Facilitating facilitators

Full transcript

Intro

Alison: Your role as a facilitator is defined by how much people don't notice you. So actually the whole point of being a facilitator is that you're not the center of the attention, actually the attention is on all of the participants.

Jay: Shaping and leading conversations of groups of people is always challenging. People are complex and have lots of different ideas and agendas and personalities. Leading up to almost every workshop or sprint I've ever facilitated, I'm feeling anxious. But my anxiety spikes up whenever I'm asked to facilitate a conversation with another group of experts, especially a group of other facilitators because they do what I do, they design agendas and conversations for a living. So my ego acts up and says that, "I've gotta bring my A game. I've gotta hit it out of the park or else I'm gonna fail as a facilitator."

Actually, as it turns out when you're facilitating other facilitators there are opportunities for you to step back, to ask them where they wanna go with the conversation, offer them opportunities to step in and even lead the conversation at times. But that takes a bit of self assurance and confidence in yourself as a facilitator. One such expert facilitator that I've learned and observed from is Alison Coward, the founder of Bracket. Alison joins me today on Facilitator's Q&A to talk about 'Facilitating other facilitators' and what's really important. It turns out it's not remaining totally in control.

Today’s episode

Jay: Alison I remember being in Boulder a couple years ago and I was running a workshop at the Sprint Conference that we were at. And I remember scanning the room, super nervous, because I was scanning the room and I saw people like yourself, professional facilitators and coaches and designers. And for me, that's when I'm most anxious. When I know that there are others that do what I do for a living 'cause you get in your head thinking they're gonna be breaking down my agenda, ridiculing my approach, you know, everything that I've designed here. And when you and I were talking a couple of weeks ago, we started talking about this topic of, "Facilitating Facilitators." And I wanted to invite you on to just hear how you prepare for things like that, when you know that people are gonna be in the room that are skilled practitioners.

Alison: I think I remember being at the Boulder conference and I remember being in your workshop. First of all, it was great. I really enjoyed it. And then secondly, I had a very very very similar feeling. I was so anxious about that session, the session that I ran, 'cause I ran one at the conference as well and how it would be received. And I think I recall looking around the room and being relieved that you weren't in my workshop. I remember a few other people being in there but I remember not seeing your face and thinking, "Phew".

So I definitely understand that feeling but there was something about that conference where I learned a lot actually because I felt that in my anxiousness to facilitate well a room of facilitators, I actually over facilitated or I over prepared. Or I didn't prepare a session that was me. And I realized that I tried to do too much because there were gonna be a room of facilitators. That session really emphasized for me the impact of standing back as a facilitator and letting people in the room do their thing.

Whenever I know that I'm gonna be facilitating a room of facilitators, actually one of the advantages is, is that they are not unfamiliar with facilitation. So they also know how to be good participants, right. You actually can do less work as a facilitator because people know how to interact and then how to engage and also know how to kind of support you as a facilitator in a session if things are kind of going off track.

Jay: Yeah. What were some of the things you were telling yourself leading up to your session that got you anxious?

Alison: I think the same thing that you were thinking in that people would be scrutinizing me as a facilitator and scrutinizing my session structure and that if I did a session, which was essentially about facilitation but facilitated it badly, then that would be an awful outcome.

Jay: It's funny, I think part of it is very self-centered. You know we imagine that we're the center of the universe and everyone is concerned about our performance but they're really just thinking about themselves and what they're gonna eat for lunch and-

Alison: Yeah. Your role as a facilitator and I know not everybody agrees with this, but your role as a facilitator is defined by how much people don't notice you. So actually the whole point of being a facilitator is that you're not the center of the attention, actually the attention is on all of the participants. So both of us going into those sessions at Boulder, being anxious about our performance as facilitators, we almost forgot what we know about what good facilitation is. It's not about us, it's about the people in the room. And I know that possibly if I had focused more on that then definitely the anxiety would have fallen away.

Jay: Yeah it's true. In that session that we just did where you facilitated our group with Google, I felt like it was a vacation. Like I felt, I mentioned this to you, that I could sense that you had control but at the same time you were willing to step back like you said, and ask us, "Is this working? Do we wanna try something otherwise?" And for me, sometimes I stress when I make that open invitation to the group, "Do we wanna go in this direction or what are you all thinking?" If there's not some end points in sight for them sometimes it just like derails and we go all over the place. Like thinking back to that session, how do you think you balanced going back and forth between having a plan but allowing us to flex?

Alison: Yeah, so there were three things about that. The first thing was I did have a loose end goal of where I wanted to get to by the end of that session. Like I knew that we needed to create a product, some kind of tangible outcome. And I purposely had a conversation with everybody about that at the beginning of the session so that we would work together towards that outcome. We actually designed what that outcome was gonna be together. I didn't know what the outcome was gonna be before the workshop but I knew that we needed to get to something, so that was one thing.

The second thing is going back to the point about facilitators. That I knew that people in the room were experienced either participating or facilitating workshops. So I knew that with a loose structure if I wanted to hand over, even for a short time, the role of facilitation to someone in the group there would be someone who would take that baton and know what to do with it.

The third thing around this was the topic. So the topic was something that I wasn't an expert in and I was relying on the expertise and the experience of people in the room. So, I guess, used that, but also emphasized the facts. Well, I used the fact that I wasn't an expert in it but I really held onto that in the fact that I don't know anything about this topic, but I've got no choice but to call on the experts in the room here. There's kinda something that is scary about facilitating a room of experts but also something that really enables you to truly facilitate.

Jay: Yeah, I think the biggest leap I had to make in going from a contributor to a facilitator, was getting over the ego of needing to be right and staying in control and it's been a lot of experiments to like loosen up control. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like, it backfired or you stepped too far back or something really kind of blew up by not remaining totally in control?

Alison: The thing is with when you're facilitating, there's two opposing ideas that you've got to hold. One is the structure of your session which you would have designed before. So you are kind of, in some respects, not entirely bewedded to your process, you're kind of, this is the structure, this is the order of things, and you are the expert in that because you've designed that. In the other sense, as I said, you're kind of not the expert in the stuff that goes in between.

So, like at any point you're kind of, "Oh, I don't know. Yes, I know the structure but I don't know the content. Yes, I know the structure." So you've got to kind of do this dance. And then there are sometimes you've got to actually then let go of the structure because it might be going in a different direction. And sometimes you might have to step into the content a little bit more to help the participants synthesize.

So you're kind of... Ego just doesn't work in that situation because the minute you kind of attach an identity to who and what you're meant to be doing any one of those points, then you lose the opportunity to be more flexible in what role you play.

Jay: Yeah. Earlier you made a comment about being invisible or transparent. It's almost a measure of success to feel like you were part of the conversation that you designed but the group could hold the conversation without feeling like you were there, kind of overshadowing them. What does that look like for you?

Alison: There was an example earlier on in my career, when I was quite new to facilitation actually and I'd been brought in by an organization to run a facilitated session, it was quite a short session. Of course I've designed it and I had someone came up to me at the end and said, "Oh, you've had an easy job, haven't you? You've just have to stand there." And in some respects it was kind of like, "Oh, that's not a good thing." But then actually, the back of my mind, I was like actually that means I've done a really good job as a facilitator because he felt that he'd done all the work himself and that's how it should be.

You know, a facilitator is meant to kind of hold lightly and not... I mean I guess there's a few people that would disagree with me about this, which is not having too much of a presence. I mean, I think you want to know or you want it to be obvious that you played a part in helping the team get to where they did but you also want the team to feel so invested that they almost forgot you were there.

Jay: Yeah, and when you get paid, when your profession is to facilitate, of course you wanna be invited back. So that's probably that balancing act of designing a good session so that people were able to get to successful outcomes but still appreciated that you helped them design that sort of container for them to have that conversation.

Alison: Absolutely.

Jay: So let me just recap then. What I've heard you talk about is when you have a session coming up with people that are facilitators or perhaps experts on design thinking or innovation or the topic itself, and they're used to being in that sort of workshop setting, where you've had success is to allow them to be the experts on those. Realizing that you don't need to induct them into writing on post-it notes and design thinking and sort of all the principles around group conversations. You've learned how to step back and in doing so, removing some of the ego that we might feel about remaining in control and being in the center of the conversation as opposed to maybe being on the perimeter.

Alison: And I think there's something else there around being okay if somebody wants to step in. If it feels right allowing somebody that has got facilitation skills maybe to take over a little bit.

Jay: So I'm gonna say that seems like pro-level facilitation and your story about the guy coming up to you and saying, like, in my mind, if somebody said that to me, I'd be like, "They think I'm lazy. They think I'm stupid." And I would have had a tough time with that. And I imagine there's a whole group of people out there that would have a tough time and you seem to just let it roll off your shoulders. So what could you tell people like myself and others out there about the real value of a facilitator as opposed to getting wrapped around the axle of being like in charge?

Alison: Yeah, focus on the experience of the participants. Like in that same workshop I had people come up to me and say, "We've been trying to crack this problem for weeks and we've just got it done in an hour." And so what that guy said to me completely melted away because that's the outcome that I was going for. It wasn't about me telling people what to do, it's about helping them organize their thoughts and figure out how they were gonna collaborate together.

So for me, if you get to the end and, people, you can feel their energy that people have really had a productive time, they've had good discussions, they've had breakthroughs, that's far more important to me than somebody feeling that they didn't recognize that I did anything because obviously I did.

Jay: Yeah, powerful. Yeah, I mean, to sum it up facilitation is really hard and you can make it much harder if you worry about being right and in charge and the expert all the time.

Alison: And that's the, sorry I just have to say, that's the challenge of facilitation, right. Because facilitation by its nature means to make something easy but facilitation is hard to make something look easy.

Jay: Yeah, thank you Alison. This has been great and super helpful. I appreciate you coming on and sharing.

Alison: Thanks for having me.

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