Planning Process Facilitation

Many organizations use outside process facilitators for their most important planning meetings. While often fairly costly, a good facilitator can greatly enhance the quality and output from such meetings. Why?

þ The top person at the meeting can participate rather than having to facilitate.

þ Facilitators will balance participation, cutting off those who try to dominate and drawing out those who may be less aggressive.

þ Facilitators can provide meeting notes, freeing participants from this chore.

þ Facilitators can ask the "dumb" and "hard" questions because they are outsiders with nothing to lose by asking such questions.

The best source of a facilitator reference is from someone who has had a good experience with one. It is nearly impossible to tell beforehand whether a facilitator will work well with your organization. Some organizations have an aggressive, confrontational culture that some facilitators may not be able to manage. Or, an aggressive, in-your-face facilitator may overwhelm a collegial, courteous culture.

You may also want to obtain a facilitator with substantial background in your industry so that you can get expert input as well as facilitation. At the very least, the facilitator should have a basic understanding of your business in order to understand what participants are saying and be able to summarize and extend points where appropriate.

Getting a good match is extremely important to getting good results from your meeting. One effective approach to checking out a facilitator is to have the person carry out a short assignment, such as several interviews with your top people. This will provide you with not only a number of personal readings but, if you ask for notes, a chance to see what the candidate has understood and might be able to do in providing meeting notes.

To be truly effective, your facilitator should be given the opportunity to meet with a number of the participants in one-on-one sessions prior to the meeting. This gives the facilitator a sense for personalities, viewpoints, and issues of importance to each person. This background can be extremely important to the meeting process since it gives the facilitator a way to prepare for the process itself, and not simply for the meeting content (from a briefing book).

Some facilitators direct meetings with a strong hand and are fairly rigid about process. Others prefer to let meetings flow more freely, breaking in only when progress has stopped or someone is trying to dominate the process. The facilitator should be willing to step in and emphasize a good point that is being ignored by other participants. Facilitators should also be able to bring up points that seem relevant but have not yet been raised by participants. This is where a solid knowledge of your business is important.

The facilitator should be able to draw to an actionable close each part of the meeting. This means getting participants to talk about options, the basis for reaching a decision, action plans, resources, responsibilities and timelines. Each important point brought out in the meeting, if a potential action item, should be identified and pushed through to an action plan outline. This part of the process can be tough, especially if the issue is sensitive or has high stakes. The goal is not to push participants into a commitment to act but only to familiarize them with what an action plan might look like if they do commit later.

Finally, the facilitator should be able to develop a good set of meeting notes. This can be expensive — often 1-3 days of additional time are required — but it can relieve your top people from this important but peripheral task. You should also get the benefit of notes free from internal politics and agendas, and with an external perspective where appropriate.

We can provide planning process facilitation services along the lines just described. We prefer to facilitate meetings in which we have solid experience and expertise since such background typically leads to more effective meetings. In most cases, we will ask to meet briefly with some of the meeting participants to provide vital process background. This usually takes a day but is nearly always worth the added cost in terms of meeting output.

Generally also, we provide meeting notes in an "action" summary format. Adding 1-3 days to the assignment, this gives our clients not only a meeting document but one that attempts to extend the process to the next steps. It addresses action plan and implementation issues as well as steps not yet incorporated into action plans but steps that are too important to miss later on.

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If you have questions or would like to discuss planning process facilitation services, please contact us.