Facilitation Essentials: #OneTeamGov Canada edition (Part One)
Join us for a taster on the art of facilitation, featuring some great tools you can bring home
Welcome to #OneTeamGovCanada! Maybe you’re here with us. Maybe not. Regardless, want some facilitation tools that you can start using right away? Wherever you might be, you’re already in the right place.
This taster focuses on facilitation and participatory leadership skills. It’s about why we need to enable full participation, mutual understanding and inclusive solutions, and how that can help us create a space where people can transform their ideas into action.
I’ll share some tools you can use to help harness everyone who’s with you for a conversation. What we learn together will also help us refine a new Facilitation Essentials course at the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS) currently taking shape. We’ll also publish the current #OneTeamGovCan facilitation guide, so you’ll have more tools to take home and test-drive.
And because everything we do together is meant to be iterative, the facilitation team will take stock of what we learn today and how we might use those lessons to make our next events even better.
Let’s start with a quick intro and energizer…
Depending on the group’s size and mood, I may do a set of introductions or an energizer to help people settle into the space and activities. These two options offer endless variations depending on the tone you’d like to set:
- Circle: The group will form a circle. One by one, people can step into it, share their name and pronouns, where they call home, and an idea that inspires them.
- Build a handshake: Pair up and ~silently ~ create a two-step handshake. Practice, and then join another duo. Each pair shares their moves, and then the foursome finds a way to combine. Practice again, and then prepare to demo.
Following the exercise, ask the group what they learned about themselves or other group members.
A teeny-tiny bit on “what” and “so what”
Let’s start with a definition.
The term “facilitation” comes from the Latin for “to make easy.”
Beyond that, there is no standard definition. Sorry.
That said, there are some core elements that you can keep in mind. Generally, the act of facilitation includes:
- Designing and preparing for a facilitated session (be it a small team meeting, a workshop with users or stakeholders, or something like OneTeamGov itself). This also includes selecting methods and resources, and developing session materials.
- Guiding the discussion to ensure participants are able to participate fully
- Maintaining impartiality; and
- Helping the group achieve their desired outcomes.
Like many fields, various organizations are articulating competency frameworks and even certifying. While personally I’m not convinced about certification, the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) competency framework does a fantastic job of diving into what skills practitioners should have. NESTA also does a good job of making the case for facilitation in a public sector problem solving context.
So what? Participation enables full participation, mutual understanding, and inclusive solutions.
“Simple shifts in our routine patterns of interaction make it possible for everyone to be included, engaged, and unleashed in solving problems, driving innovation, and achieving extraordinary outcomes.”
Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, Liberating Structures
Why bother with richer participation? Sam Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making offers the best framing that I’m aware of. By being intentional about encouraging everyone in a group to share what’s on their minds, we can become more adept at uncovering and acknowledging the diversity of opinions and backgrounds.
This in turn helps people to understand one another’s needs, which can in turn generate new ideas.
That way, people get a bigger picture of what’s at play, and an expanded range of possibilities. Collectively, this helps create a stronger sense of shared responsibility, and helps establish buy-in. Collectively, participatory leadership helps increase the skills and awareness of everyone in a group, which also strengthens the capacity of the group as a whole, and increases the odds that the group can make decisions that stick.
As facilitators, we’re working to establish and sustain trust and a supportive atmosphere, managing the process so the group can focus on the content, and teaching the group new skills so they build their own capacity (mindsets, models, skills, and tools) for collaboration.
So how is this relevant to our work as public servants? As a starting point, leveling up our facilitation skills can improve even the most routine of all routine meetings, not to mention our workshops, events, roundtables, and engagement. Building trust requires effort. As facilitators, how might we emphasize being more inclusive about hearing everyone’s voice?
For those of you who see yourselves as early adopters, or are curious about other innovation skills like design thinking, foresight, and experimentation, facilitation skills are foundational.
In some contexts, facilitation also supports more digital public service, because of some common tenants. After all, “digital” is a way of doing things. It’s about people, organizations, data, devices, mindsets, processes and adopting a culture that is agile, user-centric, flexible, adaptive, technology literate, innovative, open and that supports knowledge flow, continuous learning and collaboration.
In this context, facilitation skills help us navigate new landscapes, be it understanding people’s needs through user research, developing policies, programs, or regulations, building digital services, or even doing our own strategic planning.
Facilitation aspires to many of the same goals. And the skill helps us do many things in new ways. It asks: How might we find new ways to work together, in a way that helps us get better outcomes for Canadians?
That’s a lot of theory. What would it look like in practice? Let’s try an exercise.
1–2–4-all is a classic facilitation technique which suits many contexts, to help everyone in a room, regardless of communications styles, share their ideas. I’m including the instructions here so you can try it out with colleagues. In general, plan for about 20 minutes, however we can condense the duration with a smaller group.
- You can use this approach to dive into just about any question. In our case, we’re going to choose a few from the selection of ideas and questions that people shared this morning.
- To start, take a minute, and select an idea that could potentially improve your work life, and think of 2–3 reasons how you could (ideally) bring it to life. (~1 minute)
- Next, pair up and share your ideas. Each of you gets one minute. (~2 minutes)
- Then, find a second pair, and share your collective ideas. (~5 minutes)
- Lastly, we’ll ask each group of four to share one thing that stood out for them in conversation, and take a couple of points from the floor (~2 minutes)
- Take a moment and think about a place where you could potentially try this.
And, to be a bit meta, the ideas around “What, So What, and Now What” are a great framework for a facilitated discussion themselves. Want some quick instructions so you can try it out? Liberating Structures has you covered.
My next post outlines some exercises you can try either at the unconference, or bring back with you.