Convening an Important Room? 7 Types of Facilitation for Leaders of Place

Leaders of Place spend a considerable amount of time bringing people together – think about boards, leadership teams, partnerships, communities, industry groups. Some of those gatherings matter more than others, and those are the rooms I’m most often asked to help with. Being a strategic facilitator is the role I find most rewarding - holding safe and productive spaces for meaningful conversations that lead to tangible, valuable outcomes.

Facilitation is about Return on the Room

Every important room starts with capability: experienced and invested people with real knowledge, giving their time and attention. The ‘Return on the Room’ is what is produced from that capability. There are important conversations to be had and there are considerable costs (time, money and credibility) to convening people.  There needs to be a solid return on that investment and everybody needs to feel that the conversation has been worth their time and effort.

 2 essential questions

A lot of what people see of facilitation happens on the day – the pre-prepared questions, the table layout, the ideas drawn on flipcharts and stuck up on walls, the venue, the way the facilitator intervenes and steers.  However, getting the most valuable return on the room is determined by the thinking that happens beforehand.

I work closely with clients to get clear on what the facilitated session is for. My starting two questions are always the same:

• What exactly do you want to walk away with?
• What would you like people to be saying as they leave?

A critical part of my role is achieving clarity on those two things before deciding anything about the session itself. The answers are hardly ever written into the brief and they certainly don’t roll off the tongue. Once we have clear answers to them though, decisions around the design of the session become relatively straightforward.

The thinking before the talking

Nancy Kline, whose work on the Thinking Environment has shaped a great deal of good practice, puts it simply: "The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first."

In terms of facilitation: before people can do good thinking in a room, somebody has to do good thinking about the room.

• What is this room actually for?
• What should be different when people leave?
• Who needs to be present?
• How much time does the conversation require?
• What outcome(s) will make it worthwhile?

I obsess about these questions and then also obsess about the exact questions we will set up for the room. It’s all about questions and working a way through to usable answers.

To help with the first of those questions, I've mapped the seven rooms I find myself working in most often.

7 Types of Facilitated Rooms

Tailor the process to the outcome

Understanding the desired outcome enables a facilitator to select from a broad range of approaches. I’d like to share a couple of examples. I recently worked with a business group who had talked about the future of their town over many meetings and many years. They were tired of talking and tired of meetings that hadn’t led anywhere. The last thing they needed was more exploring. They needed a tightly timed, decision-led process, comprising three 90-minute sessions, that led to clear actions that they could all buy into and would not be revisited.

By contrast, I worked with a Board of Directors considering a bold new direction for its destination’s tourism strategy.  The facilitated sessions in this case were all about creating space for talking and thinking out loud together. We met six times over six months, a half day to a full day each. Expanding the time available for exploration was a key factor in this process - it was important that the thinking wasn’t hurried and so the process was designed to surface ideas and opinions in the sessions and then trigger deep reflection and discussion between the sessions.

Return on the Room is about Respect

If you’re a leader of a place, you may find you’re often convening people who don't report to you, who carry different mandates and who come because they care about the place, more than they care about you. Their time and goodwill have a limit.  Investing in robust thinking before people gather in a room shows respect for all those things and will be appreciated by participants.