My top tips for running meetings and workshops
A couple of colleagues recently asked me how I plan workshops and meetings. As I was answering them with some of my favourite resources, I thought “that would make a good blog post wouldn’t it”…
Et voila, here’s everything I know about facilitating meetings and workshops.
The Tl;DR is:
- Write a good objective first
- Decide who needs to be there
- What’s the best use of discussion time?
- Set expectations
- Warm up the room
- Run activities in an inclusive, collaborative way
- Manage tangents and emotions
- Close the space
- Close the loop
Phew only 9 things lol. OK let’s do this.
Write a good objective first
It might be a bit of a joke that millenials are goal oriented in everything they do, but that habit certainly serves me well when it comes to workshops.
Before asking for someone else’s time, whether it’s 30 minutes or 3 hours, I want to make sure I know what I want to get out of the discussion. This one statement then helps me make every other decision, like who should be there, what’s the best use of the discussion time, where is it held….
Putting my power lens on as well for a second; I see asking for someone else’s time as an exercise of power. And especially as I move into more senior roles, I want to make sure I’m respecting my colleagues’ time. So I feel like pairing an invite with a clear objective is essential to evidence why I want to that time from people.
Decide who needs to be there
As above, you’re exercising some power when you send out meeting invites, both in terms of who’s included or excluded. So I always take a few moments to consider who is essential to be there to make sure I’m using my power responsibly.
I try to open projects with stakeholder maps to help with this. Here’s an image of the core-involve-inform model, which is my preferred way to do it; but there’s loads of others! Usually this helps me work out who to include and when… and, especially with the ‘include’ stakeholders, often it doesn’t need to be a meeting!
But think about self-organisation and power too… is there a way you can facilitate ‘opting in’? Rather than being a facilitator asking/ telling people to come, can you give people in your team enough information to decide if they want to come or not. This is something I’ve been thinking changing in my own practise recently, especially after re-reading resources like Liberating Structures and the Reinventing Organisations guide to meetings which emphasise more distributed responsibility and power across a team.
I write more about attendees lists in my companion piece in this series as well.
What’s the best use of discussion time?
So you know your objective and who’s going to be there; now to think about how long you need and how to use discussion time.
When working out the timings for an agenda I always do the math of number of people multiplied by how long I should give each person to talk. I learned the hard way from facilitating too many over-running discussions, and started using this to try and get better.
Say you have three big questions to answer in a meeting with five other people, and you want everyone to have around three minutes to respond to each point; that’s 3 questions x 6 people x 3 minutes, or 54 minutes of discussion time… If you don’t have 54 minutes, something needs to give! That could be:
- how long people talk for. In which case you need to emphasise brevity, tell them you’re short of time and to respect the clock, and even maybe visibly use a stopwatch somewhere so they know how long they’ve got.
- how many people speak. In which case you reduce the number of people in the meeting, or purposefully set up a dynamic of 1–2 key responders and tell everyone else to be yes/no people.
- how many questions you ask. Maybe you just do 1 of your questions.
I also pair this with some Liberating Structures (especially 1–2–4-all). Does everyone need to talk to everyone, what’s the purpose of discussion? Is talking the best means of getting information and ideas out? Is there a different way to get people to share and build ideas that doesn’t need a plenary session? Particularly with some of the workshops I prepared with colleagues at Citizens Advice, I realised you don’t always need to do everything in plenary; and it can be quite liberating to embrace small group discussions to maximise the amount of time each person gets to speak without making the meeting too long.
So following that same example, you could get your 54 minutes of discussion time squeezed into just 27 minutes, or even 18 minutes, if you were to run the discussions in groups of three or two people. The trick then is re-combining your ideas from the three groups at the end, which you could do through a mix of written notes and spoken updates.
Set expectations
The work of most meetings starts long before it even starts. It’s in the agenda, the pre-work you or others do….
I try to explain what I’m expecting from people through all the above (agenda + objective + who needs to be there and why) and lots of comms so people are prepared and can do the best they can. And thinking about power again, it’s good to re-assure people “you have something valuable to contribute”, especially if you sense some power dynamics between team-mates that might make some people speak less.
One thing I have learned though is to be selective about how much information to share ahead of time. If you know your colleagues are really busy, make sure you acknowledge that; “here’s something that will take you 10 minutes to read if you have the time, but if not don’t worry because we’ll discuss in the meeting”. User Manual sessions have been useful for me in the past to also learn about peoples’ preferences; some people love the briefing notes, no matter how busy they are!
Warm up the room
You never know what energies people are bringing to a meeting… No matter how close you are as a team I think it’s always good to warm up the room in some way. It helps to get everyone on the same energy and moving in the same direction.
My default is to do a “on a scale of 1–9 which [insert animal] are you today”… My new favourite is this one based on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
Warmups help you check microphones are working if you’re running it remotely. It’s also a great chance to check people can use any tech or tools you’re using; one thing I’ve tried before when using Miro or Mural for the first time with people was to run the warmup exercise in a board, to get people used to the basic mechanics of adding notes, writing and moving them around. Where you see people struggling for whatever reason (hardware, wifi speed, familiarity) it’s great to spot this early and offer extra support so those people don’t get left out.
Run activities in an inclusive, collaborative way
There are two main influences, among a host of other tips, that have shaped how I run activities in a meeting. One is a book I read a very long time ago that I can’t remember the name of, but it was something like “101 activities for a great workshop”; sorry I can’t remember! The other is Liberating Structures.
What I picked up from all that, and from watching a host of other facilitators over the years is:
- Prepare simple instructions that are easy to follow; don’t try to do too much at once. If you’re using interactive whiteboards etc, writing the instructions out ahead of time allows others to read along as you go if they forget or need clarification.
- Think about what might go wrong and make sure there’s back-up plans
- Share the facilitation around. It mixes things up, but also great for managing team energy and not over-burdening one person
- Test it beforehand and make sure it works as you’d hope!
- Regular breaks are essential. Not everyone can sit still and concentrate for hours at a time, so first and foremost this is an accessibility consideration me. But whoever you are, I think it’s good to break things up into smaller digestible chunks with room to decompress and switch context in order to get the best out of everyone there.
- Try to capture notes as you go. This makes the write-up much quicker and easier, but also it’s a really good way to show ‘you’re being heard’ when people can see their thoughts written down.
- Utilise music and movement to manage the energy in the room. If you’ve been in a meeting with me you know I love using background music to break some of the awkwardness during moments of silence, or to raise the energy levels. Getting people to move around and stretch is also great for getting the blood flowing to the brain.
Manage tangents and emotions
One of the most difficult bits of facilitation, especially if you’re particularly conflict averse (I know I can be sometimes), is managing tangents or difficult conversations. I’m still working on this but some things that help me are
- Having a strong objective that you can keep coming back to. It helps anchor what’s in or out of scope if you need to close down a particular tangent.
- Warm-ups are good place to spot any tensions. Ideally the warm-up helps people leave any stress, anxiety or negative feelings at the door and welcomes people into a warm, comforting and safe space.
- Use some of the same tips that you might use when opening a piece of User Research to set the scope of a discussion and explain you might have to cut people off if you think you’re getting off track. I write about this in this other post.
- If you have User Manuals, this can help you understand peoples’ preferences for meeting times and styles.
- Team charters are also great for setting agreed ‘rules of engagement’. You can use these statements to explain where you’re coming from if you need to make any interventions.
- Having a car park space, where you can park tangential conversations to come back to, is another way to show that you’ve heard and appreciate what’s being said, even if it’s not quite the right time to discuss it.
- Remember the tips from Non-Violent Communication as well. If there’s a disagreement that seems like it can’t be resolved easily, make sure to separate observations, thoughts, and feelings; and agree on objectives that you’re working towards. Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of what’s going on (so the conflict is at the level of observations and thoughts/ feelings), others it’s a debate about strategy to achieve a goal. I wrote about this in this other post if you want to read more.
Close the space
I talk about this in another blog, which I’ve linked here.
Following the principle of “do no evil” and “using our power responsibly”, I always try to find suitable ways to close the room. It’s about closing up discussions and feelings so everyone is able to move onto whatever is next for them in a positive way.
Often it’s just as simple as recapping “this is what we agreed, this is who’s doing what next”. If it’s been a tense or difficult discussion, you may want to use a check-out to relieve that pressure in some way. There’s some good exercises at this website. Even just some breathing exercises can help clear the mood!
This is also a great way to show thanks to people; you’ve asked for their time, they’ve given you what you wanted (hopefully), it’s only fair to show your appreciation. If you tie this back to your original objective and why you asked people to come, you can make much more specific and powerful statements about how much you’ve achieved and that you couldn’t have done it without the people there.
One extremely cringey thing I try to get people to do is to give themselves a pat on the back… I do it slowly instruction by instruction (raise your arm into the air, touch your shoulder blade, give yourself a pat) to conceal the surprise. It works surprisingly well!
Close the loop
And finally, after it’s all said and done, it’s time to share what you discussed and make sure the outputs of the meeting live on afterward. This is all your basic stuff like:
- Circulating notes and outcomes for people that couldn’t be there (promoting transparency and inclusion), and as a reminder to the people that were there
- updating any of your team’s core documents (strategy, roadmap, decision log etc) to reflect what was discussed, to ensure sure that decision lives on.
- making sure any agreed actions are acted on (potentially you can do this through team stand-ups if you have them?)
And that’s it…
This post shared some things I know about individual actions and skills to create and facilitate great meetings.
As I was writing this I started thinking wider though, about how the team and organisation you sit in may also affect how meetings are often conducted. Part 2 is linked here, where I talk about the role of different organisational structures and systems on meeting habits and culture.
