Over the weekend, I was reminded yet again of how poorly people understand the art of facilitating group discussions. Backstory I participated in a meeting made up of leaders of various professional organizations in Chicago. Our goal was to identify ways for us to work better together. I was seated at a table of four,...
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This is a follow-up to the blog I wrote a few months ago, They Won’t Speak if You Don’t Listen. In that post, I mentioned that facilitators have two fundamental goals. They need to (1) encourage participation in the conversation and (2) control the discussion once it begins. As I said, facilitators often spend too much...
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One of the biggest problems facilitators have is very basic: failure to stay in the moment to listen and respond to what people have to say. When we work with facilitators in our workshops, we always say that there are two primary goals in every discussion. (1) Facilitators need to encourage the conversation. They need...
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When we’re working with trainers on their facilitation skills, one of the common issues we see is the trainer’s attempt to get to the “right” answer as quickly as possible. No matter how subtle or complex the question might be, many trainers are frantic to get past A so they can get on to B. We’re...
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One of the first questions we ask before a workshop begins is, “If you had to choose one thing to take away from this class, what would it be?” When we started asking this question, I was surprised to learn that the answer was almost always the same. People wanted to be more comfortable. They wanted...
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