help teams get more done faster. Enforce standards that playing games and multi-tasking are unacceptable behavior—clear violations of fiduciary responsibility.
- Perhaps alone on this, common and brief background noises such as doorbells or brief barking don’t bother us at all. They are natural and mostly unavoidable in both our remote and office environments. Common household noises are no different than hi-rise elevator noise, PA (public address) systems, or shouting across cubicles. If they are not a distraction, who cares? (flushing toilets is a different matter entirely). We waste time fumbling with mute buttons, in addition to repeating content previously muted. Standard background noise such as a child running down the hallway causes few delays or wasted moments.
Equipment Issues
- Enterprises and organizations need to step up and provide employees with more robust online tools. Cheap cameras and microphones waste time and money. Online meetings are here to stay. Even in a post-Covid world, the benefits to individuals, organizations, communities, and the planet are clear—working remotely can add value. Not everyone and not every day perhaps but ZOOM and TEAMS are not going away—ever (Until replaced by holographic equipment or some other, improved technology that benefits remote workers and reduces carbon displacement). Is there anything more annoying than a reverberating echo or loud screech caused by inferior equipment?
- With some luck, manufacturers will improve their acceptance and use of universal keyboard commands. How do I pin that? Where is the mute? How do I switch cameras? We could go on and on, but it will benefit everyone to use and embrace some common keyboard commands, icons, and shortcuts so that we can seamlessly go from MAC to PC to iPad to phone without needing to completely re-orient ourselves. Is it too much to ask for a common keyboard command that pins the speaker or another that provides a Gallery view?
Finally: Specialized Training Helps
First, don’t expect to facilitate successfully online if you don’t have the training and skills to facilitate a meeting in person. If you’re not a trained meeting facilitator, now is the time to step up your game. Check out our calendar of professional ONLINE and on-site classes HERE.
That said… There are tips specific to connecting with your participants online. We attended Daniel Mezick’s class, Connect and Communicate: How to Teach ONLINE which will help you better connect with all your virtual people, and yourself. Daniel is a special person and a superb teacher.
______
Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH focuses on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Jul 2, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support
Research conducted by professor Cynthia Rudin of M.I.T. and student Been Kim, on highly effective words for business meetings, found that the words yeah, give, start, and meeting have a larger impact in meetings than other words.
However, while the discussion also made their list of effective words for business meetings—we warn you to be cautious.
Discussion or Concussion?
The word discussion is closely related to the terms concussion and percussion. Discussion signifies unstructured meetings.
WARNING: Unstructured discussions are the primary reason most people don’t look forward to meetings.
Unstructured Headaches
How’s that unstructured discussion approach working out for you? When you have a headache departing a meeting, it’s probably because the meeting was not structured and you’re not sure what, if anything, was accomplished. Even lousy movies or novels have three components: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ever been in a discussion without one of those components? Unfortunately, all too often, we all have.
Therefore, let’s embrace the first four words and strive to avoid the fifth. In order to structure discussions, consider the analogy of the three activities of professional brainstorming:
- List (diverge)
- Analyze
- Decide (converge)
One Activity at a Time
Groups can successfully complete any of the three activities, but they cannot complete them all at the same time, and certainly not without structure. Therefore, stop using the term “brainstorming” as a verb (and its surrogate term: discussion). Do NOT brainstorm something any more than you do NOT do Agile. You may be Agile and do Lean or Scrum, etc. Likewise, do NOT brainstorm or discuss, rather—list, analyze, or converge—but have your meetings focus on one activity at a time.
“Yeah” — M.I.T.’s Effective Word Number One
As a positive affirmation, Yeah comes as no surprise. We spoke personally with Dr. Max Bazerman at length. At the time, he was our Negotiation professor while attending the Kellogg School of Business in Evanston. His research affirms that some of the guttural expressions can be the most effective words used during negotiations as well.
For example, the simple expression Huh, will incite the listener to respond. Note that the speaker is not saying “no” nor are they saying “yes.” Therefore, the speaker continues to unveil their position, providing additional insight into their true demands.
The next time you are negotiating a major purchase, try it. For example, let’s take a new or used vehicle purchase. The sales associate stops with their reasons for you to purchase from them and you say huh. You have indicated that you are not rejecting their offer, nor accepting it. The term huh motivates them to continue, likely sweetening the deal even further with additional concessions or better pricing.
The word huh really says, “Tell me more.” When parties exchange more information the likelihood increases that they will find an integral solution, one that benefits them both. Without open communications, the participants treat the negotiations as cutting a pie, determining who gets the largest piece. Collaborative negotiators understand that carefully exposed positions during negotiations can lead to a bigger pie for both parties.
Neither party should expose themselves entirely up front, but be willing to barter and exchange for more information that leads to higher quality decisions. Expose too much up front, without reciprocity, and you risk being taken advantage of.
“Give” — M.I.T.’s Effective Word Number Two
People love to receive. Go to a major trade show sometime in Frankfurt or Las Vegas and watch people waiting in line to get a “free” chotsky or promotional product. People like to receive free stuff so much that there are dozens of terms and spellings used to describe what others give them including:
- Bauble
- Chotsky
- Doodad
- Freebies (free stuff)
- Gewgaw
- Gift
- Giveaways
- Goodie bag
- Handouts
- Knick-knack
- Ornament (“ornamental festoon”)
- Promotional product
- Souvenir
- SWAG, swag bag, ”Stuff We All Get” (the PG version of two variations)
- Tchotchke, tshotshke, tshatshke, tchachke, tchotchka, tchatchka, chachke, tsotchke, chotski, or chochke
- Trinklet
While dictionaries want you to believe that such items are tacky, nondescript junk, and have “inconsequential value,” the eBay sales site proves otherwise. Plus, we’ve all heard about free iWatches and similar quality items that are given away at the Academy Awards and other award ceremonies. Free stuff can provide value.
“Research has uncovered that ‘grateful’, ‘happy’, ‘good’ and ‘awesome’ are some of the top words that come to mind after somebody receives a promotional product as a gift, and these are the type of feel-good emotions that people will generally want to pay back in terms of brand loyalty. It’s a real win-win for everybody.”[1]
Tell your participants that they are being given something and you will have their immediate attention. As always, however, avoid saying “I” and absolutely do NOT say that “I am giving you something.” After all, giving is about them, not you.
“Start” — M.I.T.’s Effective Word Number Three
Being from Indiana, you would soon discover that few, if any words have literally launched more horsepower among land vehicles than “Start Your Engines”, the command issued annually in May at the Running of the Indianapolis 500 (rescheduled in 2020 for Sunday, August 23).
The word start signifies the transition from being passive to actively doing something. Borrowed from common dictionaries, we’re talking about . . .
- To begin to work on,
- Cause (something) to begin,
- To produce or give attention to (something), and
- Set out on a journey.
The term start both incites and motivates. For example, more people look forward to the start of the fütball season than to the end of the season. While the ending games are well-watched such as the World Cup or Super Bowl, they also bring a bit of melancholy with them. Fans really don’t want the Big Game to end, but they always look forward to the start of a new season because it signifies a fresh opportunity.
For you non-sports fans, you might equally look forward to the start of a movie, a party, or reading a treasured novel more than the end. Starts are universally acclaimed because everyone has hope and opportunity at the start. Especially if you are a Cincinnati Bengals fan, when there is much less to look forward to at the end, except at the start of the next season.
“Meeting” — M.I.T.’s Effective Word Number Four
Amplify your formality. Facilitators cannot afford to be lax and informal. Announcing the ceremony or event as a meeting or workshop carries serious implications we need to get something done. Frequently, the DONE is called a deliverable. Nobody wants more meetings but we meet a lot. Why? We need deliverables.
Substitute your use of the term meeting with two components:
- The deliverable or meeting output, what DONE looks like. A clear understanding that the primary reason for the meeting is not because we enjoy meetings, rather it’s because we need deliverables to accelerate the development of the products and projects that support our livelihoods.
- The agenda or meeting design, HOW you are going to lead your group from the start to the conclusion that builds a robust deliverable and concludes the meeting. Nobody wants more meetings or more time in meetings.
Summary: Effective Words for Business Meetings
Their research also indicates that . . .
- You use these words in the right way and at the right time,
- When used at the beginning of a meeting, they grab attention and increase focus, and
- When used at the end of a meeting, they prompt a positive response.
Other interesting findings and conclusions from Rudin’s and Kim’s research include:
- Compliments that are used to offset negative comments in meetings are frequently viewed as disingenuous, and therefore should be avoided (NOTE: Be kind, NOT nice).
- Not surprisingly, participants want a conclusion. The worst deliverable from any meeting is another meeting. Participants would rather do a lousy job than need to meet again. We’re not condoning lousy, but we are suggesting that structure (and our proprietary approach to testing and ensuring meeting output) will both prevent “lousy” and ensure a sense of completion.
- Yeah indicates agreement and sets the tone for building consensus.
- Start grabs attention and creates focus by diverting the chitchat or silence to the topic of the moment. You can also leverage the term start effectively during your transitions from one agenda step to another.
- Give triggers subconscious excitement over something potentially valuable.
- Meeting amplifies the formality to get more done faster but can be substituted with appropriate synonyms such as ceremony, event, session, or workshop.
- Discussion implies an unstructured headache and should be avoided.
Since the ending for a caterpillar is the start for a butterfly, treat your closings carefully. Continue to treat each end as an opportunity for a fresh start and your participants will give your meeting lots of yeahs.
[1] Source: http://www.ipromo.com/blog/swag-meaning-acronym-the-modern-definition-of-swag/
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
by Facilitation Expert | Jun 5, 2020 | Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Meeting Tools
Research consistently reports that the three biggest, challenges of leading online meetings are:
- Technology challenges
- Distractions (keeping participants engaged)
- Participant buy-in and hiding (video)
In fact, running online meetings requires more skills than leading meetings in person. Groups are less impacted by your good looks and charm while getting lulled into some of the multi-tasking that occurs when they are checking in remotely.
Scheduling Online Meetings
While online meetings (including ceremonies, events, meetings, trainings, and workshops), work particularly well for reviewing progress and sharing information, online meetings are not optimal for all results and deliverables. Leading online meetings becomes especially challenging for kickoffs, largely attended phase gate reviews, when building consensus is critical, when the issues are argumentative or contentious, or when the situation involves highly political decision-making.
Online Meeting Considerations
Online Meetings are Particularly Helpful When . . .
- Information and perspectives from a dispersed and diverse group of contributors remain critical
- Ongoing work teams must manage complex issues and topics
- Product development and process improvement demands daily updates
- Team members are not unable to meet in person
- There is no alternative
Online Meetings are NOT Especially Helpful When . . .
- Challenging issues, arguments, or disagreements must be resolved
- People are experiencing job assignment, information, organizational, or technology overload
- Relationship building may be as important as the information
- Talking face-to-face simply makes more sense
- The technology gets in the way
When Leading Online Meetings — All or None and NOT Hybrid
When some participants gather in person and others remain remote, challenges surmount. Remote participants frequently feel like “second-class” citizens. The secret to creating equanimity is simple. If some people must “dial in” or “Zoom in”, then make everyone zoom in. It is much easier and effective to conduct online meetings with a full complement of remote participants, than trying to facilitate a combination of in-person and remote participants. And don’t forget, keep it small—five to nine.
1. “Spit Happens” — Technology Challenges
As the baby’s bib says “Spit happens”. Smart leaders ask participants to reboot their systems prior to logging in, including routers. Clean start-ups improve the chances for clean delivery. Even with stable systems, latency can cause up to a three-second delay between the time the first and final participants hear something. That’s huge. Even a millisecond can feel like an eternity to a facilitator.
Additional and collaborative meeting techniques and tools can speed idea generation and data analysis. They can also change group dynamics by allowing people to connect better and more frequently (i.e., breakout sessions) and even contribute anonymously (i.e., polling). While technology features may give participants additional time to think, when used in a distributed setting, they may also enable people to contribute at separate times from separate places. Some additional value-add includes:
- Anonymous contributions may remove political overtones.
- Everyone can see other’s contributions and build upon them.
- Participants may work on the same topic at once.
- Technology can increase flexibility to adapt to schedules, time zones, and travel budgets.
Setup
Optimally, the facilitator uses three screens: one for the gallery view or faces of the participants, one for static or transitory material such as legends or definitions for key terms, and one for the speaker view that includes dynamically changing materials, whether it’s an electronic whiteboard, the camera focused on an easel or some other shared screen platform.
Special Considerations
- No hiding. Participants stay more fully engaged when they can observe and “feel” non-verbal clues and intonations.
- Social factors. Trust and team-building needs increase and feeling connected with other people has become paramount with Covid-19.
- Thirty to sixty percent of ‘meaning’ is communicated or expressed outside of the words that are used.
- With English as a second or third language—do not assume that everyone is hearing or understanding the same meaning or intent.
Expect online meetings to take much longer to accomplish the same amount of work conducted in person
Invest heavily in scheduling and preparation:
- Allow for extra time. Fifty minutes in online meetings may not accomplish as much as in person.
- Communicate in local time, or explain how to calculate local time, when sending online meeting announcements.
- Consider the impact of the volume of comments on time available when building the agenda. If everyone on a ten-person call provides input on a specific issue, and comments on average two minutes each, you can complete only two issues per hour (in addition to your introduction and wrap).
- Get your tech together. Something will always go wrong, so have a back-up plan and use it. Consider building some “hand notices” to provide visual updates when you have audio challenges. We’ve grown accustomed to sending out four cards in advance to each participant, such as “I can’t hear you.”
- Inform participants about files or sites that should have open and available.
- Provide a written meeting purpose, scope, objectives, and simple agenda with clear expectations about what participants (ie, subject-matter experts) need to do in order to properly prepare, even 50-minute calls. Written documents increase focus by keeping everyone “on the same page.”
- For more extensive workshops, send participants’ pre-read out two weeks in advance.
2. Human Connections — Distractions and Keeping Everyone Engaged
Keeping people involved takes a concerted effort from start to finish. Get off to a good start by setting a wonderful example:
- Log in first and early. For working groups that know each other well, launch one of our countdown timers and always start on time.
- Look directly at the camera when speaking. For all intents and purposes, the camera provides the eyes of each of your participants. If you’re not looking at the camera, then you’re not looking at them.
- Consider assigning people separate roles such as timekeepers or specialized note-takers for each of the:
- Action Items: to be assigned later if not volunteered immediately
- Decisions: agreements, inflection points, and issues that are closed
- Guardian of Change: specific communications about WHO needs to be informed WHAT about some issue.
- Parking Lot: open issues to be assigned or confirmed later
- Greet each person as they come online and assign a ROLL CALL sequence or virtual seating arrangement. Please smile when using video presence. Today especially we need more frequent human connections and confidence in our leaders.
Virtual Seating Charts
Seating charts (also known as roll calls) are indispensable and will be used frequently during online meetings. When running online meetings, assign a virtual seat in the sequence to everyone as they join the meeting.
Tell them where they are sitting at an imaginary U-shaped table so that they create a mental picture of the room and their orientation to the other participants. Use their seating to determine the roll call sequence for using at inflection points.
Based on who is attending, setup your breakout rooms in advance. Vary them by issue as appropriate. Some topics need homogenous groups that think alike and others need to be stirred up with heterogenous groups
- If or when you have a hybrid meeting or participants who may be visually impaired, please establish and enforce protocol demanding that speakers announce their name (could be a nickname) when taking a turn speaking. The ideal protocol is “one name only” as verbs and prepositions add no value.
- Install ground rules and then enforce them. Add the ground rule “NO HIDING” so that your video participants are expected to stay live and not hide behind a still photograph. Be flexible of course and allow people moments of turning off the video, but as an ongoing rule, we should all agree that no hiding should be expected.
- Regularly remind participants where you are in the agenda to visually impart progress.
- Transition smoothly for each step in the agenda as you advance.
NOTE: Icebreakers or “Where are you?” sharings remain particularly valuable in virtual meetings, even simple questions like “favorite ice cream” strengthen connections between participants located remotely from each other..
Etiquette and Quality
While the following reflects common sense, your role leading online meetings mandates enforcing discipline and standards:
- Be aware of the impact of accents. Have participants slow down their pace and tempo, perhaps project louder, and explode their consonants.
- Carefully manage cadence and control pace. Slow down during transitions and speed up during the middle of your agenda steps.
- Consider body-stretching exercises during longer sessions and take a ten-minute bio-break every 60 – 75 minutes for longer sessions.
- Decide how to reach each other if technical problems arise.
- Do not permit multitasking. Remind people to “Be Here Now” to avoid keyboard sounds, barking dogs, and flushing toilets. Speak with violators after the session so that you do not embarrass them.
- For video-presence sessions especially, beware of audio lag. Compression algorithms cause latency that varies up to three seconds. Be patient. Everyone does not hear everyone else at the same time.
- Have participants put their cell phones in silent mode. Also have participants turn off notifications and secondary noise sources (e.g., landlines).
- Silence is OK. Letting people catch up or catch their breath is natural.
Video-presence Tips
- Set the camera at face height, or very slightly above.
- Look directly into the camera (e.g., green light), not above or below, or to the side.
- Lean forward at critical moments, cutting off your hairline.
- Bring your hands forward slowly and in full view to stress key points.
- Rely on hand-drawn artifacts more than PowerPoint slides
- Place an analog clock in your background to indicate progress.
- Always use an agenda pointer to visually confirm progress.
- Use one social learning event per hour. Strive for a balance of 20-minute lectures, 20-minute interactions, 10-minute breakout sessions, and 10-minute breaks.
Other Differences Contrasted to Face-to-Face Sessions
Use your intuition. Be firm but flexible.
- Add a second or third camera to your arsenal to point at an easel pad or whiteboard.
- Break up long stretches of any one speaker sooner to prevent scope creep.
- For decision-making points, with cautious precision, restate or repeat key issues as articulated.
- Large floral prints, stripes, and bold patterns are not friendly during videoconferences. Plain-colored shirts and pants/ skirts are optimal. Also, avoid wearing white and red (don’t ask me why).
- Restrict quick movements that disrupt participants, especially with poor video transmission.
- Use breakout sessions frequently (where two or more go to a separate line or “room” with each other and then return to the large group to share their findings). Remember to appoint a CEO for each team for reporting back, and be more creative with Team Names than simply Team One, etc.
- Use people’s names when appropriate.
- When appropriate, go “a round circle” (round robin using your virtual seating arrangement) for inclusive participation. If participants understand where they are sitting, there should be no time lag. Everyone has permission to say “Pass” at any time.
Are your participants checking in or checking out? 3. Checking In, Checking Out — Participant Buy-in and Engagement
The likelihood of engaging multiple cultures in online meetings increases. Therefore, to maintain clarity, closely monitor elements that contribute to rhetorical precision:
- Grammar—Remember to listen and stop processing content. Someone needs to be listening, and that role belongs to you. Use active listening to correct for imprecise word or grammar choices.
- Jargon—Monitor carefully, such expressions as “shotgun approach” and “on the same wavelength.” Avoid idioms that are not universal such as “Don’t make waves” and thousands of other examples.
- Local color—from idioms to accents, people need to slow down their rate of speech, enunciate, and project louder.
- Officialese—your particular concern here ought to be acronyms or what many people call acronyms (technically, an acronym needs to spell an actual word). Even basic English abbreviations may not be understood by everyone, such as “P & L” or “AC” (air-conditioning or alternating current?) Groups can never be too clear, so be certain to use active listening to provide a clear reflection of what is being stated.
- Slang—In Islamic and Buddhist cultures, a simple “thank God” may be considered blasphemous unless meant piously. Avoid even simple comments that lack precision such as “go for it”.
- Vocabulary—After providing reflection, confirm that everyone understands what has been stated. If you sense that someone is holding back, consider a roll call approach (round robin) to have each person interpret how the most recent content affects them.
Facilitating Online Meetings: Special Emphasis
- Before bio-breaks, consider a quick Plus/ Delta (aka Retrospective) and ask for immediate feedback on improvements or necessary quick fixes.
- Enforce “Silence or Absence is Agreement” but solicit one-by-one audible responses for critical decisions and inflection points.
- If you don’t want to ask each person to respond to a general query
(“Do you understand the new procedure?”), ask questions so that silence implies consent, and tell them to speak up if “they can’t sleep at night” with the outcome. If necessary, remind them that they have a fiduciary responsibility to speak up and you will protect them, not reach down their throat and pull it out of them.
- The larger the group, the more your meeting leadership skills need to keep select people from dominating online meetings. Remember, scope creep begins in meetings.
Preparing to Wrap
Throughout, emphasize reflection and confirmation of content. Too frequently, virtual participants are distracted and do not capture or retain as much as they do when meeting in person. Summarize, summarize, summarize . . . a “clear group” may be an oxymoron.
- Offer each participant an opportunity for final/ closing comments. Consider “PASS” or “Just Three Words” for example. “What three words describe your experience with today’s meeting?”
- Review and confirm next steps, assignments, and deadlines.
- Summarize the meeting and end by confirming the next scheduled session.
- Use the MGRUSH review, wrap, and Guardian of Change.
- Use an evaluation form to improve subsequent sessions. A Plus/ Delta can also be completed at the conclusion or use electronic polling devices. For longer projects or sessions, send out anecdotal forms.
- Distribute notes within hours after the meeting and emphasize the follow-up steps and responsibilities in your email cover note.
Finally: Additional Training Always Helps
First, don’t expect to facilitate successfully online if you don’t have the training and skills to facilitate a meeting in person. If you’re not a trained meeting facilitator, now is the time to step up your game. Check out our calendar of professional ONLINE and on-site classes HERE.
That said… There are tips and techniques specific to connecting with your participants online. Fortunately, we attended Daniel Mezick’s class, Connect and Communicate: How to Teach ONLINE which will help you better connect with all your virtual participants, and yourself. Daniel is a special person and a superb instructor.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | May 5, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Structure, Meeting Tools
Whether you use Zoom, Teams, WebEx, GoToMeeting, or another online meeting technology, don’t blame the failure of your online meetings on technology. Why? Because you need to know what to do before you change how you do it.
Don’t Blame Failure on Your Online Meeting Technology Just as an engineer wouldn’t attempt a complicated mathematical challenge on a calculator (or computer program) unless they first understood the process behind it, you, as the meeting leader or facilitator, shouldn’t attempt to lead an online meeting unless you understand meeting design and know how to lead meetings in person. In fact, once you know how to facilitate meetings, most of today’s online meeting technology becomes user-friendly. The point is, you need to understand what you’re doing, before you attempt to change how you’re doing it. (Consciousness before Competence!)
Even before Covid-19, people failed at leading meetings because they didn’t have an awareness of how to structure them, or know what techniques to use, to get more done faster. Those challenges have only intensified with the shift away from in-person encounters. To make matters worse, online meeting leaders are fumbling with electronic whiteboards, dominant personalities, and basic connectivity issues.
Where To Start?
Whether you’re teaching a class, organizing a league, or facilitating due diligence, your success depends on you knowing what to do, not how you do it. For example . . .
Teachers know what to include in a course syllabus. Once they do, it’s simple to vary how they get this information to their students, whether it’s online, oral, or print:
- Course Description. …
- Course Goals
- Learner Outcomes
- Course Method, Technique, and Activities
- Grading Procedure
- Policies. and Scheduling
If you are leading events, meetings, or workshops, knowing WHAT to do to comes first. Only then can you modify and master HOW you do it. Regardless if you are meeting in person or live online, do the following and become a competent leader of online meeting technology. Become both conscious and competent with what to do and you can invest less time worrying about how you do it.
Top Seven: What To Do for Better Virtual Meetings Regardless of Online Meeting Technology
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DONE
Know what DONE looks like, carefully and clearly articulate your deliverable. Need we say more? (“Start with the end in mind.”—ok, we did)
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Prepared
Inform participants in advance with written statements about the meeting’s purpose, scope, deliverables, and simple agenda. Hard to imagine accepting a meeting without knowing these four items, but it happens all the time. At the very least, use our 50-minute meeting template for these items. If you cannot fill out the template within five minutes, you are probably not ready to lead the meeting.
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Neutrality
Exhibit servant leadership skills and remain neutral. There is usually more than one right answer. The fastest way to get a group of people to go quiet on you is to opine what you think. If you have the answer, then don’t have the meeting. Additionally, if you want one single tip on how to become a better facilitator overnight, stop using the first-person singular terms “I” and “me” as in “I think . . .” or “Please give me . . .”
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Diversify
Experiment. Innovate. Challenge the obvious for proof. Stir things up. Try something new. Few techniques work better than shifting Perspectives. What would a monastery do differently from the mafia to manage this situation (or, vice versa)? What would Apple (Steve Jobs) do different with this design than Microsoft (Bill Gates)? How about Mother Nature (homeostasis)?
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Assignments
When asking for someone to be responsible for an assignment, never allow two people to share responsibility. One and only one, so that there is no finger pointing “But I thought Jake was working on it.” Additionally, do not ask “Who will do it?”. Rather, ask “Who will take responsibility for reporting back to the team on the status of this item?” Frequently, the volunteer does not do it but assigns it to some of their staff when the meeting is finished. You are promoting effectiveness, as having one person contact many, is more effective than having many people contact one.
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Open Issues
Do not assign any single person big hairy issues that could result in one or more products or projects. Rather, treat your meeting output or “Parking Lot” item as input to subsequent sessions when enough time has been allowed for breaking down the big issues into manageable, and compartmentalized assignments. Content Management provides an excellent technique by structuring the next session to take the issue and explore the implications or why we should care. Next take each implication, one at a time, as ask ”What should we do about it?” Answers to the “recommendations” question provide substance for the follow-up assignments.
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Continuous Improvement
Seek feedback and assessment about your preparedness, skills, and leadership for the meeting. We know from experience that conducting an open “Plus-Delta” yields mostly creature-comfort crap that doesn’t do you any good. You don’t control the temperature, lighting, or food quality. Culturally we are taught to be nice rather than kind. Therefore, no one tells you publicly that you said “Hum” 37 times in five minutes, because we are being nice. The kind thing to do is tell you, albeit privately, so use a Post-Its activity in person or a whiteboard template online so that people can leave notes for you, protecting you while maintaining anonymity.
What To Do for Faster Online Meetings (Efficiency) Top Seven: What To Do for Faster Online Meetings (Efficiency)
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Distribute in advance
Distribute your list of detailed questions that need responses to participants in advance. Optimally, by meeting time, this is not the first time a participant has heard a question to which you are seeking responses. You need to take time to properly prepare for meetings and so should participants. Meetings are too expensive to treat lackadaisically (a term you won’t find in many blogs because it is a nightmare to spell).
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Build a lexicon or glossary
Control the operational definitions of terms being used. We don’t have time to argue about the difference between a goal and an objective or a Mission and a Vision. These definitions should have been determined before your meeting. When such terms do get used, we should all strive to have a shared understanding of their meanings. For us by the way, objectives are SMART measurements and goals are directional and fuzzy (subjective), but that is not true for all cultures and there is no universal standard or answer.
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Explain the white space between the agenda items
We call this contextual control. Be prepared to explain what agenda steps contribute. Why are they sequenced as such? What is the relationship between the agenda steps and the deliverable? What do we need from each agenda step (i.e., deliverable) that will get us out of here faster? Few events bog a meeting down faster than when someone sucks the oxygen out of the room and questions, “Now why are we doing this?”
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Use ground rules and carefully define consensus
Not as the ideal state, but rather as an agreed-upon decision or position that every participant commits to support, even if it happens to be no one person’s favorite solution.
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Maintain disciplined punctuality and timing
Enforce the ground rule “Be Here Now” to discourage electronic leashes. Keep virtual meeting participants in an audible mode (NOT muted) to prevent multi-tasking, since keyboard sounds are easily heard.
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Prevent scope creep
Know your holarchy and the scope of the question you are asking. The meeting scope decomposes into the scope for each agenda step and decomposes further into the scope of each question or activity. Know precisely where you are, or anyone can take control. When participants ask questions, they shift their role from meeting participant to meeting designer. Ever heard the expression, “That person has their own agenda.”? You’ve all heard about scope creep and scope creep begins in poorly conducted meetings.
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Be kind but, NOT too nice
Challenge participants to provide evidence and objective support for their arguments and claims. Consensus gets built around underlying causes, not overt symptoms.
Top Seven: What To Do for Transferring Ownership from Online Meetings (Mindfulness)
What To Do for Transferring Ownership (Mindfulness)
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Importance
Develop a quantitative understanding of the importance of the meeting. What is at risk if we fail? How much money is being invested or how much FTP (full-time person) is committed? Look at the potential value of the product or project you are supporting. If it fails, what have we lost?
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Responsibility
Stress their fiduciary responsibility. You’re responsible for protecting the participants but they are responsible for volunteering content. It’s not your job to reach down their throat and pull it out of them. Your meeting not only provides an opportunity for them to speak, their role as professional adults implies, they have an obligation to speak. If they have pertinent information about the topic and do not mention it, shame on them. They are violating integrity and you cannot control their integrity.
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Warm-up
Conduct some type of icebreaker, warm-up, or get-to-know-you-better activity even if it is a quick, one-question answer (e.g., favorite vacation place?). Especially with your online communities, strive to permit and encourage more connections and relationship-building than you might in person. To this end, generously conduct breakout sessions, even if they are brief so that everyone gets heard while also becoming more appreciated for who they are and what they can provide.
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Exploration
Explore outliers and seek to understand reasons for going beyond groupthink. We have all learned, perhaps too well, that voting is not a higher-quality method of decision-making. Voting yields bigger numbers, but not necessarily better results. Carefully craft a statement of purpose (WHY) and then separate your OPTIONS from your CRITERIA. Clarify your options (e.g., Definitions Technique). Prioritize your criteria (e.g., PowerBalls). Apply your prioritized criteria to your options (e.g., Perceptual Map, Decision-Matrix, etc.). Test your decision quality by asking “to what extent” the decision harmonizes and supports the purpose you started with.
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Alignment
Have or distribute copies of the strategic stuff. Mission, Values, and Vision can help determine trade-offs during arguments. For example, we serve an industry where safety is paramount and safety provides a common appeal for resolving arguments. For them, the approach that appears riskier or more dangerous will be lost every time. Additionally, you should have the business unit and product objectives readily available. After all, nobody wants more projects, and nobody wants more meetings. We meet and conduct lots of product development and process improvement projects because we want the results.
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Communications
Conduct a Guardian of Change (i.e., communications plan for the meeting results) activity when concluding your sessions. At the end of the meeting get everyone to agree on what they are going to tell their superiors and other stakeholders about what was accomplished (or not) during the session. It’s always a good idea to have participants sound like they were in the same meeting together. Especially with remote teams, where language skills are diverse and English may not be the primary language, determine the precise rhetoric participants should use so that superiors and stakeholders everywhere are receiving the same intended message.
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Hope
Aim for outputs, hope for outcomes. You can only control what goes into the meeting and not what happens as a result of it.
Good luck. Seriously, a little grace and karma never hurt a servant leader striving to conduct consensus-building group sessions.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Apr 4, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Support
Today we bring you quick tips for more effective meetings. “Distribution Talk With Jason Bader“, a podcast that exposes…
“… the stories, struggles, and solutions from interesting characters who have chosen to make a career in the distribution industry.”
~ Jason Bader
In Jason’s interview with Terrence Metz, Managing Director and Lead Facilitation Trainer for MGRUSH Facilitation and Coaching, Terrence shares some quick tips for more effective meetings . . .
“You don’t build consensus around what people think. You build consensus around why they think it.”
~ Terrence Metz
Jason is a class act and a renowned distribution expert. On behalf of his clients and listenership, he asked for some quick tips to help his clients better prepare and deliver meetings to increase their effectiveness.
Neutrality Tips for More Effective Meetings
The 30-minute conversation begins by exploring the challenges of neutrality. With experience dictating that there is more than one right answer, the scar tissue that builds up from “biting your tongue” teaches the ego to hide. We all prefer to avoid pain, and speaking causes more pain than listening. In fact, according to Terrence:
“Meetings are always more effective when the client speaks more than the consultant.”
~ Terrence Metz
Therefore, take your content knowledge and put it in the form of a question(s). Prepare the questions in advance and sequence them properly. Then you can afford to stand back and seek to understand. The neutral facilitator is most effective when, with heartfelt sincerity, they help the group seek the best answer for them. Not the universal answer or the best answer for everyone. Rather, it helps them find the best answer for them, given their situation, assumptions, and constraints. That’s what servant leaders are all about.
Define Consensus for More Effective Meetings
Consensus means everyone agrees. However, it also means that it may not be anybody’s favorite. Consensus means I might prefer something else, but the resolution is robust enough that I can support it professionally and, personally, I will not lose any sleep over it.
It also means that if you cannot support it, or if you will lose any sleep over it, we do NOT have a consensus. Therefore (if you are an employee in a for-profit organization), if you have a problem, you have a fiduciary responsibility to speak up. As well-paid professional adults, your point of view will be recognized and you will be protected from fall-out or damage, but speaking is incumbent on you. The facilitator must protect the people, but not be expected to reach down their throats to pull it out of them.
“For professionals, a meeting is not an opportunity to speak, rather it is an obligation speak.””
~ Terrence Metz
Meeting Method Based on Meeting Type
Facilitation bases its effectiveness on servant leadership skills. Core skills include speaking clearly, asking precise questions (properly sequenced), actively listening to responses, and observing reactions, all the while maintaining perfect neutrality (referees never grab the ball from the player to score). The combination of these elements implies some structure.
Structured meetings run contrary to the opposite, an unstructured discussion. People frequently have a headache when they depart from a discussion, which is not surprising. The term discussion is closely related to the terms concussion and percussion.
At the very least, a quick tip for effective meetings requires you to determine (in advance) to know what DONE looks like. Are you . . .
- Planning? (WHO does WHAT by WHEN)
- Prioritizing (purpose, options, criteria)
- Problem-solving (gap analysis or present-future comparisons)
- etc.
Eight Meeting Killers of More Effective Meetings
Jason further explores a previous article on Facilitation Best Practices, linked above, and summarized briefly here:
- Participants ought to be prepared in advance, even if a culture shift is required (starts with leadership).
- Punctuality is critical so STOP one-hour meetings and run 50-minute meetings that give participants time to transition and attend to personal requirements.
- Always start with the end in mind, the single most important contributor to an effective meeting. This describes leadership, also called, line of site. Where are we going?
- Avoid structureless meetings called discussions (see above).
- STOP using the first-person singular term “I”. This is not about you and never was. This is all about them. Are you willing to serve or do you need to be served?
- As a servant leader, shut up and listen. (see chart below)
- Use ground rules to avoid unstructured discussions. (see above)
- Avoid hybrid meetings with some virtual and some face-to-face participants. Make them all or none and treat everyone equally. If not, virtual participants frequently get treated like second-class citizens.
Talk Time
We’re not trying to argue that the slope above is perfectly linear. Rather, the angle makes it clear. If you want to increase the likelihood of meeting success, shift as much airtime as possible to participants. When you talk the entire meeting (that sucked). When they talk the entire meeting (that was dope).
Three Things To Do for More Effective Meetings?
When asked for a few simple things for listenership to do differently to increase their likelihood of more effective meetings, Terrence says . . .
- Get off to a smooth start. Use our seven-step Introduction sequence to ensure a solid, five-minute start to any meeting or workshop.
- No hybrids — Avoid calling on virtual participants last. At the very least, call on them first. (During Covid-19, set up a virtual seating arrangement and use a roll call method).
- For staff meetings or regularly held “information-sharing” (or updates), embrace the three-question approach:
- Tell us, WHAT have you accomplished since we last met?
- What are you working on now?
- What kind of impediments or challenges might you have that any of us can help you out with?
Use the link below to listen to Jason’s interview with Terrence, and listen directly to Jason Bader’s website.
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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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
by Facilitation Expert | Feb 18, 2020 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Support
Meetings capture a huge investment of time.
Unproductive meetings affect your cash flow, morale, and the potential growth of your biggest asset, your people. As frequent and important as we attend meetings, little (if any) structured training has been provided to help us become better meeting participants, and more importantly, meeting leaders. To build consensus, you and your teams are dependent on improving three areas of behavior.
1. CLEAR THINKING – WHY (Leadership)
Leadership training ensures that we begin with the end in mind. WHY do we meet equates with what DONE looks like? Highly effective facilitators know what DONE looks like before the meeting begins. They are able to clearly describe the deliverables from the meeting. Effective facilitators and meeting leaders can also explain what is at risk if the meeting fails. They prove value by the amount of money or FTP (i.e., full-time person) wasted if the group fails to deliver. Effective meetings begin with clear deliverables.
Even a lousy facilitator will succeed at building consensus when they draw line of sight from the meeting deliverable to the wallet (quality of life) of their meeting participants.
The best facilitators in the world will fail miserably if they don’t know where they are going. Poor facilitators still succeed when the deliverable is clear and impacts the quality of life of the meeting participants. When meeting output directly impacts participants, the meeting participants (aka subject matter experts) help the facilitator become more effective.
How to Build Consensus: Leadership (WHY), Facilitation (WHAT), and Meeting Design (HOW)
Knowing ‘where’ your group is going provides a keen sense of leadership. It is easy to follow a leader who knows where they are going. Conversely, when the leader is uncertain about what they need, what they are asking, or what they should be doing, it is easy to disengage from the session and disown the results.
An effective leader knows what DONE looks like for every step in the agenda. They know how each step relates to meeting deliverables and the logic that drives the sequence of steps in the agenda. They can effectively explain the white space, or the space between the lines on a simple agenda.
Before your meeting begins, you better know what each step looks like, in advance of asking for subject matter perspectives and content. We call this insight contextual control. Are you building a list, a statement, a matrix, a model, or something else? If crafting a policy, determine if the policy statement should be five words, five hundred words, or five pages long. The only wrong answer is when the meeting leader does not know what DONE looks like before the step begins.
2. CLEAR REFLECTIONS – WHAT (Facilitation)
Once it has been made clear where we are going, facilitation skills make it easier to know WHAT to do to make a meeting successful. Effective meeting leaders can become doubly effective when they combine their line of sight with facilitative skills.
Active listening while providing reflection of BOTH what participants are saying and why they are saying it, along with remaining neutral and non-judgmental, are the most critical skills to effective meeting management. Reflection does not always need to be verbal. Facilitators that use easels to write down participant input provide a visual reflection that is both immediate and easy to confirm.
Experienced facilitators know that more is better. They capture participant input verbatim which will never get them in trouble. You should also embrace the principles of Brainstorming at all times. Quickly gather all substantive input without discussion (diverge) and then go back to clarify, challenge, and modify the original input (analysis). Do NOT combine gathering and discussing at the same time in an unstructured discussion. After the analysis of the raw input, your refined output can be confirmed (converged) as content the group can support (professional test of consensus) and not lose any sleep over it (personal test of consensus).
Unfortunately, we have developed poor muscle memory over the years. Some behaviors need to be ‘unlearned’ before new behaviors are embraced. The only way to change such behaviors is through practice and immersion. Talking heads (ie, instructors’ lips are moving) won’t do it. Only active participation and practice will work at instilling effective and facilitative behaviors.
3. CLEAR MEETING DESIGN – HOW (Meeting Design)
Even a great facilitator who knows where they are going (ie, What DONE looks like) still needs help. They need to know HOW they are going to build consensus and get a group of people from the meeting Introduction to the Wrap. While the best meeting design (or methodology or approach, the agenda) has more than one right answer, there is one wrong answer — if the meeting leader does not know HOW they are going to do it.
Even when you know where you are going, having effectively described the deliverable, you will still be challenged with HOW are you going to lead a group from the Introduction to the Wrap. The sequence of steps, activities, and questions captures the meeting design (or method) you may use to lead your group. pathway implies more than one right answer but the WRONG answer is if you have no method or do not know how you are going to build your deliverable.
During MG RUSH Professional Facilitative Leadership classes, we provide clear instruction, demonstration, and student practice on six different methods of prioritization. Each applies at different points along a decision-making continuum ranging from simple to complicated through complex. Take time to build and document your method before your meeting begins, because once the meeting begins, you need your energy to focus on leading, listening, and overseeing your participants.
Consider these questions before any meeting or workshop.
Prompted by “Three (Incredibly Simple) Questions The Most Successful People Use To Change The World,” Forbes contributor Mike Maddock published an article that could have been cut and paste (figuratively) from the MGRUSH Professional Facilitation Reference Manual. Indeed, to lead a successful meeting, these three questions (slightly modified) should be considered for every meeting or workshop, that fully align with the preceding discussion on the WHY, the WHAT, and the HOW of incredible meetings.
Before the Meeting You Must Know — What is the deliverable?
(Forbes: What’s the outcome I want?)
For meetings, our focus is clearly on output (ie, a thing) rather than outcome (ie, a new condition) since we are typically unable to generate new outcomes before the meeting ends. We can however create the input required to catalyze new outcomes, and that is the purpose of the meeting.
You Should Know — What are the problems and challenges I foresee?
(Forbes: What stands in my way?)
Excellent facilitation depends on thorough preparation and interviewing your participants in advance. Especially stress preparatory time when collaboration and consensus become absolutely necessary. What people, issues, or components of the culture are going to get in the way of collaboration and consensus? Your answers yield insight necessary to build optimal agendas and activities for each specific meeting situation.
You Could Know — Who has already created this type of deliverable?
(Forbes: Who has figured it out already?)
You are not the first session leader in the history of mankind to confront your type of deliverable and situational challenges. Find others that have already done it. The manager of one MG RUSH alumnus calls it, “Once stolen, half done.” Focus on others within your own organization through formal networks like a Community of Practice (CoP) or Community of Excellence (CoE) and informal relationships and friendships. Learning from the experience of others will jumpstart your chances of success, so please do not be shy about asking for help.
Click on image above to view our video tutorial on YouTube Three Behaviors to Build Consensus
Remember, there are three clear and critical behaviors required to build consensus: Leadership, Facilitation, and Meeting Design. Embrace all three when you lead a group of people, and do the following:
- Articulate your meeting purpose, scope, and deliverable. Put them in writing. If you can’t effectively describe where you are going, you are not ready to lead. Know what DONE looks like before your meeting begins.
- Be more facilitative and exhibit less “command and control”. Take what you know and put it in the form of a question. And, STOP using the first person singular, especially the word “I.” If you already have the answer (as in, “I think . . .” or “I believe”), then don’t host a meeting. Meetings are an awful form of persuasion.
- Provide an agenda. Even if you deviate, at least have a planned road map that details how you expect to get us from the Introduction through the Wrap generating the deliverables your participants need to build consensus and label your meeting successful.
If you start embracing these three behaviors in every meeting you lead, you will be exponentially more successful. We guarantee it.
______
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 daily 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.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.
In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
