The One Quality That Distinguishes Great Facilitation

Your meeting or workshop design and facilitation involves a myriad of choices. Don’t you want them to be as meaningful and robust as possible?

Approximate reading time: five minutes

What would you guess is the one quality that distinguishes truly great facilitation?  Does it help if I tell you it has 14 letters?  How about knowing that the word contains the letter i three times?

I am, of course, talking about intentionality, “an attitude of purposefulness, with a commitment to deliberate action,” according to Dictionary.com.

Being purposeful.

Acting deliberately.

Choosing with intentionality.

I suggest these are the hallmarks of exceptional facilitation. Let’s examine why.

Why intention matters

Any facilitated meeting or workshop involves dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of choices.  Some made in advance (what this post addresses); many made in real-time.  The more these choices align with clear intentions in support of stated outcomes, the more they may achieve meaningful results. 

Intentions function similarly to core values or outcomes: they provide a standard or benchmark to guide your choices and help evaluate their degree of success. They provide more shape or velocity to your efforts and imbue your methods with more meaning.  If you’re familiar with Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, intentions might be said to be the why behind all of the whats (the tools, techniques, and tactics of your facilitation).

Choices lacking sufficient intention aren’t necessarily bad or guaranteed to create challenges or produce poor results.  They simply are less likely to realize their potential power to help achieve the intended results. 

Minimal intentionality is like leaving money in a low-interest savings account when you could move it into a high-yield account and immediately get better returns. You still make money if you don’t move it, but not nearly as much as you could.  Strong intentions generally deliver higher returns.

Intention in action

Imagine you’re facilitating one of the first meetings of a newly formed volunteer committee.  What are some intentions you might want to bring to this effort? 

Among the many that come to mind, one I might focus on is making committee members feel welcome, valued, and connected … intentions that are particularly important during the forming stage of a group.

With this as an intention, I might direct some of my attention and focus to the following areas (links to related posts are provided when possible):

• Existing relationships, if any, among group members.

• What group members most need to learn about each other in order to prime their work together.

• Individuals’ motivations or agendas (hidden or disclosed) for joining the committee.

• Surfacing the knowledge, experiences, and strengths each individual brings to the committee’s work.

• The agreements committee members want to make about how to be and work with each other.

• Orientation: what committee members need to understand about their roles and responsibilities, the desired results for their efforts, how their efforts connect to other organizational entities and activities, and policies and procedures to guide their work.

• My preparation (advance and on-site) so that I am 100% available to welcome and connect participants as each one arrives online or onsite.

The divine is in the details

Clarified intentions not only help focus a facilitator’s attention on the macro components that may matter most, they also can inform and shape tactical or “microexperience” choices within them. 

In their book Designing Experiences, authors J. Robert Rossman and Mathew D, Duerden assert that, “As a designer, you should make sure that all microexperiences receive the same degree of intentionality to provide uniform quality across your designed experiences” (p. 89).  For facilitators, meetings and workshops are our experiences and we are their designers (in collaboration with participants and/or clients).

Whether you think of the divine or the devil being in the details, intentional choices differentiate a “good enough” meeting or workshop from a truly exceptional one.  To help ensure intentionality in my efforts, I use a very simple matrix or table.  Here is what one might look like for the earlier identified intention of making committee members feel welcome, valued, and connected.

Using a tool like the matrix helps make more purposeful or deliberate decisions.  These decisions increase the odds of a richer meeting or workshop experience.  For each macro or micro meeting or workshop component you specify (i.e., food and beverage is macro, afternoon break is micro), spend time thinking about how it can reflect your stated intentions.

As proof of concept I still remember 20+ years ago when a meeting facilitator’s advance survey asked participants for our favorite morning and afternoon beverages.  Imagine the surprise and delight when we arrived at the meeting site and found our preferences fully stocked.  Talk about intention in action and making people feel welcome!

Finally, be sure your evaluations assess how well you fulfilled your intentions. I typically use a mix of open-ended questions and Likert-scale or ranked responses to get a good sense of how well I did at both the macro and micro levels. I’m always pleased when evaluation comments reference intentionality like this one from one of my half-day facilitation skills workshops:

I loved this workshop! I appreciated the integrity and thoughtfulness that went into this entire program. Jeffrey truly modeled the way throughout this entire session and allowed us to understand and practice the concepts as we were learning them. The level of polish was incredible.

Bottom Line

Your meeting or workshop design and facilitation involves a myriad of choices.  Don’t you want them to be as meaningful and robust as possible?

When your intention(s) are clear, you focus your attention on what matters most and don’t waste time and other resources elsewhere. 

That’s why I live by this simple, albeit it a bit cheesy, facilitation mantra:

Clarify intention before directing attention. Doing so helps avoid excess perspiration and feelings of desperation.

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Related Posts

These posts address other aspects of intentions in action.

Designing Experiences book review

How Workshop Previews Can Accelerate Results

Food Is Facilitation Fuel for Energy, Attention, and Community

Better Agendas Produce Better Meetings;

Turbocharge Learning and Networking Opportunities By Bridging the Gap

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© Facilitate Better and Jeffrey Cufaude, 2023. All rights reserved.

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