Welcome to this week’s post. This is one more for the “series” dedicated to workshop facilitation.
Whit Christmas time approaching, this is an hard week for writing, so it’s going to be a quick one and I’ll try to be brief. A very little and focused reflection, let’s see how it works as an experiment.
Down to business!
Takeaways (TL:DR)
When it comes to managing a group of unknown people, and preferences regarding facilitation, there’s no such a thing as “best practices”. I’ve written in the past about the importance of reading the room and being flexible and adapt in these situations. Confronting with other facilitators can give you a great perspective on this diversity of approaches. It’s great to get a richer and broader set of options for future sessions and evaluate trade offs with more clarity.
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Weekly retrospective
A bit of context: last week we’ve been invited to visit a client for a preliminary meeting in order to organise and collect requirements and expectations for a workshop that will take place at the beginning of next year. The session is meant to be part of the kickoff of a new project, and involves a large group for a single room: 20 people are expected to be involved, belonging to different parties. The commissioner stakeholders, the design studio (us), the technical partner, and 5 couples of people from 5 different companies which are clients, coming from 5 different countries.
It’s not only a lot of people, but also a lot of diversity. Usually, this is a great starting point and a very good bonus for the value of a workshop. But more on this later.
This time there’s an external facilitator that will lead the activities, I will get to wear the hat of the participant for once, but I’m still contributing to the organisation with a colleague and the facilitator itself.
The topic
During the trip back “home” we got to discuss a lot of details about the organisation and in particular I want to focus on the composition of the smaller groups for the second day of activities. My position and perspective was to mix the groups as much as possible, while the facilitator was pushing to keep the couples of clients’ people, which are each couples of colleagues, together. Let’s analyse pros and cons.
The value of diversity
My point of view was pretty straight forward: you have a lot of diverse perspective in terms of culture (countries of origin), of domain knowledge (each couple of clients works in a different market), and involvement with the commissioner and their products. I think this diversity is one of the core values of a co-design workshop and I would exploit it as much as I can by mixing up participants and hope try to make them engage in conversations that favours serendipity and highlight patterns in different fields of application of the product. In the end this should be one of the best intentions for a facilitator, as the term itself suggest, in my opinion.
The value of confidence
The actual facilitator instead, suggested to have the couples remaining together in the several smaller groups that will be made of 3 or 4 people in total. He was very pragmatic about it. The group is already very demanding due to the number of people (so much that I suggested to have at least two facilitators and split the group as soon as possible) and even harder to manage for the aforementioned diversity. Because of this, having two people that know each other could promote participation and confidence in the small groups and end up with more content to discuss and occasionally a better result in the end.
Further discussion
First of all we should also take into account the fact that the english language is an additional element of challenge. The group goes from english people, so native speakers, down to people who will need help with translations because of their basic knowledge of the language, with a full spectrum in between.
The facilitator, even if he has a decent level of english, also didn’t look very confident having to lead such a complex situation in a non native speaker and was worried about loosing details of the experiences that participant could bring to the table because of the limits imposed by their ability to express their thoughts and share their stories. Which is pretty legit actually.
Of course with close people coupled with one or two technical participants you create a fruitful ground for open discussion but you also get very vertical discussions over a particular market, which will need further work and much more effort later to analyse and spot common points. What’s more, as I was mentioning, I also think you are leaving off the table the chance that people with much more different backgrounds will inspire each other to have a broader perspective of the topic through confrontation and mixing up different user needs and experiences.
It’s also true, and I experienced this myself in the past, that it is very easy to find yourself at an impasse with participants or an entire group that struggle to be involved, get distracted, or even sabotage the activity. So it is a very delicate topic.
By having colleagues work together in the same group you also risk to introduce to the table unbalanced relationships created by internal hierarchies. But in this case there are different strategies and tools from the facilitator toolset to flatten this element a bit, like alternating individual and group activities.
Conclusions
There really isn’t a better solution. There’s a difference in priorities, in risk aversion, in the ability and/or strategies that a facilitator con bring to reduce complexity and mitigate contingencies. Of course isolating this topic is a bit of a virtual and unreal discussion, as we are not taking into consideration the entirety of the context like which are the activities and goals of the workshop, the maturity of the participants in taking part of such kind of events, their involvement, their unique personalities and how the group will respond to all of this.
This is not something you can predict and with so much uncertainty maybe the safer choice is indeed the best one to create more value in the end. But also, maybe, there are different tradeoffs to apply in other decisions for the organisation of the session and there are other solutions to reintegrate some of the diversity you loose by prioritising the confidence of the participants.
Time will tell when the day of the workshop arrives.
And you?
What would you do in a similar situation? Which value would you prioritise as a facilitator? Would you take a side in this discussion even without further details and clarity of the context?
Let me know in the comments.
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia