Make and Invite Connections to Enhance Meaning, Understanding, and Action (Facilitation Friday #8)

One of the core principles of effective facilitation

You deplane and immediately check your phone or the gate monitor. 

You want to know one thing: where do I go next?  Where is my connection?

Whether it be volunteers on a conference call, staff colleagues in a meeting, or learners participating in a workshop, they seek the same thing: connections. And in our multi-tasking, information-overloaded world, helping make connections is a vital part of effective facilitation. 

What can happen if meeting or workshop discussions lack timely connections? Relevant comments go unheard, conversation quality declines, application of ideas falters, and meaning and relevance dissipate.

Facilitating Useful Connections

To enable better discussions and decisions, effective facilitation:

• designs environments, agendas, and collateral materials that make it easier for individuals to freely contribute their perspectives;

• listens for and seeks to make explicit or help surface relevant connections among individual comments; and

• helps participants determine the implications (so what?) and applications (now what?) of discussions for them and their efforts.

To invite connections, a facilitator might ask how a decision under deliberation could affect operations in different departments, how the current discussion connects with previous ones, how an idea relates to the organization’s mission or vision, or how a conversation might apply to individuals’ choices and work.

Effective facilitation also helps connect—or thread—comments from individuals in a conversation. When facilitating, you presumably listen more deeply, broadly, and actively than participants.  At any given moment, you likely have a stronger sense of the links among disparate comments.

While you can share the connections you sense, part of being facilitative means making it easier for others to do that work.  To help group members make these connections—as well as identify the meaning of what has occurred—pose expansive, open-ended questions:

1. So where are we at from your perspective?

2. What might the idea(s) being considered mean for your efforts?

3. How does what Tonya just shared relate to the points Andrew and Wanda made earlier?

4. What are you noticing right now?  What might it mean for what we next address?

5. What, if anything, isn't connecting for you or making sense right now?

6. We've heard lots of different viewpoints.  Any common threads among them? Any promising outlier perspectives?

Such questions create a reflective space for individuals and groups to slow down and make sense of what is transpiring.

Effective facilitation also periodically pauses the conversation and invites group members to assess the nature of their deliberations and how to enhance them:

• In terms of the discussions and decisions, what’s working well that we should build upon?

• Where are we falling short and what might we want to do differently?

• How might we better apply the shared norms or agreements we established to guide our efforts?

• In hindsight, what pre-reading or other advance information might have made it easier for you to understand and contribute more fully to the discussions?

Meaning and Connections Are Not Universal

Individuals filter what happens in a conversation, meeting, or workshop through their respective lenses, roles, and experiences in order to make sense of things ... to make meaning for themselves.  Periodically surfacing these different meanings can help knit together a richer and more robust understanding among participants.

In doing so, consider inviting more introverted participants to share their sense of the conversation.  Why?  Their more contemplative nature often is quite conducive to distilling the dialogue.  “I’d love to hear what our quieter participants in the conversation are noticing or sensing”.

Pausing for such “check-ins” can be especially valuable if clusters of participants share perspectives that may influence the meaning they may make; i.e. individuals from different departments, geographic locations, institutional sizes, et al.   In this case, consider a multi-round exercise for more extensive reflection and debriefing:

1. Divide participants into these “commonality clusters” and identify connections.

2. Form new groups with representatives from each of the groups in #1.  Have them sub-divide if they are too large. Invite them to cross-pollinate their respective perspectives.

3. Reconvene as a large group for further reflection and processing.

Making Connections for Learning

Workshop facilitators in particular need to help connect their content to the different contexts individuals may represent, as well as invite individuals to make meaning of the ideas and issues discussed.  Doing so explicitly helps individuals realize greater learning value. Content insufficiently connected to context(s) often temporarily raises learner awareness, but does not lead to meaningful or enduring change in mindset or behavior. 

I often have participants explore two questions:

1. Implications: So what?  Why or how does this matter?  In general?  For you?  For others?

2. Applications: Now what?  What might you (or others) wish to do differently?  How might you apply this information?

Using a simple think-pair-share approach allows individuals to answer these questions for themselves and to then learn what implications and applications others identify.

Some learners experience a disconnect if they don’t believe they can adopt outright an idea, concept, or practice introduced in a workshop: “There’s no way that would work in our organization.”  In these instances, effective facilitation asks them to consider how they might adapt what is suggested so that it will more likely work in their respective context.

Bottom Line?

By listening deeply and helping weave individual comments into a coherent whole, as well as helping individuals make (and share) meaning from what is occurring and being discussed, facilitation can help achieve synergy, producing a group result that surpasses what individuals might have accomplished on their own.

We now operate in a world in which more people toggle among virtual, in-person, and hybrid environments.  Organizations and facilitators likely need to increase their attention to how those environments affect the connections they seek to help occur and to adjust their meeting or workshop design and facilitation accordingly.

Getting in Action

• How might you more effectively make (or invite others to make) meaningful connections in the meetings or workshops you facilitate?  What technique might you use or what questions might you post to do so?

• If you’ve experienced useful connection exercises (i.e., think-pair-share) which ones might you adopt (or adapt) for your own facilitation efforts?

• Think of the participants you facilitate.  What do you know (or need to know) about them in order to identify the types of connections they would find most helpful and how your facilitation might make it easier for those to occur?

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