Thoughts on facilitation

[written by Tais Real]

Facilitating meetings has been a learning-by-doing process for me in yunity.
Fascinating and very complex.
This is me trying to pin down some of methods that seemed to work, the challenges I've faced and possible ways to solve them.

Facilitation 

who

Ideally, a person who calls for a meeting can facilitate it. Who to better know than themselves what they wish to get out of a meeting?
But not everyone feels comfortable with facilitating, or this person could be too emotionally involved with the topic to efficiently facilitate. The caller and the facilitator should work together beforehand to unite their visions for the meeting and consider the best ways to achieve the goals (agenda, group energizers, relaxation exercise, dreaming or planning, hats rounds, brainstorming, etc, etc!). 

What if the meeting was a common wish, with different expectations?
It will be more challenging - and more fun! 
Spend the first part of the meeting on letting everyone express their desires and expectations for the meeting. In this round, don’t hesitate to interrupt: participants can often start to develop their ideas or reflect upon others, but this should be short: we simply want a list to manage time fairly and have a good overview of the diversity in the group. Ideally, the next stage would be: working out together a common agenda. Make topics and order suggestions based on the previous round, and invite everyone to speak out their resistance if any. 

why

It’s happened and will happen again that some question the need for a facilitator. Is this not an disguised reintroduction of hierarchy? Sure, things can be said against it: it does involve a form of symbolic domination. The facilitator is likely to be listened to, more than others. But ey, the facilitator is there and only there because people allow him/her to be. So he/she has to prove him/herself a good “servant of the group”. 

I prefer facilitating meetings that I’m actually not very involved with (PR meetings over FSINT meetings), because in the later scenario, I reflect a lot on how much I shouldn’t be interfering because it might be my involvement in the project speaking and not just my facilitation concerns, and sometimes perhaps don’t speak out because I’m busy assessing why I want to speak out.

taking notes

Facilitating and taking notes at the same time - if a lot is happening at the meeting, can be confusing. But often, I find myself a better facilitator if I’m taking notes, because I control the visual of the meeting and can make more quickly sense out of the underlying communication structure. Ideal situation would be a pair of notaries, maybe both also facilitators? taking turns to work on the same pad.

I consider minutes as very important part of a meeting: clear and organized notes will help working forward, making it more inviting for people to refer to them for tasks. If the order of an agenda isn't followed during a meeting, I would reorganize the minutes by topic to build a clearer outcome.

For consecutive planning meetings, I recommend reading out loud the notes of the previous meeting to consider what has been achieved or not, if our expectations where too high, too low or just right, and to be reminded of good floating ideas that couldn't fit anywhere back then and might find their way into existence this time around.

interrupting

how - Doug's method of raising an arm quietly, showing he wants to talk, seems very efficient. As he is respected as a calm and good facilitator, the group usually automatically assumes that his point needs to be heard. Oder?
Showing disapproval: bad move.
The sandwich move: give positive feedback on a comment before pointing out why it is inappropriate or irrelevant - and end up with something like “but thank you for sharing”. 

when - How do we know when someone just took a detour to come back to the relevant topic or when they just drift away? Some people take a long, convoluted way to express their thoughts. How can we minimize the loss of communal time spent on expressing in 40 minutes an idea that could be explained in 5? Unfortunately I don't see a great solution: cutting them off repeatedly has negative consequences both for speaker and facilitator and can easily lead to tensions between the two. But if the speaker keeps on taking too much time and thus indirectly cutting off other people, the facilitator should do something about it. But what?

Getting to know the individuals and how they express themselves seems to be the first condition to solving any of this. Then and only then, the facilitator can have a private chat with that said person, using the uppermost tactfullness to explain that something has to change. Something like "You have great ideas but it seems that the way you express them makes it difficult for people to really grab them. Would you allow me to share with you some methods I learnt for a more efficient communication?" (but really, I should never be a diplomacy teacher). What are these methods then? Golden rule: deep listening. That means we respect each other and we don't interrupt one another. Focus on what someone is saying until they have finished, close your eyes if needed. Eventually you may find that this eases up the very process of talking, yourself. By assuming that others listen as deeply as you do, you may not feel the need to rush into unorganized thoughts anymore. And indeed, people will understand and remember much more clearly a slow speech that goes straight to the point than a fast one that gets lost on its way. But frankly, this whole piece of advice might only be relevant for the couple of people I have in mind as I'm writing this. Which brings me back to my main point: know who you're dealing with before attempting to correct them. Try to understand where their flaws in group communication might come from and kindly suggest ways to address and avoid these flaws.

Possible methods

Dreaming, planning, doing, celebrating

Idea (from back in Rotterdam) to label meetings according to a Dragon Dreaming phase.

These four phases are part of a continuous circle. It takes place on many levels: from one meeting to the next one, from one Trello column to another, from one sprint to another with Scrum, from the vague idea of yunity to the launching of the platform. So defining a meeting as a certain phase is helpful, but it should always remain clear that the borders between phases are merging. It is no strict rule to abide to, merely a mean to combine intentions. A dreaming meeting can, for instance, naturally evolve into planning. Another example: reading notes of a previous meeting at the start of a meeting and having a feedback round at the end of a meeting are both short phases of celebrating and also doing by reassessing what we did wrong.

Dreaming

• getting to know each other, when many new people
• sharing values
• emphasis on feelings
• brainstorming without discussing ideas, just co-creating them
• could involve many community building energizers

Planning

• things need to be done: clear out tasks and assigning them, ideally. We want new input and we want to discuss how appropriate certain ideas are to figure out which ones should be implemented
• make checklists for future tasks
• have the minutes transcriber or facilitator implement new concrete tasks that came up in the meeting onto relevant Trello boards / GitHub issues for devs oriented meetings

Doing

• any technical meeting which involves one particular task being done, e.g. finalizing yunity one pager in Chemnitz, e.g. organizing the MediaKit
• the facilitator, if needed, invites to diplomacy in communication -as always, but deciding as a group on what some people have been working on individually can be tricky because easily perceived as invasion and disrespect of personal work
• feedback, readjusting current work. What could be done better, why are we not reaching our goals, etc..

Celebrating

• nothing new should come out. We gather our many achievements, to feel good and be aware of what others have been up to.
• many energizers. Perhaps even booze.
• no need to plan or facilitate, yuniteers are natural celebraters!

The hats round

Found on this very nice website (oops, french spam) with other “collective intelligence tools”. Concept by Mr. De Bono.

Have not tried it yet, though very keen to. It resonates very well with observations I’ve made in the last few months: in a group, we often take the role of who’s needed. E.g. I often play devil’s advocate and whistle blower (black hat), but should I walk into a group with what I consider enough of those, I will gladly enjoy these holidays and put on my yellow, happy hat. 

In practice: six colored hats, and each one corresponds to a way to approach a topic. We debate an issue as a group, and all get to express ourselves with the same hat in a round. It has the potential of letting people who are more shy than others explore in which dynamic they are most comfortable with expressing themselves; and for the others, of trying out new ways of interacting.

The white hat: facts. What information do we have, what information do we need? Where can we get it?
The red hat: emotions. No need for justification. How do I feel about this? How might others feel? Fears, likes, dislikes, loves and hates.
The green hat: creativity. What is possible? Which ideas do we have? What can we create together?
The yellow hat: strengths. What are the good points? Why can this be done? What are the benefits?
The black hat: weaknesses. What’s wrong with this plan? What hasn’t been thought about? Is it sage? Can it be done?
The blue hat: structure. Thinking about the thinking. What is our focus? How can we organize ourselves better? What have we done so far, what do we do next?

The order of the hats is decided by the facilitator, to best fit the meeting’s intentions.

Brainstorming

(research in progress)