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, e.g. "What do you want to discuss regarding the clock situation?"
• 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.

Before/During Meeting: Establishing and Protecting Ground Rules

• Ground rules are ultimately about respecting your co-workers' time. They are often oriented around ensuring that:
  • Those who are attending participate actively, hear each other and feel heard
  • Disparate opinions and perspectives are treated with respect
  • The work gets done without interpersonal issues getting in the way
• Ground rules vary between working groups and can be established in any/all of the following ways:
  • Ahead of time, usually wiki'd and referenced in the meeting minder (applicable mostly to standing committees)
  • Established or adjusted as needed at the start of a meeting (applicable to new/ad hoc committees or stand-alone meetings)
  • Reiterated as needed during the discussion itself
• The facilitator is the ground rule enforcer. 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, when confronted with disruptive situations including but not limited to:
  • Discussion continuously strays off-topic
  • Individual committee members butt heads and make the issue personal
  • Participants are repeating themselves
  • Participants are arriving late
  • Participants are interrupting each other and failing to listen well in general

During Meeting: Keeping the conversation on topic and moving forward

• We all want to get things done in meetings, but unguided discussion will inevitably breed chaos. A few common problems and solutions:
  • The conversation is going on a tangent: ask the group if this topic should be added to the agenda for later discussion. If it keeps coming up and feels urgent, consider discussing it immediately before resuming the topic that was previously being discussed.
  • The same idea keeps getting repeated: ask the group to agree on that statement as a “given” and write it on the board for reference.
  • "Ghosts” are being raised (nonspecific statements about things that haven't gone well in the past): ask the group to agree to productively focused conversation, i.e. "what's possible," "what do we want to achieve going forward?" You may also propose a separate mediated discussion to air out the "ghost" issues.
  • 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 up on a critical topic: initiate a go-around, or call on individuals who haven't spoken yet.

During Meeting: Ensuring that proper process is followed

• Primary example at Free Geek: Consensus Model. 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 are often placed in the category of "Points of Process." What constitutes a Point of Process should be defined and agreed upon in advance, and should warrant interruption of a queue or stack for the purpose of direct response.
  • Concerns must be stated before they can be clustered. Clustering may be repeated if more concerns come up.
  • Counter-proposals may move the conversation toward consensus and should not be skipped over.
• Proper process also includes enforcing ground rules, or creating them if they don't exist already within/for a particular context.

For a gateway to lots more information about the Consensus Model, see Consensus.

During/After Meeting: Establishing and ensuring effective follow-up

• Conversation can often stall in the realm of stating and restating what we want or “it might be a good idea to do xyz.” Reign this in by proposing commits, and asking individuals to take them on.
• Setting deadlines for commits can help arrange priorities for future action/follow-up and make future meetings more effective/ensure continuity.
• 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.