Improve Relevance and Value with One Simple Question (Facilitation Friday #40)

Responses will help your session design and facilitation put the pedal to the metal.

“I wish I could read everyone’s minds.”

This aspiration came from an association committee chair participating in one of my facilitation skills workshops.  She was lamenting the difficulty of making the right choices to serve participants’ different needs and preferences.  While challenging, doing so is an essential facilitation goal.

Remember, the essence of facilitation is making it easier.  What we need to help make easier (and how to do so) is specific to the individuals in a meeting or workshop.  Gathering information to help shape our efforts to do so is the second question of my three-part Making It Easier framework:

For whom am I trying to make this easier?  What do I know or need to know about them to determine what they might find easier?

Might receives emphasis because no amount of participant data is a guaranteed predictor of how individuals will behave in a session.  Any session design is best thought of as an educated guess based on what we think we understand about how participants may engage with the meeting agenda or workshop content.

Gathering Useful Data

Of course the more we know about participants in advance, the better our guesses can be.  And the more sessions we facilitate, the more observational history we collect about what seems to work for different participants.  Data combined with our accumulated insights—once checked for any unconscious bias—can help us make better session design and facilitation choices.

But what if circumstances don’t allow for much data collection?  Or you’re a novice facilitator without a lot of practice reps to inform your efforts?

Fear not.  Drawing on one simple question’s responses (preferably collected before the session) significantly improves my meeting or workshop design and facilitation:

What—in advance and/or during the session—would make it easier for you to give your best and get the most from the session?  Described more thoroughly: given the outcomes and agenda for this meeting or workshop, as well as the setting and other participants, what would make it easier for you to contribute freely and offer your best thinking?

While you can certainly turn this into a multiple-choice question or have participants rate the desirability of various options you suggest, I find the most useful information comes from the open-ended question.

Converting Responses Into Insights

To help distill participants’ responses into more actionable information, you might:

• Use a Word Cloud generator to discover what words participants most frequently use.

• Ask ChatGPT or another AI agent* to summarize common themes and identify interesting unique or outlier responses.  This 90-second video describes how to do so.

*The environmental costs of AI can be significant and are mostly invisible to us as end users.  Do factor this into how you use it.

While both tools convert the lengthier responses into a more manageable distillation, I recommend at least skimming the actual responses for other potential insights.  Like numerical averages, qualitative data summaries sometimes minimize the story of any individual responses.

When possible, in advance of the session I highlight for participants what I learned from their survey responses and what choices I made as a result.  Even done only at the start of a session, I find it reinforces that their contributions were valued and acted upon. If you want to share a compilation of their actual responses, inform them on the survey that this will occur.

Applying the Insights

Understanding what participants perceive will make it easier for them to contribute their best during a meeting or workshop informs my choices in many areas, including:

• What content to include and at what knowledge level(s)

• Which formats, processes, and exercises to use to best engage participants with the content

• Examples, metaphors, or analogies that might resonate most

• The amount of detail to provide in any instructions

• Pre-reading and other pre-work

• Logistics: room set, breaks and meals, materials, et al

• Possible post-session follow-up

• Content segments most likely to not go as planned and my backup options/audibles to call

Bonus Question

For sessions where participants know each other fairly well, I sometimes include a second survey question:

Now that you’ve responded for yourself, what else do you think might make it easier for other participants to give their best and get the most?

I find it interesting to compare responses to this question with what participants self-identify would make it easier for them.  Doing so sometimes leads me to different design or facilitation considerations.

Bottom line?

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good when gathering participant insights to inform your session design and facilitation.  While comprehensive surveys may be most helpful, responses to even one simple question can significantly improve a session’s relevance and value for participants.

Getting in Action

1. You’re preparing for an upcoming meeting or workshop you’ll facilitate.  If you could get every participant to respond to only one question to inform your efforts, what would you ask?  Perhaps post it as a comment to this post for others to learn from your ideas.

2. In addition to sharing how participants’ responses informed your choices, what could you do to increase the survey response rate for future sessions and demonstrate to participants that their input makes a difference?

3. Because anyone can—and everyone should— make facilitative contributions, how might you use survey responses to enable participants to do so more during a session?

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