5 things to consider before facilitating your first workshop
Facilitation at Potato
In my role as a Coach at digital product studio Potato, facilitation plays a big part in how I support our product teams and clients in becoming more effective in their delivery of digital products and services as well as helping the wider organisation move forward with various initiatives.
It’s a skill that’s fairly easy to start putting into practice to enable you to start to learn and improve over time.
Facilitation helps set up our workshops and meetings for success to ensure there is a clear structure to support the team in moving towards a clear goal that’s set out at the start.
What’s the expectation of a facilitator?
An effective facilitator should aim to leave the team feeling energised, positive and motivated with clarity on ownership of actions that will move them forward after the workshop.
The facilitator is responsible for creating a group process and safe environment in which the group can be open, trust each other and feel comfortable, which supports the group to reach successful decisions, solutions or conclusions.
As the facilitator, your role is to stay neutral and to not steer the output of the workshop, even though you may have some ideas of what might surface throughout the workshop.
You focus on ensuring there’s effective participation from across the group, that all contributions are considered and included in the actions that emerge and ensure the group take shared responsibility for the outcome.
Below are my 5 recommended considerations before planning and running your first workshop:
1) What’s the goal?
Before you start planning the structure of your workshop you’ll need to identify what the goal is. What are you enabling the team to do? And who is defining this? This could be the team themselves or a sponsor from within the organisation. With the goal defined it will help you design the structure for your workshop with the end goal in mind.
Make sure to agree this goal with the team or sponsor beforehand, so that expectations are aligned as well as introducing the goal at the start of the workshop.
2) Who needs to attend?
Based on the goal of the workshop, who needs to be there? This can vary greatly depending on the goal. It could range from the core team, a range of stakeholders from across the business through to key representatives from multiple businesses.
Having the right mix of people to enable the right input and discussion can be hard. It’s worth having a few conversations with different stakeholder groups to discuss who’s best placed to attend and complement the knowledge of the other participants.
Understanding the backgrounds of the attendees will help plan the flow of the meeting — what kind of knowledge will be in the room? who might have an overpowering opinion on certain topics? who might cause the flow to stray into different directions?
3) How does the workshop need to be structured?
Next up you’ll need to consider how you structure the workshop to provoke thought but give room for the group to generate the content.
During the planning process you’ll find out more about the people attending, where you’ll hold the meeting, how long you have and most importantly, consider how it will play out, what does it look like? What might happen? Do you have enough time to allow discussion to wander a little if helpful, do you have time to course correct if things come up that mean your plan becomes less relevant?
I find it helpful to plan a “get out” if things run over in certain areas, can you wrap up at different points and still gain value from the workshop and form actions?
There are as many ways to design a group process as there are types of events to facilitate. Continual learning and development can help you find what works for you, what comes most naturally and what is your style?
4) Remaining neutral
This is where an “external” facilitator really makes sense, as it becomes trickier when someone from within the group attempts to facilitate, as well as contribute.
Ensuring a neutral stance is easier if you take a step back from the team and focus on moving the team towards the goal. This means listening, staying neutral, asking questions, prompting exploration of ideas, mediating conflicting views and opinions and keep to the structure of the workshop where you can to ensure the goal is met within the time allocated.
In some circumstances, the group can come to focus on the facilitator as the person who is steering the ship. However, you want the team to be discussing within themselves, not to you. When this happens, it’s helpful to move away from the group, avoid eye contact and allow the group to focus on themselves.
5) Create a safe space
For the team to be really open and comfortable, it’s crucial to create a safe space. Psychological safety is a term coined by Amy Edmonson, a Harvard Researcher defined as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”.
Creating safety is a whole other blog post in itself, however some key things to consider are to ensure you give the attendees the opportunity to introduce themselves if they don’t know each other, ask some simple ice-breaker questions and ask them what they’re individually looking to get out of the workshop, so they not only feel it can address their personal needs, but also builds awareness of each other, which can help when conversations become challenging.
Tom Barrie is a Coach at Potato Bristol, a studio that exists to help organisations design, develop and launch more purposeful and effective digital products with clients including Google, Mozilla and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
