Adaptive Path Newsletter for October 7, 2009

Like any new love, this was something strange and curious to me when I first saw it. I saw it in action soon after I arrived at Adaptive Path. Previously, I had spent a lot of time working email. I sent a lot of it to co-workers and clients hoping that somehow people would be captivated by my ideas by seeing them in neat predictable electronic letters and attachments amongst probably thousands of other pieces of email just like it. But on my first day of work at Adaptive Path, facilitated work sessions became part of my now heart-shaped world, and completely changed my perception of how business people and designers can successfully share ideas.

Out from behind email. Everyone’s ideas are coming together at once and then shared with the larger group.

Like any method of running meetings, it’s easy to make fun of facilitation. It’s related to collaborating which, as my former colleague Sarah Nelson reminds us, can result in design by committee. It’s mocked in the beloved show “The Office” when boss Michael Scott’s attempts at facilitating a meeting result in condescending, belittling remarks to his sweet, helpless employees. But when put to work properly, it rocks anyone’s world.

Let’s go back to that first moment when I spotted my crush. I was invited to participate in an internal work session, we call them Open Design Sessions, for a travel site. While woefully intimidated by my new colleagues, I was wide-eyed and intrigued by the chemistry I experienced. I knew something truly transformative was going to happen when I saw one of my colleagues in front of a white board with a marker ready in hand. She opened the session with an engaging question: “What would an trip planning application be like that allowed you to include information from multiple sites?” And then she sprang into action. She wrote down everyone’s ideas and concerns, each one as important as the last. None of the ideas were judged, and she provided new prompts when the sharing of ideas started to quite down. Everyone was thinking through possibilities well before ideas were turned into wireframes and design comps. She wasn’t imposing an agenda; she was simply interested in getting ideas out. She dealt with disagreement like a skilled diplomat, bringing the group back and focused when the discussion started to stray. Concerns were also given a home on the white board along side the glowing ideas. As a participant I felt engaged and included. I felt like my ideas were just as important as everyone else’s ideas no matter what the person’s role was within the company.

Why Am I So Mesmerized by Facilitation?

Working in the design world, facilitation is nothing short of necessary and here are the two reasons why:

As the design problems we work on become more complex, we need more minds engaged in creating or adopting solutions. In turn, business people and designers must guide more people to effectively solve problems or adopt solutions. Usually, a solution or idea created by one person isn’t going to solve big design problems.

I believe that no problem has ever been successfully solved that involved making another individual wrong. In order to successfully create a solution, we must bring other people along in the process of creating that solution. I’ve found that a facilitated work session is one of the best tools to share ideas and make a meaningful move toward solutions. What makes for a great facilitated session isn’t rocket science. One of the most important things, as with any prospective love interest, is the first impression a facilitator makes.

By far, opening up the session is your most important moment. Chances are, even before you start the group has already judged your outfit, come up with someone you remind them of, and may even think they don’t like you. However, when you open the session, there’s a window where your participants will likely put aside their prejudices and give you a chance to create something new and focus their attention on the problem at hand. However, you have to word it in an engaging way that causes people to choose to engage.

I like to use the method Michael Wilkinson’s describes in his book, The Secrets of Facilitation called IEEI. The first step is Inform. In this step, tell your participants about the session and what they’re going to do. There’s nothing worse than not knowing what a (long) meeting is about. The second step is Excite. This is the opportunity to let everyone know that they’re going to be sharing ideas, that will be meaningful to the problem at hand. The third and perhaps most important step is Empower. Empowerment is about the role that the participants will play, the activities they’ll be doing, and how their participation will make a difference. The last step is Involve: everyone is quickly given the opportunity to participate––usually a short activity that gets everyone talking to each other. These steps allow you to set the mood and make a great first impression with the group. If you master opening your session, you’ll set the stage for creating a great session where prospective design problems (or any problem) can find the best solution.

I would add to Wilkinsons IEEI, that it’s important to “let go.” Once you’ve set your group up with the activities (like free listing, sketchboards, or The KJ Technique, let go of any attachment to what should happen. This is where a skilled facilitator will see the session’s participants erupt with ideas that would never have been shared otherwise. Early on when I started facilitating work sessions, I would bring my own agenda of what I thought should happen, and what the group should create. This, as you can probably imagine, resulted in low engagement on behalf of the group. After watching my colleagues facilitate work sessions more and more, I realized the value of providing some simple structure to the activities the group is going to do, and then letting the group move the session in various directions. Of course, as the facilitator, it’s important to bring the group back if distracted by an unrelated topic, or move them on to the next activity, but generally speaking, being a facilitator is about letting go enough to let other people’s ideas emerge.

So many great ideas from one of our facilitated work session. Ideas we likely would have never thought of while sitting at our computers writing email.

I find that when I manage projects facilitation is the most important tool my team uses. I still send plenty of email to my co-workers (remember, it’s what I’m good at!), but when it comes to bringing everyone along and having the group generate ideas, a facilitated work session transforms both the work and the work experience. It may even cause you to fall in love with an old project again.

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