Becoming a better facilitator one workshop at a time

Some tips from field experience on how to handle complex engagements and effectively guide your team to successful outcomes.

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Good facilitation is a pivotal skill in client engagements at IBM. Both art and science, it helps teams in a workshop navigate the unknowns of a project, encourage new ideas, evaluate options critically, align understanding, and converge on opportunities.

In fact, the role of facilitator is one of strategic significance. In client engagements, for instance, it allows the business to 1) drive everyone´s efforts to understand the crux of the problem, 2) identify achievable outcomes that could be pursued through a POC, and 3) create a plan to accomplish them.

It is a three-pronged pattern of action, that closely matches the elements of strategy as outlined by the great author Richard Rumelt — a diagnosis of the problem space, a guiding statement and a set of cohesive actions.

Importantly, facilitation is something that never comes too easily, regardless of your design background or of how many Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT) workshops you´ve run in the past. The truth is, facilitation is a practice that we develop as we go. It encompasses a gamut of creative and managerial skills that you’re likely to have learned in other contexts.

With that said, as I recently embarked on the journey to become an EDT coach, I found myself reflecting on some key learnings and on some advice I have been giving to people I’ve been coaching.

While each workshop has unique requirements, there are shortcuts and best practices that can help you confidently handle whatever client or internal engagement you might happen to be thrown into. Here are some areas to focus on:

Promote a culture of co-creation and accountability within your team

In one her brilliant pieces, facilitator expert, Alison Coward, discusses team culture and brings up a distinction between consumers and co-creators. While the former are co-workers who passively accept a team’s dynamics, the latter proactively strive to ameliorate and re-invent existing collaboration patterns. It’s a concept that resonates quite strongly with many of the engagements I had the chance to lead.

Sometimes in fact, the facilitator is implicitly “expected” to carry most of the weight of a workshop, from its preparation to the after-session documenting. But the multidisciplinary nature of the problems we try to solve (mirrored, not by chance, by the composition of our teams: designers, data scientists, architects, AI engineers and business experts) call for a more dynamic involvement of all team members.

In the same way that it´s not sustainable for a leader to be solely responsible for workplace culture, it can be equally unfeasible for a facilitator to drive every aspect of a design thinking engagement. In fairness, everyone’s contribution should be encouraged to ensure the best possible outcome for all of the stakeholders involved.

For a start, it´s crucial that you acknowledge your team’s expectations as early as possible. By getting a sense of what everyone is trying to accomplish — to gather technical information, for instance, rather than to delve into a client’s broader business strategy — a facilitator can effectively outline the most appropriate workshop structure with a sound flow of activities.

To pick an example, having an AI Engineer revise our Data and AI Design Thinking framework prior to a workshop allows me to select only the essential activities and information needed. This prevents me from filling up the agenda with unnecessary exercises and wasting the team’s valuable time together.

Thanks to our flexible frameworks, different activities can be freely stitched together, to create customised templates that meet the information needs of all members in the team. (If you are new to IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, you can delve into it here ).

Make time in your schedule to prep the workshop structure with your coworkers. Mural is great for such alignments and can really serve as a shared script. Keep in mind that, at the end of the day, people are not that interested about what specific activities you include in the flow, and they might not feel like they know Design Thinking enough to give input. Still, they can contribute to the planning by sharing the outcomes they require to ensure that their information needs are met during the session.

Just make sure though, that they accept that it’s everyone’s responsibility to make a workshop a success. This inevitably calls for them to be explicit about their respective intents and potential non-negotiables.

Lean in on your intuition to better use time

Facilitating is a great deal about understanding human interactions in non-spontaneous circumstances. As the workshop unfolds within the rigorous timeframe of the set agenda , it’s crucial that you tune in with your participants. Are people zoning out and losing focus? Or is an interesting conversation taking place in the room that you should not cut short?

As we learn to sense the “flow” in the room, we can also better understand how to manage time more productively.

A couple of times after facilitating, someone gave me a remark that I found both amusing and intriguing. People were surprised at how I seemingly managed to end the workshop in timely fashion, while simultaneously making time for some unforeseen discussions to take place.

For many people reading this, this advice may sound controversial, but hear me out. Your agenda should be elastic enough to allow for the valuable unforeseen to take place. It should be designed with flexibility at its core so that you can re-adjust it to avoid going overtime.

I call valuable unforseen elements all the interactions and conversations that are adding something valuable for the aims of the session. These might include a client sharing important business information, a discussion between stakeholders that can be decisive for framing the opportunity, or a creative session that is generating lots of interesting, unusual ideas.

In my journey as facilitator, I’ve noticed that with experience also comes a certain knack for sniffing the “good stuff”. Over time you get better at sensing when some segments in the workshop are particularly valuable and also at thinking on your feet how to balance and shift time in the schedule.

As a rule, when preparing the agenda for the day, I include some buffer minutes between segments. This can also be a good hack in case I need to give myself room to breathe, refocus, and handle unexpected situations.

Balance impartiality with your vertical expertise

On common argument for facilitation is that it requires to be impartial and to focus on the group process. There are situations though where a workshop would benefit from the injection of its facilitator’s expertise.

This is often a concern for designers who facilitate. UX and service design skills can contribute a great deal to a solutioning session, as they can add a much needed human-centric angle to big ideas and concepts. The point to be mindful about is how to do this without defeating the objective to be impartial.

By and large, every facilitator will have to manage at some point a duplicity of roles in their engagements, a notion which some academics have defined the “facilitation continuum” (Harvey, 2002). On one end of the continuum, the goal of facilitation, and thus the role of the facilitator, is task-focused, e.g., to identify a business opportunity or conceive an idea; on the other end, the goal of facilitation is “to develop and empower individuals and teams and create a supportive context for change”.

Navigating this tension may be tricky, because it demands the facilitator to tap simultaneously into different skillsets and to seamlessly switch viewpoints within the context of the same session.

One way you can navigate this tension is by incorporating your vertical skillset into your facilitator’s aims of promoting different viewpoints when the team is working on solutions and ideas.

If you are a designer, for instance, you could encourage participants to reflect on questions that support human-centric outcomes.

What is the user trying to achieve?

Can you re-think this solution feature in terms of a user goal?

Can you imagine any unintended implications of this technology/solution that can impact on users?

Are there secondary users that we should be aware of?

By acting as “the voice” of the user, designers can provide guidance on human centric outcomes even while facilitating, but without necessarily imposing their strong viewpoint on the design of the solution itself.

Reach out to other people (especially for introverts)

I kid you not: at every new workshop that I facilitate I find out something I didn’t know. I realise what I could have done better. And this always stings a bit. No matter how much passionately and meticulously I prepared for it, something, big or small, will go awry. Being an introvert, my natural reaction would be to reproach myself as soon as I’m alone. After a workshop, I’ve spent many hours, on my own, at a cafe to reflect on the outcomes of the day. I’m sadly playing back in my head all of the things I wished I did differently.

While reflecting on the workshop is all very well, you should always avoid doing it entirely in isolation. Retrospectives are great tools for collectively reviewing with your team the good and the bad of the engagement. Quite simply, sharing an experience with your team deflates negative thinking and puts mishaps and flaws into the right perspective.

Asking feedback to clients — even when it feels like the session wasn’t an outstanding success — is yet another enormously valuable method to ripen an unripe aspect of your facilitation approach.

Reaching out to others may feel awkward. However, only two years into the role, having retrospectives and feedback as hard-coded rituals in our facilitation practice showed me just how transformative they could be.

Takeways: a squiggly, rewarding journey

The points I have explored in this article concerns essential soft skills that you´ll necessarily have to practice in your job. They include finding ways to better collaborate and to openly communicate with your team. Also, the sensibility to understand unexpected situations and to be flexible in the flow. Finally, the ability to create the right setup to share your technical, unique designer’s perspective and expertise, when that’s warranted.

So far, my biggest lesson has been that the journey from your first workshops, learning the techniques, to mastering the art of facilitation and achieving valuable outcomes is not an easy feat. You shouldn’t go in expecting it will be a smash-and-grab: as an art and science, you have to give yourself the time to grow.

There will be setbacks, twists and turns and also a lots of good fun. Most of the time, a big part of it will be something beyond your control. It’s by no means a linear journey, but perhaps that´s precisely the reason why it can become so rewarding.

Silvia Podestà is Advisory Innovation Designer at IBM Denmark. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.