A lovely new community: the cross-gov facilitators’ network

Earlier his week, about 30 people from 15 organisations got together to kick off a new cross-government community for facilitators.

As this was our first meetup, we spent most of the time talking about why we wanted to come together, what we’d like to try and achieve, how we want to work as a community and what sort of things we’d like to do.

This post is to share what we discussed and what we’re going to do next, and invite to get involved. There are also some technical notes about how we ran the session and how it went, at the end.

Why we want to come together & what we want to try and achieve

We want to form a community of facilitators in and around government so that we can:

• Learn, try things out and improve together
• Help and support each other
• Promote the value of really good facilitation (and participation)
• Encourage and help more people to build their facilitation skills and confidence

Principles

We quickly found a consensus around a few guiding principles for how we want our community to work. We’ll keep them under review, but these are it, for now.

We want to:

• Work openly and positively, with honesty and fun
• Be actively inclusive
• Share, reflect, learn and improve together
• Create connections and help each other
• (Maybe — depends on us working out how this might work and if we are really able to commit to it: provide a directory / offer facilitation as a service across government)

Things we’re going to do

We came up with tons of ideas of things we could do together. We agreed that we will start with these things:

• Hold regular (monthly, at first) meetups, hosted by someone in the community and always with remote participation
• Work out how we would set up a directory of gov facilitators
• Set up a coaching circle, to offer each other advice & help
• Run design crit style events, where we can share our workshop designs and get constructive feedback from the community
• Set up a place to share useful resources (and maybe some kind of playbook / advice on patterns to achieve particular outcomes — to be discussed at a future meetup) — we’ve set up a shared doc for now, and we will see how it develops from there — please do have a look and add any useful things you’ve come across.

How to get involved

So far, we’ve got a Trello board as the main way of communicating with each other (see below for how we used this to manage our first meetup). Please feel free to join the board and add yourself to any cards you’re interested in working on in the ‘things we’re doing’ column.

We’re going to set up a mailing list so that we know how to contact each other. If you’d like to join and you’re happy for your email address to be shared with the community, please add your details to the list.

We’ve also got a nascent hashtag going: #govfacilitators — join in the conversation there if you have questions or contributions you’d like to share.

This post is the first in a new publication — government facilitators’ network— if you would like to publish a post to the publication, please get in touch, we’d love to host your post.

We’d love to expand our community so please get in touch if this all sounds like something you’d like to get involved in. We don’t care how experienced or expert you are — our community is for anyone who is interested in facilitation in or around gov.

Technical notes

For fellow facilitation enthusiasts, the rest of this post is how we ran the meetup, in case it’s useful for anyone else planning a similar event.

Aims

The purpose was to get like-minded people together and find out what scope there was to learn together and help each other out. So the main aims of the session were to:

• spark enough energy, feelings of shared values and interests and commitment to get an active community going
• see if we could agree a few things to get on with, in a way that actually resulted in them happening

Venue — half in the room, half remote

We had about half of the participants in a room in DfE’s building in Westminster, and half participating remotely over Skype. This is a tricky combination for any meeting — it’s easy to accidentally exclude the people who aren’t in the room in person.

Taking a leaf out of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s excellent book on remote working, we ran the meeting remote-first, so that people in the room didn’t have any particular advantage over people participating remotely.

Doing this effectively requires a few things to be in place:

• Decent tech — we are fortunate here at DfE in that we have good meeting tech in place — we used Skype to enable people to participate remotely, met in a room equipped with video conferencing kit, and used Trello to manage the conversation
• Everyone needs to introduce themselves, every time they speak, and make an effort to project and be heard over the microphone — a slightly difficult and uncomfortable habit to get into, but quick and easy once you have it
• The facilitator has to make sure they deliberately and repeatedly make space for people participating remotely to contribute, recognising that otherwise it can be much harder for those people to get a word in edgeways

Advance prep

In advance, we asked everyone to contribute to a Trello board with 5 column headings (I think I first saw this way of using Trello to manage a meeting used by Mark Dalgarno in a retrospective he was running):

• Introduce yourself (instruction: add a card explaining briefly who you are and where you come from — this also made it much easier for those participating remotely to put faces to the names)
• How would you like this community to operate — principles (instruction: add cards to suggest principles of how we might work together, and comment on cards that are already there)
• How would you like the community to operate practically (instruction: add cards to suggest things we might do together, and comment on cards that are already there)
• Things to talk about at this & future meetups
• Volunteers to host / facilitate future meetups

One thing I failed to think about enough in advance was how everyone was going to keep in touch with each other afterwards. I’ve got everyone’s email address from when they signed up to the event, but didn’t ask their permission to share them or use them for purposes other than this specific event, which is a bit of an elementary error I am now kicking myself about. Anyway, lesson learned, and I’m sure we can work this out as we go along from here.

We had a few options on the board, but didn’t get around to choosing one during the meetup and there wasn’t a clear consensus in favour of any particular channel. It’s a tricky one, this — I’d love to know how others deal with this when the participants don’t all automatically gravitate towards a single shared platform.

In the meeting

We didn’t do creeping death introductions because they take loads of time and are very difficult to concentrate on / take in, especially if you’re participating remotely. Instead everyone could look in their own time at the introductions on Trello.

We worked through each column on the board together, time-limiting each one to make sure we could get through each column at least a bit. For each one, we:

1. Worked silently for 3–4 minutes, adding new cards, commenting on existing ones and then voting on them to give us a sense of how much consensus we had and which things were most popular in the group
2. Ran through the top few most popular cards, clarifying any questions and deciding what to do about each one
3. Checked with everyone to make sure we hadn’t missed anything really important from the remaining cards

Where a card needed further action or work, we asked people to add themselves to the card if they want to work on it — by doing this, we very quickly formed:

1. a couple of self-organising working groups
2. a group of people interested in being in a coaching circle (where everyone in the circle coaches each other)
3. a design crit group (to review each others’ workshop and meeting designs and offer feedback and support).

We decided to work through the list of topics we want to talk about at future meetups, in order of their popularity in the voting — people added themselves to cards where they wanted to lead a discussion on that topic.

Review and things to improve next time

We added an extra column to the Trello board at the end of the meeting for people to post feedback about how they thought it went. We generally felt like this meeting design worked well and was good for including everyone regardless of whether they were there in person or participating remotely.

If I were doing it again, I’d do a few things a bit differently. I would:

• make sure I’ve thought about post-event logistics in advance (rather than focusing all the effort on the event itself)
• use Trello again, as it worked really well — but be sure to include a bit of a teach-in at the start for anyone not familiar with it
• be sure to have someone waiting around for late arrivals (we had a couple of people stranded in reception having missed us when we went to pick people up — I had made a wrong assumption that most people would have a cross-gov pass and be able to find their way in independently)

That’s it for now, but watch this space — hopefully you’ll be hearing plenty more from this lovely new community as we get ourselves off the ground…