Facilitation training covers principles, techniques and tools for achieving the best results when facilitating participatory types of meetings that are aiming to achieve results, to elaborate a solution or to make a decision as a group. It is a highly interactive training with practical exercises.
Why Facilitation Training
The best solutions and decisions are made when a group of people combine their creativity, experience, intellectual capabilities, and critical thinking to develop something that didn’t exist before.
It’s fascinating to see how diverse perspectives come together to create something valuable through collective, participatory decision-making.
However, this collaborative effort is not without its challenges.
More often than not, it’s not something easy or natural that happens on its own without guiding the process. It can be quite difficult and drain the energy of the participants. There are often too many diverse ideas, and it can be unclear what to do with them.
So, often, the decisions are made way too soon, not going out of space with familiar options and obvious solutions. This is totally fine for “business-as-usual” operational decisions, but it produces very mediocre solutions for really difficult and complex problems, which require different approaches: first really understanding the problem, and then collaborating, having the diversity of ideas and backgrounds to find non-trivial effective solutions. This process also requires time. A lot of it. Too often, we try to be efficient and not “waste our time on endless discussions”, just agreeing on something when everybody is really tired of arguing.
This is where the role of a skillful facilitator becomes crucial. Not only do they guide the group through the complexities of the decision-making process, but they also help the group understand its dynamics and not be intimidated by it.
The dreaded Groan Zone gives us an opportunity to explore different options and possibilities, as well as understand better the ideas and points of view of other participants.
Target Audience
Everybody who organizes and facilitates:
- brainstorm meetings
- workshops
- retrospectives
- ideation sessions
that need to be productive, use the brainpower of all the participants, be inclusive and result in clear outcomes/decisions made.
People in these roles will benefit from the training:
- Managers
- Team Leads
- Team Coaches
- Scrum Masters
- Product Managers
- HR professionals
- and actually, any team member
Length: 4-14 hours (from half-day up to 2 days)
The training can be held onsite, in hybrid mode or online.
Agenda
- Foundation of Facilitation – how to engage the participants and get the results out of the meeting
- Stages of Facilitation Process & Dynamics of Group Decision Making (Divergent Zone-Groan Zone-Convergent Zone)
- Facilitation techniques and tools
For longer version of the training we will cover more facilitation techniques and tools and will practice them.
Trainer: Julia Västrik
Group Decision Making Model used in the pictures – credits to Sam Kaner “Facilitators’s guide to participatory decision-making”.
See also: Participatory Decision-Making In Pictures
