As a trainer since 1985 I’d had numerous opportunities to develop my training and development skills, through education, conferences and seminars. And the term "facilitate" was one I used lightly to refer to the classroom role I played when trainees were engaged in group discussions and, to a degree, I was correct. But when I first began to facilitate strategic and business planning processes in 1995, along with my successes, I experienced some struggles. And I wasn’t really sure why.

With this realization at hand, I set out to discover the meaning of the term "facilitate" in the context of facilitating group planning meetings, such as strategic planning, business planning, idea creation, problem-solving, and team building. Through a combination of facilitation courses, professional association events, networking with other facilitators, and lots of practical ‘trial and error’ experience facilitating planning meetings for groups, I have had the opportunity to enhance my skills and incorporate some new learnings along the way.

Here are a few of the lessons I have learned that have helped me -- or "tricks" as I’ll take the liberty of calling them -- which I would like to share with you.

Trick One - Staying Out of Content

The distinction that was the most helpful to me to grasp was that, while as a trainer my role is expertise based, and my job is to ensure the participants learn what was set out in the learning objectives for the course – as a "facilitator" for group planning meetings, my role truly is one of facilitation, and my job is to help the participants reach their own conclusions in regards to the subject at hand. In short, in "pure" facilitation, I don’t have a content role.

Reality is that there may, in fact, be times when I am asked not only to facilitate a group, but to contribute my expertise regarding the content as well. One of the things I have ultimately learned is that in situations where a high proportion of contribution to content expected from myself, calling in another facilitator may be appropriate.

But does this mean that a facilitator can never contribute to content? In reality, don’t organizational facilitators sometimes do just that? I believe that a facilitator can do so, in situations where it is appropriate, by following three "musts":

the group must have requested the facilitator play this "content role" up front
the facilitator must let the group know when they have something to contribute (e.g. "I have a comment on that, if you’d like...") and get the group’s permission before proceeding
the facilitator must avoid the temptation to control the ensuing discussion
It is a challenge to stay out of content, especially for facilitators with a training background. I’ll admit that I struggled with this one, as do most other facilitators that I have met. To help me, I periodically use a little trick to remind myself of my role – I found a great little lapel pin that has a little man shrugging his shoulders, hands upwards, with the caption, "I Dunno" below. I find this to be a gentle reminder when I put it on in the morning of a new facilitation (people do often ask about it), and it does help to keep me honest.

Another "trick" to symbolize a facilitator’s changing role (to the group, and to oneself!) between facilitation and content roles –– is to use two different colored baseball caps, and to literally change between them when changing roles. I have seen this one in action, and it works great!

Trick Two - Letting Go Of Control

Letting go of control was perhaps the biggest obstacle I had to overcome in order to improve my effectiveness when facilitating planning groups to achieve their task. As a trainer, my orientation was always towards achieving the established learning objectives, keeping to my agenda, and taking responsibility for supporting trainees who don’t learn. Where I experienced a few bumps in my early days as a facilitator was when I fell into the trap of applying the same orientation to strategic planning sessions. After all, there is still an objective to be achieved, right? And the few times when I tried loosening control, the results sometimes came too close to chaos for comfort. I knew I needed to shift something, but I wasn’t sure what.

Perhaps the greatest insight for me was learning that, while it is part of my role is to help the group establish desired outcomes, and sketch out an agenda to achieve those outcomes, it is the group that "owns" the outcomes and agenda, not me. So, when a group seems to be leaning to a more in-depth discussion of an issue than had been planned, my job is not to move them on, but to feed this back to them, for example, "I’d like to make an observation. We are due to go onto agenda item X. But this widget discussion seems to be getting quite in-depth. And we probably won’t achieve our third outcome if we stay any longer on widgets. What would you like to do?".

It is then up to the group to decide how to spend the ensuing time, not the facilitator. I have found this approach wonderful with the groups I work with; if the widget discussion is critical they may make the decision to sacrifice other agenda items; if they were just getting "off track" they’ll recognize it and decide to return to the planned agenda. It’s their call, they appreciate making the call, and it takes a tremendous pressure off the facilitator to figure out what the group needs. Now, if I don’t know what we should do next, I ask the group!

This mental shift to group ownership of the process is also helpful in dealing with situations where the group begins to behave contrary to what they established as their guidelines for working together. Once again, the facilitator’s role is to feed this back to the group, "An observation for you. Earlier today, you set listening as a guideline. What I am observing that some people are getting cut off before they’ve made their point. How do you want to deal with that?"

Trick Three - Make Everything Relevant

In facilitated meetings, as in training sessions, participants need to be "warmed up" before starting. In training one can occasionally get away with "warm ups" that don’t link directly to content; the same is not true of facilitations. Yes, participants still need to be warmed up, but they need to do more than get their minds off the outside world – they need to begin to focus on the task at hand. When a facilitator neglects to recognize this (as I did), he or she may find the group impatient with the "warm and fuzzies" when we got together to discuss X. And they’d be right.

The facilitator has an obligation to make everything relevant to the purpose for which the group has gathered. This means that the warm-up activity should be related to meeting’s purpose, and have people emerge from the activity with an initial sense as to others’ views or background on the subject. Since learning this distinction, I have actually found that many activities in my trainer’s tool kit will work fine for facilitations, as long as I modify them to ensure relevancy to the task at hand.

Trick Four - Lots of Techniques or Just a Few

With more experience and development in group facilitation behind me now, I continue to focus on learning more techniques, or tricks, to add to my facilitation kit (and, in particular, conflict resolution techniques, which are valuable for any facilitator to have).

I’d like to share, however, a discovery that may be especially helpful to those at an earlier starting point in the group facilitation area. As important as it is to learn new techniques, I discovered that if you have just a few solid, core group discussion facilitation techniques – and have enough creativity to adapt them slightly so as not to bore participants in ongoing teams or meetings – you really don’t need a lot more. Nice to have, yes. But the new facilitator, or one who is focusing on improving his or her skills, is perhaps better off to focus on learning just one or two core techniques.

For example, a solid understanding of Nominal Group Technique, applied with minor variations in a range of situations, can provide a solid foundation for facilitation. By working in-depth with one technique, and learning its many applications and intricacies, one’s skills will improve and, as confidence grows, so will facilitation effectiveness.

Best of luck to you in your facilitations. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.