12 Easy Questions to Upgrade Your Meeting Design and Facilitation (#Facilitation Friday #20)

When participants help shape how a meeting will unfold they often feel more ownership for both the process and the results.

Obtaining participant input to inform your meeting design and facilitation increases the likelihood of an engaging, productive, and efficient gathering. Doing so helps build the “container” for shared understanding among the meeting participants, the conversation that follows, and the way participants engage with each other and you as the facilitator.

Tips for Gathering Input

I typically include some questions in an advance survey of participants; others are saved for when we convene.  A few considerations for deciding which approach:

• The shorter the meeting, the fewer questions I reserve for the actual gathering. 

• Surveys are better for questions that require more thoughtful responses or might cause some participants to feel a bit vulnerable answering in front of others.

• Questions whose responses would benefit from some real-time discussion generally are saved for the start of the meeting.

Responses to any advance survey questions are always aggregated anonymously and distributed for participant review prior to the meeting.  You can use ChatGOT or a comparable program to distill key themes.  At the start of the meeting we can discuss the responses and identify their specific implications (so what?) and applications (now what?).

12 Common Questions for Participants

1. What does success look for this meeting?

2. What knowledge, strengths, and/or unique perspectives can you contribute to help achieve the meeting outcomes?

3. What should everyone know about your interests and positions related to the meeting agenda?

4. Describe how you will likely engage and participate in the meeting discussions. 

5. What preferences or pet peeves do you have related to meetings like this one?

6. What information or support might help you make your best contributions during the meeting?

7. What lessons from the past can inform the discussions and/or decision-making process?

8. How should we handle any disagreements that might emerge?

9. Whose opinions or perspectives might not be represented by/among the meeting participants?

10. Given the meeting’s desired outcomes, likely agenda, and setting, what might be required for equitable and inclusive discussions in which participants feel safe to speak freely?

11. How should what happens in the meeting be shared?  By and with whom?  How? When?

12. What expectations do you have for other participants?  For me as the meeting facilitator?

Note: I favor open-ended questions such as these. I periodically augment them with a limited number of forced-choice, Likert-scale or ranking questions, generally when polling participants during a virtual meeting or when I have a large group for an in-person gathering.

Bottom Line

When participants help shape how a meeting will unfold they often feel more ownership for both the process and the results. To upgrade your meeting design and facilitation, develop a list of core questions you can draw from to solicit meeting participants’ input.

Getting in Action

1. How might you modify (add, subtract, rephrase) the sample questions for your own efforts?

2. For an upcoming meeting you will facilitate, determine which questions to use in an advance survey and which to pose at the start of the gathering?

3. What other approaches might you use to gather relevant participant input to better inform your meeting design and facilitation?  For which meetings might those approaches be most helpful?

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