Facilitate better workshops and meetings with these 5 exercises
Do you regularly facilitate workshops or meetings but don’t quite feel like a full pro yet? Here are five tools that will help you sharpen your facilitation skills and confidently guide any session.
This tool selection was curated by Martin from the Neue Narrative team.
One role in the new world of work that I believe is seriously underestimated is that of the moderator or facilitator.
The translation suggestions in the LEO online dictionary already capture a lot of what facilitation means: easing, enabling, paving the way, supporting, and mediating. That’s exactly what a good facilitator does.
The facilitation role is an important leadership role. Within a meeting, it has the power to decide what is helpful in the moment and what isn’t. It takes responsibility for making good use of the time and ensuring the meeting achieves its goal. It always makes sense for one person to hold this role.
In some meetings, the facilitator won’t be very visible (though having the role still does no harm). In others, they’ll be heavily challenged because everyone is talking at once and no one knows what the meeting is actually about anymore. If you don’t yet have this role, make sure to introduce it and give it the importance it deserves. Define clearly what its purpose is and which responsibilities it carries.
The most important responsibilities of a facilitator are:
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Before the meeting, the role makes clear why the meeting exists. This can be done via a message or email in advance, or communicated in the calendar invitation.
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The role ensures that the agreed rules are followed. For example, if your team has agreed on a specific decision-making process, the facilitator guides the meeting along that process.
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Probably the trickiest part: the role gives participants the floor and takes it away when necessary. This isn’t always easy, but if everyone present is clear that this person holds the facilitation role, it becomes much more doable.
One thing is clear: it’s worth investing time in developing your facilitation skills. In this collection, I’ll introduce you to five small tools that will help you become a better facilitator.
1. Create space for arrival
Every meeting and every workshop benefits from a short check-in. It helps everyone arrive properly and gathers important context about the people in the room.
In its simplest form, this means coming together as a group, posing one or at most two questions, and then having everyone answer in turn. These can be very open questions, such as:
- How are you showing up today?
- What’s keeping you from being fully present right now?
If that fits the group better, you can also ask questions with a stronger work focus, for example:
- Which completed to-do made you happy this week?
- What’s the one thing you definitely want to get done this week?
For inspiration for good check-in questions, take a look at the check-in generator at tscheck.in.
2. A basic structure you can rely on
Every format is different, and every team needs its own solutions that truly fit. Still, for a facilitator, there’s nothing more valuable than building blocks that work every time.
The Meeting Canvas is exactly such a basic structure. It includes:
- a checklist with key elements for a good meeting
- a section for standard agenda items (e.g. reviewing projects, reviewing KPIs)
- a section for the open agenda. Meaning topics brought in by participants
- a section for next steps
With these building blocks, you can create almost any meeting format.
3. What do you need? Working with tensions
Now we’re switching into pro mode. In the concept of tension-based work, there’s at least one question that can really help you, in your role as facilitator, to generate quick, solution-oriented outcomes. The question is: What do you need?
We know this concept from the organisational model Holacracy. A tension is defined as the gap between what is and what could be. It’s a positive impulse for change. Unused potential that only becomes productive once the underlying tension is brought into the team.
In discussion rounds, participants therefore bring in tensions rather than vague topics, and your role is to help resolve them. This is where the key question comes in: What do you need to resolve your tension or close this topic?
For example:
- Do you just want to share information?
- Do you need specific information?
- Do you want to request a to-do or start a project?
Earlier, I described how difficult it can be to take the floor away from a participant. With the concept of tension-based work and this guiding question that becomes much easier.
4. Imagine the worst meeting possible
Many teams spend a large part of their working week in meetings. Yet surprisingly few teams ever pause to reflect on what actually makes a meeting good or bad.
The Meeting from Hell exercise takes a playful approach to this question. Instead of starting with best practices, participants first imagine the worst meeting possible. From there, they flip every element into its opposite and design their ideal meeting.
The process works in three steps:
- Describe the worst meeting imaginable
- Turn these characteristics into their positive opposite
- Develop a shared meeting manifesto with clear rules
By the end, the team has defined a small set of principles that help make meetings more effective, energising and purposeful.
5. A decision process for every case
To conclude this collection, I’d like to recommend a decision-making process that you can suggest whenever participants get stuck and can’t reach a decision without a clear and reliable structure.
The great strength of this process is that it helps cool down heated discussions and breaks decision-making into seven clear steps that ultimately lead to a solution:
- Clarify the tension: What problem needs to be solved?
- Concrete proposal: Present a prototype solution.
- Clarifying questions: Stakeholders ask relevant questions.
- Reaction round: Everyone shares their perspective and feedback.
- Refine the proposal: The prototype is adapted based on the feedback.
- Objection round: Participants raise any relevant objections or safety concerns.
- Integration: All valid concerns are integrated into the proposal.
In the end, you arrive at a decision prototype that is at least “safe enough to try” — meaning it may not be everyone’s favourite option, but it’s good enough to start moving forward with.