The Art of Facilitation — Part II

Published in

Design Research & Facilitation Resources

4 min readAug 17, 2017

We’re in the third, and fourth weeks of our facilitation workshop series.

After exploring what makes a good facilitator and taming the content, we are diving into delivery. Here’s a break-down of how we ran this trainer workshop.

Week 3: Mapping the Content

The facilitators split into teams they had chosen on the previous week, based on their interests.

Throughout the week, they had been able to prepare using their team’s channel on Slack, which made the session smoother.

Each team broke down their presentations into Themes. They discussed the following elements:

General structure : themes in sequence, and whether they are theory or practice
Salient points that should be discussed

At this point, the roles were not distributed. This ensured each theme would be the co-creation of a group, rather than a person’s own point of view.

Once the big chunks were split, we broke off into inidividual work, each mapping the following for our team’s topic:

What facilitation at the tables could look like
What material we might need to have on-hand

Once this exercise was complete, we came back in our small groups and compared notes.

The next morning, the summary and next action-items were posted on the Leadership+ channel for all group members to access.

Week 4 : Event Blueprint & Dry Run

Building on the previous week, the workshop launched with facilitators mapping their portion of the event.

First, each group split the themes within their members.
Each member then created a blue print of the event:

Each theme was broken down in specific slides (with page reference from deck) and keywords summarizing the important points to present (theme column).
Each topic was then broken down into directives to give to other co-facilitators (Co-Facilitators Guidelines), who will help guide practical portions of the workshop from the tables.
For each theme, the facilitators compiled a list of materials and logistics consideration (Pre-Workshop Prep).

We developed this template for our teams to use, and you are welcome to use this blank template:

We gave each team 15 minutes for their members to individually map out how they were going to present their slides, and then gathered around the table for a dry run with feedback.

We filmed each theme with immediate feedback as small capsules, to allow facilitators to watch their pieces of the presentation at home, when rehearsing some more.