‘Who’s on 1st’ Facilitation

Hopefully some of you have seen this, for those that haven’t – it’s well worth a 6 minute investment to experience some classic humor from 1937!

I’m not going to ask ‘have you ever’ but instead ‘how often’ do you experience this type of communication challenge? We all do! Too frequently we witness it between others in a meeting. And, it’s usually not a laughing matter :(.

I was once in a large sales meeting when the presenter and a participant had a clear disagreement. Each felt very strongly and was not backing down from their position. This went on for several minutes. None of the executive team in the group intervened, and many of us felt very awkward. And certainly neither of them ‘won’ the debate.

The art and science of effective facilitation is simply grounded in actively watching for and mitigating miscommunication between stakeholders. It’s not about picking a side, it’s about asking the right questions to get the diverse parties to better understand each others perspectives.

In this skit – Abbott and Costello started out understanding each other well, but as soon as unclear information was exchanged each of them became stuck in their approach and simply kept repeating the same questions to be undestood, but didn’t truly seek to understand the other.

A facilitator’s role is to:

• Actively guide the group to follow the agenda
• Redirect folks when they digress or there is conflict
• Foster engagement from everyone
• Promote established protocols: decision making, action ownership, time, and use of collaboration tools

A Facilitator objectively coaches the group to meet its objectives in an effective, efficient, collaborative and respectful manner.

Who is the facilitator?
In large groups someone should be formally appointed the role.
BUT – in an organization with a mature, collaborative, agile culture – EVERYONE is a facilitator. Everyone holds each other accountable. Once this discipline is broadly adopted, conflict resolution becomes a rarely needed action.

So – give it a try, be a facilitator!