Facilitating a meeting? Making the most of your dry run

8 min readJun 24, 2020

Meeting plans are great on paper, but until you test drive, it is hard to know what’s going to work. If you’re going to do one, how to get the most out of it?

As part of a series on facilitation (more on that in future posts), I asked colleagues with varied experiences what works for them and, based on their feedback, have created a checklist of proposed steps to take between designing a session and running it. The purpose of the checklist is to itemize areas where a dry run can offer clarity, even if imperfect, about how things will go, and hopefully also reduce pre-session nerves and questions. My goal has been to make it as comprehensive as possible, recognizing not all elements are needed for all situations. People have shared fantastic advice, on things I wish I had known about much earlier in my facilitation work. This post, and accompanying checklist, aren’t the last word on the subjet. In fact, they are intended to start the conversation. My hope is to add ideas and make it more widely available.

At the point of writing, we’re in the midst of a pandemic, and working virtually, however most concepts apply regardless of whether virtual or in-person — it’s just the “space” that is different.

Clarify your intentions, and plan your rehearsal

Before organizing your dry run, reflect on your needs and set some intentions. What do you want to happen? What do you want people to leave with? To remember? For larger events, consider doing at least two dry runs. Schedule a more in-depth version at least a week before a larger event, and a series of mini-tests early on the day of your session. If your event is virtual, consider doing individual dry runs for each of tech and content, and then subsequently combining them. Colleen Tiernan, Senior Innovation Advisor at Employment and Social Development Canada suggests also doing a pre-mortem: imagine your meeting has failed and the failures that caused it, and then work backward to determine how to avoid those mistakes.

Organizing your dry run

Do some mental modelling what you anticipate a successful session will look like, so then you can tell when you are off track (“at this point, we should start to see this…if we aren’t what can we do about it?”).

All of my colleagues were emphatic about the need to gather an audience with whom you can user test your session. Include as many diverse voices and perspectives as possible. Rachelle Dempster, a Learning Designer at the Canada School of Public Service, recommends preparing a specific agenda for each dry run, and sharing it with all participants. Plan to work through the WHOLE thing — avoid the temptation to spend a lot of time on the first half and then rush through the second half. Build time into the dry run to pause and check in on what is/isn’t working.

Ask different people to watch for and evaluate different things, such as clarity of instructions, how the exercises resonate, what tech adjustments may be needed, etc. This helps them frame their feedback.

Think of it like choreography: the more you practice, the better you can deal with missed steps. Ready? Pack your sense of humour, and get ready to roll.

Part One: Test your design, content, and delivery

You’ve designed your session, and created a detailed facilitation plan. Now is the time to make sure you have thought through the details, and assess your back up plans.

Test your design: Is it logical and do the various elements flow well? As you dry run your activities, check to make sure you have allocated enough time to each activity. Kate Borowec, Director of the Surge Team at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS), recommends building in short buffers throughout a longer session.

Test your content: Making sure your exercises both make sense, and align with your overall objectives. Are the instructions as clear to others as they were to you when you were creating them?

Daphne Guerrero, a Free Agent with the Office of the Chief Information Officer, recommends testing the interactive components, and then testing them again with different people to see how they resonate in various contexts. Ask your dry run audience for feedback on their levels of engagement, particularly in a virtual context. Rachelle Dempster reminds us that, in virtual contexts, participants need to interact every few minutes in order to maintain their focus.

Your dry run session is also a great place to seek feedback on your back-up design and content, both in case you need to pivot to address the needs of a given group, or in the event tech or other issues necessitate a change in plans.

Test your delivery: Speak your remarks aloud and check whether they’re clear, concise, and resonate with the audience. According to Andrew Chisholm, also of TBS, “What resonates when you’re writing something is one thing, but you don’t know if they work until you get them off the page.” How is your voice (volume, tone) and body language? Practice varying your vocal tone, inflection, pitch, and volume to create a sense of excitement, and urgency. If you are working with guest speakers, ask them to do the same.

Practice being comfortable with silence and pauses, in order to offer people enough space to step into the dialogue. In a virtual context where people may not be able to see you, it’s worth being explicit about what you’re doing. For example, you can say “I’m going to take a sip of my coffee, while I wait for the first person who is ready to speak.”

Part Two: Test your set-up, physical and/or virtual, and your meeting flow

Test your space (physical or virtual): It is always, always best to do a dry run in the actual physical or virtual setting where your meeting will take place. If your meeting is virtual, you’ll need a “producer” to oversee the tech and make sure things flow. If you can arrange for help at the dry run and event, assign additional troubleshooters for each of your tech and content. Rachelle Dempster recommends providing your producer and troubleshooters with your detailed facilitation plan (including auditory and visual cues, and any relevant tech passwords and details, in advance.

Test your meeting flow: Test your content with your tools. Then test again, so your delivery appears seamless. If your meeting is physical, test with the actual supplies (e.g., sticky notes) you will be using. I have learned, the hard way, that not all kinds of sticky notes stay on the wall. If your meeting is virtual, make sure you and your producer are very comfortable with every function of your virtual meeting software, and how to troubleshoot any issues.

Part Three: Test your tech. Then test it again.

Test your devices, and any related audio-visual equipment: Check possible camera views and angles, and remove any background distractions. Do you have enough microphones and do they work? Do any of your devices require passwords, and do you have access?

Consider making a packing list, and include back-up devices, cables and cords (e.g., HDMI, extension) battery packs, or chargers. If you will have IT or A/V technicians working with you, note their contact information in a few places.

Part Four: Check in with yourself

Give some thought to what you’ll need to be on top of your game. Are you rested? Hydrated? In a good mental space? You’ve visualized your outcomes. You’ve made mental models of what kinds of progress you’ll want to see along the way, so you assess whether you’re off track. You have tested all the key elements of your meeting, and made back up plans for them. You’ve got this!

The day of

I’ll restate the obvious. Plan to arrive, or log in, at least an hour early to look for and trouble-shoot anything unexpected. Re-check your audio and visual equipment. Is the sound working? Do the microphones work? Make sure you know what’s in your facilitation plan, and in your back-up plan. Then take a breath and get ready to roll.

Lastly

All of these ideas reflect things to do in a perfect world. I’d love to add to the list, and I can also think of many, many, times where I wished I had worked through such a checklist. Or had such a checklist. Or had an opportunity to do a dry run or three. I’m remembering the dry runs I cancelled due to inclement weather, or competing priorities, and then the pre-event uncertainty about how things would go. Some dry run is better than no dry run, but the more comprehensive you can be, the greater the sense you’ll have about how all the pieces will fit together. They’re worth the time.

Have ideas to share?

Here’s a list of the items discussed here, formatted as a checklist. Have items to add? Consider adding them to the comments, and I’ll add them to the next version.

Special thanks to the colleagues who contributed ideas and experiences to the first iteration of this list:

Alexanda Epp; Andrew Chisholm; Anna Wong; Colleen Tiernan; Daphne Guerrero; Elaine Hays; Eric Shoesmith; Ericka Stephens-Rennie; H. K. Khan; Hero Laird; Ioana Finichiu; Janice Cudlip; Jocelyn Kula; Joel Bourgeoys; Kate Borowec; Kiran Khullar; Marie-Claude Leclerc; Nadia Nesrallah; Octavia James; Paula Pyne; Rachelle Dempster; Sarah Leblanc; Stephanie Richardson; and Tim O’Loan.