Who should lead our workshops and sprints?

Full transcript

Intro

This is Episode #6, today we're gonna answer the question, "Who Should Lead Our Workshops and Sprints?" See you in the video! Alright so today we're talking about who should lead our workshops and sprints. 

Today’s question

To answer that question, we first have to answer what it takes to do the job well and there's probably a lot that we can come up with here but we can also probably boil it down to about 5 big topics. In a future video, stay tuned, I'll go through each of these 5 with a little bit more depth and clarity but today, just a quick overview.

Number 1 is the time so the agenda, designing it, leading it, making sure that you can get through the topic and everything the group is there to talk about and decide.

The space so whether you're in person and in a conference room with tables and chairs or you're doing things like we are in 2020, virtually, with digital whiteboards and whatnot, that's yours to set up. Then the team, who should be in the room, who shouldn't be in the room, and once they're  all there making sure that you can manage power, making sure everybody is heard.

4, the conversation, what are you there to talk about and what research do we need and other information do we need to assemble, how do we bring that conversation together so that we can have a very visual, focused discussion and get through it.

And then finally, the energy so people are gonna show up, they're gonna be thinking about other things they're gonna be distracted, how do you keep them engaged and energetic throughout, when do we take breaks, when do we do some warm-ups, when do we keep the team feeling safe and organized and energetic and happy to keep moving forward. So the answer, the person that does all of this stuff, this magical, mythical person is a facilitator.

So the question we're really asking is what happens if you don't have that role in your company, which many companies don't today and I see some teams and some organizations are starting to hire specifically for facilitators but a lot of companies are also using their existing team members to do this job part time which is fine for today.

But in front of you you have a couple options. Really you can work with somebody inside the team, inside the company that's already doing other jobs and you can borrow them to play facilitator or you can go outside and you can hire an external facilitator, a professional that does this for a living or maybe there's a happy medium between the two so let's dig into each of these really quickly.

So if you go internal there's a couple good wins that you can get from it, 1. The team probably already trusts them, perhaps, or you should look for somebody that the team does trust already so you won't have to start from scratch. There's also, they have a lot of context so they know about the business, the market, the segment that you're working within, the specific project, they have a lot of that context already. Third is they have a lot of, there's a lot of systems and methods and tools, they're going to use things that are already approved so they require less back and forth and wrangling to get people over that hump.

But there's some downside of course to working with existing folks, number one they, there's some politics around it so the person themselves might feel like they're too busy to do that job or others might be jealous or think that the person you're nominating might not be right for the job, there's just politics in general within companies that exist and that's gonna happen when you look for somebody inside the team, inside the company.

Also, they might have a lot of context but that means that they're gonna bring a lot of assumptions and bias with them and the facilitator has a huge amount of power in the room and if they use that power to influence decisions, now they're really biasing the decisions and outcomes that the group comes up with.

Finally, some of those methods and tools they actually may be really ineffective. But you have your blinders on because that's just the way it's always been done so that can be a limiting factor. And then you have your external facilitators to come in so some good and some bad with external facilitators.

On the good side, they probably have a lot more autonomy to come in and use the methods that they've been using and have success elsewhere that now, what that also means is that they have a little big more freedom to operate and people are gonna trust them a little bit more because they're outsiders because they're not people that you know that the way that they approach work day in and day out so they have that more autonomy to push the group into that discomfort, into those uncomfortable areas.

They also have this fresh, outside perspective a lot of the time I get questions about do you have specific industry expertise and I say no, I have a little bit but that's not my job, my job is to manage all of those 5 things that we talked about, your job is to know about your market and be the expert, the subject matter experts but I can also bring a little bit of fresh perspective not only to the conversation, and the research, and the topic itself but how the team members are interacting together and I also have that autonomy to not feel so threatened that my boss is in the room with me.

And also, then, I'm gonna bring new ideas new tools new methods into the conversation because I'm not stricken to the existing approved methods and tools systems that your team is using today so I can experiment a whole bunch more, get away with it.

But then there's of course some downsides, of course any time you go outside you're outsourcing that expertise and that intelligence to somebody else as opposed to investing in internal team members, there's fees so you have to pay an external facilitator, traditionally that's gonna be more expensive than working with somebody inside granted external facilitators that's what they do they're professionals so they should have more expertise on it but you're gonna have to pay for it.

And then finally just the idea that myself or someone who's an external person is coming inside that's gonna threaten some of the existing team members and that will be something that you have to navigate and the facilitator, if they're good at what they do, they're gonna know how to develop relationships and quickly build the trust of the team members, they're there for support not to take anyone's job.

So, what's the happy medium? Well so if you don't have an internal person today, work with an external facilitator and what any really great facilitator, what they're gonna do is they're gonna come in for a set amount of time and part of their practice is gonna be to coach up the folks that are next up to do those big 5 things that we covered at the start of our video and they'll coach those people up so that eventually they can leave and now you have this internal rung of facilitators. And what's the right role? it really depends, it could be a product person or a designer or researcher, someone in operations, really what it comes down to is do they have those soft skills to manage the time and the team and the energy and all those other things. Is that something that they're interested in doing? And it doesn't matter their personality type and in a future video we can talk about this as well, introverted facilitation and extroverted facilitation they both have a place and they can be really powerful in their own right.

If you're interested in kind of upgrading your toolkit on your own and you don't have access to an external facilitator I have created a Facilitation Mini-Course, you can scan the QR code here on the screen, it's a free course, it'll send you 30 lessons over 30 days, totally free, no commitment whatsoever.

I've created it because I really learned so much from other great facilitators and it's my way of giving back. If you're interested you can sign up for the course and you'll get those lessons sent to  your inbox every day. That's all for this video,

I hope that it helped you think about who should be leading your workshops and sprints and stick around we'll of course be coming up with our next Q&A with Jay in 2 weeks. See ya!

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