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I love to train people in facilitation skills.  It’s so much fun!

People get to try new things in a safe environment, games are played, there’s growth and challenge, fabulously supportive atmospheres can build up.

What’s the minimum group size for this kind of learning?

How about one?

A group of one

From time to time I’m approached by people who want to improve their facilitation skills, but who don’t have a ready-made group of colleagues to train with.   I point them towards open courses such as those run by the ICA, and let them know about practice groups like UK Facilitators Practice Group.  And sometimes, I work with them one-to-one.

This one-to-one work can also happen because a client doesn’t have the budget to bring in facilitator for a particular event, and we agree instead to a semi-coaching approach which provides intensive, just-in-time preparation for them to play the facilitator role.  This is most common in the community and voluntary sector.

The approach turns out to be a mix of process consultancy for specific meetings, debriefing recent or significant facilitation experiences, and introducing or exploring tools and techniques.

Preparing to facilitate in a hierarchy

A client had a particular event coming up, where she was going to be facilitating a strategy session for a group of senior people from organisations which formed the membership of her own organisation.  She had concerns around authority: would they accept her as their facilitator for this session?  She was also keen to understand how to agree realistic aims for the session, and to come up with a good design.

We spent a couple of hours together, talking through the aims of the session and what she would do to prepare for it.  We played around with some design ideas. I introduced the facilitator’s mandate, and she came up with ways of ensuring she had a clear mandate from the group which she could then use to justify – to them and to herself – taking control of the group’s discussions and managing the process.  Helped by some coaching around her assumptions about her own authority, she came up with some phrases she was comfortable using if she needed to intervene.  We role-played these. She felt more confident about the framework and that the time and energy we’d put into the preparation was useful.

Facilitation skills as a competence for engaging stakeholders

As part of a wider team, I’ve been working with a UK Government department to help build their internal capacity for engaging stakeholders.  As a ‘mentor’, I worked with policy teams to help them plan their engagement and for one team, this included helping a team member get better at meeting design and facilitation.  He already had a good understanding of the variety of processes which could be used and a strong intuitive grasp of facilitation.  We agreed to build this further through a (very short) apprenticeship approach.  We worked together to refine the aims for a series of workshops.  I facilitated the first and he supported me.  We debriefed afterwards: what had gone well, what had gone less well, and in particular what had he or I done before and during the workshop and what was the impact.  He facilitated the next workshop, with me in the support role. Again we debriefed.  We sat down to plan the next workshop, and I provided handouts on carousel, which seemed like an appropriate technique. I observed the next two workshops, and again we debriefed.

Instead of a training course

I worked with a client who wanted to develop his facilitation skills and was keen to work with me specifically, rather than an unknown and more generic open course provider.  I already knew his context and he knew I’d have a good appreciation of some of his specific challenges: being in the small secretariat of what is essentially an industry leadership group which is trying to lead a sustainability agenda in their sector.  His job is to catalyse and challenge, as well as to be responsive to members.  So when he is planning and facilitating meetings, he will sometimes be in facilitator mode and sometimes he will need to be advocating a particular point of view.

Ideally, I’d have wanted to observe him in action in order to identify priorities and be able to tailor the learning aims. But the budget didn’t allow for this.

We came up with a solution which was based on a series of four two-hour sessions, where I would be partly training (i.e. adding in new ‘content’ about facilitation and helping him to understand it) and partly coaching (i.e. helping him uncover his limiting assumptions and committing to do things differently).  The sessions were timed to be either a bit before or a bit after meetings which he saw as significant facilitation challenges, so that we could tailor the learning to preparing for or debriefing them.  The four face-to-face sessions would be supplemented by handouts chosen from things I’d already produced, and by recommended reading.  We agreed to review each session briefly at the end, for the immediate learning and feedback to me, and partly to model active reflection and to get him into the habit of doing this for his own facilitation work.

In our initial pre-contract meeting, we agreed some specific learning objectives and the practicalities (where, when).  Before each session, we had email exchanges confirming what he wanted to focus on. This meant I could prepare handouts and other resources to bring with me.

And this plan is pretty much what we ended up doing.

He turned out to be very well suited to this way of learning. He was a disciplined reflective practitioner, making notes about what he’d learnt from his experiences and bringing these to sessions.  He was thoughtful in deciding what he wanted to focus on which enabled me to prepare appropriately.  For example, in our final session he wanted to look at his overall learning and to identify the learning edges that he would continue to work on after our training ended.  We did two very different things in that session: he drew a timeline of his journey so far, identifying significant things which have shaped the facilitator he is now.  And we used the IAF‘s Foundational Facilitator Competencies to identify his current strengths and learning needs.

Can it work?

Yes, it’s possible to train someone in facilitation skills one-to-one.   This approach absolutely relies on them have opportunities to try things out, and is very appropriate when someone will be facilitating anyway – trained or not.  The benefits are finely tailored support which can include advice as well as training, coaching instead of ‘talk and chalk’, and debriefing ‘real’ facilitation instead of ‘practice’ session.

There are downsides, of course.  You don’t get the big benefit which can come from in-house training, where a cohort of people can support each other in the new way of doing things and continue to reflect together on how it’s going. And you don’t get the benefit of feedback from multiple perspectives and seeing a diverse way of doing things, which you get in group training.

But if this group approach isn’t an option, and the client is going to be facilitating anyway, then I think it is an excellent approach to learning.

Sometimes our work involves facilitating conversations among people who know that they disagree with each other.

They may be professional campaigners, politicians or lobbyists. They may be householders or developers.  They may be in the room because a sudden row has blown up triggered by news of a forthcoming decision about funding, planning permission or a change in the law.

Whatever has led to it, the people I’m thinking of have already established a ‘position’ about the topic, and assume that their job in the meeting is to advocate and defend that position.

Defending a position

Defending a position leads to people asserting certainty about causes, consequences and facts, often more certainty than is justified by the current state of knowledge and analysis.   It encourages people to dispute the facts put forward by others, and to question their motives.  People defending a position often build such an edifice of certainty around themselves that it is very hard for them to move away from their initial position, even if they want to.

The things said about those who don’t agree with the position can be damaging to working relationships and lead to a decrease in trust, making subsequent conversations harder.

Win/win or win/lose?

Positional conversations assume a win/lose paradigm.  But what if it were possible to find a win/win?  You can only discover the potential for a win/win if you move beneath the positions and discover the interests and needs.  (I could tell you about boogli fruit, but I’d have to kill you.)  What has led people to develop their positions?  What interests are served by those positions? What are the needs which are met through those interests?

Below the inversion

The classic PIN diagram shows a couple of people communicating (!) their positions to each other from mountain peaks.  I was first introduced to this by Andrew Acland and Pippa Hyam in a course they ran for The Environment Council many years ago.

My  version also has a layer of cloud cutting off the positions from the possibility of common ground.  They can’t even see that the mountains they are standing on are part of the same range.

PIN diagram

(The Munro baggers and assorted hill walkers among you will know that layers of cloud like this form when there’s a temperature inversion. HT to Alex Roddie over at Glencoe Mountaineer blog for the pic.)

Our job as facilitators, mediators or consensus builders is to help people talk and listen to each other about the stuff below the inversion.

Climbing down from a pinnacle can be a risky experience, and people need to feel safe about giving up their position and moving into unknown territory.  The facilitator can create this safety by being very open about why they are inviting people to explore interests and needs, the process they are suggesting (including its consensual nature and the identical invitation being extended to others) and by accepting with respect the responses people give.

As people describe and listen to each others’ interests and needs, they can see more clearly the common ground that already exists: the latent consensus.

Latent consensus

There is bound to be some latent consensus!  Good conversations can help add detail and hard edges to the motherhood and apple pie, lowest-common-denominator morass which some people are so afraid of when the word consensus is used.  As relationships strengthen and respect and trust increases through good conversation, people can begin to build outwards from the latent consensus and create new common ground.  This includes agreeing to disagree in a spirit of curiosity and respect, rather than a re-establishment of positions which must then be defended.

Because of course there will still be things people disagree about, below the inversion. But conversation can focus on understanding the disagreements (choices, preferences) more clearly.  Which of them are symptoms of anxiety caused by uncertainty about facts or about whether they can trust the others?  Which of them relate to paradigms, values and basic underlying assumptions?  And which are options which can be selected following further research or exploration, and which can be lightly held as alternatives for a long time to come?

Avoiding positional thinking in the first place

If you can get in to the process early enough, it’s possible to head off positional thinking.  Early stages can involve all the parties (stakeholders) in collectively defining and describing the current situation (or problem), including the things they like about it and the things they don’t like about it.  People can develop a shared view of the better future (or solution) they’d like to see – and understand respectfully what the things are that they disagree about, too.

Options for the end goal may be created.  Options for getting there may be created.

When presenting back options which have been created by sub-groups, we sometimes push people unwittingly towards taking a position when they might otherwise hold an open mind for longer. ‘Dot voting’ to show preferences too soon is one trap.  Asking people whether they like an option is another.

A great way to avoid doing this is to ask for feedback on what people like and don’t like about each option, rather than asking them to make a judgement about the option as a whole too early.  The facilitator can also ask them what they think they understand by it, and what seems unclear or they’ve had to make an assumption about.

Carousel, galleries with the option for post-it commenting, or world cafe can all be used to set up conversations like this and harvest the results for further pondering.

On my bike, between meetings last week, I was passing St Paul’s Cathedral in London so I wandered through the Occupy London Stock Exchange ‘tent city’.  Occupy LSX has divided opinion. At the meeting I was going to – a workshop of organisational development consultants, facilitators, coaches – some people made rather snide remarks about the likely impact of the first cold weather on the protesters, and about unoccupied tents.  There’s a retort here about the infamous thermal imaging scoop.  Others were interested in and sympathetic to the dissatisfaction being expressed, but frustrated by the lack of a clear ‘ask’ or alternative from the occupiers.

Emergent, self-organising, asks and offers

What struck me, however, were the similarities between the occupy area itself, and some really good workshops I’ve experienced.  There was plenty of space given aside for ‘bike rack’, ‘grafitti wall’ and other open ways of displaying messages, observations or questions.  There was a timetable of sessions being offered in the Tent City University, and another board showing the times of consensus workshops and other process-related themes.

There was a ‘wish list’ board, where friendly passers-by could find out what the protesters need to help keep things going. Marker pens and other workshop-related paraphernalia are needed, as well as fire extinguishers and tinned sweetcorn.

I saw these as signs of an intentionally emergent phenomenon, with a different kind of economy running alongside the money economy.  Others have blogged about the kinds of processes honed and commonly in use at this kind of event or camp, in particular if you’re interested there’s loads on the Rhizome blog.

Don’t ask the question if you don’t already know the answer?

I recognise the frustration expressed by some of my OD colleagues about the lack of clearly-expressed alternatives.  This kind of conversation often occurs in groups that I facilitate: someone (often not in the room) has expressed a negative view about a policy, project or perspective.  The people in the room feel defensive and attack the grumbler: “I bet they couldn’t do any better” or “what do they expect us to do?”.  Some management styles and organisational cultures are fairly explicit that they don’t want to hear about problems, only solutions.  (Browsing here gives some glimpses of the gift and the shadow side of this approach.)

But I see something different here: a bottom-up process where people who share broadly the same intent and perspective,  come together to explore and work out what they agree about, when looking at the problems with the current situation and the possible ways of making things better.  The are participatively framing a view of the system as it is now, and what alternatives exist. This takes time, of course.

They are also, as far as I can tell from the outside, intentionally using consensus-based processes rather than conventional, top-down, leader-led or expert-led processes to organise this.  Understandably frustrating for the news media which rely increasingly on short sound-bites and simple stories with two sides opposing each other.  And it could get very interesting when the dialogue opens up to include those who have quite different perspectives on “what’s really going on here” (for example mainstream economists, bankers, city workers).

The other thing I notice about this expectation of a ready-made coherent answer, is how similar it is to some group behaviour and the interventions made by inexperienced facilitators and coaches.  When I am training facilitators, we look at when to intervene in a group’s conversation, particularly when to use the intervention ‘say what you see’.  (This makes it sound very mechanical – of course it’s not really like that!)

The trainee facilitator is observed practising, and then there is feedback and a debriefing conversation.  Perhaps they chose not to intervene by telling the group what they observed.  Sometimes during this feedback and debrief, a trainee will say something like “Yes, I noticed that, but I didn’t want to say anything because I wasn’t sure what to do about it or what it meant.”  They are assuming that you can only ‘say what you see’ if you know what it means and already have a suggestion about what to do about it.

But it also serves a group to say what you see, when you haven’t a settled interpretation or clear proposal.  (In fact, it is more powerful to allow the group to interpret, explain and propose together.) All questions are legitimate, especially those to which we don’t (yet) know the answer.  Ask them.  Guess some answers.  And this – for the time being – is what the occupy movement is doing.

The revolution will need marker pens

All this consensus-based work and open-space style process needs plenty of marker pens (permanent and white-board).  So if you have a bulging facilitation toolkit and you’re passing St Paul’s, you know what to do!

Update

Others have spotted these connections too. Listen to Peggy Holman talking about Occupy Wall Street on WGRNRadio, 9th January.

I facilitated a workshop once, where everyone knew that they wanted to work together on something, but they didn’t know what.

They were all lawyers of one kind or another: barristers in private practice, in-house legal eagles for NGOs, members of the judiciary.  They shared an interest in human rights and climate change.  They shared a suspiscion that existing human rights legislation (including conventions) and existing courts which hear human rights cases (including some international ones) might be a good way to take forward cases which would catalyse action to reduce emissions and ensure victims of the impact of climate change get proper help.

During the workshop they shared information and stories, hoping that they would find one exciting thing to work on which had real potential. They discussed the detail of different legal approaches, what a perfect case would need to look like, the pros and cons of bringing cases in different jurisdictions.

As the workshop went on through its first day and towards lunch on the second day, they still hadn’t found it.

And then suddenly they had!

How did that happen?

What did they do to find the focus? What did I do to help?

I don’t know.  Nothing different than we had been doing for a day and a half.

Bingo!

It was like that moment when you find the house keys.  We had been looking and looking in all the right places and all the right ways.  It wasn’t that we started looking better just before we found them.  It’s just that we finally found them.

(It’s funny how they’re always in the last place you look.)

Back in March 2011, I enjoyed working with the IEMA to facilitate a workshop for environmental professionals, ably supported by Debbie Warrener. The workshop was organised to give some of the UK’s most long-serving and successful internal environmental specialists a chance to share experiences of leadership around sustainable business practice, and collaboratively sketch out the skills environmental professionals need if they are to shift their organisations strategically towards sustainability.

There were no presentations – it was a collaborative venture where everyone in the room had wisdom and expertise to contribute.

During the workshop they created a mind map of key skills. This was done very rapidly, following several rounds of discussing challenges successfully met and skills used in doing so.

I came across my notes of this mind map in the nether reaches of my filing pile just now, and it struck me as one of those things which you could work away at for a long time and not improve much.

So here it is.

I was really pleased to see how much was to do with interpersonal skills, influence, collaboration and mainstream management and leadership skills.  We have heaps of fantastically technically expert environmentalists working in organisations. Too often they are marginalised and lacking in power or influence. They can find themselves shaking their heads sadly at the decisions made by the people with power, who don’t see the unsustainability of their actions or can’t see how to change.  Combining technical excellence with the savvy of the change-maker is essential.

IEMA’s current framework

IEMA have since developed a skills framework at a number of levels which draws on this work, and other research and engagement they have done with their members.  You can see it here and read more about how people are reacting to it here.

And there’s another framework mentioned in this earlier blog post and the article it links to.

Update

In November 2011, IEMA’s magazine published this, looking at the skills and aptitudes needed by some very senior sustainability people in UK businesses, and includes personal stories from a number.

My client drove me to the station from our rather remote venue this afternoon.  She said:

“Do you think about a workshop after it’s over, or…”

I mentally completed her sentence as “or don’t you manage to?” After a small pause, she finished

“…or are you able to let it go?”.

I was reminded of the usefulness of not assuming you know what someone else is going to say.

And I realised I’d filled the pause with my own self-criticism: because I’m intellectually committed to action/reflection, and thinking about a workshop after it’s over is a powerful reflection stage.

But sometimes I’m just too tired to concentrate on reflecting ‘properly’. And I might beat myself up about all the scintilating learning I’m missing by not journalling or even blogging as much as I might.

Instead, my mind wanders or I retreat into the self-indulgence of a journey home where I can read the paper, mess up the Kakuro or stare out of the window.

But this particular journey home has been longer than expected, and I’ve got my second wind. So I will ‘reflect properly’, drawing on what we talked about and thought about on the way to the station.

You’re working too hard

One of the things my assessors said after my CPF earlier this year was that I was working too hard. The group should be doing the work, I need to get out of their way.  Perhaps I can take the same advice about reflection on my facilitation: let my mind do the work and get out of its way.

Wandering mind

The drive to the station was quite long, so I did let my mind wander, sparked by my client’s question. We had one of those leisurely conversations which are interspersed with gentle silences.  And our conversation touched on spaces, client comfort and workshop plans.

Owning the space

My mind wandered to what we had done to own the space. This workshop was the third in a series of three and all the venues we used had their challenges. Two of the three lacked good smooth walls to stick flips on and write on.  Today’s was crowded and we had to prop up boards on tables and stacked chairs to be able to see the flips.

In every venue, we quickly assessed the room, decided which furniture to move around or move out of the room altogether, and worked out where we would display the flips we needed for various metaplanning-type exercises and for participants to be able to see the running record.

Over the years, I have had to learn about the importance of layout, gain the confidence to take responsibility for making spaces as good as they can be for the conversation we want to have, pick up some tips and tricks for improvising the space and equipment needed, and get more decisive about making changes rapidly. That experience has paid off today.

Over-identifying with the client: whose comfort?

I have been more conscious recently of my own tendency to over-identify with my client, when facilitating stakeholder workshops. I feel uncomfortable when I think the client team may be feeling uncomfortable. I feel relieved when I think they may be feeling relieved.

I’m confident that this is not having a significant effect on my facilitation, but I’m conscious that this is a danger and that I need to check my inner motivation when choosing to intervene (or not) in situations where I believe that I know what my client would like to hear. Holding the space in periods of discomfort, doubt, uncertainty, conflict, anger, disappointment – this is one of the special gifts which a facilitator can bring to a group, and I’d like to strengthen my ability to do this with ease, without being overly concerned about the client’s level of comfort.

As it happens, today I was impressed with how well the client team responded to some of the things stakeholders said, which were probably hard for them to hear. Defensiveness was mostly absent.  When the team thanked people for sharing their experiences, perspectives, frustrations and aspirations, I think they meant it.

If I had, even unconsciously, sheilded the client from this difficult conversation, then I might have avoided some temporary discomfort (largely my own?) but I would have prevented some important truth-telling and mutual understanding from emerging.  And the elephants in the room would have remained hidden in plain view.

Let go of the plan

In two of the three workshops, we radically redesigned the agenda part way through the day.  A wise facilitator once said to me that any fool can design a workshop, it’s being able to redesign on the hoof that is the mark of greatness.  I wouldn’t claim to greatness, but my redesigns were good calls!

Today’s was helped enormously by the intervention during lunch of a process-savvy participant who observed that what the organising team wanted to talk about was not what the participants wanted to talk about. We negotiated a ‘deal’ to split the afternoon’s work so that some time was spent on the more pedestrian but urgent client concerns (and the group threw themselves into this) but a larger chunk of time was allocated to some open space. This was agreed by the rest of the group.

As my client and I discussed this on the way to the station, I was reminded of some insights about planning.

• At this AMED event last Friday, we talked in passing about Eisenhower’s claim that “plans are useless but planning is indispensible.”
• A few days before, at an ODiN workshop organised by Chris Rodgers, someone talked about their frustration at hearing people use ‘opportunistic’ as a way of disparaging those charities which apply for funding without a nailed down strategic plan.
• And my reading of this new sustainability leadership book containing experiences written through an action research lens has helped me understand how intention, values and an understanding of what you feel drawn to do can be coupled with being alert to opportunity resulting in emergent strategy.  (There’s an explanation of emergent strategy here, but you may know of a better one – stick it in the comments.)

I think there’s a parallel here with workshop (re)design:

• some values underpinning your work as a facilitator,
• some shared aims (intentions) agreed with participants,
• an understanding of the expertise and resources (e.g. time, space, numbers of different kinds of people, access to information) available for the conversation.
• being alert to ‘what’s trying to happen here’ and getting out of its way.

If you have those things – as a result of doing some planning (having a conversation about planning) – then a strategy is able to emerge if you get out of its way.

Update: This today (1st October 2011) from Dave Pollard would call this resilience planning, rather than strategic planning. An interesting post.

The conversation goes where it goes – who knows what might have happened if…

What I didn’t follow up on was the confession which may have been present in my client’s question: does she find herself unable to let go after a workshop, dwelling on what might have been in a way which doesn’t help her learn but perhaps keeps her in that unconfident phase of believing that she hasn’t done well enough?

I don’t know.  That conversation may have been equally rich.  The coach in me would have gone down that route, but the coach in me was taking some time out.

But by not trying too hard, and offering my own meandering observations, I reflected properly on what I’d learnt from the day.

Spurred on by discussions over at the Involve blog, I want to share a really useful framework for those of you who are thinking about engaging stakeholders or (sections of) the public while you decide what to do about something.

At the start, discussions within the organisation which is asking for input need to establish clarity about what’s alread fixed, what’s completely open and what there are some preferences about but where there is room for change.

Pie chart

Pie Chart: Lindsey Colbourne

Not negotiable - At the start of your engagement process it is likely that what’s decided (and thus not negotiable) may be at the level of overall objectives, and timescales.  For example, a Government department may have a policy objective and a legal deadline to meet.   A local council may know that it wants to revamp a local park, and have a potential funding source whose criteria it needs to meet.

Negotiable – You may have some existing preferences, ideas or initiatives which have been piloted and could be rolled out.  There may be some technical information which will inform the decision or be used to assess options.

Open – There will be aspects of the decision which you have no preference about and where the decisions can be in effect (even if not in law) delegated to others.

Remember that you will also have decided-negotiable-open aspects to your engagement process – the people you talk to, the points at which you engagement them, the methods and channels which are used.

The conversation you have internally with your team about what goes in each slice of the pie can often be dramatically useful: flushing out assumptions which have hitherto been hidden, and exposing disagreements within the team in the safety of your planning conversations rather than in the less forgiving gaze of stakeholders.

The pie slices shift over time

At the start of the process, it’s likely that the ‘decided’ slice is slimmer than the other two.  As the process unfolds, things usually shift from ‘open’ to ‘negotiable’ and from ‘negotiable’ to ‘decided’. Principles and assessment criteria get agreed. Ways of working are negotiated. Working groups or consultation processes are established. Exploratory conversations crystalise into options which get fleshed out and then assessed. Some options get discarded and others emerge as front-runners.

Sometimes, things can move in the other direction: when opposition is so strong that you have to think again, or when new information emerges which shows that ways forward which had seemed marginal are now much more likely to work.  In extreme circumstances, this may lead to the initiative being abandoned altogether. The recent debacle over England’s publicly-owned forests is an example of this.

Tell people what’s ‘up for grabs’

There’s no point asking people what you should do about something if you have already made up your mind.

Nice cartoon illustration here (added 5th July 2011 – thanks to Joanna Knight for the link).

By all means ask for feedback which will help you communicate your decisions more clearly. Understanding people’s concerns and aspirations means you can address them directly in your explanations about why you have made a particular decision and how to expect to implement and review it.

Do people the simple courtesy of letting them know which aspects of situation you are most keen to get their feedback and ideas about – which information will most helpful in informing the decision, the dilemmas you’d like to think through with them, the innovative ideas you’d like to test out.

That way, everyone’s time is spent where it can make the most difference.

Simples.

Thanks to…

Acknowledgements to Lindsey Colbourne and others at the late lamented Sustainable Development Commission, InterAct Networks, Sciencewise-ERC and the Environment Agency who have been developing and working with this framework over the last few years.

Why do we find ourselves in conflict, instead of in disagreement?

One of reasons is the anxiety we feel when faced with uncertainty. Do we know the facts? Do we know the cause and effect relationships between them? How sure can we be that our actions will have the intended consequences?

I’m delighted to be able to bring you the latest words of wisdom on managing uncertainty, from Andrew Acland, facilitator and mediator extraordinaire and author of “A sudden outbreak of common sense: Managing conflict through mediation”.

Andrew says:

“Uncertainty is a feature of many of the situations in which mediators and facilitators are asked to work for several reasons. First, our work tends to be in fairly complex situations, and often uncertainty is one source of that complexity. Secondly, any situation that involves human beings involves uncertainty: we are a tricky species. Thirdly, uncertainty creates conflict – which is why we get called for in the first place.

The purpose of this note is to suggest what we can do with uncertainty when it rears its awkward head in the middle of an already difficult meeting.”

Click here to read Andrew’s full paper.

I’ve met some interesting and challenging facilitators recently who have helped me reframe and explore my facilitation work and my sustainable development aims.

Our conversations together have been so refreshing and enriching, we wondered if it might be possible to open them up to a wider group…

So we have created Deep Open.

It’s a one-day workshop for people who are interested in groups, conversation, change and sustainable development.  We hope to enable conversations which allow us to be aware of our feelings (physical and emotional), alert to difference and conflict, challenging and honest.  We’re going to experiment with having our feelings rather than letting our feelings have us.  We’re going to experiement with not distracting ourselves when things feel uncomfortable.  We’re going to try to resist being task-focussed, whilst staying together with purpose.

If you are intruiged by this – rather than irritated – then you might want to join us on 19th May in London for this workshop.

We’re running the event in conjunction with AMED. The others involved are Johnnie Moore, Debbie Warrener and Luke Razzell.

In November ’09 I blogged that my toes were in the water, trying out how to integrate e-communications into workshops.

Over a year later and I’m happy paddling up to my ankles: using cut-down post-its, a document camera and telepresence.  I was delighted to work with a client which had installed video-conferencing in many locations in the UK and US.  We were able to run a half-day workshop for a small team who were spread over three different locations.

This is a stock picture from Teliris on wikimedia commons, but it gives an idea of what the room looked like. In addition to the large screens, the people in the ‘main’ room had screens in the desk where images from slide shows or the document camera were visible.

Here are some very practical lessons and tips from that experience, firstly about things you can do before the meeting begins:

• When designing the session, keep it interactive, don’t feel that you have to make it one-way just because participants are on different continents.  Consider what might cause you to alter your design.  For example, I had expected there to be at least two people in each location, which would enable pairs / small group discussion.  But in the end one of our locations was used by just one person. So I adjusted the meeting design to include quiet thinking time, rather than pairs discussion. I asked everyone to make a note of their key points, so that everyone was ready to say something in the later round robin.
• Make sure you check the time difference between locations, and double-check it!
• Visit the room you’ll be facilitating from, and play with the equipment.  How do you enable participants to view slides or an electronic document?  How do you dial up the other locations?  What do you do if the connection is lost? How much delay is there when people speak?
• If you’re lucky enough to have a ceiling-mounted document camera, can the camera pick up writing or diagrams on a flip chart sheet or on the desk?  How big does the writing need to be? Where are the edges of the camera’s vision, and do these match the edges displayed to participants in other locations? Mark the edges with masking tape.
• Make friends with the IT / facilities team.  What works well in their experience, and what trouble-shooting tips can they share.  How do you get hold of them during the meeting?

In the meeting

Having worked out how the document camera worked, and tested different sizes of post-it and handwriting, I was able to use small square post-its to record individual contributions and move them around until we had collaboratively created a timeline of the organisation’s journey to this point.

Later in the session, I recorded contributions about people’s vision of the future in a mind-map which was also broadcast live to the people in other location, via the document camera.  Unfortunately one of the locations lost the feed, so we ended up with some people not being able to see what the rest of the meeting could see: an imbalance which we were unable to correct before the meeting ended.

For my own use, I made a little map of who was sitting where, and used it to keep track of who’d spoken. This enabled me to invite contributions from time to time.

This was a half-day meeting, so I built in a comfort break which everybody really needed. Keeping focussed and engaged in virtual meetings are harder work than face-to-face, I think.

Improvements?

In future, I’d like to work out a practical way of integrating a running record into a meeting like this.  A simple word document shared live through google doc or a similar system might work.  You would need to check that everyone could access it – firewalls might be a problem.  Alternatively, a bespoke webmeeting package with a whiteboard could be used. I’m getting experience of both Huddle and Central Desktop in different client work at the moment.