The Art & Science of Facilitation

Reading the Virtual Room

This is a question I get asked a lot: How do you ‘read the room’ when you’re meeting virtually?

In other words, how can you tell whether people are tracking or checked out, where the group energy is, and when it’s time for a break or some other shift?

My answer: it’s not actually all that different from reading the room in face-to-face settings, although we tend to think it is.

Running A Virtual Meeting

It’s stressful for a skilled in-room facilitator to imagine working without the body language cues that are so familiar and so revealing, I know. But I think we make this harder than it is.

There’s an expectation that because we lose body language, a virtual meeting won’t be as good as being in the room together and that it’s going to be an inferior experience.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Use An Agenda For Your Virtual Meeting

Start with an engaging agenda, where people have things to do that will achieve outcomes they care about.

Let them create, write, draw, discuss, decide.

Give them tools to support doing that work at a distance.

Ask good, thought-provoking questions.

Then get out of the way.

How To Read The Virtual Room

To read the room, look for the same things that you look for in a face-to-face gathering.

The only difference is that instead of ‘body language,’ you’re tuning in more to the tone of voice, evidence of activity, and the clues that you can get from the collaborative tools you’ve selected.

Are people working? Are they digging into the things they need to talk about or build?

Keep tabs on how many different people are participating — just a few, or most, or pretty much everyone? If there’s silence, is it paired with intense creation (generating sticky notes, writing in a document, whatever) or is it paired with a lack of activity?

If it’s the former, there’s no problem; let them work.

Ask Questions To Engage Virtual Participants

On the other hand, if there’s a lot of silence and nothing seems to be happening, that’s a cue that something maybe wrong. If that’s what I notice, I will usually make a neutral observation about it and then simply ask what’s up. That might look like this:

“I’m noticing that it’s been quiet for a couple of minutes and I’m not seeing anything show up on the shared tool we’re using. Is something not working well for you that we can maybe change?”

I have no way of knowing why people aren’t participating unless I ask them.

If I’ve created the right container, there’s enough safety that people can speak up and tell me what’s going on for them. I can then make adjustments as needed to re-engage the group, take a break, or help them tease out whatever issue is causing the block.

Example Responses To Your Question

Here’s a sampling of responses I’ve gotten to that question in the past, to give you an idea of what you might hear:

What are we supposed to be doing, again? (My instructions weren’t clear)
We can’t open/find the collaborative tool (Again, this is on me to get them where they need to be)
We can’t answer this question because we don’t have enough information (Time to reframe the question)
This isn’t the right thing for us to be talking about right now (Let’s find out what the right thing is, and talk about that)
We don’t see how this activity will get us to our outcome (I can briefly explain how I think it will and ask for suggestions that would make it work better for them)
All of us have just gotten an emergency text and we’re looking at our email because there’s a crisis that just came up for our team (Okay, let’s give you space to work through that)

There’s usually a very good reason people aren’t participating, and it’s almost always resolvable. But you won’t know until you ask — which is just as true in a face-to-face meeting as it is in a virtual one. We’re simply used to leaning more on what we see than on what we hear to make that determination.

Let Silence Be Your Friend In A Virtual Meeting

Just remember, silence can be your friend in a virtual setting. It can feel really uncomfortable because you can’t see what people are doing, but it can be a strong signal for change in a group that doesn’t like to speak up or criticize. Be open and inviting so that the group feels they can trust you to fix whatever needs to be fixed, and you’ll find that reading the virtual room isn’t difficult, it’s just different.

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This article originally appeared on Rachel Smith’s blog, Digital Visual Facilitation, on June 12, 2019.

Designing Your Meetings With Purpose

Responsibilities of a Facilitator

Your role as facilitator no longer depends on your opinion or even on your expertise about the content.

A facilitator has the responsibility to assess the situation, the people and plan productive meetings, all while remaining neutral and staying out of the content.

Your role as facilitator no longer depends on your opinion or even on your expertise about the content.

Realizing that content is no longer the facilitator responsibility but perhaps more of an outcome, an effective facilitator will focus on planning each meeting to assist in improved team efficiency and productivity.

The Facilitator and The Meeting

Some think that the facilitator is the “person in charge.” Rather than “charging your way” through a process, a meeting, or a team, there are three things that will help you bring focus to this role:

What: Only focus on those topics that are important and useful to all or most of the people in the meeting
Who: Only invite those people who need to understand, buy into, or act on the topics being discussed
Why: Give people the information they need in order to understand why they’re at the meeting.

The Result: Good Collaboration

Good collaboration doesn’t just happen. It takes forethought, intention and a keen sense of human nature. Human nature? Yep! Understanding how people get triggered and how people feel respected is part of the role as facilitator. Plan a process for a group of people that minimizes conflict and maximizes productivity. That takes skill, logic, intuition and a lot of practice.

If, for example, you need the group to arrive at decisions, then you’ll need to structure the process to get them there. Chances are good they cannot go straight to a decision and instead, will need to explore possibilities, then evaluate the alternatives, then make decisions.

These essential three steps are frequently rushed, so practice allowing the time to nurture what the process needs. To facilitate a group through large decisions it is likely you won’t have time (or the necessary requirements) within a single meeting. Consider three separate meetings, one for each purpose and design your meetings to encourage that outcome:

In the first meeting, meant to explore possibilities, imagination, innovation and creativity are welcome.
In the second meeting, meant to evaluate the alternatives, critical thinking, analysis and budget knowledge are welcome.
In the third meeting, meant to make decisions, negotiation and compromise are welcome.

Take Time To Design Your Meetings!

As you can see, how you design your meeting sets the stage for how it will go. When you design your meeting with clear purpose and intention, it’s likely to evoke less conflict and promote more efficiency and productivity during the meeting and for the team.

What Successful Agile Team Facilitators Know

Successful Collaborative Leadership

In some cultures, it’s a badge of honor to be participating in three virtual calls at the same time, or be multitasking during a meeting, or even be running between meetings.

Yet, behaviors such as these are a reflection of organizational flaws in the way we meet. When you’re trying to collaborate on a project, but you don’t quite have the time to be fully present, it can disrupt the whole group process and cost the team time.

There are many ways we can prevent and correct bad meeting habits, while simultaneously making effective use in the way we come together in an organization. It starts with setting the intention to collaborate. And the good news is that collaboration doesn’t have to take all that much time – it simply requires a little forethought by the Facilitator.

So what does successful collaborative leadership look like, exactly? Here are five things that a facilitator should know before going into a meeting.

Who Does The Meeting Serve?

A meeting should have at least one sponsor (a person or group of people who will be the primary beneficiaries of the outputs of the meeting). Sometimes, this may be the person who asked for the meeting. In a retrospective, the team is often the group who will benefit the most from the output, so they become the “sponsor” of the meeting.

What Does “Success” Look Like?

Before the meeting, interview the sponsor and ask them: What will we have accomplished at the end of this meeting that would make it successful? It’s hard to be successful if there isn’t an agreed upon definition about what success will look like.

In the case of a retrospective, talk with the team or survey them prior to the meeting to find out what they would like to achieve in the meeting. It can help focus your retrospectives and give you different topics to talk about, aside from the typical “what worked” and “what do we want to keep/change.”

Who is Needed At The Meeting?

Not everyone who attends each meeting needs to be there, and not everyone who needs to be there is always there. This can be a source of great frustration for meeting participants and facilitators, and it’s often a source of dysfunctional behavior in the meeting.

Get clear on who needs to attend and confirm their commitment to attend in advance. If these critical people can’t make it, then reschedule the meeting for a time when they can. If others are showing up just to hang out, politely ask them to go because they’re not needed.

How Will We Accomplish The Outcomes?

Successful group meetings don’t just happen. They require some level of process design, depending on the desired purpose and outcomes. If the meeting is a daily standup, then little to no design may be required because it’s a quickly facilitated dialogue.

However, a retrospective to address some challenging team dynamics during the last iteration may require 4-6 hours of planning and design time, on average. It includes:

interviewing the team
crafting an agenda (a series of questions that will be asked of the group)
designing the facilitator script
deciding the group process (brainstorming, mind mapping, facilitating dialogue, etc.) that you will use to reach each desired outcome

This level of planning gives the facilitator and the participants a clear focus on the purpose of the meeting and keeps everyone on track. Without a clear plan, meetings can quickly start to spin into details or unrelated topics and never reach an outcome or decision.

How Will The Plan Adapt to Change?

As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

The facilitator’s guide is an excellent tool, but oftentimes, the most valuable part is in the creation. Don’t be so tied to your plan that you can’t adapt to what’s happening real time with your team!

How do you create intentional collaborations? What are some ways you that would help you begin with an end in mind?