“Should we use an internal or external facilitator?” Good question. Everyone has experienced good and not-so-good facilitators. All too frequently, the ‘poor’ experiences can be attributed to the selection of the facilitator. Break that down further, and you may discover you chose an internal facilitator when you should have hired someone from outside your organization (or an external facilitator). The next time you’re faced with this choice, rather than guess, use the twenty questions below to determine whether to use an internal or external facilitator.
Keep in mind that the topic of “change” drives the need for facilitation. Change makes many people uncomfortable.Some attribute the resistance to change to the FUD factor—Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Therefore, this article will help remove the mystique of deciding which type of facilitator will be optimal, and more importantly, why.
Internal Facilitator Defined
Internal facilitation depends on people who are part of the organization, project, or community as meeting managers. In organizations, they frequently represent middle or upper-level staff members. We refer to those with skills in guiding group discussions, activities, and consensual decision-making. Internal facilitators may or may not have substantive knowledge or expertise in the technical/content issues that are being discussed. Above all, content knowledge is not critical, although facilitators must be conversant in the terms and language.
External Facilitator Defined
External facilitation depends on people from outside the organization, frequently in the form of a ‘consultant’. Facilitators external to the organization provide meeting design, activities, and decision-making tools. They assist the group in building consensus and taking action. Hence, external facilitators should have no vested interest or bias toward supporting a specific decision.
Justification and Logic for Internal or External Facilitators
Groups need meetings that make progress, and good facilitation makes this possible. A skilled facilitator and meeting designer develop an effective process that guides the discussion to get results. Facilitators can be either internal to your group, or external. Both types have advantages and disadvantages.
What is the logic of the decision? Following the discussion below you will find a tool with 20 simple questions. Using three to five minutes to answer them will help you quickly determine if you should keep it ‘inside’ or hire someone from ‘outside.’ And when the decision is not clear, the tool makes evident the risk factors to consider.
First, a brief discussion about twelve factors to consider.
Six Factors that Favor the Use of Internal Facilitators
Reasons for Internal Facilitator
Logic and Justification
Content Knowledge
Internal facilitators often have detailed knowledge about the issue(s) being discussed.
Context Awareness
They have knowledge of the history and context of the situation. Critically, they have knowledge and/ or relationships with many of the participants and stakeholders.
Life-cycle
Presumably, internal facilitators will still be around after the workshop and perhaps must live with any projects or initiatives that result.
Out-of-Pocket Cost
Likely less, probably much less
Quicker
Internal facilitators don’t require as much time to become familiar with the issue, context, participants, and stakeholders involved. Therefore, by balancing their workload, internal facilitators can be made available almost instantly with management support.
Respect
As a known agent, internal facilitators may be more respected than another ‘outsider’ or ‘consultant’ who may not be trusted.
Six Factors that Favor the Use of External Facilitators
Reasons for External Facilitators
Logic and Justification
Better Agenda Design
Professional external facilitators understand and rely on the importance of meeting design. Some call this methodology, but in a practical sense, it includes the agenda steps, activities, and tools that will be sequenced to create the deliverable, aka what DONE looks like. Additionally, experience and increased expertise working with other clients and industries create special expertise that helps bring in new ways of looking at problems and solutions.
Challenge the Moment
One strength of external facilitators is the ability to spot important insights and redirect focus to ensure that important, yet tangential issues, get explored. Therefore, external facilitators may bring a fresh perspective and new questions. They should be willing to ask difficult questions and confront commonly held assumptions.
Challenge the Status Quo
Coming from a broad range of industries, external facilitators are better skilled at challenging groupthink. They can use their external insights to challenge deep internal paradigms and assumptions.
On the contrary, internal facilitators may not be willing to risk their standing within the community and be fearful of retribution
Focused Preparation
Full-time professional external facilitators know how to plan and run successful workshops to get the most out of the significant resource investment you have allocated or invested. External facilitators plan so they can deliver maximum value for the duration of the session.
Neutrality and Independence
External facilitators help participants feel like they ‘own’ the outcomes.
On the contrary, internal facilitators may be perceived to lend bias, against participants, stakeholders, and decisions.
Sponsor Fully Participates
By using external facilitators, the sponsor(s) or decision-maker(s) can be fully engaged and present during discussions.
Scoring the Attractiveness of Using Internal or External Facilitators
Simply write to us if you prefer to receive the following as a quick and simple spreadsheet that you can modify or adapt. For example, you could weigh the questions and multiply the weights by your score to develop a weighted score. However, the simple approach suggested below will take you less than five minutes. It will generate a score that will be a positive integer between twenty and one hundred.
Scoring Interpretation
Higher numbers incline toward favoring external facilitators while lower numbers favorably encourage the use of internal facilitators. We recommend using either the numbers one (favors internal), three (equal ranking), or five (favors external).However, if you are stuck or need some flexibility, we’ve kept the door open for you to use the numbers two (slightly favors internal facilitators) or four (slightly favors external facilitators) if required.
Conclusion—Interpretation of Results
While not a statistically tested tool, we know the logic remains directionally correct. Smaller numbers (associated with less meeting risk) favor using internal facilitators. Hence, larger numbers (associated with greater meeting risk) favor the use of external facilitators.
Based on a sampling we conducted, scores of fifty and below favor the use of internal facilitators and also indicate less risky workshop sessions. Scores of seventy-five and above favor the use of external facilitators and also indicate more risky workshop sessions. Therefore, scoring provides a leading indication you can use to decide.
If you score between fifty and seventy-five, which direction does it favor? While it may not matter too much, look at the questions driving the scores and ask yourself which ones (s) are most important. If unable to develop clear insight, perhaps you should consider a combination with the external facilitator taking the lead, supported by an internal facilitator. Or, perhaps consider an internal facilitator taking the lead, mentored by an external facilitator.
NOTE: While the factors used are not independent variables, they all deserve consideration. For example, the scope could be narrow such as the acquisition of a single company but many stakeholders are required including finance, HR, legal, etc. Conversely, the scope could be wide such as the acquisition of a new product line but the stakeholder involvement might be restricted to customer contacts such as marketing, sales, and customer service.
“Facilitation represents an approach used by appointed individuals, which teams foster to build capacity and support practice change. Increased understanding of facilitation roles constitutes an asset in training practitioners such as organizational development experts, consultants, facilitators, and facilitation teams. It also helps decision makers become aware of the multiple roles and dynamics involved and the key competencies needed to recruit external facilitators or members of interprofessional facilitation teams.”[1]
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[1] Implementation Science, “External facilitators and interprofessional facilitation teams: a qualitative study of their roles in supporting practice change”, Received 2015 Sep 15; Accepted 2016 Jun 16, Sylvie Lessard, Céline Bareil, Lyne Lalonde, Fabie Duhamel, Eveline Hudon, Johanne Goudreau, and Lise Lévesque, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947272/
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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.
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, wedare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining
Clients frequently contact us about facilitating a meeting or workshop on behalf of an individual or organization.It might be a large, multi-national firm planning a complicated, and potentially expensive, deliverable. It could be a small, nonprofit organization seeking to get the most out of their busy board member’s time. While one organization seeks someone with the methodologies to lead their meeting, another seeks a meeting designer. In both cases, they want someone with the knowledge and skills necessary to make their meeting quicker and more impactful.
Methodologist or Meeting Designer? Since it’s not likely all groups use the same term, should we adjust?Given the nature of increasing diversity among participants, EFL (English as the fourth or fifth language) replaces ESL (English as a Second Language).Therefore, the clearest route keeps it simple.It may be tough to replace the term ‘deliverable’ with the term ‘goal.’It may be even tougher to replace the term ‘methodologist’ with the phrase ‘meeting designer’.However, make the shift immediately.
Make Your Language “Grandma” Friendly
My grandmother might not understand the term “methodologist,” but she will think she understands meeting designers.Likewise, she would cast an evil eye at the term ‘deliverable’ while comfortably absorbing the expression–meeting goal.
Skills of a Meeting Designer
It Begins with a Meeting Designer
Primarily, a meeting designer needs to know the meeting goal—WHAT to design, build, or agree upon that will thrill the executive sponsor and excite the other stakeholders (people in the meeting).
Once you clarify the DONE of your meeting, consider the participants, their areas of expertise, group dynamics, and potential dysfunction.The tools selected for use during the meeting reflect the needs and abilities of the participants, their level of cooperation, and other constraints such as time and space.
Progress or Breakthrough?
To what extent do creativity, breakthroughs, and innovation contribute? True design allows for inspiration that requires “empathetic thinking, human-centered activities, and getting people to work together.”*Remember, nobody can be smarter than everybody because participants leverage one another’s strengths to build a solution that did not walk into the room.
Leverage Proven Structure — Decision-Making for Example
Assemble or sequence your tools and activities around a proven structure.For example, consensual decision-making requires at least three components that can be built any which way from using Post-it® Notes to submitting notes electronically, including:
Purpose of the Object:(Note: NOT the purpose of the meeting.You better know the purpose of the meeting before you go any further).As a simple and concrete example, if the meeting intends to decide on a gift for someone retiring, what captures the purpose of the gift?(eg., gag gift, keepsake, memorable experience, etc.)
Options:From which to choose.Amazon provides lots of options as well as competitors in brick stores such as Target® and CVS®.
Decision Criteria:Factors that must be considered when selecting among the competing options.For gift-giving, to what extent it appeal to the recipient, provide a sense of reward and recognition, etc?Note that many groups fail to separate the options from the criteria and thus, prioritize their options.The way our minds operate, we prioritize our criteria and apply prioritized criteria against our options.For example, if you are selecting a new garment, size may be more important than fabric.
While your meeting design may call for various and creative means of generating gift ideas, eventually options must be compared with the prioritized decision criteria to build consensual agreement and understanding. Smashing your options and criteria together can also rely on various methods, for example:
Leverage Proven Structure — Problem-Solving for Example
For problem-solving or gap analysis, the tried and proven structure suggests:
Purpose of the Object of the Meeting:If you build a plan to solve burnout in the IT service department, first determine the purpose of the IT service department.Since all plans reflect WHO does WHAT, to determine the value of the WHAT (or action), determine to what extent it supports the purpose.Always begin with the WHY (purpose and input) to generate consensual agreement about the WHAT (action and output).
Current Situation:Where are we now?What does the problem look like? Describe the problem condition, etc.
Optimal Situation:Where do we want to be?What does the solution state look like? Describe the ideal or optimal condition, etc.
Symptoms:What are we observing that indicates a problem exists?For example, burnout among the IT Service Department — tardiness, wrong tools, red-eye, etc.
Causes:For each symptom, there could be more than one cause.Since plans should be focused on causes rather than symptoms, develop a list of potential causes.
Mitigation:Once the problems are understood, then ONE AT A TIME ask about potential solutions.You CANNOT ask, “What are the ALL the actions we should take to address ALL the causes?”Be prepared to sharpen the question even further. For example, if fatigue is a major cause of burnout, there are at least four questions to ask . . .
What can the service technician do to help prevent fatigue? (e.g., diet)
What can management do to help prevent fatigue? (e.g., ergonomics)
What can the service technician do to help cure fatigue? (e.g., earlier to bed)
What can management do to help cure fatigue? (e.g., hire more resources)
Meeting Designer Creativity
To obtain answers to the questions above, you can leverage numerous tools and methods, from individual Post-It Notes to group-built illustrations.When it comes to HOW you reach the group goal, there is more than one right answer.There is a wrong answer, however, and that is if you don’t know the HOW when your meeting starts.
“Being a meeting designer helps you push people beyond their conventional thought patterns by using human-centered design methods, playfulness and visualization.”*
Facilitating Meeting Design
Practically speaking, given a well-planned and scripted meeting design, I could facilitate the meeting for you.The role of facilitator differs from the role of meeting designer.Many link the facilitator to the metaphor of a referee.
Another analogy we frequently use involves a music conductor.Though they are responsible for all of the musical attributes of a composition or recording, they do not play the instruments. They depend on their musicians.
As the facilitator, you police the process. While the role of the facilitator demands neutrality, the facilitator should demand equality among participants.All must be treated fairly and with the same amount of deference.Participants should leave their egos and titles in the hallway.Whether on board for 22 days or 22 years, treat participants’ input equally.
We’ve learned from one of our alumni that, in some facilitated sessions, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wear sweaters to hide rank.Everyone receives permission and encouragement to speak freely.Removing distractions ensures that everyone gets heard and enables your group to build traction.
Start with Primary Form to Convey Meaning
While rhetoric relies primarily on the words communicated in meetings, other methods are equally satisfactory. Look at the various means of communicating the meaning behind the words used:
Iconic (or, Symbolic) — Icons and symbols project intent and meaning, and many have become universal to leapfrog challenges associated with narrative approaches.Street signs, bathroom symbols, and public transportation indicators project meaning and intent, frequently without much room for misunderstanding (take the STOP sign for example).
Illustrative— Drawings, illustrations, and other creative artwork reflect meaning, intent, and purpose.Note that a picture of a bird provides a more powerful way of understanding a bird than a narrative description.
Non-verbal — Needless to say, much of the information in a meeting transfers through body signals, openness (or closeness), shifting eyebrows, frowns of disapproval grins of approval, etc.Hand gestures alone help explain the verve and passion or intensity behind some meeting participants’ claims.
Numeric — We built our quantitative SW-OT analysis to describe the Current Situation numerically, thus avoiding initially some of the emotion and passion that can bog groups down.By starting with numbers, instead of words, participants strive to understand rather than trying to be understood.
Others —Dance, music, and other forms of expression also communicate meaning and intent, although most of us rarely engage other methods for expressing intent beyond the first five mentioned above.
TODAY’s QUOTE
“The biggest communication problem: we don’t listen to understand, rather we listen to reply.”^
Meeting Design Structure Increases Flexibility
Without meeting design structure, we are not flexible, more like loosey-goosey.Meeting design structure enables us to take the scenic route with the understanding that if it dead ends, or becomes boring, we have a path wherewith to return.
Look at your normal meeting ‘discussion’ ( a term closely related to concussion and percussion). Without a facilitator or leader, people discuss relevant items and gather some useful information. But the meeting ends, not after building a resolution, but when the time runs out. Unfortunately, we don’t normally complete meetings, but we do end them.
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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.
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.
^ source remains unconfirmed, including perhaps Yqbehen and Stephen Covey. Sometimes attributed to George Bernard Shaw who said, “The single biggest problem in communication: an illusion that it takes place.”
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Think of a meeting break as a pressure relief valve. Under normal circumstances, a standard ten-minute break, every seventy-five minutes or so, allows participants to decompress so they can return to the meeting refreshed and on track. However, when a minor disagreement threatens to explode into a full-blown situation, you need more than a standard break. For such times, use one of the ‘special’ meeting break methods below.
When the pressure gets to be too much, take a ‘special’ meeting break.
Method: When THEY Need a Meeting Break
Whenever the group gets stuck on a subject, begins to go round and round in a circular argument, displays drowsiness, exhibits brain-dead comments or motions, etc, take a ‘special’ meeting break. Before you send them on a break, however, command the following:
Instead of the standard 10-minute break, give them an additional five minutes (15 minutes total).
Write down a question (visually) they need to answer when the break time has concluded.
Tell them to use ten minutes for themselves (ie, phone, email, bathroom, etc.), but to take the additional five minutes and walk around, preferably getting some fresh air (outside, perhaps in an outdoor courtyard or near a fountain), and even doing some minor stretching.
During the ‘special’ five minutes, tell them to develop their responses to the question you have posted visually (easel, projector, or whiteboard).
When participants return, begin with input and new ideas they developed during the break.
Method: When YOU Need a Meeting Break
As the leader, perhaps you are stuck, saturated, or brain-dead—so, take a break. Before you begin this ‘special’ meeting break, however, repeat the five steps above. Note the following benefits that accrue from this approach:
Participants remain productive for five minutes of the break while giving you a full, one-quarter hour to sort through your notes, phone home (if necessary), and better ascertain what you should do next.
You also save face, while at the same time creating a win-win scenario. No one has ever been disappointed when asked to take a break.
Method: When EVERYONE Needs a Meeting Break
The cognitive benefits of exercise provide a positive benefit for people of all ages. Clinical proof exists that you learn twenty percent faster after exercise than after sitting still.
Why? Exercise improves the blood’s access to specific brain regions and stimulates learning cells to make brain-derived neurotrophic factors, or BDNF, which acts like a Miracle-Gro® for neurons.
Especially during full-day or multiple-day workshops, you will note around 3:00 PM everyone’s energy begins to lag. Biorhythms are actually lower mid-afternoon than at any point, even during our sleeping hours. Be prepared to take a quick, thirty- to sixty-second ergonomic break.
Ask everyone to stand up.
Either lead or have someone pre-selected to guide the group through a few, simple exercises. For example, have participants roll their heads, twist their torsos, bend their hips, rotate their arms, etc (Someone who takes or teaches yoga part-time is always a good choice.)
Alternatively, consider some basic, deep-breathing exercises.
Experiment, based on how many participants, how much space is available, and how much time is remaining. Everyone will benefit by feeling better and staying more awake and vibrant.
The ergonomic break, a simple device, has resulted in many issues being resolved, arguments ended, decisions being made, and participants waking up.
A ‘special’ meeting break allows time for evaporation with saturated participants, and space for new ideas to develop. For the facilitator or session leader, it also affords additional time to reorganize while the team remains productive and on task.
Method: An Immediate, Silent Meeting Break—Pause for Two Minutes of Silence
While it may seem counterintuitive to plan a silent period in a meeting, evidence supports the opposite. Alexander Kjerulf, author of “Happy Hour Is 9 to 5,” shows silence to be an ideal way to encourage deep thinking and robust ideas, during your ceremony, event, meeting or workshop.
The purpose of meetings is not to talk—the purpose of meetings is to arrive at ideas, solutions, plans, and decisions.
Since few of us can think deeply while we’re talking, two minutes of silence provides a chance to gestate over a decision, issue, or other topics.
MEETING BREAKOUT SESSIONS
How To Manage Breakout Sessions
Similar to a meeting break, a breakout session provides a change of scenery (and reduces pressure) by creating a smaller, safer (feeling) environment for participants. Breaking participants up into smaller groups or teams overcomes the monotony of relying too much on individual speakers that contribute to narrative Brainstorming and enables quieter individuals, who may not speak up in a large group, a way to contribute. As an added benefit, Breakout sessions or breakout teams enable groups to capture more information in less time.
Rationale for Meeting Breakout Sessions
Typically the session leader (aka, facilitator) may take up to one-half of the total talk time by setting up context and providing a thorough reflection of participant input. With ten participants in an eight-hour session, each participant probably contributes less than fifteen minutes of individual airtime, unless you spice up your meetings with breakout sessions.
How To Manage Breakout Sessions
Additionally, a very strong benefit of breakout sessions, all members (especially quiet ones) are given permission to speak freely. Their perspective and contribution defend their entire team’s position, not necessarily their lone voice.
Here are important considerations for managing face-to-face or virtual breakout sessions:
In advance, have breakout team assignments preselected and decide on the method for analyzing their input.
Publish your assignment or questions to be answered on a screen or in a handout. Be crystal clear with your instructions and the format you expect each breakout team to provide or build when they are DONE.
Keep the question or instructions posted (e.g., on an easel, projector, or whiteboard) or print it out and distribute it to each breakout team, as teams frequently assemble outside the main workshop room.
Give breakout teams a precise amount of time and monitor them closely for dysfunction, progress, or questions. Five minutes is typically optimal. Amazing what a group of people can accomplish in three to five minutes when provided with clear and detailed instructions.
Notes on Meeting Breakout Sessions
Make sure you have them document their findings and not simply report back using the “aether”. Large-format paper works great for providing input that consolidates into more refined output.
Appoint a CEO or Chief Easel Officer for each team. People usually laugh at this description of CEO, and groups that laugh together statistically perform better together. The CEOs are your single point of contact for each team when asking for progress reports or providing them with commands such as bringing their worksheet forward.
When teams return with their documents, you have already built consensus within each breakout team. Now you need to reconcile the voice of a few breakout teams rather than the voice of many individuals.
Be creative when assigning members to breakout teams. Consider birth dates (e.g., months or days); birth position (e.g., last child); latitude or longitude of home, office, or birthplace; mountain peaks, constellations, cut-up cartoon strips (e.g., Dilbert® . . . ), etc. Thematically strive to align the names of teams with the project or product naming conventions.
Note of Caution
While breakout teams are exceptional at gathering ideas, you are usually better off analyzing their contributions as one large group. Build consensus around the cause, not the symptom. Frequently what teams bring back reflects WHAT they believe rather than WHY they believe it. The WHY needs to be shared with the entire group so that the consensus you build remains on solid footing.
In Conclusion — Getting People Back from a Meeting Break
Use MG RUSH countdown timers during breaks, even lunchtime, to provide immediate and visual feedback about the time remaining. Since our timers include bundled music, the stimulation works well for creating ambiance in the room. Alternatively, consider Brain Breaks that motivate participants who enjoy puzzles to return early as well.
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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.
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.
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Meetings are necessary. But not all meetings are good. To be more precise, not all meetings are run well. But how can you rescue a bad meeting if you’re not the one leading it?
While our workshops focus on creating better leaders, the truth is, that most of us spend the majority of our time as participants. While we’re not suggesting that you, as a participant, instantly take over a bad meeting, there are some actions you can take to improve a bad meeting without stepping on the toes of your meeting leader.
The Do’s and Don’ts—Starting with the DON’TS
We start with what NOT to do, as it is essential that you have four rules clearly in mind before you take any action:
To put it simply: NEVER embarrass the person leading the meeting.
What can you, as a participant, DO to rescue a bad meeting?
Everyone is Sitting
If all participants, including the leader, are sitting down, take a marker and stand up. Suggest to the leader that you can assist by recording what is happening. Try to summarize what seems to be the purposeand direction (for lack of an agenda) of the meeting. Before rising, you may even draft and then suggest an agenda to help guide the meeting.
Unless you are told to sit down and shut up, you have become the facilitator. By standing up, recording on flip charts, whiteboards, or projector screens, and using facilitation skills to keep the discussion focused, you have effectively changed the course of a bad meeting by using a facilitative leadership style.
The Leader is Standing
If the meeting leader is standing up, start by using facilitator skills, such as asking sharp questions and using reflective active listening, to get the group focused. If the leader is not effective in knowing where to go, your effort to clarify will not be a problem. Once you gain a role as a “focuser”, you may then suggest that your agenda would help everyone make better contributions. Playing “dumb” is very effective in getting people to set directions without feeling threatened by you.
You may suggest to the leader that he or she has so much to contribute, that you would be willing to stand up and do the flip chart recording. Again, once you are standing with a marker in your hand, you subtly become the facilitator. In both cases, talk to the meeting leader after the meeting. In a non-threatening way, explain how the next meeting can be made more effective. You will begin to change the meeting culture in your organization.
Seven Ingredients to Avoid a Bad Meeting
Seven Ingredients to Avoid a Bad Meeting
You want to avoid meeting killers. A “killer” would suggest the absence or void of much of the following. There is no set formula for subtly controlling bad meetings, but there are seven ingredients that suggest a strong likelihood of positive impact. Listed in order of importance, the seven ingredients include:
1. Know What Done Looks Like:
Any leader needs to know where they are going before they take off. Make the purpose and deliverable of the meeting clear immediately. People can follow a leader who knows where they are going. However, people are reticent to follow someone who does not know where they are going. And meeting participants ALWAYS know the difference.
Structure yields flexibility. If you draft a map for their journey, it is easy to take a detour or scenic route because you know where to go when the temporary path is no longer valuable. Plan your work and work your plan.
3. Suggest Ground Rules to Ensure On-time Performance:
The terms “concussion”, “percussion”, and “discussion” are all related. Avoid meeting headaches and get more done faster. While not required, ground rules help everyone get more done, sooner.
4. Control or Define Terms to Prevent Scope Creep:
Unless your deliverable calls for a definition or scoping boundaries, do not allow arguments about the meaning of terms. Bring your definition tool to the forefront and get participants level set on what key terms mean to everyone. You need consensus around the meaning of the terms being used, so prevent arguments about definitions by building them immediately, with the group. Scope creep kills projects, and it kills meetings as well.
5. Enjoin and Facilitate Argumentation:
The best return on investment of face-to-face meeting time (and costs) derives from resolving conflict. When two or more people (or teams) disagree, they need a meeting referee — a facilitator. Arguments do not get resolved with text messages, emails, decks of slides, and PDFs. See How to Manage Conflict for refreshing tips.
6. Focus on the Analytics or Tools that Galvanize Consensus:
There is more than one right answer or tool for nearly all circumstances. Given your participants, constraints, and personal experience suggest a tool that may be optimum for the situation. If required, recommend a backup approach, if something immediately goes awry.
7. Increase the Velocity of Participation:
Groups are smarter than the smartest person in the group because groups generate more options than individuals alone. Solicit and encourage a multiplicity of input. The human mind is empowered tremendously when it can compare and contrast options to influence decision-making.
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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.
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.
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We all have skills to perform many roles in life, such as switching quickly between parent and child when attending a family gathering, or switching quickly between friend and customer when shopping or dining with a significant other. Likewise, structured facilitator training enables facilitators to switch their consciousness quickly between the roles of facilitator and meeting designer.
NOTE: A facilitator can “show up” with someone else having performed the coordination, documentation, and meeting designer roles.
Four Roles of Effective Facilitation
Coordinator:
This role is usually filled by admin support or by someone who will be the facilitator. The coordinator role is not always formal but must exist. Therefore, preparation responsibilities include:
Reserve the meeting room,
Ensure the arrival of equipment and supplies,
Seeing to (and perhaps receiving and setting up) refreshments, and
Giving support on participant requests such as logistics, timing, and travel information.
Documenter (or, Scribe):
Occasionally this role is filled by an assigned scribe. But, frequently, the individual who is the facilitator performs this role alone. Regardless, the scribe must record the group’s ideas in an organized manner. However, documenters do not edit or change the content on their own. Responsibilities include:
Set up the documentation software and tools,
Capture outputs and inflection points, not verbatim discussions,
Distribute the meeting or workshop notes, and
Manage edits, document versions, and archives.
Neutrality
The scribe reacts to facilitator requests. Therefore, the role demands unbiased and neutral behavior during facilitated sessions. Any judgment, evaluation, or “improvement” of content potentially leads to a biased, distorted record of session output and must be avoided.
Deliverable
The meeting objective is not recording minutes, but writing down outcomes and outputs with a sufficient amount of detail to enable accurate review and understanding. The output must satisfy the session deliverable and provide information for the product or project it supports. After that, the document trail serves as the group record of what is agreed upon. The deliverable provides a sense of group accomplishment. Frequently, the document trail provides the only artifact of clear results from the group effort.
Methodologist (or, Meeting Designer):
The meeting designer’s role details the approach or agenda steps used in a meeting. The source of the meeting design may change throughout the life cycle of a product or project. For example, in the planning phase, the meeting designer may be a strategic planner—someone who understands how to develop an action plan.In the analysis phase, the meeting designer may be an analyst, a process expert, a business architect, or some combination. In the design phase, the meeting designer may be a workflow or user experience specialist.
Responsibilities include:
Help the facilitator, business partner, and technical partner codify the deliverable and define the appropriate agenda steps to follow,
Provide succinct questions to ask and the optimal order for asking the questions,
Occasionally participating in meetings to ensure that the meeting output meets the standards of quality and consistency—namely, that others can act upon the deliverable effectively, such as the product development, project, or Scrum teams. While meeting designers may suggest content, their most valuable input comes from raising additional questions for the group.
The meeting designer’s role is not necessarily a single individual or even a person.For example, the executive sponsor could be the meeting designer in strategic planning.The meeting designer for buying travel tickets could be a system such as Expedia.The meeting designer could copy their design from a framework such as Scrum or SAFe. Business or technical partners (i.e., project management) frequently serve as meeting designers.
The session leader is commonly the meeting designer. If that’s you, seek out the expert of the deliverable—one who clearly understands the questions to ask that will build the product needed, whether it’s planning, requirements gathering, prioritizing, “hot wash”, etc.
Facilitator:
The session leader role demands many, many tasks. Thus, the success of the session depends on your real skills, knowledge, and abilities as a group leader.The facilitator’s role frequently includes ALL OF the traditional roles of “Facilitator” discussed below, along with the roles of “Coordinator”, “Documenter”, and “Methodologist”, discussed above. Therefore, managing context remains the key focus of the facilitator. Other responsibilities include:
Create synergy by focusing the group and using your facilitation skills to enhance communications,
Ensure that all participants have an opportunity to participate,
Listen actively to the discussion and challenge assumptions,
Manage the scribe and/or the documents,
Observe the group and adjust when necessary,
Questions that achieve clarity—aiding understanding among participants,
Recognize disruptive behavior and create positive corrections, and
Work to manage conflict that develops.
Servant Leadership
The facilitator role creates an environment where every participant has the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, and excel. Listening to and observing the team’s progress will help you to better serve your participants. Above all, meeting leader skills reflect the core aspects of servant leadership.
NOTE:
Begin to sense how much easier and yet more effective you could be if someone else coordinated the room, participants, and supplies. If someone else provides a detailed agenda with the activities to launch and questions to ask.If someone else managed the documents at the end of it all.
In fact, as session leader, you could lead a planning workshop in the morning for one group, at one facility, and a user experience workshop, in a different facility, for another group in the afternoon.And you could do so easily if the responsibilities of the coordinator, meeting designer, and scribe are assignedy. Specialization of labor led to economical growth around the world, but few realize the same concept applies to the traditional role of a ‘facilitator.’
The principles and practice of facilitating, rather than preaching, provide the most effective means to create clear messaging. Therefore, listening and observing are core to the speaker’s success.
International Institute of Business Analysis™ (IIBA®):
The IIBA’s Guide to the Business Analyst Body of Knowledge® known as BABOK® Guide v3 stresses facilitation. When explaining disciplined and structured thinking, the term ‘facilitate’ appears 112 times over 514 pages. Statistically, approximately 25 percent of the BABOK‘s pages mention the need or link to the importance of facilitation.
The List Goes On . . .
Many sources sing the praise and importance of facilitation.Yet what real skills are required and are they shared equally across all meeting types?
For this unique assessment, we took our own Professional Facilitation curriculum and compared it with . . .
International Association of Facilitators (IAF) 18 Core Competencies,
International Institute for Facilitation (INIFAC) 30 Master Facilitator Competencies, and
Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) 35 Certification Competencies
Facilitator skills are not equally important in every facilitated session or meme.
Business Facilitation (or, formal organizations),
Conflict Management (or, mediation),
Community Facilitation (with a large stress on ‘helping’), and
Instructional Facilitation (such as teaching, training, coaching, etc.)
The combined result below compares 25 facilitator skills and scores the importance of each against the four types of facilitation.Structured facilitator training best supports business facilitation, followed by conflict negotiation, and finally, community facilitation and instruction of various types as shown in the chart below.
For each skill, we force ranked from Low to High and to prevent repeating the same score. Next, we changed the PowerBalls symbols to numeric values from 5-High to 1-Low to create a total score that shows the impact of the skills across the four meeting types.Not surprisingly, structured facilitator training and skills are needed most for Business Facilitation followed by Community Facilitation, Conflict Mediation, and then Instructional meetings or training situations.
Facilitator Training Skills
NOTE:Some skills for mediation and instruction may not be included because they have little impact on structured facilitator training.For example:
Curriculum Development
Content Expertise
Bottom Line
Within consensus-building and decision-making situations, structured facilitator training proves to substantially help groups get more done, faster. For optimal facilitator training, begin with understanding the four roles of effective facilitation, namely coordinator, documenter, meeting designer, and facilitator.
Thus, if you are facilitating business meetings and want to improve your effectiveness, strive to improve your structured facilitator skills. Above all, your investment in facilitator training will pay for itself many times over.
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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.
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.
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How often have you found yourself in the hallway after a meeting wondering what happened?
Daniel Pink’snewest research proves that the end of a meeting is more important than the beginning. Endings leave lasting impressions. Recency triumphs over primacy. And yet, how often have you found yourself in the hallway after a meeting wondering what happened? What did we agree to? Or worse, you disagree with someone who thinks the results are different if not diametrically opposed, to what you think. Enter, the Guardian of Change.
Nobody wants more meetings but we still meet a lot. We meet for a purpose. Successful meetings have an end in mind. Some call it “DONE”. Others call it a deliverable. Either way, the meeting purpose is satisfied once the objective is reached, once we have the object of the meeting. Notice that the deliverable of meetings is a noun, never a verb. You cannot hand off a ‘verb’ to someone else, but you may hand them a ‘noun’ or an object.
Even if the deliverable is a plan of actions (verbs) to take when the meeting is over, those actions need to be documented, and that document is called a plan. Any plan details WHO does WHAT. The plan is the object or deliverable, not the action itself. Meeting objectives sets plans in motion so that the real work begins after most meetings end.
If you ask a group of ten people, “What is a process?” or “What does a single requirement look like?”, you will assuredly get ten different responses. All of them are correct for their respective contributor. Indeed, there is more than one correct answer.
Frequently, however, it’s a good idea for participants to echo the same message so it sounds like they were in the same meeting together. The importance is critical when you have a multi-national organization where translation issues cause misunderstanding and turbulence.
For major initiatives such as strategic planning or project launches, it is wise to invest a few hours to build a robust communications plan, but most meetings do not afford that much time. Rather than skip the activity entirely, Use the MGRUSHGuardian of Change tool to consensually build quick and simple messages.
Guardian of Change
When your meeting or workshop is complete, take a moment to get participants to agree on what they will tell others they got DONE in the meeting. We call that activity the “Guardian of Change” and it should be included in the Review or Wrap agenda step of nearly every meeting you attend.
Here’s how it works for most meetings, and it only takes five minutes. For critical and public workshops such as strategic planning, this activity may be pulled out of the Review step and made an entirely discrete agenda step. Most would call that step a “Communications Plan.” More about that, later.
Before participants depart from a standard or even a standing meeting, facilitate their “water-cooler” “coffee pot” or elevator speech” with a simple T-Chart. Allowing for two stakeholder groups, usually, one that looks upward (eg., superiors) and another that looks across or downward such as “Employees”. Your appropriate group titles are placed at the top of each column in your T-Chart.
Two-column (T-chart) Guardian of Change
Next, working one at a time, simply ask:
“When you walk into a Superior in the hallway and they ask you what was accomplished in this meeting, what are you going to tell them?”
Apply the Brainstorming principles of Ideation, and write down their input verbatim and without any discussion. When someone objects, politely shut them down and remind them that for the moment, there is no discussion. Analysis and agreement will follow once initial ideas have been written down.
Move to the second column and ask . . .
“When you walk into another employee in the hallway and they ask you what was accomplished in your meeting, what are you going to tell them?”
Common sense dictates that frequently the messages are different in each column. And you will discover that people will argue over the messages and even single terms suggested such as “complete” versus “substantial progress.” In fact, what your participants need now is a facilitator.
Through active listening, clear definitions, and an appeal to the organizational objectives, you will get the group to agree on what they are going to tell others. You will have them sounding like they were in the same meeting together.
True to Life Example
Guardian of Change
Note in the following example from our pro bono effort with a 501(c)(3) organization, some initially wanted to tell parents that the organization was . . .
“beefing up”
“More support”
“Expansion”
“Enhancing”
After extensive, if not heated, discussion, the group agreed to downplay ‘promises’ to better manage expectations. Level-setting. Can you imagine the different messages going around the parental community if we had not facilitated the Guardian of Change?
Some parents would have heard they are “expanding, enhancing, etc…” and others would NOT have heard “about that.” As if the participants were coming from different meetings.
Rather, the participants agreed that . . .
“It was discussed that items in GREY (for parents) ought to be substituted with lighter rhetoric and general aspirations rather than concrete claims.”
The message that went out to parents was simple and unified . . .
“The P.A.P. program is our top priority and we’ve got good people working on it.”
Don’t let unmanaged messages circle around, get to “management”, and let you get bitten in the butt. Prevent disturbing turmoil with just a few minutes of structured activity. You’ll be all so glad you did, you’ll want to thank us later.
Comprehensive Communication Plans
Communications plans are complicated by the number of stakeholder groups that need to be messaged, the potential variety of the messages themselves, the manner of delivery (ranging from face-to-face to press release), and the frequency or timing of delivery as parts of the message may be offered up over a period of time.
Communications Planning
Many cultures and methods today use the term “Champion” to signify someone who is leading or promoting. Be careful.Our experience with a Fortune 100 manufacturer discovered that their best new product ideas were not being commercialized. Rather, new product ideas that were receiving approvals and funding were highly correlated with the charisma, charm, and personality of the Champion, rather than the value of the idea itself.
Substitute the term “Guardian” for the term “Champion”.
As a stakeholder, you probably don’t want to hear that more attractive commercial opportunities are being passed up because of the persuasiveness of competing Champions. Therefore, we encourage organizations to substitute the term Guardian for the term Champion. Typically, you really want someone to guard and protect their concepts. You want assurance that they will adequately represent and accurately speak to the value of the concepts.
You don’t want your Guardians to let others eat away at the value, detract something from the value, or characterize the value as being worth less than it is. Nor do you want them to inflate the value to be worth more than it actually is. You would prefer they guard it, for what it’s worth, nothing less and nothing more. Therefore, we encourage the use of the term “Guardian” rather than a “Champion” who spearheads their idea at all costs.
Ever see an idea get approved because of the promoter, rather than the intrinsic value of the idea? We all have. Even worse, have you ever seen a valid idea lose out because the promoter was fearful, shy, or timid?
There’s a story about the relatively shy inventor of the Selectric® typewriter who first took their invention to the Underwood typewriter company, a “Company of the Year” award winner. Underwood executives said “no”, so the inventor went to another company known for its scientists and evidence-based thinking and they said “yes.” That company was the International Business Machine Company, more commonly known as IBM. The rest, of course, is history. Underwood Typewriter went out of business ten years later.
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.
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.
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The Global SCRUM GATHERING® Austin was kicked off on a warm Monday morning in May by Daniel Pink. Because his research focused on time and timing, Daniel compiled and published his results and findings in his newest book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Additionally, his presentation averaged a five-star rating from the 224 of us who checked in live.
During the Global SCRUM GATHERING kickoff, Daniel stressed the importance of two findings, highly relevant to facilitators:
Regardless of how much time is allotted, real work does not begin until the meeting or project reaches its midpoint. Consequently, in a four-hour meeting, at the two-hour mark, someone will remark that “half our time has expired” and suddenly participants get serious. Similarly, at the project level, once the project reaches its midway point, contributors develop a sense of urgency and step up their contributions. Half-way warnings. Additionally, it doesn’t matter if you allow one hour, one week, or one month—be on the lookout for the halfway point.
(Keeping this in mind, with a powerful Introduction, using our 6-Step Method, you will NEVER wait half-way to help a team become productive.)
“Endings” are more important than beginnings when it comes to memory and recall. While smooth starts remain critical, participants will evaluate you and the value of the meeting by the last five minutes.
(ie. What did we accomplish? (Review) What has changed in my world? (Next Steps) Who is going to manage xxxxxx? (Assignments) Our professional Review and Wrap recommends a fourth step for a solid close, get some feedback on how you did. Click the links for a good refresher on solid Introduction and Review and Wrap activities that no meeting, even 50 minutes in duration, should be without.)
The Global SCRUM GATHERING conference progressed during the week with topics covered by this author including . . .
Why Agile Transformations get stuck. Traditional (non-Agile) leadership mindsets, organizational structures, and slow-moving cultures provide leading indications. Because too many organizations focus on framework implementation, ignoring the human factor.
How to mitigate backdraft among teams—those uncomfortable feelings or negative reactions that arise from team and organizational dysfunction.
How to lead Agile organizations by leveraging heuristics. Improving decision quality by exploiting the structures of information and the environments in which they are applied. Reference here to the Cynefin Framework. (Obvious-Complicated-Complex-Chaotic)
Cynefin Framework
“The Death of Agile Transformations” and how to avoid them. Personally, loved the Cuckoo Effect:
“Any foreign innovation in a corporation will stimulate the corporate immune system to create antibodies that destroy it.”
Global SCRUM GATHERING
The Global SCRUM GATHERING may be summarized by Peter Drucker’s quotations above and below referenced during the session:
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s knowledge.”
How to be Agile enough to reinvent yourself (Stacey Ackerman was wonderful).
Roger Brown provided compelling evidence and financials to hire an Agile coach (or, we would argue, a meeting and facilitation coach).
Shu-Ha-Ri or mastering Scrum—“first learn, then detach, and finally transcend.”
The difference between Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. (All M.L. is A.I. but not all A.I. is M.L.) Be sure to use a data scientist or A.I. engineer to help build a methodology for your A.I. or M.L. workshops.
Chris Messina, creator of using hashtags (initially on Twitter and now everywhere) closed with refreshing material and the importance of wealth—defined as the quantity and quality of connections with others.
Control the Room
Control the Room
Terrence concluded a week in Austin TX as a speaker at Douglas Ferguson’s Voltage Control-sponsored “Control the Room 2019”—Austin’s 1st Annual Facilitator Summit. Douglas, an alumnus and a very smart and compassionate guy (and professional Design Sprint facilitator), used the conference to break down the silos of facilitation. Succinctly summarized, In his words:
“to move past the guilds and methodology-centric gatherings and convene facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together.”
Priya Parker (“The Art of Gathering”) opened the day with remarkable personality and humaneness. As reported in the following article:
“Her 90-minute talk was a pure delight and received a standing ovation. She is a stratospherically talented facilitator.”
You may access summaries of all “Control the Room” presentations HERE. The “Control the Room 2019” artwork captures our presentation segment. It has been borrowed from Douglas’ report, so additional kudos to Patricia Selmo for the graphic recording. “Control the Room” generated high energy, and warm camaraderie, and will return to Austin on a regular basis. Therefore, anybody who facilitates meetings would benefit from attending.
After recently working with Julia Reich, the graphic recorder of Stone Soup Creative, we have developed a strong affinity for graphic recording. Julia should be applauded (and hired) because her MeetingPathway to Success provides a simple-to-follow guide for complex events called meetings (or workshops). You can download your copy HERE, or visit our Facilitation Store to order a poster-size copy. Meanwhile, below is her delightful infographic based on the MGRUSH Professional Curriculum when she attended in Columbus OH.
MGRUSH‘s Professional Facilitation Meeting Pathway
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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.
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.
______
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Over the years, students and alumni have clamored for a simple reference sheet of our curriculum and how to prepare for a meeting. Consequently, we think we have it now and hope you agree.
Meetings can be expensive and wasteful, especially when poorly prepared. Therefore, download a PDF of the Meeting Pathway guide and Workshop Canvason our Facilitator Resources page. Alternatively, go to the Alumni section of our website. Additionally, posters are available for purchase in assorted sizes and formats at our Facilitation Store.
The Workshop Canvas aligns expectations for meeting and workshop charters.
Meeting Pathway to Success
Meeting Pathway to Success
Julia Reich, graphic recorder of Stone Soup Creative, should be applauded (and hired) because her MeetingPathway to Success provides a simple-to-follow guide for complex events called meetings (or workshops). Primarily intended for individuals working on their own, MeetingPathway begins with the end in mind (DONE). Oddly, however, it concludes with your final preparatory activities. Therefore, follow the six steps in the MeetingPathway to remember everything critical to the success of your meetings (or workshops).
The MeetingPathway provides a color-coded, single-page reference sheet that stresses the significant components of an important meeting, and includes:
We are also introducing the first and only structured Workshop Canvas. Primarily intended for teams coordinating critical workshops, it similarly includes:
Use the Workshop Canvas to supplement the MeetingPathway to reinforce clarity and help build consensus around the components of a successful meeting from your group’s perspective. The Workshop Canvas establishes a consensual tone based on transparency and evidence-based decision-making. Consider ordering a large poster version for use with Post-It® Notes, then photograph your ongoing development, and share it with other stakeholders as appropriate.
The Workshop Canvas includes 37 preparatory considerations.
Review and adapt the 37 questions for each meeting or workshop. Note that the three vectors of leadership [WHY}, facilitation [WHAT], and methodology [HOW] are sequenced. Additionally, they cut across four primary dimensions including Deliverable, Culture, Commitment, and Logistics.
MGRUSH alumni have immediate access to a brochure that includes both the Meeting Pathway (11 x 17) and the Workshop Canvas.
Poster versions of both are also available in the Facilitation Store in paper quality from a simple matte finish to photographic glossy on foam mount. For more information and prices go to Meeting Pathway or Workshop Canvas.
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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.
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.
______
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During a four-day conference, we facilitated more than 20 speakers and varying presentations, each citing distinctive topics ranging from embracing social responsibility to utilizing Google® Hangouts for small groups. Participants applauded our approach, and we decided to share it here to help you become a more effective facilitator.
Challenges Associated with Facilitating Speakers and Conference Presentations
As observed recently at a PMI (i.e., Project Management Institute) event, speakers are typically preachy and not facilitative. This means more moving of lips and less active listening, resulting in less audience response and interaction. Session challenges include:
Lack of any conflict to resolve, which makes for a boring session
Unclear deliverable (i.e. “increased understanding” doesn’t have enough urgency for most participants)
Uncertain purpose (preach, Q&A, applause—nothing is compelling or consensual about this approach)
Begin with the End in Mind When You Facilitate Speakers and Conference Presentations
Begin with the conference purpose, scope, and objectives (i.e., deliverables) clearly stated and mounted on large format posters throughout the week for immediate reference. Two other preparatory sheets that should be mounted and visible to all are the Simple Agenda and appropriate Ground Rules (e.g., silence the electronic leashes).
Throughout multiple presentations, some speakers will encourage questions during their presentations and others will ask participants to defer questions until their presentations have been completed. In either case, insist that questions be directed through the facilitator with clear reflection back to both the audience and the speaker. This enables you to repeat the question to ensure that all participants have heard it. Also, verify with confirmation that you “got it right” as you distill questions into fewer words using less commentary. After each speaker’s response, reflect as required in Active Listening, and distill their response into the fewest words, using their terms, that directly address the question.
Focused Q & A for Speaker Presentations
During conference presentations, most Q&A (i.e., questions and answers) revolve around clarity, and, as facilitators, you must strive to ensure clear understanding. But don’t stop there. Further challenge the topic, as appropriate, with questions about “anything substantive” that may have been missing. If you ask a smart group of people “Is anything missing?”, the answer is invariably “yes” because there is ALWAYS something else. Therefore, stress the concept of “substantive” “critical” or “important” to prevent the discussion from drifting. Next, seek for general agreement to ensure the participants can support the primary takeaways from each of the conference presentations, and that no one insists that something is highly erroneous or blatantly wrong.
During Q&A, carefully document the Key Findings, as emphasized by participants. After each Q&A, transfer the focus back to the conference purpose and deliverables.
In one of the conferences we facilitated, the deliverables were to provide answers to three discrete questions. We asked participants to link their new knowledge and understanding from presentations back to the three questions and, one at a time, asked them what it meant by re-phrasing their input as a direct response to one of the originally posted questions. Two of the three primary questions demanded future recommendations or actions. Which brings us to…
For each session, capture actions that need to take place after the conference has ended in support of the conference’s purpose. Another way to phrase this question that works very effectively is . . .
“Now that we have heard or learned (summary of participants’ Key Findings), what will you do different tomorrow?” — Facilitator
Bad Habits Die Hard
Nearly everyone conducts a question-and-answer session when new evidence or information has been unveiled. Typically, we then give the speaker a round of applause and take a break or dismiss. The assumption is that we all heard the same thing or that our interpretation will automatically lead to consensual changes and coherent behavior. Such is not always the case. Sometimes meeting participants take off in opposite directions based on their interpretation of new content.
Structure of the Trivium (or, Taleb’s Triad)
The Trivium Helps Facilitate Speakers and Conference Presentations
Some will note the basic structure below follows a strong sense of will, wisdom, and activity. Ranging from Plato’s Trivium (i.e., logic, rhetoric, and grammar) to a Use Case (i.e., input, process, output)—simple structure follows the basic flow of WHY before WHAT before HOW. To develop consensual understanding, deploy the following structure. Especially compel audience participation in steps 2 and 3 below; that is . . .
FACT (or, evidence or example or something significant the speaker has contributed—the WHAT part)
IMPLICATION (ask SO WHAT? from the audience separately for each FACT captured above)
RECOMMENDATION (ask NOW WHAT? (we should do about it) from the audience separately for each IMPLICATION captured above.
The method begins optimally before the speaker’s presentation has begun. Namely, ask the listeners to be on the lookout for (takeaways), why we should care (implications), and what we may want to do differently that will make us more efficient or effective (recommendations). Speaker presentations should stimulate participants about what they can do differently. Therefore, conduct a review session with the same logic, breaking down the “many-to-many” into a clear path of manageable takeaways:
Solicit the takeaways such as facts, evidence, or examples newly learned by the meeting participants. This list provides the WHAT factors.
For each WHAT factor from above (i.e., one at a time), develop a consensual understanding of the implications and why we care. Strive to obtain objective measurements that properly scale the gravity of each implication. This list provides the SO WHAT factors.
For each factor (i.e., one at a time), facilitate consensual understanding about what changes in our lives, and what we should do differently—develop recommendations based on the implications rather than the facts. This list of new behaviors is why we took the time and money to listen to the speaker—it comprises a list of NOW WHATs.
Wrap-up and Close Your Conference Presentations Effectively
Be disciplined about documenting their comments. Finish with MGRUSH‘s four steps of an effective close:
Review and confirm documented findings and actions
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.
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.
______
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This month we’re reposting an interview by Douglas Ferguson with Terrence Metz, Managing Director of MGRUSH Facilitation Training.
This article originally appeared on voltagecontrol.com. (Reprinted here with Douglas Ferguson’s permission.)
Terrence was a featured speaker at Control the Room: The 1st Annual Austin Facilitator Summit!
How can a company successfully oversee its internal ideas? It’s a fascinating question in the era of innovation. Terrence Metz, Managing Director of MGRUSH Facilitation Training and Coaching, is a good guy to ask this gnarly question because he once helped a major division of 3-M create a method for managing ideas.
Terrence is a leader in facilitation training who consults, coaches, and trains businesses worldwide. He’s taught over four hundred facilitation classes and three thousand students on five continents. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, and senior officers among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. He also writes a blog with articles on facilitation skills to help people lead faster, more productive meetings and workshops.
Terrence and I recently spoke and, since we share a passion for facilitation, I loved hearing his viewpoint. Read on for highlights from our conversation.
Terrence Metz, Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Training and Coaching.
Defining Ideas
A division of 3-M came to Terrence’s organization when they discovered they didn’t have enough new product ideas and it was causing them to fall behind. Consequently, Terrence helped them build a “Product Concept Management” process. In other words, they defined how to manage indefinite or unformed concepts or “fragments of ideas.”
He discovered that part of the problem of managing ideas is in definitions. What exactly constitutes a valid idea to pursue? If the team doesn’t agree on what an “idea” is, how can you vet them? They needed to have a common language. They decided that “notions” are ideas in a more embryonic state, while concepts are “the conversion or confirmation of a fully articulated, qualified idea.”
Terrence shared: “The group came to say, ‘No, you don’t have an idea if you’re taking a shower. You have a notion.’ You have something that could become an idea, but it’s certainly not an idea while you’re drying off. It’s simply a notion.”
“Our thesis,” he explained, “was that ideas/notions and concepts need to be managed differently. You may have problem descriptions floating out there, and they need to be analyzed relative to potential solutions. Fragments of ideas simply needed to be managed differently than a completely solid idea.”
“We strongly urge an idea management process to never end. Even ‘bad’ ideas may yield value at some point in the future… We don’t kill any ideas.”
Terrence Metz
When? Not If
As I do in all my interviews, I asked Terrence about wrong-headed things he’s seen in organizational innovation programs and he said: “The thought that ‘It can’t be done.’ From a future view, it’s not if, only when.” He went on to share a story that illustrated his point: “I was working with research folks from Motorola when the first iPhone was rumored. But, they discounted the ‘rumor’ because their engineering group had looked at some of the touted features and had already determined that it could not be done.”
“If it can be imagined it can be built. You have to relax typical constraints including time and budget. Then go back and evaluate if it’s worthwhile…”
For him, companies need to build solutions without any constraints: “If it can be imagined it can be built. You have to relax typical constraints including time and budget. Then go back and evaluate if it’s worthwhile or what components we have to remove, substitute, or replace to make it practical.”
Terrence Helping to Manage an Open Issue
Focus, Focus, Focus
He also talked about the importance of focus to inspire a “can do” or “blue sky” attitude: “If you have the right people in the room, you can do anything—if you can get them to focus on the same thing at the same time. The hardest thing to do with a group of smart people is to get them to focus.”
“You have to have such a well-established methodology so there’s no time for their thoughts to drift.”
This is where his experience as a facilitator comes in: “You can’t get people to focus by telling them to focus, it doesn’t work. First, you need to remove and be alert for possible distractions. Second, you have to have a well-established methodology so there’s no time for their thoughts to drift.”
Innovation is a mindset
To Terrence, innovation is an attitude or mindset: “Innovation, much like Agile, should permeate every aspect of a business, especially those dependent on new sources of revenue. Innovation captures an attitude that ought to be pervasive within an organization, providing an ongoing commitment to newness.”
“Innovation might be viewed as a set of values that signifies a belief in seeing beyond present conditions…”
He described how he sees innovation defined at different levels of a company: “At the organizational level, it implies structural and cultural change. At the process level, it implies efficiency and effectiveness. At the product level, it implies new or changed technology, packaging, etc.”
“If we don’t aspire for what’s new, we’re going to be somebody else’s lunch.”
Terrence also stresses that innovation relies on a commitment to change: “We know our competitors are changing. My commitment [to change] is based on this idea that the greatest motivator in life is death, and if we don’t change we will die. To avoid death we need what’s new. We’ve got to be in a constantly changing, evolving process. If we don’t aspire for what’s new, we’re going to be somebody else’s lunch.”
“My commitment [to change] is based on this idea that the greatest motivator in life is death, and if we don’t change we will die.”
Ingredients of Innovation
Terrence views the “Voice of the Market” as his innovation silver bullet. He doesn’t believe in only listening to the Voice of the Customer because he doesn’t think customers alone are the predictors of future needs.
Another important ingredient for innovation is people who “embrace diversity and stir up the pot.” He looks for people who, “don’t see obstacles, only opportunities. Those who have an attitude of embracing ‘newness’ are getting it both wrong and right. And since they persevere, they are getting it more right, and more frequently right, than others. Some say ‘fail fast.’ I prefer, ‘fail with a bow’ (i.e. fail with dignity).”
We also talked about measuring innovation. For Terrence, that can vary: “Typically they include time and money. Edison measured his quantity of failures. 3M uses revenue from SKUs released in the past five years. I doubt there is a universal measurement… Regardless of the appropriate measures for an organization or industry, the trend line may be more critical than the discrete performance of any given period.”
Facilitators seek harmony, not happiness.
Do we need an agreement?
As a facilitator, Terrence often brings people together to work on, and (hopefully) agree upon, a plan for the future. But he doesn’t believe in getting everyone to simply agree: “Agreement is everybody thinking the same. Agreement would be as if we all played the same notes on a piano. We’re not seeking agreement, that’s boring. What we’re seeking is harmony, and that’s where we’re able to play different instruments, we’re able to play different notes, but we’re able to pull together in the form of a composition that surpasses anything one individual can do.”
“What we’re seeking is harmony, and that’s where we’re able to play different instruments… but we’re able to pull together in the form of a composition that surpasses anything one individual can do.”
Instead of blanket agreement, Terrence looks for consensus: “…find something robust, strong, and clear enough that everybody in the room can get behind it and support it. It may not be anybody’s favorite, but as a group, it becomes our favorite. Consensus also means you’re not going to lose any sleep over it. If you say one thing in this room, but you get home tonight and you toss and you turn, we don’t have consensus.”
And, if a group truly cannot come to a consensus or resolve a major argument, Terrence sees termination as an option. “When all fails, which can happen, what we need to do is terminate. We need to leave the room, but not with everything hanging in the aether. We need to document the nature of the argument, the reasons for contrasting positions and we need to get some help…”
“Facilitative leadership is perhaps one of the most important skills in the next 50 years.”
Facilitative leadership
According to Terrence: “Facilitative leadership is perhaps one of the most important skills in the next 50 years.” With today’s complex work environments, no one person can know all the answers. “Why do we have so much wasted meeting time if we have smart subject matter experts? If they have the knowledge and they have the energy, then why is the meeting failing?”
He went on: “Why are we failing to come up with the right stuff? The answer is they don’t know how…The old command-and-control is dead. If you’ve got an answer, don’t have a meeting. But if you need answers, you need consensual solutions that entire groups can support and get behind, then what you need is not an “answer man,” you need a facilitative leader.”
“If you need consensual solutions that entire groups can support and get behind, then what you need is…a facilitative leader.”
Of course, Terrence notes his bias toward facilitation since he trains people in it. However, even without official training, people need facilitation skills: “What are those skills? Those skills are not public speaking. They’re not skills of style; they’re skills of substance. It’s not knowing the answer, it’s knowing the question. It’s a skill of being a good listener, not a good persuasive charismatic speaker.” #facilitationtraining
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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.
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.
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A meeting without conflict is a boring meeting, and we’ve seen very little value derived from predictable and unexciting meetings and workshops. However, internal and external conflict reflect emotions that, when harnessed, enable creative change and improvement.
Facilitators manage groups. Therefore, first understand how groups function and appropriate ways to support them to manage group conflict.
Stages to Manage Meeting Conflict
To Manage Meeting Conflicts, Understand a Group Life Cycle
Groups, like people, develop and evolve. Similarly, they can also regress. Therefore, as a session leader, you strive to move your group through a developmental sequence. Most groups evolve through four stages as they change. Hence, for any given group, you may see only the first two or three stages. Do not forget—in a room of ten people, there are at least eleven personalities!
To manage group conflict, understand the stages and characteristics of groups, including:
Forming — Orientation, hesitant participation, search for meaning, dependency
Storming — Conflict, dominance, rebelliousness, power
Norming — Expression of opinions, development of group cohesion
Performing — Emergence of solutions, formation of a “team”
Note: The four stages are adapted from Tuckman, B.W., “Development sequence in small groups,” Psychological Bulletin, 1965, 63, 384-399.
Forming— Keyword: Confusion. Groups at this early stage are working on two primary areas, the reason they are there (purpose) and social relationships. In addition, the Integral theory states that at the beginning of any meeting, people are thinking of themselves, as “I”. Consequently, you will see some landmarks such as:
“I wonder WHY I’m here?”
“I wish I had a cup of coffee.”
Concern over purpose, relevance of meeting, “How this helps?”
Looking to the leader for structure, answers, approval, acceptance
Looking to the leader to prove that the meeting will work
Cultures that find themselves locked into this stage are frequently described as “Command Control” where much decision-making is completed by management. Participants stay focused on “I” such as, “I wish I had eaten something before this meeting.”
Storming—Keywords: Conflict (differences) and creativity. Here groups begin to acknowledge differences in perspectives; conflict is characteristic between members or between members and leader. The Integral theory states that the impact of the meeting deliverable can get people to stop thinking selfishly. Consequently, some landmarks include:
Cultures in this phase focus on cultivating and changing through personal and professional improvement. Participants get nudged to begin thinking about what “It” is that justifies their time together.
Norming—Keywords: communication and commitment. The participants are more comfortable expressing their opinions. The Integral theory states that once participants understand “it” (deliverable), they can contribute effectively. Hence, some landmarks:
More open communication
Unwillingness to be fully responsible for the outcome
Inter-member support
Cultures here display and value competence, especially on the expert capabilities of a few members of the group or team. Most importantly, individuals can start thinking about the deliverables and how it impacts others (“Thou”) throughout the organization
Meeting Conflict — Stage 4
Performing—Keywords: Community, consensus, and collaboration. Rather than focusing on differences, members begin to recognize the commonality and shared interests. The Integral theory states that once participants collaborate, the “I” dissolves into the pluralistic “We”. Therefore, the participants form a cohesive team—they unite, with landmarks including:
Open communication
Pride in the group
Focus on getting the shared goals and tasks of the group accomplished
Inter-member support
Here we have a collaborative culture where decisions are consensus-driven and the team works in complete partnership toward success. Hence, the individuals view themselves as an integral unit, known as “We”.
Boundaries between stages are not always clear. Nor do groups permanently move from one stage to another. Therefore, as the facilitator, you guide the group through the earlier stages of performing. In working with the group during a meeting, you need to gauge how the group, as a whole, is able to perform the task at hand. Depending on the readiness of the group, you as process leader will lead in diverse ways. Meanwhile, readiness consists of two qualities, job or task readiness and psychological readiness (motivation, confidence).
As a leader, you monitor these two dimensions (task and relationship) constantly on both group and individual levels. As you monitor, you express your assessment of the situation with two types of leadership behavior. Consequently, these include:
Task/ directive behavior (i.e., process policeman)
Task behaviors are characterized by the degree to which a leader engages in directing or controlling group activities (tasks). Direct or control meetings when you assess that the participants have exhibited a comparatively low level of readiness to do a specific task, with examples of task behaviors including :
Controlling (intervening to change the method or situation)
Defining roles
Directing (supervising and tracking accomplishments against the plan, recommending or insisting upon certain methods or procedures)
Therefore, use task leadership behavior to move a group from Stage 1 (by telling) to Stage 2 (for selling).
Understanding Relationship Behavior
Relationship behaviors are characterized by the degree to which a leader engages in developing a relationship amongst participants knowing that the relationship is a key factor in completing. Therefore, such behaviors are appropriate when the leader’s assessment is that the participants have exhibited a level of readiness to do a specific task. Some examples of relationship behaviors are:
Therefore, use relationship leadership behavior to move the group from Stage 2 (where you are selling) through Stage 3 (with a participating style) and into Stage 4 (where you delegate).
Differences Between Task and Relationship Behaviors
Another way to think about the difference between task-leader behaviors and relationship-leader behaviors is to remember that task behaviors focus on how the job is done while relationship behaviors focus on how people work together. Task behavior enables the group to do the job. Relationship behavior empowers the group. Therefore, remember that you are a temporary task manager. Hence, determine where the group is with readiness and use the appropriate type of behavior to move them toward successful and efficient completion of the task and deliverable.
Paradigms are established accepted norms, patterns of behavior, or shared sets of assumptions. Hence, they are models that establish boundaries or rules for success. Therefore, paradigms may present structural barriers to creativity based on psychological, cultural, and environmental factors, with examples including:
Flow charts, diagrams, and other conventions for presenting information (e.g., swim lane diagrams)
Stereotypes about men and women and their roles in business, family, and society
Where people sit in meetings—once they find a seat it becomes their seat for the rest of the meeting
Groupthink Demands You to Manage Group Conflict
As creatures of habit, we blindly subscribe to our cultural paradigms, unknowingly allow our biases and prejudices to affect our decision-making, and readily fall prey to groupthink. Because, there is power in large numbers, but not necessarily quality. Voting, for example, reflects a method of groupthink decision-making. As you know, the winner is not necessarily a better decision, it only reflects a bigger number.
Challenge Both Paradigms and Groupthink
To cause groups to challenge their paradigms or groupthink:
Ask the “Paradigm Shift” question—“What is impossible today, but if made possible . . . What would you do differently?”
Force the group to look at a familiar idea or scenario in a new way by changing their perspective. Shifting perspectives frequently helps “shake” paradigms. Consider using Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats or imposing some other perspective or comparison such as:
Ant colony compared to a penal colony
A weather system compared to a gambling system
Monastery compared to the mafia
Have a few tools in your hip pocket that can be readily found with Scannel and Newstrom’s series or many other sources.
Use the “Five-year Old” routine—ask—“But why?” frequently, or until the group thoroughly discusses an issue, its assumptions, and implications. Also consider the simple challenge, “Because?”
Don’t Forget, People DO Change
People Do Change
Dr. Wayne Dyer proved that people do change. Because there is a quantum shift of values after living twenty to thirty years with both men and women. Hence, the shifts shown occur after a notable change in maturity, such as we find today with “empty nesters” or people who find themselves no longer hosting others, in particular, their own children.
For some clear and specific suggestions, here are four straightforward activities you can perform to resolve conflict. Additionally, see the article for detailed support on the four activities below:
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.
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.
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Using Methods From Liberating Structures to Create a Robust Design Sprint Plan
MG RUSH welcomes Douglas Ferguson as an Endorsed Facilitator and Guest writer. Douglas is an expert in Design Sprints and how to facilitate a Design Sprint Plan. He is highly regarded for start-up inspired strategies and innovation transformation. A proven and successful CTO in his past life, Douglas has a passion for helping organizations solve tough problems through powerful group decision-making methods. Douglas prioritizes the human aspects of any challenge, believing that innovation is driven by listening to users and uncovering diverse perspectives.
This is part of Douglas’ workshop recipe series where he shares methods for facilitating successful workshops. Here he breaks down the essentials of a Liberated Design Sprint Plan. This article originally appeared on voltagecontrol.com. (Reprinted here with Douglas Ferguson’s permission)
Using a set of appropriate Liberating Structures is useful for Design Sprint planning.
Planning is critical for a successful Design Sprint. In fact, I wrote an article with tips on how to plan a successful Design Sprint. When building an agenda, it’s helpful to get stakeholders together in a structured manner to create an effective plan.
This planning recipe is designed using Liberating Structures (LS) to accommodate a large group of stakeholders and still result in a concise and cohesive plan for your Sprint.
Liberating What?
Liberating Structures is a menu of 33 activities or “microstructures” that you can use in meetings or workshops. It was created by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless.
Liberating Structures is a menu of 33 activities that groups can use for better workshops, meetings and planning sessions.
Recommended Liberating Structures for a Design Sprint Plan
9 Whys for a Design Sprint Plan Goal | 20 mins
What it is: The 9 Whys is an activity to help you quickly reveal a compelling purpose and move forward with clarity.
Why we use it: It helps clients articulate their Design Sprint goal.
Method Steps
Craft an opening question using the template “What do you do when working on ____” or something custom.
Break the group into pairs.
Each pair selects one person to be the interviewer.
First, the interviewer asks the opening question.
Next, the interviewer seeks a deeper answer by repeating versions of the question: “Why is that important to you?” 5min
After 5 minutes, switch roles and repeat the previous step.
Each pair shares the experience and insights with another pair in a foursome. 5min
Invite the whole group to reflect by asking, “How do our purposes influence the next steps we take?” 5 min.
Wicked Questions | 25 min
What it is: Wicked Questions is an activity designed to reveal organizational challenges.
Why we use it: I use this method to uncover some of the key tensions that our Design Sprint will reveal.
Method Steps
Introduce the benefits of Wicked Questions.
Present example questions such as, “How is it that you are raising your children to be very loyal/attached to the family and very independent individuals simultaneously?
Introduce the following template: “How is it that we are … and we are … simultaneously?” 5 min.
Have each participant generate pairs of opposites at play in his/her work using the format. 5 min.
In small groups, generate additional pairs of opposites at play. 5 min.
Each group selects its most impactful Wicked Question. 5 min
Share back with the whole group. 5 min.
The group picks out the most powerful questions and further refines them. 10 min.
Ecocycle Planning | 95 min
What it is: Ecocycle Planning is where you review and prioritize all of your current initiatives.
Why we use it: It gets everyone on the same page before the Sprint about initiatives in-flight, as well as what is and isn’t working.
Liberating Structures, Design Sprint Planning, Liberated Design Sprint Plan
Method Steps
Introduce the idea of the Ecocycle.
Hand out a blank map to each participant. 5 min.
Participants generate individual activity lists: “For your working group or department, make a list of all the activities that occupy your time.” 5 min.
Work in pairs to decide the placement of every activity in the Ecocycle. 10 min.
Form groups of four and finalize the placement of activities on the map. 15 min.
Each group puts its activities on Post-it notes. Create a whole-room map by having all of the groups place their Post-its on a larger map. 15 min.
Instruct the group to step back and digest the pattern of placements. 5 min
Ask: “What activities do we need to stop to move forward? What activities do we need to start to move forward?” 10 min.
In small groups, create a first action step for each activity that needs to be stopped. (10 min. or more)
In small groups, create a first action step for each activity that needs to start (10 min. or more)
Ask the groups to quickly discuss the activities that lack consensus. When possible, create first-action steps for each one. 10 min.
Purpose to Practice | 120 min
What it is: Purpose to Practice is an activity to help a group create their shared purpose.
Why we use it: It helps us define five essential elements before a Sprint: purpose, principles, participants, structure, and practices.
Method Steps
Introduce Purpose to Practice by explaining that the group will explore five elements: Purpose, Principals, Participants, Structure, Practices
Hand out blank worksheets. 5 min.
Begin with purpose by asking, “Why is the work important to you and the larger community?”
Use 1–2–4 All to generate individual ideas and stories for purpose. (1–2–4-All refers to working alone, then in pairs, then foursomes, and finally as a whole group.) 10 min.
Ask, “Has this element shed new light that suggests revisions to previous elements?” 5 min.
For principles, ask: “What rules must we absolutely obey to succeed in achieving our purpose?”
Use 1–2–4 All to generate, amplify, and finalize ideas for principles.10 min.
Ask, “Has this element shed new light that suggests revisions to previous elements?” 5 min.
For participants, ask: “Who can contribute to achieving our purpose and must be included?”
Use 1–2–4 All to generate, amplify, and finalize ideas for participants.10 min.
Ask, “Has this element shed new light that suggests revisions to previous elements?” 5 min.
For structure ask: “How must we organize (both macro- and microstructures) and distribute control to achieve our purpose?”
Use 1–2–4 All to generate, amplify, and finalize ideas for structure.10 min.
Ask, “Has this element shed new light that suggests revisions to previous elements?” 5 min.
For practices, ask: “What are we going to do? What will we offer to our users/clients and how will we do it?”
Use 1–2–4 All to generate, amplify, and finalize ideas for practices.10 min.
Ask, “Has this element shed new light that suggests revisions to previous elements?” 5 min.
Critical Uncertainties That Might Upset a Design Sprint | 100 min
What it is: Critical Uncertaintiesis a way to reveal the issues that are both fundamental to success, but also full of unknowns.
Why we use it: It helps us understand some of the biggest questions and challenges a group has coming into a Sprint.
Method Steps
Invite participants to make a list of uncertainties by asking, “In your work, what factors are impossible to predict or control?” 5 min.
Prioritize these factors by asking, “Which factors threaten your/our ability to operate successfully?” 10 min.
From that list pick the top 2 factors that are both critical and uncertain. 5 min.
Create a grid with two axes, for your 2 top factors ( X & Y).
Label one end of both axes with a “more of X/Y”
Label the opposite end of both axes with a “less of X/Y”
Four quadrants are created. 5 min.
Each of the groups creatively names and writes a short description for one of the quadrants. 10 min.
The groups share their names & descriptions. 2 min. each
Each group brainstorms three strategies that would help the group operate successfully in the scenario. 10 min.
The four groups share their strategies briefly. 2 min. each
The whole group identifies which strategies are robust (strategies that can succeed in multiple quadrants) and which are hedging (strategies that can succeed in only one scenario but protect you from a plausible calamity). 10 min.
Each small group debriefs with What, So What, Now What? 10 min.
The four groups share their debriefs and the whole group makes first-steps decisions about their Now What. 10 min.
Individuals write down observations stood out. 1 min.
In a small group discuss observations for 2–7 min.
Small groups share with the whole group 2–3 min.
Capture the important WHATs on a whiteboard.
Individuals write down patterns, hypotheses, and conclusions. 1 min
In a small group discuss patterns, hypotheses, and conclusions 2–7 min.
Small groups share with the whole group. 2–5 min.
Capture the important SO WHATs on a whiteboard.
Individuals write down next steps 1 min.
In a small group discuss next steps 2–7 min.
Small groups share with the whole group. 2–10 min.
Capture the important NOW WHATs on a whiteboard.
These are six Liberating Structures that Douglas has found useful to use with clients when planning a Design Sprint. Have other activities or methods that you like to leverage? Let us know!
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Don’t ruin your career or reputation with bad meetings. Therefore, register nowfor 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
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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Using the principles of facilitative leadership, novice facilitators will succeed when they draw a line of sight from the meeting deliverable to the quality of life of the meeting participants.
To understand “facilitative leadership,” begin by understanding the two terms: ‘facilitative’ and ‘leadership’. For example, the root term for ‘facilitative’ means “to make easy.” Therefore, the role of a meeting leader primarily relies on making it easier for their people to succeed. Leadership begins with line of sight and knowing where you are going. Assuredly, a leader needs to know the destination and focus on reaching milestones during the journey. For instance, in meetings and workshops, a leader needs to know what DONE looks like. In other words, they need to know the destination.
Similarly, facilitative leadership demands understanding about . . .
Importance of the holarchy (i.e., organizational goal alignment, dependencies, and reciprocities)
The role (of the facilitator) is not as a person, but rather as a temporary position (like a referee)
Skills such as clear speaking, precise questioning, keen observing, and active listening
The criticality of being content-neutral; passionate about results, yet unbiased toward content
We aspire to develop understanding among our readers about the differences and challenges of becoming a facilitative leader. We seek primarily to shift the thinking of our readers from facilitation (as a noun or a static way of being) to facilitating (as a verb or a dynamic way of doing). Therefore, truly making it easier for meeting participants to make more informed decisions. Facilitating creates value because the method encourages speaking with people rather than at them. For that reason, facilitating is about creating an environment that is conducive to productivity and breakthrough. Above all, the role of the facilitator is about stimulating and inspiring people. In other words, facilitating amplifies the DNA of the modern leader.
Consequently, Learn to Overcome Challenges with Meetings
Building and using an appropriate meeting design called an agenda. The agenda represents the method or how the leader will get the team from the introduction to the wrap in a consensual and expeditious manner.
Challenging participants to make their thinking visible. Understanding that people think about symptoms, not causes.
Constantly observing the participants’ body language or using a roll call method to further include online participants.
Having well-built questions that avoid vagueness and ambiguity. Understanding that the meeting deliverable (call it ‘Y’) is a function of many details (call them ‘X’ for weighty issues and ‘x’ for the minor points). Therefore, Y is a function of many Xxes. Participants do not need answers. However, they need someone who knows the right questions to ask, and the optimal sequence for those questions.
Removing distractions during the meeting, especially electronic leashes.
Showing up for meetings prepared and that includes having properly prepared participants so that the meeting can take off running.
Staying conscious about everything above, while carefully administering and adjusting to a method using appropriate tools to get more done faster.
Substance over style, speaking with clarity when required (i.e., aspiring toward rhetorical precision). Realizing however that the “facilitator” role is primarily geared toward listening rather than preaching.
Understanding there is more than one right answer and decision-making quality is sensitive to the conditions under which one solution may or may not be better than an alternative.
Nine Characteristics of the Facilitative Leadership Difference
Facilitative leadership benefits are best realized for projects and teams where the leader is coordinating competent specialists in complex situations. The best leaders are flexible because both command control and facilitative leadership have their place. Task-focused direction is required for the close oversight of tasks. Structure-focused direction works best when leading teams of experts.
Focus on providing structure that supports superior performance
Work to meet the expectations of management
Operate without status or rank consciousness
When to Use Facilitative Leadership
We want you to see that facilitative leadership does not apply to all situations but is ideally suited for projects and teams where the leader is coordinating the efforts of subject matter experts. Use facilitative leadership when you have:
An effort or project requiring breakthrough, creativity, and innovation
Decisions requiring broad support and commitment from stakeholders
Diverse team members who get evaluated with different performance measurement systems
Teams communicating across time zones, cultures, and organizational boundaries
Organizational Benefits of Facilitative Leadership: Improve Quality, Reduce Costs, and Optimize Timing
Facilitative Leadership Benefits
Benefits ensue both to the organization and participants. Organizations that deploy skilled facilitators have allocated resources to ensure the success of their meetings.
Ability to test for the quality of the deliverable before the meeting concludes (valuable since the worst deliverable of any meeting is another meeting).
Agendas, approaches, tools, deliverables, and outputs become more repeatable and consistent.
Analysts obtain higher quality, more comprehensive information.
As context is carefully managed, teams focus on higher-quality content.
As stakeholders’ ideas are included, meetings become more collaborative and innovative.
Facilitative leadership makes it easier to develop new leaders.
Faster results: Facilitated sessions accelerate the capture of information, especially if the meeting participants arrive knowing the questions and issues that need to be discussed.
Fewer omissions—projects accelerate with increased clarity and reduced uncertainty.
Greater commitment and buy-in from all stakeholders.
Higher quality results: groups of people make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group. Facilitated sessions encourage the exchange of different points of view enabling the group to identify new options, and it is a proven fact that people or groups with more options at their disposal make higher-quality decisions.
Modern leaders who have been successful with their existing style accrue additional benefits from the increased flexibility of adapting a facilitative style.
More coherent communication among workshop participants, project, steering, and dependent teams.
Properly facilitated sessions lead to innovation because multiple perspectives generate a richer (360-degree) understanding.
When staff is treated as collegial, commitment and motivation increase.
With assertive structure and facilitation, quality dialogue becomes the focus.
Witness a decline in smart people making dumb decisions.
As you increase your facilitative leadership skills, you and your team participants will become more successful. For example, let us consider six substantial areas of success for improving your facilitative leadership and meeting in more detail:
Properly facilitated, participants understand both WHAT is decided and WHY. Since groups are capable of generating more options than the aggregate of individuals, they arrive at higher-quality decisions that are capable of reconciling seemingly contrary points of view.
Flexibility and Breaking through Stalemates and Deadlocks
Structured approaches afford a higher degree of flexibility than approaches without structure. With structure and topical flow, meetings can take the “scenic route” because there is a backup plan to provide a respite from the stream-of-consciousness approach taken by unstructured meetings. By exploring newly created options and challenging working assumptions, teams can break through their stalemates and deadlocks by rediscovering common ground or by creating options during the meeting that did not walk into the room at the start of the meeting.
Impactful Groups through Improved Working Relationships
Conflict becomes responsibly managed rather than ignored. Complex issues may be addressed face-to-face as they should, rather than through a series of e-mails and innuendo. Proper facilitation will demonstrate the opportunity and method for discovering win-win solutions. Consequently, as stakeholders’ ideas are sought, meeting activity becomes more collaborative and innovative.
Integral Decision-Making
Defined as better alignment with organizational goals and objectives. Structured decision-making must appeal to organizational goals and objectives supported by the meeting; typically, the project, program, business unit, and enterprise. Alignment with the “holarchy” perspective ensures that proposed actions are appropriate and supports prioritization based on the impact of proposed changes across the entire enterprise. Therefore, effective decision-making reflects the integral perspective.
Knowledge Transfer and Increased Organizational Effectiveness
Learning organizations understand the need and power behind the transfer of knowledge from those who know to those who do not know, but should. Facilitated environments provide the opportunity for challenge, reflection, and documentation that underlies shared understanding and amplifies organizational effectiveness. Facilitative leadership also makes it easier to develop new leaders.
Saving Time and Increased Personal Effectiveness
Session leaders (aka facilitators) will get more done faster. As staff is treated as colleagues, commitment, and motivation increase. By becoming an expert on methods and tools rather than content, they can continue to use tools that generate consistent and repeatable results. Meetings only fail because either the participants do not have the talent, do not have the motivation, or do not know how. The role of the facilitative leader shows them how.
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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.
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.
______
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Staying relevant and compelling when you facilitate multiple generations presents significant challenges.
Problems develop when meetings include different mindsets, communication styles, and personal preferences. Scheduling, work patterns, and technology intensify friction. Teams are ever-changing and often cross time zones and cultural boundaries. A servile attitude provides you with the simple secret when you facilitate multiple generations — all types of people — because one trait, common to all, is that people would rather be asked than be told.
Traditional stereotyping needs to be avoided, but frequently suggests that . . .
Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) remain competitive,
GenXers (born between1965 and 1977) exhibit skepticism, and
Gen Yers (aka ‘millennials’, born since 1978) like technology
Whether you prefer Meyers-Briggs (MBTI), DISC, eColors, or others, most agree that not everyone thinks alike.* Dare to compare:
Some focus on differences while others focus on similarities.
Some follow logic while others are guided intuitively.
A portion looks at the risks while others focus on the benefits.
Some require structure while others prefer independence.
Some are influenced by language and others by graphics and visual displays.
(Sensible Humor . . .)
To Facilitate Multiple Generations, Let It Be
By the way, our favorite (only half-seriously) personality typing remains the Beatles’ “Let It Be” album. After all, why else would they be arranged in the clockwise order shown?
While servility will help you facilitate during a meeting, embracing the following preparatory considerations will help solidify your chances of meeting success:
Be careful not to stereotype based on appearances and comments
Don’t overgeneralize groups based on individual character traits
Prepare as if every stakeholder plans to attend your meeting
As professional facilitators, consider the following suggestions that will improve your ability to facilitate multiple generations, and all types of people, all of the time.
Appeal to the “Zen” of the experience. Use break timers with music. Provide and build graphical support to complement the narrative world. Remember, we facilitate ‘meaning’, not words. Meaning can be captured with illustrations, icons, and numbers—in addition to words. You can use the Creativity Tool or Coat of Arms anytime you need consensual answers to questions.
Be flexible and willing to adjust and accommodate participant constraints such as timing and availability. When a participant runs into an unexpected personal “issue”, let’s do what we can as a group to show support and respect for that person, rather than charging ahead. Decision quality demonstrates that a complete answer is better than a quick answer (see Daniel Kahneman).
Both remain and stress your content neutrality. Stop judging (even cheerleading), making comments about content, and avoid using the first person singular, especially the word “I.”
Do not let one person or group dominate the contributions. Prevent “Broken Records” by writing down their contributions. Prevent scope creep by asking precise questions. Avoid DUMB questions (Dull, Ubiquitous, Myopic, and Broad).
Embrace an icebreaker activity to get everyone contributing sooner. Likewise, anticipate and plan for additional team-building activities as appropriate. Make it easier (facilitere) for your participants to enjoy and value one another. Similarly, prepare some quick exercises (eg., Man in the Moon) that prove “nobody is smarter than everybody.”
Keep participants focused on “what DONE looks like” rather than HOW it gets done.
Keep people moving around. Supplement breakouts with ergonomic “stretching” every thirty minutes. Take breaks every 60 to 75 minutes so that people stay off of their electronic leashes, knowing they will have frequent and ample time to reply to their electronic mail and messages, all at once.
Send your participants and executives to facilitation training so they develop an understanding and appreciation of the challenges faced by meeting leaders. There are ample resources invested in “Diversity” training but where diversity appreciation becomes needed most may be found in situations that involve groups, teams, and meetings. Diversity training encourages the appreciation of individuals but does little to increase heterogenous group performance.
Spend some personal time with your participants and get to know them better. Meeting participants respond better to leaders they respect, and respect must be earned. Formally or informally interview them. Discern their core competencies, concerns, and unique talents, everyone has one you know. (See below from Howard Gardner).
Stress participant equality regardless of tenure or title.
Demand that participants leave their egos and titles in the hallway. If they cannot leave their titles behind, do not invite them. If they are “senior” and already have an answer, do not have a meeting. Meetings are an ineffective and very expensive form of persuasion.
Strive to conduct meetings where either everyone is live (face-to-face); or, everyone dials in, including people in the same building or facility. If not, at least place your virtual participants ‘up front’ and call on them first (not last) when seeking participant input. People dialing in become treated like second-class citizens so enforce a protocol whereby everyone, even those attending live, identifies the face behind the voice before continuing.
Test the quality of your meeting output before adjourning. The worst deliverable from any meeting is another meeting. If you do not know how to test the quality of your meeting output, take an MGRUSH class on facilitation.
Use breakout sessions liberally by mixing up your teams frequently. People become more conversational in small groups (two to five people) and develop a stronger appreciation for one another. As you sense dysfunction, intervene and take a mentoring approach. Coach your participants about how to treat one another in a public environment. You will discover that more conflict arises around personality types and toxicity than by different age groups.
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NOTE:
In 1983 an American developmental psychologist Howard Gardener described 9 types of intelligence:
Naturalist (nature smart)
Musical (sound smart)
Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart)
Existential (life smart)
Interpersonal (people smart)
Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart)
Linguistic (word smart)
Intra-personal (self smart)
Spatial (picture smart)
Facilitate All Generations — Gardner’s Types
* Please note trademarks associated with Apple Records, Adioma, and personality-typing organizations.
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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.
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.
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“Creating Products that Customers Love” strikes us as highly poignant, as much of the world heads toward a holiday season with much gift-giving.
Roman Pickler’s book, “Agile Product Management with Scrum” provides the single best book, barely over 100 pages, to understand the role of a Product Owner. Some even claim it remains one of the seven must-read books about the Agile mindset. Therefore, with a foreword by Jeff Sutherland, and included within the set of Mike Cohn’s signature books, take two to three hours and give it a quick read. However, it does presume some previous familiarity with the Agile Scrum framework.
Product Owner Role
Beginning with an understanding of the role of Product Owner the old-school versus new-school comparison of product management certainly reads like MGRUSH’s explanation of traditional leadership versus servant leadership. Stressing the importance of self-organizing teams, our “Nobody is Smarter than Everybody” gets duplicated with Pickler’s:
“The wisdom of many is preferred to the brilliance of one.”[1]
Naturally, the Product Owner role stresses collaboration, particularly with the Scrum Master and product stakeholders. Because, as Product Owner, they . . .
Represent the customers and the product users
Identify and describe customer needs and product functionality
Lead the visioning activities that bring the vision to life
Stress teamwork and collaborative decision-making to ensure shared ownership
Envisioning the Product
Therefore the Product Owner, through the Product Backlog, converts the product vision[2] to attributes by securing answers to solid questions such as:
Who is going to purchase the product?
Who is going to use the product?
What needs does the product address?
How much value does the product add?
What attributes are critical for the product’s success?
Where will the product excel?
Compared to competitive alternatives, what are the unique selling points?
Where and how much revenue will be derived?
What do we need to do to win?
Pickler leans on Cockburn’s logic of prioritization, namely:
Sacrifice others for this
Try to keep
Sacrifice this for others
After that, they are combined into a product roadmap. MG RUSH covers numerous methods in other articles, such as:
He further suggests that Product Backlog descriptions can be detailed, or course-graining (called epics). The Product Owner is responsible for structuring and refining the Product Backlog. Items may be grouped by functionality to create themes. For instance, the calendar function is a theme of a smartphone.Each theme generally represents “between two and five-course requirements. (epics)”
Next, he discusses methods of valuing or prioritizing backlog items that help the Product Owner prepare for Sprint Planning. Therefore, the Product Owner is encouraged to decompose and refine product backlog items breaking down epics into detailed user stories. This technique is referred to as “slicing the cake” (Cohn, 2004, pg 76). He also references, but does not discuss in detail, Bill Wake’s INVEST criteria (stories need to be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable).
For sizing stories Pickler offers up t-Shirt sizing (XS through XXXL) and Planning Poker, using a Fibonacci scale through 13 and then substitutes 20 for 21 as Huge (or, XXXL). Today there are apps abounding for smartphones. Therefore, simply search “planning poker app” to generate numerous options for Android and iOS. Ours includes a coffee break symbol and a questions mark and includes pure Fibonacci and t-shirt sizing options as well.
In addition, his discussion of nonfunctional requirements and scaling the product backlog demand careful reading. Similarly, slow down to review his along descriptions of common mistakes when refining the product backlog such as:
Disguised Requirements Specification
Wish List for Santa
Requirements Push
Grooming Neglect
Competing Backlogs
Other Product Owner Considerations
Finally, his book ends with commentary focused on large projects, discussing items like velocity and burndown. Prior to his final discussion of transitioning into the role of Product Owner, he stresses additional collaboration and makes comments covered by many other posts such as:
Sprint Planning
Definition of Done
Daily Scrum
Sprint Backlog
Burn down and Velocity
Sprint Review
Sprint Retrospective
Therefore, every Product Owner should review this valuable book, and other Sprint Team members could learn as well. After all, “Nobody is Smarter than Everybody.”
[1] Likewise, according to Google’s 10 Golden Rules:
7. Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision-maker as a hero. We adhere to the view that the “many are smarter than the few,” and solicit a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions.” — by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
[2] Defined by Ken Schwaber as: “The vision describes why the project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is.” — Agile and Project Management with Scrum (2004, pg 68)
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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.
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.
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Our readers and students have clamored for a quick-reference checklist of the most important facilitation Do’s and Don’ts. Therefore, we bring you this brief, yet powerful, set of reminders below (alpha-sorted by the highlighted term or phrase).
Please note that the highlighted facilitation do’s and don’ts are linked to best practices articles that provide additional examples and evidence-based rationale.
Make contact, absorb, reflect, and confirm; confirming WHY somebody said something or WHY the facilitator is doing something.
Don’t allow arguments and discussions to go around you, as facilitator. Make them go through you and provide frequent and thorough reflection so that everyone is driven to understand the same rationale or evidence.
Visualizing and documenting what needs to be done and said in advance, especially instructions for the methodology and tools you plan to use.
Don’t assume that everyone shares an understanding of the terms being used because filters and biasescause misunderstanding. It’s better to assume that it’s unlikely you have a consensual understanding, even when participants claim to agree.
Apply prioritized criteria against the most qualified options
Test the decision quality to see how well it supports the original purpose
Stop cheerleadingwith positive remarks such as “great idea” or “I like that.” Dr. Thomas Gordon (Harvard) proved that judgments or affirmations of the positive can be more injurious to group participation than negative comments.
Definition Tool:
Put the MGRUSHDefinition Toolin your hip pocket and use it regularly, recalling the five activities a robust definition demands, namely:
What is it NOT
Describe it
Detail the attributes, characteristics, requirements, or specifications
Illustrate it
Get two examples from the business
Don’t forget the MGRUSH 3-step method for resolvingconflict:
Active listening to prevent ‘violent agreement’
Appeal to objectives, from project through enterprise (see Holarchy)
Thoroughly document, then take off-line, typically to the executive sponsor
Deliverable:
Know whatDONE looks like; nothing can save a leader when they don’t know where they are going. Hence, codify your deliverable and share it, before the meeting begins. While others call it “right-to-left thinking” some say “start with the end in mind.”
Don’t rely on “one size fits all” and overuse the same tool (e.g., PowerBalls). Decision-makingranges from the simple to the complicated through the complex, and extends from the qualitative through the quantitative—so use the most appropriate tool in your specific situation.
Focus:
Value the importance offocus and perspective. The hardest thing to do with a group of smart people is to get them to focus on the same thing at the same time. Consequently, remove distractions so that focus is all that remains.
Avoid using thefirst person singular, specifically the terms “I” and “me.” Additionally, avoid too many thank-you’s and self-references such as “I think”, “I want”, and “I believe.”
Holarchy:
Connect the dots; provide a holarchyexplanation that quantifies the importance and impact of your meeting, typically measured in terms of investment at risk (e.g., $$$) and/ or FTP (full-time person).
Don’t permitgroupthink and reliance on habits and patterns of the past. “We’ve always done it this way” will not persist forever. Hence, incites participants to understand that change can be proactive or reactive.
Preparation:
7:59 AMpreparation and interviews. No facilitation class in the world will make you successful when you show up unprepared.
Don’t forget or skip the MGRUSH professional 7-activityIntroductionand 4-activity Review and Wrap.Consider rehearsing the introduction so that the meeting begins smoothly, thus giving participants confidence. Participants remember the last five minutes so close with clear action steps.
Precision:
Rhetorical precisionor clarity of word choice increases its importance the more complicated the topic or scope of discussion. Hence, closely monitor and remain vigilant about your rhetoric.
Don’t permit discussion and comments when you are in alisting mode. Brainstorming demands that during ideation, there should be no discussion. The facilitator is normally the first person to violate this principle.
Roles:
Stress rolesin the meeting emphasized that all participants are equals, regardless of title or tenure in the hallway. Then treat everyone the same, and don’t be deferential to “executives.”
Don’t lead a meeting without first sharing the purpose, scope, deliverables, and simple agenda, preferably in writing and preferably shared with participants before the meeting or workshop begins.
Structure:
Structureyour discussion to avoid asking for the deliverable; rather ask for parts of the deliverable that aggregate to the final deliverable. Remember the mathematical expression: Y = f(X) +(x) + (x) and ask about the little “x’s”, not the “Y” or even the large “X’s”.
Don’t string on virtual participantsat the end. Put them in a virtual seating arrangement up front, and call on them first, not last. Next, enforce a protocol even among the live people so that virtual participants know who is speaking.
WHY First:
WHY before WHAT before HOW; Always build consensus around the purpose of something before beginning your analysis and solution development.
Don’t discount the value of visual feedback. Remember that more is better and it is easier to edit stuff ‘out’ of your final documentation than it is to fully remember what was said. Therefore, capture verbatims and edit later.
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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.
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.
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The Business Model Canvas was created by Alexander Osterwalder, of Strategyzer®. The canvas provides a one-page primer and template for analysis. Questions and points of view are detailed below.[1] We offer it to support the MGRUSH Business Analyst community. Please modify each and all of the following to help your situation.
UPDATE: MGRUSH has released its Meeting Pathway (infographic guideline) and Workshop Canvas (37 open-ended preparatory questions). Consequently, the Meeting Pathway details a comprehensive meeting and workshop preparation approach that you can now download.
Business Model Canvas — Agenda Steps and Questions to be Addressed
[1] The Business Model Canvas and Meeting Pathway and Meeting Canvas are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license and thus available for restricted distribution
RenDanHeYi Adoption Canvas
ALTERNATIVELY — CONSIDER THE QUANTUM MANAGEMENT APPROACH THAT FOLLOWS:
RenDanHeYi Adoption Canvas Intended to Support Zero-distance with Customers
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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.
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.
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Structured meetings and workshops positively impact organizations and stakeholders–even permeating cultures. Here are a few straightforward benefits of facilitation training that support structured meetings.
Business wisdom demands the application of knowledge, stuff that is ‘in−formation’ (not static). Compound the dynamism of information with the challenge of organizing a group of people, where nobody is smarter than everybody. Groups of people fail (or operate at sub-optimal levels) either because they don’t care, don’t have the talent, or don’t know how. Meetings and workshops with structure (aka interactive design❖) have always been stressed by MGRUSH. Structured facilitation training instructs HOW TO get a group of people to focus on the right question (topicality) at the right time (sequencing).
Structured facilitation training largely teaches you how to think by affecting your greatest power, the power of choice. From choosing which foot to place on the floor first, after rising in the morning, to what to wear when retiring for the evening, each day presents itself with thousands of choices. Without structure, groups are not naturally capable of focusing on the same thing, at the same time. Their choices become confused, chaotic, and sometimes catastrophic. Structured facilitation training is the process of making it easier for people to be more effective in leading groups, teams, meetings, and workshops. It includes three primary components: leadership, facilitation, and methodology.
Structured Facilitation Training Explains the Holarchy of Decision-making
Three Aspects of Structured Facilitation Training
The structure provides a method for transforming the abstract (thoughts) into the concrete (products). In elementary school, we learned about the WHY, WHAT, and HOW. In professional group environments, they equate to:
Differences Between Structured Facilitation and “Kum-bah-yah”
The differences between structured and unstructured facilitation training begin with different deliverables. The structured world seeks outputs such as product requirements or priorities resulting from root cause analysis. The unstructured world seeks outcomes such as community awareness or peace in the Middle East.
With structured facilitation, arguments can be resolved by appealing to the objectives within the structural holarchy. The unstructured world depends on building trust and increasing awareness but has no surefire method for driving consensus. The structured world reminds us that all arguments may be resolved by appealing to enterprise objectives. The unstructured world does not necessarily share any common purpose, scope, or objectives to resolve disagreements.
Structured Facilitation Training Includes
Meetings capture a huge investment of time.Unproductive meetings affect P & L, 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, effective meeting leaders.Creating highly effective meetings depends on improving three areas of your behavioral skills, namely:
WHY —
Leadership training ensures that we begin with the end in mind.WHY do we meet equates with what DONE looks like?The best facilitators in the world will fail miserably if they don’t know where they are going.The worst facilitators can still succeed when the deliverable is clear and has an impact on the quality of life of their meeting participants.
WHAT —
Once it has been made clear where we are going, facilitation skills make it easier to know WHAT to do to ensure a successful meeting.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 (i.e., the instructor’s lips are moving) won’t do it.Only active participation and practice will work at instilling effective and facilitative behaviors.
HOW —
Even a great facilitator who knows where they are going (i.e., What DONE looks like) still needs help.They need to know HOW they are going to get there.How will they lead a group of people from the meeting Introduction to the Wrap?While the best methodology or approach (i.e., 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.
Practical Benefits of Structured Facilitation Training
Analysis of business requirements:policies (WHY), rules (WHAT), and procedures (HOW)
Application environments such as AGILE, Design Sprint, DMAIC, JAD, Kaizen, Kanban, Lean, LeSS, RUP, SAFe, SAP, Scrum, SDLC (waterfall), SOA, and XP
Business agility, architecture, holistic decision support, product development, process improvement, and program alignment
Popular deliverables include gap analysis, planning of all sorts, prioritization with levels of increasing complexity, and team and project charters
Project and portfolio management approaches that demand consensus-based prioritization
Work products like Daily Stand-ups, Kick-offs, Innovation and Creativity Sessions, Logical Models, Look-backs, Product Backlogs, QFD, Retrospectives, Reviews, Root Cause Analysis, SIPOC, Stand-ups, Use-Cases, and User Stories
Help Yourself to Some Additional Revenue Too
Because innovation drives profit, most people have ignored structure to secure breakthrough ideas. Understand why listening to the voice of the customer makes economic sense.
The poor evaluation of ideas represents the number one cause of failure for newly introduced products. Frequently customers either don’t need the new product (i.e., technology push) or the product does not work as expected. Structured facilitation improves the quality of evaluation and decision-making, ensuring that the best concepts become commercialized.
Focus groups stress qualitative aspects and may not effectively represent the market at large. Offline research tends to be overly quantitative and sterile, frequently subject to close-ended questions/ answers when conditional knowledge may be more important to informed decisions. While one-on-one interviews afford deep probes, they confine the knowledge to what already exists; i.e., they stay “in the box”.
Surveys help track results but lack the ability to provide leading indications of unmet needs and unexplored issues. Web-based discussions drive further but do not support solid decision-making principles. Concept testing provides qualitative feedback but lacks the quantitative rigor needed to support decisions. Conjoint analysis, also known as “Com-Pair” (and other terms), supports decision-making but does not help generate new ideas or options.
Structured Workshops Integrate the Best of All Methods
Structured workshops generate breakthrough ideas, create strategies, and ensure alignment with more customers. Group dynamics stimulate, leading to higher quality ideas and decisions. However, without solid facilitation, dominant personalities may introduce bias. Starting with customer pain points and leveraging the input from other methods mentioned above, a collaborative approach will always generate higher quality decisions than those made in a vacuum or subjected to seen and unseen biases.
Facilitation training prepares you to challenge with reflexive questioning, the “pregnant pause”, and other tips to secure evidence and support. Nobody is smarter than everybody, especially in the hands of a professional 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.
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.
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In the world of content and product development, Kanban and Scrum are two of the names you’ll hear most often. One difference exists between workflow tools that may help you manage projects by visualizing status and progress and optimizing workflow on everything from software design to individual project management.
Though both frameworks make dynamic work progress easy to follow for everyone on a development team, Kanban and Scrum cater to different needs and priorities. Let’s have a look at features of each. We’ll focus on their strengths and weaknesses to help you decide which tools may seem better suited for you.
The Basics
Kanban and Scrum frameworks operate in different ways. Like digital versions of traditional whiteboards, and relying on the fact that our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, both frameworks use virtual tickets or post-it-note-style cards to plot out a project’s structure and timeline, using a “pull system” to break work up into steps, stories, or slices that can be understood at a glance.
Kanban boards channel continuous workflow while conserving the number of work-in-progress (WIP) activities. Visually it resembles a board with vertical columns. In its simplest form, three are used: To Do, In Progress (Doing), and Completed (Done).
Kanban teams include stakeholders, the product owner or project manager, and a group of developers. Kanban implements the User Story model, using migrating cards to represent WIP.
Scrum breaks workflow into time-boxed iterations of up to 30 days called “sprints,” within which cards migrate from a ranked to-do list called a product or sprint backlog through the tasks Not Started and Works in Progress columns to the tasks Completed column. In this way, a Scrum board’s evolution visually marks the team’s day-to-day progress throughout the sprint.
Kanban Pros and Cons
The Kanban system is particularly well-suited for teams working on multiple deliverables. Or, with different release dates or whose focus is maintenance and continuous development. Kanban boards channel continuous workflow, providing flexibility with content development and delivery. Some Kanban tracking systems, like Volerro, permit real-time collaborative annotation of files, which design developers working on graphic-intensive projects will welcome.
However, a feature that supports open-ended work is a drawback for teams that want to restrict work done per cycle, which Scrum does via Sprints. During a Scrum Sprint, a team commits to finishing a certain total number of tasks. These may all occupy the In Progress column simultaneously without threatening bottlenecks, given the strict limit on action items.
Similarly, WIP bottlenecks become a productivity risk for Kanban boards. Therefore, managers and owners must impose Work In Progress limits. Since these limits constrain each team member’s workload at a given time, they may be seen as an advantage of the Kanban framework.
Scrum Pros and Cons
Scrum’s main virtue is the predictability of the framework for consistently producing a certain amount of value in a given timeframe. Therefore, Scrum boards provide a good fit for developers operating on the basis of fixed scheduling commitments. Additionally, for those who wish to focus effort and incentivize productivity around non-negotiable deadlines.
But there is a cost: greater predictability means less flexibility in scheduling and workflow dynamics. The rigid format may frustrate those who prefer to not adhere to the formal hierarchy of roles within Scrum—Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team Member.
Despite their basic functional similarity, Kanban and Scrum cannot easily be compared in comprehensive terms. The choice between them involves trade-offs between flexibility and predictability, collaborative openness, and top-down control. Which project management framework will better suit your development team depends heavily on its style, needs, and abilities.
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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.
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.
What is a Design Sprint? Created at Google Ventures, a Design Sprint represents a methodology that helps teams complete a five-day workshop for building and testing some problem-solving product or solution (prototype). A prototype might include a product on a screen, on paper, a service, a physical space, or an object.
Created by Google Venture’s Jake Knapp, along with Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky, a Design Sprint leads participants from an abstract idea to a workable prototype. The five-day deadline, intensive teamwork, and facilitative focus provide an effective way to generate ideas and evaluate them quickly. The title of their book published in 2016 is “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. According to the creators, they used Design Sprints on everything from Google Search to Google X. Not surprisingly, the Design Sprint method relies heavily on methodology led through highly effective, professional facilitation.
Design Sprint Agenda
We recently collaborated with Jessica Olsen, CSPF from The Doolittle Institute to build a five-day agenda (the creators never mention the term ‘agenda’ and prefer using a checklist) based on the Design Sprint methodology. We have liberally modified some of their suggested tools to include MGRUSH tools provided in our Certified Structured Professional Facilitator training. Note in particular that we have a distaste for voting because it involves winners and losers. As consensus fighters, we provide decision-making options based on using criteria and structured analysis.
As described by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, “listen in if you have a big opportunity, challenge, or idea and need perspective, insights, and practical answers.”
Design Sprint Agenda — Day One, MAPPING
Agenda Step
Estimated Time
Notes and Tools
Introduction
15 to 45 minutes
Duration depends on the number of participants and the length of icebreakers. Follow the MGRUSH Introductory seven-step introductory sequence, stressing roles:
Introduce yourself: stress neutrality, meeting roles, and workshop impact.
State the workshop purpose and get an agreement.
Confirm the workshop scope and get an agreement.
Show the workshop deliverables and get an agreement.
Cover the administrivia (e.g., safety moment).
Explain the workshop Day Four agenda (preferably through metaphor or analogy).
Share the ground rules.
a) (Optionally) Have the attendees introduce themselves
b) Have Decider[1] make some quick rah-rah comments
Long-term Goal
15 to 75 minutes
Using Breakout Teams, treat much like a vision statement of the prototype being built. Consider using either the Purpose tool or the Temporal Shift tool.
Questions
30 to 60 minutes
Using Breakout Teams, develop a list of Design Sprint Questions to be answered by the end of the fifth day. Consider using three of the Six Thinking Hat tools, and in this sequence, namely:
White Hat (Neutral Objectivity) — Questions about data, facts, figures, information, examples, and other types of evidence
Black Hat (Logical Negative) — Questions about risk, problems, obstacles, and likely causes of failure in reaching the vision
Red Hat (Emotional View) — Questions about biased views, hunches, “gut”, and feelings
Mapping
30 to 60 minutes
Using Breakout Teams, build something akin to a process flow diagram. Consider using the Creativity tool to capture key customer benefits, applications, or other uses. In the words of the authors:
“List customers and key players on the left. Draw the ending, with your completed goal, on the right. Finally, make a flowchart in between showing how customers interact with your product. Keep it simple: five to fifteen steps.” (pg 66) [2]
Expert Views
60 to 120 minutes
Facilitate expert views from your Design Sprint team and guests from the outside. For about fifteen to thirty minutes each, capture their vision, research, how things work, and previous efforts or considerations. Other team members listen, observe, and write down notes. Consider strengthening your questions with the Perspectives tool.
How Might We (HMWs)
30 to 60 minutes
Team members convert their notes into opportunity statements (HMWs), akin to Scrum Stories. Use the Purpose tool format. Consider strengthening your questions with the Perspectives tool (pg 75).
Prioritizing
30 to 60 minutes
First, consolidate with the Categorizing tool or some equivalent approach. Consider various and appropriate prioritization tools ranging from Perceptual Mapping to the Decision Matrix tool. (NOTE: If using an MGRUSH tool, note that you will separately need to build criteria and apply the prioritized criteria against the HMWs.) For less formal cultures, consider a Scrum method of prioritization such as the Team Circle or even Planning Poker. The creators recommend voting (pg 80).
Updating
30 to 60 minutes
Given new input from the experts and the HMWs, consolidate into an updated Long-term Goal, updated Questions, and a consolidated map.
Selection and Testing
15 to 30 minutes
According to the creators, “Circle your most important customer and one target moment on the map. The team can weigh in, but the Decider makes the call.” Test back to Long-term Goal to ensure alignment.
Review, Preview, and Wrap
5 to 15 minutes
Use the standard MGRUSH four-activity approach, namely:
Review and summarize what the group accomplished.
Review any open items: Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
Guardian of change: determine what the group agrees to tell their superiors and other stakeholders.
Improvement: Use a quick Plus/ Delta for any quick fixes needed over the next four days.
Day One Things We Like
Remember to take breaks every sixty to ninety minutes
ABC: Always be capturing
Take care of humans
Day One Things We Would Change
Ask for permission. Ask the group for permission to facilitate.NOTE: The facilitator does not need to ask to do their job. They will properly confirm roles and impact during the Introductory sequence.
Keep asking, “How should I capture that?”NOTE: (With a marker silly.) Rhetorical precision demands that the question confirm WHAT we captured and provide an accurate reflection of the speaker’s intent.
Decide and move on. Slow decisions sap energy and threaten the sprint timeline. If the group sinks into a long debate, ask the Decider to make a call. NOTE: Poor quality decisions sap precious resources. Long debates are not available when the method and discussion are structured, especially when the focus of decision-making ought to be on the criteria and not on the options.
Design Sprint Agenda — Day Two, SKETCHING
Agenda Step
Estimated Time
Notes and Tools
Introduction
5 to 10 minutes
Follow the MGRUSH Introductory seven-step introductory sequence, stressing roles:
Reconfirm meeting roles and impact of deliverables.
Review the workshop purpose and get agreement.
Review the workshop scope and get an agreement.
Reconfirm the workshop deliverables and get an agreement.
Cover administrivia (e.g., safety moment).
Explain the workshop Day Four agenda (preferably through metaphor or analogy).
Reconfirm the ground rules.
Lightning Demos
2 to 3 hours
Take turns providing three-minute tours of favorite solutions from other products and domains within the same company. Capture all the ‘big ideas’ preferably using both narrative and sketching. Based on personal favorites, biases, or expertise, decide on afternoon assignments.
Notes
15 to 45 minutes
For each person, articulate, codify, and confirm (pg 110).
Ideas
15 to 45 minutes
Have each make some rough doodle sketches (pg 111).
Crazy 8
10 to 15 minutes
Have each follow the Crazy 8 sketching method (pg 112).
Sketches
30 to 60 minutes
For each, create a three-panel storyboard showing customers throughout the solution. Keep in mind the following rules:
Make it self-explanatory
Keep it anonymous
Ugly is OK
Words matter (rhetorical precision)
Give it a catchy title
Review, Preview, and Wrap
5 to 15 minutes
Use the standard MGRUSH four-activity approach, namely:
Review and summarize what the group accomplished.
Review any open items: Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
Guardian of change: determine what the group agrees to tell their superiors and other stakeholders.
Improvement: Use a quick Plus/ Delta for any quick fixes needed over the next three days.
Day Two Things We Like
NOTE: Effective facilitation of discussion around the Demos becomes critical.
Day Two Things We Would Change
Referring to a 1959 Yale study on brainstorming as ineffective. NOTE: We’re willing to bet that ideation rules were not imposed and that the analysis component was very weak. Listing is easy, it’s the analyzing that’s tough and it requires structure to break down issues into focal points for facilitated discussion and consensual understanding.
Design Sprint Agenda — Day Three, DECIDING
Agenda Step
Estimated Time
Notes and Tools
Introduction
5 to 10 minutes
Follow the MG RUSH Introductory seven-step introductory sequence, stressing roles:
Reconfirm meeting roles and impact of deliverables.
Review the workshop purpose and get agreement.
Review the workshop scope and get an agreement.
Reconfirm the workshop deliverables and get an agreement.
Cover administrivia (e.g., safety moment).
Explain the workshop Day Four agenda (preferably through metaphor or analogy).
Reconfirm the ground rules.
Prototype Selection
2 to 4 hours
Consider the creators’ method described below or substitute a more rigorous decision-making tool such as a Perceptual Map a Decision Matrix or both.
Art Museum
Pre-work
Should be done the night before by affixing sketches on the wall, friendly for touring, like an art museum.
Heat Map
pg 133
In silence the creators recommend applying dot stickers to the most compelling parts or ideas, one sketch at a time.
Speed Critique
pg 136
Discuss the compelling parts of each sketch, one sketch at a time, for three minutes. The original sketcher then replies if they feel the group missed something. Capture stand-out ideas and review concerns and questions.
Straw Poll
pg 138
The creators recommend each team member place one vote on their favorite and support it with their rationale.
Decision
(Supervote)
pg 141
Creators prefer ‘Note and Vote’ with Decider making the final decision. The advantage of the creators’ method is the combining of elements from multiple sketches, as parts of each sketch, rather than the entire sketch, may be used to build the forthcoming prototype.
Rumble
(Optional)
Decide if the winning ideas can fit into one prototype, or if conflicting ideas require two or three competing prototypes (a Rumble). Note and Vote instructions on pg 146.
Storyboard
2 to 4 hours
Build a storyboard to frame the prototype. The creators’ method recommends drawing a large grid, selecting an opening scene, and a flow that might be expected from the customer’s point of view. Illustrations are preferred over narrative comments.
Review, Preview, and Wrap
5 to 15 minutes
Use the standard MGRUSH four-activity approach, namely:
Review and summarize what the group accomplished.
Review any open items: Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
Guardian of change: determine what the group agrees to tell their superiors and other stakeholders.
Improvement: Use a quick Plus/ Delta for any quick fixes needed over the next two days.
Day Three Things We Like
Illustrations are preferred over narrative comments. NOTE: A picture is worth a thousand words and a sketch (metaphor or analogy) is worth a thousand pictures.
Day Three Things We Would Change
NOTE: With the proper method, consensus can be driven but you MUST consider criteria discretely from options.
Design Sprint Agenda — Day Four, PROTOTYPING
Agenda Step
Estimated Time
Notes and Tools
Introduction
5 to 10 minutes
Follow the MGRUSH Introductory seven-step introductory sequence, stressing roles:
Reconfirm meeting roles and impact of deliverables.
Review the workshop purpose and get agreement.
Review the workshop scope and get an agreement.
Reconfirm the workshop deliverables and get an agreement.
Cover administrivia (eg, safety moment).
Explain the workshop Day Four agenda (preferably through metaphor or analogy).
Reconfirm the ground rules.
Prototyping
4 to 6 hours
Assign roles: Makers, Stitcher, Writer, Asset Collectors, and Interviewer. Consider breaking the storyboard into smaller scenes and assigning each scene to team members (pg 187).
“
Making (two or more team members)
“
Stitching
“
Writing
“
Asset Collections (two or more team members)
“
Interviewing
Trial Run
30 to 60 minutes
Identify necessary corrections, ensuring that the Decider and Friday’s Interviewer attend.
Calibrations
30 to 60 minutes
Make changes, finish the prototype, and finalize the Interviewer guide for Friday.
Review, Preview, and Wrap
5 to 15 minutes
Use the standard MGRUSH four-activity approach, namely:
Review and summarize what the group accomplished.
Review any open items: Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
Guardian of change: determine what the group agrees to tell their superiors and other stakeholders.
Improvement: Use a quick Plus/ Delta for any quick fixes needed over the final day.
Day Four Things We Like
Divide and Conquer. NOTE: Assigning discrete roles for building the prototype(s).
Suggestions in Kick-Off Slides:
If your product is on a screen, try tools like Keynote, PowerPoint, InVision, or Marvel.
If it’s on paper, design it with Keynote, PowerPoint, or Word.
With a service, use your Sprint Team as an actor.
If it’s a physical space, modify an existing space.
If it’s an object, modify an existing object, 3D print a prototype, or prototype the marketing.
Goldilocks quality. NOTE: Create a prototype with just enough quality to evoke honest reactions from customers (pg 170).
Day Four Things We Would Change
NOTE: Day Four is a solid, collaborative, and productive day—well constructed.
Design Sprint Agenda — Day Five, TESTING
Agenda Step
Estimated Time
Notes and Tools
Introduction
1 to 2 hours
Create two rooms, one for interviews and one for observation. Position hardware and set up a video stream to the observers’ room (pg 202).
Five Interviews
4 to 6 hours
Following Interviewing protocols for prototyping (pg 212). Team members capture notes, issues, successes, and problems.
Notes
Concurrent
Gather notes on a pre-built grid using a row for each prototype or section of a prototype and a column for each customer being interviewed (pg 219).
Patterns
30 to 60 minutes
Observe, discuss, and capture using the Notes above (pg 222).
Back to the Future
30 to 60 minutes
Review Sprint Questions from Day One. Decide which patterns are most important moving forward. Also, review Long-term Goals from Monday to fortify the next steps. Stress the opportunity from both the successes and the failures.
Next Steps
30 to 60 minutes
Agree on an action plan going forward and consider applying some type of Roles and Responsibilities Matrix such as a RASI chart using the MG RUSH method for budget, timing, and resource estimations. Allow for the possibility of additional Sprints (on the same topic), albeit likely briefer than five days (See Kick-off slide #45).
Review, Preview, and Wrap
5 to 15 minutes
Use the standard MGRUSH four-activity approach, namely:
Review and summarize what the group accomplished.
Review any open items: Assign responsibility and detail how the group can expect to be updated.
Guardian of change: determine what the group agrees to tell their superiors and other stakeholders.
Improvement: Use a more substantial Evaluation Form to obtain feedback on overall performance.
Day Five Things We Like
Incredible capacity of structured, group activities.
Day Five Things We Would Change
Voting: Need we say more?
[1] ‘Decider’ is one of three primary roles in a Design Sprint, the other primary roles include ‘Facilitator’, ‘Interviewer’, and ‘Sprint Team.
[2] Refers to the page number in the creators’ book, “Sprint – How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. Additionally, the MG RUSH style encourages using fewer periods (full stops) than in American English.
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