Facilitation Overview

Facilitators support the leadership, strategy and planning processes by handling any required administrative tasks and enabling the people participating in these other activities to focus on the essential part of their respective roles. In addition to helping to control the conversation and keeping the team on track, an important element of a facilitator’s responsibility is working with the team to help ensure critical quality management discipline across all of the various processes, sub-processes, and steps, without interfering in the content.

Facilitators are responsible to:

• know who will use the outputs of the process, as well as how, when and where the outputs will be used;
• understand the specific requirements of all process outputs, as well as the significance of those requirements;
• suggest the most appropriate methods to be used;
• communicate and gain agreement on methods with the process sponsor;
• identify the inputs to the process and specifically document the input requirements;
• work with process sponsor to identify sources of all process inputs;
• communicate the requirements and coordinate the preparation of process inputs with the respective sources; and
• receive the inputs and prepare them for use by the team.

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Facilitation Team

Because the leadership, strategy and planning processes represent the highest impact, long-term value-creating processes in almost any business model, an extraordinary degree of discipline should be used to support, guide and actively manage these processes. Responsibilities of the facilitation team include experienced facilitation and technography, as well as research, graphic artists and information management support. The number of people actually required to carry out these responsibilities will depend on the size of the team and the complexity of the strategy or planning activity. To achieve the greatest degree of objectivity, facilitators and technographers should be organizationally independent of the process participants, if at all possible.

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Facilitation Processes

Manage strategy development and planning processes

This process establishes and maintains the quality management discipline required to achieve the greatest possible effectiveness and efficiency of strategy development and planning. Central to the approach are the concepts of process documentation, experimentation and cycles of learning. The approach is largely qualitative and “requirements definition”-based, as opposed to statistical analysis driven. Useful resources would include Crosby’s Quality Education System, The Team Handbook, and other soft-sided materials.

In addition to incorporating the methods and techniques provided by Crosby, Joiner, et al., the approach makes extensive use of information management tools and disciplines, effectively resulting in “technology-enabled” strategy development and planning processes.

Define roles and responsibilities

This process identifies the individuals who will participate in the strategy and planning processes, what roles they will play, and what their specific responsibilities will be. Generally, this process will be co-operated by the facilitator(s) and the sponsor. Some of the roles that need to be defined include:

• The Sponsor
• The Instigator(s)
• The Facilitator(s)
• The Facilitation Team
• The Strategy Team
• The Planning Team

By clearly defining the roles and responsibilities, participants will have a clearer understanding of when and how they will be involved in the strategy and planning processes.

Arrange participant involvement

Once the roles and responsibilities have been clearly defined, the facilitator should conduct interviews with each of the participants to understand their perspectives and unique areas of contribution. The facilitator should have a prepared list of questions and should also be prepared to answer any questions the participants might have. As part of this process, the facilitator should identify any potential scheduling issues in advance of establishing the strategy and planning schedule. The facilitator should also provide each participant with an overview of the processes in which they will be involved.

Establish the strategy and planning schedule

Once the facilitator has completed the interviews, checked schedules and prepared the participants, the sponsor and the facilitator should develop the schedule of strategy and planning activities based on the agreed upon approach. The schedule should be circulated in draft form for feedback purposes, modified as necessary and then distributed as a final schedule for strategy and planning. Participants must participate in person in all activities for which they are required. Generally, sessions should run for no more than four hours with regular breaks and are best conducted in the morning.

Gather, manage and secure strategy- and planning-related information

Strategy- and planning-related information requires special handling to ensure that it is current, complete, available to those who should have access to it and not available to those who should not. Documents should be controlled in distribution, and all working documents, once incorporated, should be collected and destroyed.

Access to electronic files should be secured and audited to prevent unauthorized access. Participants need to be reminded not to retain personal copies of the files or hard copy materials.

Facilitate collaborative sessions and activities

Collaborative sessions should be conducted by a trained facilitator who is knowledgeable about the activities being facilitated, aware of the perspectives of the participants and able to refrain from materially contributing to the content. If the individual selected as facilitator has meaningful content to contribute, an alternative facilitator should be used.

Annotated agendas should be developed and thoroughly walked through prior to the session to ensure continuity and coherence. These agendas should be distributed to the participants in advance of the meeting to enable them to adequately prepare.

Active listening skills are critical, both for the facilitator and the participants. If someone does not understand what has been said, they should ask for clarification as necessary. Different types of behavior need to be modeled and objectified so that participants can reach a deep level of collaboration quickly. A variety of proven creativity and collaboration tools can be helpful in this regard.

A skilled technographer can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of a collaborating team by orders of magnitude. Whether a dedicated technographer is used or whether facilitators trade off with technography duties is a matter to be determined by the facilitation team. The collaborating team must understand that the technographer serves a special role and should not be judged or critiqued. The facilitator(s) will work with the technographer before and after the sessions to ensure that any necessary preparation and follow-up activities are completed.

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