Jacquie Riddell’s Post

Today I was paid a lovely compliment about my ability to moderate a meeting effectively and efficiently while keeping an upbeat energy. It got me thinking about other great facilitators that I have had the pleasure of observing and learning from in my career. Here are a few things I have learned and deploy in my facilitation: Preparation and Agenda Setting: invest time in preparing for the meeting. Collaborate with key stakeholders to create a clear and focused agenda that outlines the meeting's objectives, expected outcomes, and the roles of each participant. Agenda is shared in advance to give attendees time to prepare and contribute effectively. Active Listening and Observation: actively listen to participants and pay attention to their body language and tone. Gauge the level of engagement and understanding, ensuring that everyone is mentally present and encouraged to contribute. Inclusive Environment: create a safe and inclusive environment where all voices are heard and respected. Encourage participation from everyone, ensuring that no individual or group dominates the conversation. Intervene as necessary to prevent any dismissive behavior towards certain ideas or individuals. Guidance and Focus: steer conversations towards the defined success criteria. Keep participants focused on the agenda's objectives, preventing the meeting from going off track. Any topics that arise but are not directly relevant are noted in a backlog or parking lot for future consideration. Encouraging Healthy Debate: promote healthy and constructive debate. Encourage differing perspectives, diverse opinions, and dissenting views. At the same time, ensure that debates are respectful and aimed at finding the best solutions. Clarifying and Defining Success Criteria: if the success criteria are unclear or missing, work with the participants to define them. Ask clarifying questions, gathering input, and help the group reach a consensus on what constitutes a successful outcome. Time Management: keep a close eye on the clock, ensuring that discussions stay within the allocated time frames. Balance the need to delve into important topics while also moving the meeting forward to cover all agenda items. Conflict Resolution: step in to mediate and find common ground. Help participants understand each other's perspectives and work towards finding mutually agreeable solutions. Documentation and Follow-up: an assigned scribe documents key points, action items, decisions made, and any changes to strategies or agreements. Share the meeting minutes, action items, and recordings to ensure that everyone is clear on the next steps and their respective responsibilities. Check in on execution status consistently. Continuous Improvement: seek feedback from participants and use it to improve facilitation skills and future meetings. Be open to learning and adapting their approach to meet the unique needs of different groups and contexts.

I love facilitating. It was a course I took several years ago at Roffey Park Institute called the Art of Facilitation that did it. I signed up because the title of the programme spoke to me – the ‘art’ of facilitation – yes! Led by the brilliant Helena Clayton and colleagues, I left the programme feeling like a more skilled, curious and compassionate facilitator. Years later I continue to draw on their insights and feedback in my work. One facilitation practice we didn’t explore though was co-facilitation. I didn’t even think about its absence on the programme until I read an interesting report this week by SessionLab into the State of Facilitation 2024 (see link in comments). The report found that experienced facilitators are more likely to facilitate with a colleague than those who are starting off. Reflecting on my own journey as a facilitator, when I started off, I worried that asking a client to pay for a co-facilitator would be seen as a sign of weakness. I’ve since experienced many times the benefits of co-facilitation - the creativity, our combined ability to navigate complexity, the different skills that each of us brings, the joy of working together. I see co-facilitation as a sign of strength – and huge value to the client – not weakness. It’s something I would advocate almost every time. And it’s not just for large groups. I recently designed and facilitated a series of very small focus groups with Al Pacifico-France. The insights from co-facilitating were huge, for the client, for participants, and for both of us. For all of you out there who also love facilitation, there is loads more in the Session Lab report about the experience of facilitating in 2023, about the challenges, changes and what might lie ahead in 2024. There is a pressing need to increase the diversity of facilitators. I think there is a need to focus on building more inclusive facilitation skills and practice too. That said, I finished the report feeling proud of what we do as facilitators to bring people together, and enable them to work well together, on the things that matter.

Are you new to facilitating or just generally don't love it much? Yesterday, I was... Leading a train-the-trainer session for one of our clients and wanted to share a quick list of tips I gave them. Over the course of my career, I've gotten the chance to learn from some of the best facilitators out there (including my Liberation Labs co-founder, Michael Gregor 🏳️🌈). Here are a handful of key ideas to keep in mind, especially if you're newer to facilitation OR don't enjoy it much 😂 Feel free to pass these along to others who could benefit from them! 💡 YOU are the conduit of the outcomes and experience. Slides or other materials are helpful tools but they only work when you are the driver and fully own that role. 💡 Shared expectations are there for a reason. They shouldn't *only* be whipped out when topics might feel emotionally charged; they can be a way to level-set at the start of almost any meeting. Feel empowered in reminding the group when one or more are not being met, particularly if harm is being caused to you and/or others in the space. This might sound like, “I hear you. I actually want to take a moment to pause and ground us in our shared expectation to speak from our own experiences. Can you reframe your share to be in line with that?” 💡 The facilitation experience is designed to be bidirectional. Even if you're more introverted (or an #HSP like me!) facilitating *can* feel like a fun and purposeful opportunity to create community, learn about each other, and leverage the existing wisdom in the space if you stay open to it. Allow each new group to surface and teach YOU something new, even if you've delivered that specific content a million times before. 💡 Use this chance to validate and instill confidence in attendees. Underscore and appreciate specific contributions to the conversation. This might sound like, “I appreciate what you just named, Maria, especially the part about taking notes about your student’s life and interests if it’ll help you remember later.” 💡 Create an inclusive and equitable experience for all. There are obviously COUNTLESS ways we should be doing this in the lead-up to, during, and after sessions but here's one way: gently encourage all attendees to speak up and engage. This might sound like, “I’d love to invite those who haven’t shared yet to jump in here, because it's important we hear from as many voices as possible.” Then take time to PAUSE and allow for someone new to fill the space. This is not an exhaustive list of course 🖤 What are tips you would share with newer facilitators? #employeeengagement #facilitationskills #learninganddevelopment

GETTING STARTED IN FACILITATION🪄 In my experience it is important to identify your goals. Is the facilitation activity one of a leader who frequently meets with a small group? Or is it a strategic facilitation where while not the group's leader you will be facilitating a larger meeting? In the former send out an advance memo outlining the purpose of the meeting and invite the group to be prepared to share their ideas. At the meeting review the goals: e.g. "By the end of this meeting we will have identified three changes we would like to make to our current summer student selection process." Then proceed to invite the group to share their ideas one at a time and record them. Once ideas are recorded then you can discuss in more detail and finally use a ranking method to determine the top three. For the latter, a large group facilitation, a more detailed memo with a clear goal(s) is needed. Think of your large group as clusters of small groups each group discussing an issue or problem. Your role rather than leader, will be that of a conductor taking the group through a series of discussions, reporting out their discussions and so on. Timing must be more precise and each step in the process must be planned carefully. In both cases you are there to draw out or "facilitate" the flow of ideas. Reviewing a set of group norms for the meeting will go a long way in preventing some typical problems facilitators face. Norms might include: 1) respect everyone's ideas 2) one speaker at a time, 3) build on each other's ideas and so on. Finally if you are new to facilitation start small, work with a more experienced facilitator, feel free to appropriate other facilitators methods and take risks occasionally. Don't forget to reflect on each experience: "what worked well; what do I need to change; what do I need to stop doing for next time? Check out my book for more ideas.

"What do you do if your facilitation session falls flat?" I would like to share insights from my extensive experience in facilitating sessions (Based on my contribution to the community article). Throughout my career, I have encountered various challenges during facilitation sessions, including audience silence, passivity, and a barrage of questions. However, I view questions as invaluable opportunities that provide insight into our group's dynamics and enable us to tailor our approach accordingly. In my experience, such behaviors often stem from: - a lack of clarity regarding the session's purpose, - a dearth of vision regarding the meeting's ultimate objectives, - participants' failure to recognize the relevance of the tasks at hand, - fear of judgment from colleagues, - underlying distrust within the group. To effectively address these issues, I adhere to a structured approach when preparing and organizing sessions. Some of the key strategies I employ include: 1.Clearly defining session objectives and expected outcomes when inviting participants, ensuring alignment and clarity from the outset. 2.Conducting preliminary meetings or discussions with key stakeholders(or antagonists) to align objectives and address any potential concerns. 3.Articulating the session's purpose and expected outcomes at the outset of the meeting, fostering an environment conducive to open dialogue and encouraging questions. 4.Incorporating icebreaking activities, tailored to the specific dynamics of the group, to foster engagement and rapport among participants. 5.Establishing session ground rules focused on fostering equality, mutual respect, and an absence of judgment, thereby creating a safe and inclusive environment for collaboration. By adhering to these principles, I strive to create facilitation sessions that are engaging, productive, and conducive to meaningful collaboration and problem-solving. And now, my friends, I'm curious: What approaches do you employ to navigate through facilitation challenges? Let's share insights and strategies to enhance our facilitation skills together!

Facilitation in companies is becoming more well-known in many sectors now, but you may be wondering why external facilitators in particular, are fast becoming a necessity in organisations of all sizes. This article shares some great questions on why facilitation can be key to everything from decision-making and conflict-resolving to strategy-making https://lnkd.in/gBVEtqHk but we thought you might like to hear about the design and feedback from one of our recent projects too! We were asked to work with the leadership team of a large hospital that had multiple areas of need across their wards. They wanted to troubleshoot some situations that felt unclear and prioritise their identified challenges, so that they could focus their time and resources in the most efficient way. Our initial 2-day workshop on Alignment enabled the leadership team to understand and feel aligned on the real challenge at play, whilst confirming that the time spent on solving this, would be worth it. We supported the team to identify and flag initial issues that could arise in the work and created an initial action plan to help move things forward. Our second Leadership workshop focused on Strategy, helping everyone collaborate on creating the goal and understand what success would look like for them and the various wards. We guided the team through some tricky conversations looking at how they could reach their goal and importantly, making a decision on what order they needed to do things. They collaborated to create their ‘North Star’ and finished by creating a timeline and roadmap. The leadership team also formalised their individual commitments to helping reach the agreed North Star within the next 6 months. The outcome of this work led to a project giving each ward a day, to help them identify some of the more granular challenges that could impact the Hospital reaching this North Star. We facilitated a day with each team to identify the conflicts and challenges that were specific to their teams, whilst helping them co-create solutions and ideas that were achievable for them to take forward. We also provided the ward teams with materials which they could use to self-facilitate a review and reflect on how things were progressing, within the following few months. The feedback from the workshops and ongoing impact from their time with us has been hugely positive, with their hospital director feeding back: “Having outside people helping us makes such a difference - you did it really deftly and steered it well when people weren’t making decision, or where we had to stick to time. Even though you don’t work in our industry, you just got it. You’ve honestly blown me away. We loved your approach; you ask great questions and importantly let the team lead to their natural conclusions, whilst being guided by you both - you have such a great unity, I can’t wait to get you back in!"

Are you ready to ignite the sparks of creativity and collaboration? Facilitation Week is just around the corner, and it's time to put on our thinking caps and let our creative spirits soar! 🚀🎉 Facilitation Week isn't your run-of-the-mill event; it's a vibrant celebration of Process Facilitation, a chance for us to come together as a community and make some noise about what we do best! 🌟 Your Mission (Should You Choose to Accept It) 🌟 Today, we're amping up the energy and asking EVERYONE to make a huge splash in the facilitation universe, and we need your sessions on board to make it happen. 🌊 But that's just the beginning! We're not just asking you to participate; we're inviting you to become Facilitation Superstars! Here's how: 1. BLOGGING BONANZA: Unleash your inner writer and create captivating blogs or articles about Process Facilitation. Share your wisdom, insights, and innovative ideas with the world. 2. VIDEO MAGIC: Lights, camera, action! Make short, snappy videos about Process Facilitation. Whether it's a how-to, a success story, or a hilarious outtake, videos are the way to go. 3. CASE STUDY CRUSADERS: Dive deep into Facilitation success stories and craft interesting case studies. Inspire others with your stories of triumph and transformation. 4. BOOK BUFFS UNITE: Love reading? Share your thoughts by reviewing books on Process Facilitation or Facilitation Skills. Your reviews could spark someone else's passion for learning. 5. LET YOUR IMAGINATION SOAR: Have an unconventional idea to celebrate Process Facilitation? We're all ears! Think outside the box and propose something fun, exciting, and entirely you. DATES TO REMEMBER: Facilitation Week kicks off on Monday, September 11th, and runs until September 17th. It's a whole week of creativity, learning, and sharing. Together, let's turn Facilitation Week into an explosive celebration that resonates far and wide. We're on a mission to spread the magic of Process Facilitation to the world, and with your enthusiasm and creativity, there's no limit to what we can achieve! 👏🎈 So, gear up, team! Let's make some noise, inspire, and connect during Facilitation Week like never before. Get ready to share your passion and talents with the world, and let's make this a Facilitation Week to remember! 🌟💃 @Shalaka Gundi (IAF Certified Professional Facilitator) @Archana Pingle (CPF - Certified Professional Facilitator) Sanjay Dugar, CPF Hardy Alexander, PCC-ICF @Chander Sharma - Clarity Coach Jawad Ahmed, IAF Certified Professional Facilitator @Shubha Rajan Kavitha Talreja Bhanumathi Cousik Ramesh Srinivasan Bhavana Arora @Sushma Banthia Bharti Maru Madhujit Singh Raghavender Yadgirkar Parineeta Mehra Brunda Manurkar @Michelle Pinto Mala Bali @Puja Thakur Chamundeeswari Venkat Dhwani Shah @Preeti A. Deepak Verma,PMP Varma Dr. Shreya Govind ( Ph.D) Ketki Anand Kirti Mutreja Pragya Taneja @Vidya GV Brinda Sahota Murali Venkateswaran

😍 Designed especially for people who work with people, Integral facilitation training: The Roots is a place to take a breath from your daily life and make a step forward in your professional and personal development.   While learning you meet like-minded people and grow your network.  🔑 Today, we want to share with you why facilitation is the key to working successfully with people, teams and events. 🌀 Facilitation is the art of enhancing communication and making processes between people clearer, smoother so the group achieves better results. When you're a facilitator you don't just manage meetings, you create a space where ideas flourish and people feel inspired and engaged. 🌀 When working with a team, a facilitator creates clear structure and guides processes. This helps participants focus on the important points and are able to achieve efficiency and satisfaction. It also helps to resolve conflicts if they arise. 🌀 It is important that the events are not only informative but also interactive. Facilitated discussions, working sessions and creative exercises allow people not only to listen but also to actively participate in the process. This creates deeper understanding and engagement. We believe that by facilitating structured dialogue and exchange of ideas, people feel inspired to get involved and become part of the change. 🙌 In a world where collaboration and interaction are key, facilitation is an integral part of working successfully with people, teams and events. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments! 💬👇

I started with one session design and switched "on the spot" to another!   I was ready to facilitate a second strategic planning session with a nonprofit board of directors when it took an unexpected turn. A few hours before the session, the board president received urgent information about a unique and impactful opportunity available to the organization. The participants agreed that they had to use the session to decide whether to take the opportunity. I had to immediately design activities that would help the participants make the most beneficial decisions about the opportunity presented to them. Here's how we navigated the whirlwind and reached a decision.   1️⃣ Understanding the opportunity and sharing perspectives 🔤 Description of the facts: The Chair and other board members provided information about the opportunity with each board member asking clarifying questions.   👂 Active Listening: Participants individually wrote notes about how they saw the opportunity fitting with their goals from the first session. They then discussed in pairs with one person being the speaker and talking for two minutes about her thoughts. The second person gave the gift of listening. They then changed roles. I then facilitated a total group discussion about what they said and heard. This activity helped the participants understand their own and each other’s thoughts about the opportunity.   2️⃣ Weighing the Pros and Cons ✔ ✖ We listed the pros (advantages) and cons (disadvantages) related to the opportunity and then discussed them thoroughly.   3️⃣ Embracing Diverse Views 😀 Be a Champion! 🙁 A Naysayer! 😑 A Devil’s Advocate! I invited the participants to speak as: 1.      Champions supporting the opportunity offered by the situation, 2.      Naysayers opposed to the opportunity, 3.      Devil’s advocates to question every aspect of the opportunity.   4️⃣ Reaching a decision 🖐 Five-Finger Method: When the group seemed to have discussed all aspects of the opportunity, I called for a five-finger decision based on Michael Wilkinson’s book "The Secrets of Facilitation." Each person put up their fingers to indicate their support for the opportunity, ranging from 1 strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree.   👍 Final Round: Each member shared their decision, culminating in a collective decision.   Throughout this process, I applied principles and techniques from The Circle Way and the Focused Conversation (ORID), adapting to suit the group's needs. A skilled facilitator needs to be highly skilled in one or two approaches and draw on them in moments of conflict, confusion, and in my case, rapid re-design of a session.   Facilitation is a rewarding mix of pre-design and “on the spot” response to the needs of the group. Enjoy the challenge and freedom of this balance. #facilitation #design #sessions #workshops #meetings #change #opportunity #decisionmaking #conversations #discussions #dialogue #onthefly #pivot

Central PA friends and colleagues! I am hosting a facilitation training at 3 Dots Downtown this Friday June 14th. We have 3 spots remaining. Have you ever experienced a “this could have been an email” meeting - one that leaves you bored and disengaged? Has your group ever struggled to meet its goals for gatherings, events, or processes? Do you feel disconnected from the people you work or collaborate with? You may be missing a secret ingredient - effective facilitation. Facilitation is the art of making work easier and unlocking growth and learning. Facilitation can be the alchemy that engages your group, fosters relationship building and inclusive environments, helps meet your outcomes, or supports clear and direct communication. You don’t need to be a trained facilitator to facilitate. In fact, you are probably already facilitating in your work, social, and home life in ways you might not even recognize. You already are a facilitator! Now it’s time to tap into the power of your skills and hone your craft intentionally. More details and registration: https://lnkd.in/gGBSip35