Facilitation

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Essence

The essence of great facilitation skills lies in the ability to guide and orchestrate effective group processes, discussions, and problem-solving sessions to achieve desired outcomes. A skilled facilitator creates an inclusive and collaborative environment, encouraging active participation and contributions from all participants. This involves adeptly managing group dynamics, fostering open communication, and ensuring that diverse perspectives are considered and respected.

Great facilitators possess strong interpersonal and communication skills, enabling them to navigate discussions, clarify ideas, and synthesise information in a way that promotes understanding. They are neutral and impartial, allowing them to guide discussions without imposing their own agenda. The essence of facilitation skills is grounded in adaptability, as facilitators must be responsive to the unique needs and challenges of each session, adjusting their approach to meet the goals of the group. Ultimately, great facilitators contribute to the efficient achievement of objectives, building consensus, and fostering a positive and collaborative atmosphere within the group they are guiding.

Experience

As a manager I've been facilitating meetings most of my career.

It's essential to clearly define the objectives of the session and come prepared with a solid understanding of the technical aspects of the project to facilitate informed discussion. You need a collaborative environment fostered through team-building, inclusive participation and open communications. At Westpac, by encouraging a fairly reserved test lead to contribute to the discussion I unlocked a testing bottleneck whereby tests could be performed as a suite following a batch run, rather than as isolated tests. It saved days on the overall testing program.

A good facilitation workshop needs a structured agenda with visual aids to enhance engagement. At Rabobank, I created a simple series of boxes representing parts of the process and information flows. This brought structure to the discussion and we could annotate and develop a common vocabulary to describe the issue. Teams should feel at ease at a facilitation workshop, often invitees are taking their own time to help the project, so it's also important that time is managed carefully. It should include planned breaks so people can check-in on their day job and to build trust I always try to stick to the advertise end time.

Another aspect of good facilitation is to be adaptable. Even with advance planning, sometimes the session evolves and the actual real issue is to the side of the initial area of focus. At Greencross, while facilitating a session on data migration, the actual root cause of the issue was the design of a feature; it was impossible to migrate data into the new feature. We had the right stakeholders in the session so we quickly pivoted to redesigning the feature.

Facilitation sometime brings conflict out into the open. Key skills while facilitating are to handle the resolution of the conflict constructively. Judgement is needed to determine if the forum is right place to handle the conflict, but often by stepping back to objectives and facilitating an open discussion, new ways can be found that addresses the concerns of the conflicting parties.

Finally, facilitation doesn't end with the session. Actions plans must be developed and followed up. Also, it's a good idea to hold a retrospective to seek feedback to continuously improve facilitation effectiveness.

Credentials