The following article has been written in the context of a blog from Alison Coward who now runs Bracket Limited
. I have known Alison for a number of years and value her different perspective, not least as she comes from the creative sector (and is not held back as I am with my technical background and mindset).
The article struck me as being really valuable (to help with workshop facilitation) as it exemplifies the business analyst when she or he is most valued by the organisation, when they are acting as a facilitator and problem solver.
When it comes to facilitating great effective workshops, there is always room to improve and introduce new techniques to your sessions. It’s an ongoing learning process and you’ll discover more exercises to try, gain more confidence (and helping to facilitate in the future), and get better at reading the energy in the room.
Table of Contents
But how do you find opportunities to practice your workshop facilitation skills ? It may not be possible for you to run workshops as frequently as you’d like to experiment and try new methods.
Through my experience, I’ve identified four areas that can make a huge difference to the success of your workshops. The advantage is that they are mostly skills that you can practice on a regular basis (and also improve) in your work, with your colleagues and in collaborative projects.
In this post, I’ll explain what they are, why they’re so important in workshops, and give you some resources and links to explore further to support you in effective workshop facilitation (and helping to facilitate in the future).
4 Skills For Workshop Facilitation
Curiosity and Asking Good Questions
As a workshop facilitator, your aim is to encourage participants to share their thoughts and ideas in a productive way. This task becomes much easier if you have a genuine curiosity in what people have to say. You’ll be asking a lot of open-ended questions – one of the most important communication tools in workshop facilitation.
Shaping and asking good questions that encourage people to think deeply helps you to truly identify a problem before prematurely solving it. The right questions promote creative thinking, help people generate lots of possibilities, and prevent them from fixating on one limited solution. Sometimes you need to ask the ‘stupid’ questions that others are afraid to ask, so that you can reveal and challenge assumptions. At other times, you’ll need to respond to a participant’s question with another question to turn the thinking back on them.
Curiosity and asking good questions are just as important when planning to run an effective workshop, as they are during one. The overall purpose of your workshop will be a big question or set questions that your participants will need to work through together. Each activity that you design starts with a list of questions that you will use to prompt and challenge your participants’ thinking.
Two leaders who are working to improve our questioning skills are Warren Berger and Hal Gregerson:
- Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question
aims to help us re-develop the ability we had to question as children, but loose as we get older. He explains how learning to transition through a series of “why” to “what if” to how” questions can help us to innovate better and bring about powerful changes. - Gregerson’s 4-24 project was launched to encourage people to practice spending 4 minutes each day asking themselves questions about their most pressing challenges, so that they can bring this skill into their work.
Listening And Empathy
If you ask good questions, then you’ll receive better responses. The next step is to listen effectively to gain richer insights and learn more.
Great listeners are good at not talking and being okay with silence. When you ask a question in a workshop, people may need some time to process it and think through their answer. This can mean quietly waiting just beyond what is naturally comfortable before someone responds.
IDEO have developed a short audio course on “Creative Listening” a technique they see as central to helping them solve big design challenges.
Active listening – a technique where you repeat or paraphrase what has been said to demonstrate understanding – is being recognised as an important skills for leaders. For example, Google encourage their managers to practice it with their teams.
Listening and empathy go hand in hand. Listening intently to someone, and seeing the situation from their point of view is a powerful combination. It helps you to handle conflict and respond effectively in difficult conversations, both of which can happen during a workshop.
Like listening, empathy is increasingly being recognised as a key leadership skill. Good starting points to understand more are Brené Brown’s talk on Vulnerability and Roman Krznaric’s RSA Animates talk on Outrospection. In his talk, Krznaric says that empathetic people get beyond prejudice by nurturing their curiosity, are sensitive listeners, good at understanding others’ needs and promote two-way dialogue – all valuable qualities in workshop facilitation.
You can evaluate empathy with a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes”, a set of questions that requires you to guess a person’s emotion from their eyes.
Dealing With Uncertainty
When people are brought together to explore and develop something new, as they are in a workshop, it’s an uncertain situation. You don’t know the direction it will take and what ideas will emerge. There will be some ambiguity as you work together to find solutions, chaos as varying answers and viewpoints are shared, and conflict as people challenge each others’ ideas and make decisions.
These ‘messy’ situations can make the average person feel uncomfortable, but engaging with them can make us better creative thinkers, problem-solvers and decision-makers. IDEO calls this “sailing through the fog” – those points in a project where a team feels lost or stuck. In this short video, they explain that “the best way through the fog, is through the fog”, by using tools like brainstorming to make progress.
Workshop facilitators need to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, as well as guiding their participants through this complexity.
Some other ways to deal with uncertainty in workshops are to:
- Be patient: at those moments of uncertainty, remember that these are part of the process of making real breakthroughs and developing new ideas
- Be flexible: as new ideas and possibilities emerge, understand that you may need to change your workshop structure to suit. When alternative options emerge, it’s also okay to ask your participants what they would like to do
- Avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis: sometimes a productive way to move a discussion forward is to try an idea out in a small way, to either validate it or rule it out.
Synthesising Ideas
As well as managing creative uncertainty, there are also times when you need to ‘ground’ ideas and make them tangible to move a project or discussion forward. As a facilitator and objective observer, so you’re in a perfect position to spot connections between ideas, in a way that participants are not able to because they’re too close to the content.
You may not be involved in generating ideas directly, but don’t be mistaken that you don’t have a creative part to play. As Steve Jobs famously said, “creativity is just connecting things”, and this is an important role that you’ll have in a workshop. Maria Popova, curator of the brilliant resource Brainpickings, champions combinatorial creativity, explaining that new ideas take shape from building blocks of content, insight and knowledge and the key skill is being able to combine them and see patterns where others are unable to.
This means that you’ll start to hone your ability to synthesise content, both on-the-spot in workshops, and afterwards when you’re reviewing the content that was created. You’ll identify key themes and pick up on interesting points of conflict that could serve the basis for further problem-solving.
A way to practice this is to develop your “integrative thinking”, a skill that Roger Martin wrote about in The Opposable Mind. The idea of integrative thinking is to get used to holding opposite viewpoints at the same time, without feeling the need to quickly decide between them. Instead, you use this creative tension to develop something even better.
Good synthesis can only be as good as the content, so asking excellent questions, listening well and being able to handle ambiguity are important in the lead up.
What other skills can you practice regularly to help you improve your workshop facilitation?
Workshop Facilitation Tips
Here are 3 important tips that you can use for your next workshop.
- You need to be organised. This means having a clear agenda and objectives for the workshop, as well as knowing who your participants are and what their needs are. It’s also important to be familiar with the material you’ll be covering. The last thing you want is to get lost in the middle of a workshop!
- You need to be prepared to engage your participants. This means being able to answer their questions and keep them involved in the workshop. It’s also important to be aware of different learning styles and make sure that everyone is getting something out of the workshop.
- You need to be flexible. Things rarely go according to plan, so you need to be able to think on your feet and adapt to the situation. This can be a challenge, but it’s also one of the most rewarding parts of workshop facilitation!
How to Facilitate a Workshop Online
With the current pandemic, many workshop facilitators have had to transition their in-person workshops online. This can be a daunting task, but it’s not impossible! Here are a few tips to help you make the transition:
- Get familiar with the platform you’ll be using. There’s nothing worse than trying to facilitate a workshop on a platform you’re not familiar with. Test out the features and make sure you know how to use them before the workshop starts.
- Make sure your participants are also familiar with the platform. This means sending out instructions beforehand and being available to answer any questions they might have. The last thing you want is for people to be struggling with the technology during the workshop!
- Be prepared to troubleshoot. Things will inevitably go wrong, so it’s important to be prepared for anything. Have a backup plan and make sure you know how to contact your participants if something goes wrong.
Group Facilitation Techniques
There are a few useful group facilitation techniques that all workshop facilitators should know about and can come in useful in your next group workshop. It is important to be able to manage group dynamics. This means being aware of the different personalities in the group and how they might interact with each other. It’s also important to be able to keep the group on track and make sure that everyone get involved.
- Round Robin – This easy approach is intended to increase participation rates or assist identify a problem. Then each person in the group is asked to express their views on the issue being discussed, without interruption from anybody else in the group. As a consequence, the facilitator can then get the group to summarise these thoughts and opinions before they continue.
- Brainstorming – Multi-Voting – Brainstorming allows groups to come up with a long list of ideas. However, it is only useful if you narrow down these ideas into a manageable amount. The whole group should then vote on the best ideas to save time in the future.
- Working in Small Groups – This is the ideal method of group work, especially at the beginning of a meeting. It helps break down any initial barriers and makes it easy for everyone to participate. As a result, it’s also helpful in getting individuals to define what issue the group is working on.
Workshop Books
Alison Coward has an effective workshop ebook.
Workshop Toolkit
The following are useful items that I have resources to prepare, run and support my workshop facilitation sessions.
Brown Paper
Magic Whiteboard
Masking Tape
Creating Swim Lanes
Index Cards
Post It Notes / Sticky Notes
Pens
