Facilitating How to

Facilitating Meetings: A How-To Guide

Role of a Facilitator

The role of a meeting facilitator is to ensure effective use of the meeting time. Time is an extremely valuable resource in the nonprofit world and particularly at Free Geek, where we have lots of meetings and rely on them heavily to accomplish collaborative work. Effective use of meeting time is ensured through the following means (in roughly chronological order:

• Preparing the agenda
• Establishing and protecting ground rules
• Keeping the conversation on topic and moving forward
• Ensuring that proper process is followed
• Establishing steps for follow-up, ensuring effective work going forward

Before Meeting: Preparing the Agenda

• Review recent meeting minutes. Consolidate COMMITS that need checking in. List established "old business" topics and flesh out any others from discussions that have been initiated since the last meeting.
• Notify participants of the agenda a few days in advance. This allows time for other topics to be submitted.
• If the wording of a proposed topic is unclear, e.g. "Discuss the clocks at Free Geek," poke the presenter to request contextual information.
• Consider other ways you can prepare ahead:
  • Check in with presenters to see how much time they expect their item to take, what priorities they have for the discussion.
  • Which items are the most time-sensitive? These should be given top priority even if they've come up more recently.
  • Prepare a proposal for which items to table in case you can't discuss everything in the allotted time.
• Writing the agenda on the wall whiteboard can provide a handy reference to overall meeting priorities.

Establishing and protecting ground rules

1.Each committee/working group may have its own set of ground rules established. These can be adjusted as needed at the start of a meeting, or reiterated during the discussion itself. 2.Ground rules are often oriented around ensuring that participants feel heard, disparate opinions are respected, and that generally the work gets done without interpersonal issues getting in the way. 3.The facilitator is the ground rule enforcer. If you find that discussion often strays off-topic, individual committee members butt heads, people are repeating themselves, arriving late, interrupting each other and failing to listen well in general, you may want to think about halting the agenda to set ground rules or remind the committee of the ground rules that have already been set.

3. Keeping the conversation on topic and moving forward 1.In a geeky, hyper-intellectual environment such as Free Geek, it's easy to stray from the topic at hand into tangential ideas. The facilitator must be attentive to this and willing to call it out. If the tangential topic energizes people, or keeps coming up, the facil can ask e.g. “Do we want to put this on the agenda and come back to it later in the meeting?” 2.Move the conversation forward. Just a few handy tactics for doing this: If one idea keeps getting repeated, ask the group to agree on a statement as a “given” and write it on the board. If “ghosts” are being raised (nonspecific statements about things that haven't gone well in the past) ask the group to agree to focus on “what's possible” or “what's wanted moving forward”. If conversation is stalling because people aren't prepared to address the topic, propose to table it for a length of time, and ask everyone to commit to preparing for later discussion. Everyone wants to talk at once: keep a “stack” or “queue” for round-table speaking, allowing for interjections in the case of clarifying questions/statements. Certain people aren't speaking on a critical topic: initiate a go-around, prompting each person to speak their mind.

4. Ensuring that proper process is followed 1.Example: consensus. Used by the collective formally/informally, and mostly informally by other committees. Really briefly, consensus process is: A) Open discussion of an issue, B) Development/presentation of proposals, C) Clarifications, D) Concerns and clustering of concerns, E) Resolution of concerns/counter-proposals/further discussion, F) Opportunity to block, G) Consensus. These can happen in different orders, with certain caveats: Clarifying questions should be addressed expediently, concerns can't be clustered until they've been stated, counter-proposals may move the conversation toward consensus and should not be skipped over. 2.Proper process also includes enforcing ground rules, or creating them if they don't exist already for this particular context.

5. Establishing and ensuring effective follow-up 1.Conversation can often stall in the realm of stating and restating what we want or “it might be a good idea to do xyz.” The facilitator can rope in this conversation by proposing commits, and asking people in the room to take them on. 2.Setting deadlines for commits can help arrange priorities for future action/follow-up and make future meetings more effective/ensure continuity. 3.If time is left over in the meeting, use this time to review and approve the minutes, and set initial priorities for the next meeting's discussion.