 | ‘Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.’ |
| Casey Stengel (1890–1975) |
Introduction
It’s said that ‘two heads are better than one’, and most would agree that it’s easier to develop a new idea or to solve a difficult problem when you’ve got someone to work with. On a similar theme, ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ and ‘many hands make light work’. These popular adages illustrate the great potential of teamwork. If channelled effectively, groups of people can pool their collective knowledge and experience to impressive effect.
To tap into the immense potential of teamwork, you’ll need to be a facilitator and an enabler. By this, we mean someone who uses their people skills to make it easy for their colleagues to achieve their maximum contribution – both individually and as part of the team.
You need to get collective, collaborative working happening in all kinds of ways. This will range from everyday events, such as one colleague bouncing an idea off another, through to larger-scale, set-piece events such as project meetings and workshops. Whichever way, a brilliant project manager smoothes the path and makes it all possible. So, although facilitation isn’t traditionally found in the job description, we see it as one of the core competencies for brilliant project management.
Facilitation is a discipline in its own right, with its own specialist set of tools and techniques. Although it’s not necessary to become an expert in the field, it’s essential you’re capable of facilitating project meetings and workshops. In this instance, your capabilities will make all the difference.
As with the other people skills we’ve covered, facilitation is a well-documented subject and your competency will grow with practice, experience and further research. Our aim here is to review the fundamentals of facilitation from a project perspective and to run through the practical techniques that we think every project manager should master.
Project managers as facilitators
Some people earn their living working exclusively as facilitators. Typically they’re independent of projects – often brought in from outside the organisation – dipping in and out when needed. They tend to be used to lead important workshops and high-profile meetings.
However, in our experience, relatively few organisations employ their own full-time facilitators and only a small number bring in independent specialists on an occasional, as-needed basis. In fact, the vast majority of organisations don’t use recognised facilitators at all. You might be lucky enough to have a specialist like this to run some of your key events. More often than not, though, you’ll be expected to do this job at the same time as contributing to the discussion in some useful way.
We don’t see this as a problem. Although the Facilitators’ Union will see our comments as close to outright heresy, we usually prefer to handle our own facilitation. A brilliant project manager is quite capable of facilitating and has the added advantage of a first-hand understanding of what’s good for the project in the widest sense. It’s the best of both worlds and the organisational logistics are much simpler too!
It shouldn’t happen to a project manager (but it did) ...
A senior project manager was asked to deliver a session on the ‘Fundamentals of Facilitation’ as part of an internal training programme. Two junior project managers were drafted in to help deliver the material – as training-within-training. Despite their nerves, the two newcomers got the presentation off to a flying start. They were just about to hand over to their senior colleague when a mobile phone rang. They watched in amazement as their mentor disappeared out of the room to take the call.
Experienced managers aren’t necessarily brilliant facilitators. If you don’t have a natural aptitude, you’ll need to put effort into developing your skills.
As we’ve said, though, there’s much more to facilitation than running meetings. In fact, there’s a touch of facilitation in -everything you do as a project manager. For example, there are elements of facilitation in sorting out a dispute between two team members, just as there’s a good measure of enabling in building an effective team. However, there are three everyday project situations in which your facilitation skills will be vital:
- When new ideas need to be generated. For example, when customer requirements need to be captured at the start of a project.
- When a problem needs to be solved. For example, when the team has produced a flawed product and you need to work out what’s gone wrong and how it can be fixed.
- When you need to get people with different views to reach agreement. For example, when you’re faced with a number of possible designs for your project and each has its enthusiastic supporters and vociferous detractors.
In the remainder of this chapter we’re going to explore the principles behind facilitation and then pick out some practical techniques that can be used in these common project situations.
Key principles behind successful facilitation
You’ll need to use your facilitation skills in all kinds of situations and fortunately there are some basic underlying principles that will always point you in the right direction. In any given circumstance, we recommend you set yourself four fundamental goals, each of which is critical to successful facilitation and deserves a closer look.
Four fundamental facilitation goals
- To provide a process. To provide an appropriate and reliable method for working through the problem or decision in question.
- To get people working collaboratively. To get the right people together and to get them in the right frame of mind to work together productively.
- To introduce a degree of challenge. To ensure opinions, conclusions and decisions are given the right level of scrutiny before they’re accepted.
- To have some initial ideas. To kick-start the process when there’s a shortage of inspiration, or when things start to stutter and stall.
Providing a process
The starting point for facilitation is to provide a suitable method for working on a particular problem or issue. By taking responsibility for defining the mechanics of how a piece of work is going to be done, you’ll enable your attendees to focus their attention on the specifics of what needs to get done. You’ll also put yourself in a good position to steer your colleagues towards an end result that’s fit-for-purpose.
On the flip side, the consequences of not providing a process are likely to be costly. Valuable time will be lost debating how the work should be tackled, and the friction caused among the participants might result in an immediate setback to a successful outcome. Even worse, the team may try to tackle the task in a hit-and-miss fashion, disappearing off on tangents and stumbling into dead ends.
The process you introduce will provide a series of logical steps for resolving a problem or making a decision. It will be tailored to your project situation and may be influenced by relevant standards – or simply best practice in your particular field or industry. Above all else, it must be simple to understand and easy to use.
There are some straightforward questions you can ask yourself, to help check you’ve picked the right process.
- Is the process well suited to dealing with the problem or issue? Is it fit-for-purpose? Make sure your approach is tailored to achieving your precise objectives. Run through the steps with a colleague to test it out.
- Is the approach practical considering both the number of people and the specific individuals involved? Think carefully if you are dealing with a very large group or with born troublemakers.
- Is it necessary to assign specific, individual responsibilities to the participants? You need to be confident of their cooperation, so at least sound them out beforehand.
- Is there any risk that things won’t run as smoothly as planned? Make sure you’ve got a Plan B just in case you go down like a lead balloon.
- Is the process simple to understand and easy to use? There’s no point in picking a technique that requires completing a specialist degree course!
The answers to these questions will help you to refine your approach – or perhaps change it altogether if you begin to have doubts about the likely success of the process you have in mind.
Getting people working collaboratively
Once you’ve decided how you’d like people to work, the next step is to think about what you can do to ensure your team collaborates in a constructive way. The key to this usually lies in getting everyone actively involved and working together from the outset. It’s important to establish an immediate rapport or you’ll be facing a long uphill struggle.
It’s impossible to provide a formula for getting a facilitated session off to a great start, since the number of variables involved makes each one unique. However, there are some practical measures worth considering that can improve your chances of leading a productive session.
Improving your chances of a productive session
- Get the right type of people involved. You’ll need the participation of people with the right skills and experience. You’ll also need to think about the personalities involved. Enthusiasm, good communication skills and an open mind can be as important as good ideas.
- Choose the right facilitation techniques. Select techniques that suit your material and the participants. For example, if you’re dealing with a contentious issue, take some of the heat out of the situation by using a technique that gets people thinking in a factual and logical way.
- Get everyone relaxed and interested from the start. A well-chosen icebreaker is an excellent way to get people comfortable and interacting straight away. Get people talking, thinking and laughing.
- Encourage everyone to contribute from the beginning. Look out for people who don’t want to take part or feel concerned about doing so. Find ways of demonstrating that you’re interested in everyone’s views. Reassure those who feel uncomfortable about speaking up; establish there’s no such thing as a ‘dumb question’.
As a final thought on getting people working well together, never underestimate the power of fun! You should always look for ways of making your facilitated sessions interesting, perhaps even entertaining at times, but without appearing frivolous. You’ll know from personal experience what a difference it makes to work on something that’s captured your interest. This is particularly true where creative processes are concerned. After all, it’s pretty difficult to come up with an inspirational idea when you’re trying to stifle a yawn.
Introducing a degree of challenge
Once people get working together and build up a head of steam, it can be easy for them to get too focused and to develop tunnel vision. They become blinded to other possibilities and options, especially if some strong personalities begin to dominate. So a brilliant project manager needs to be prepared to counterbalance this by introducing a degree of challenge from time to time.
It’s important for you to use your facilitation role to make sure that ideas and proposed decisions stand up to scrutiny, before they’re finalised. You’ll need to do this in a constructive way to maintain the goodwill of the participants, but once they see that you’re helping them to improve the quality of their ideas, they’ll be inclined to cooperate.
Typically, a few, well-chosen, open questions will get your colleagues thinking that bit harder. You can encourage them to look at a problem or decision from different perspectives. Suggest time is spent looking at the drawbacks to a preferred option, as well as its positive points. Think about alternative solutions, however good your first idea seems. Keep pressing for the team to take a fresh viewpoint.
By introducing a degree of challenge in your facilitation you’ll be testing the resilience of the ideas put forward. It’s far better to prod and probe when you can easily fix any shortcomings.
When someone says, ‘Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute...’ it usually means that they don’t agree with what’s being said but don’t feel they can say so outright.
Providing some initial ideas
Most of the time, facilitation is about managing the process and letting the participants do the hard work. However, there are some situations where you should roll up your sleeves and contribute directly to the discussion itself. For example:
- if the discussion needs to be kick-started or is complex and needs initial channelling;
- when the creative process is getting bogged down or is in danger of going off-piste.
Sometimes you’ll need to prepare material that can be used to spark discussion. This is because people usually find it easier to work from an initial idea than from scratch – even if that idea turns out to be not that great. It’s important that you introduce this preparatory work as a starting point for discussion and not as a done deal. That way, you’ll maintain the motivation of your contributors – which might waiver if they sense they’ve been presented with a fait accompli.
It’s not always possible to prepare material ahead of time. For these occasions, or where a stalemate is developing, here are a few, easy-to-use techniques worth having up your sleeve:
- Introduce a new angle. Reinvigorate the discussion by getting people thinking about things from another perspective.
- Change the subject, start on a new topic. Car park the current discussion and come back to it later if necessary when minds are refreshed. A change is as good as a rest.
- Take a break. At times, all it takes is a ten-minute break to recharge everyone’s batteries. A creative process can be intense and your team will need regular refuelling stops.
- And don’t flog a dead horse. Recognise the law of diminishing returns.
Facilitation techniques for all occasions
As well as there being some useful guiding principles behind facilitation, there are plenty of practical techniques available to project managers. Whatever you’re looking to achieve, you can be sure that there are some handy tools out there that will make your life easier. You don’t even need to be a paid-up member of the Facilitators’ Union to use them!
There are three facilitation techniques that we use most frequently. We like them because they’re both simple and effective. They’re also good, general-purpose tools.
Top three facilitation techniques for project managers
- Brainstorming – a popular technique used to generate numerous ideas using the combined talent and experience of a group in a facilitated meeting environment.
- Criteria-based decision making – a way of reaching a joint decision in a group when there are multiple options available.
- Root-cause analysis – a technique for uncovering the underlying reason why something happened.
These techniques can be used in the three common project situations we highlighted earlier on: generating ideas, solving problems and reaching agreement. We’ll outline how each technique can be used in these scenarios. However, you’ll soon see that they’re more widely applicable and can easily be combined in all sorts of useful ways.
Generating ideas
The creator of the brainstorming technique, advertising executive Alex Osborn, is famously quoted as saying: ‘It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.’ Brainstorming is based on this principle.
The aim of brainstorming is to generate lots of ideas to work from – with the emphasis initially on quantity rather than quality. Brainstorming is designed to get everyone in a group contributing. It also encourages participants to build on each other’s ideas.
Brainstorming is a great technique to use when you need a comprehensive set of ideas in a relatively short space of time. It also has the advantage of working well with both small and large groups of people.
Simple guide to brainstorming
- Clearly define the problem or opportunity to be worked on. For example: ‘How can we shave 20% off our house-building budget?’.
- Ask participants to voice their ideas. All ideas are welcomed – even those that seem outlandish.
- Record every idea. No discussion or evaluation of ideas is allowed, and nothing is ruled out.
- Encourage people to build on the ideas of others.
- Continue until you run out of steam.
Brainstorming is, without doubt, the most widely used and misused facilitation technique. The most common mistake is to allow discussion and evaluation of ideas as they are recorded. This interrupts the free flow of ideas. Part of the success of brainstorming comes from people building on previous ideas, often by free association. So it’s essential to emphasise the ‘no discussion’ rule at the beginning of any brainstorming session and then to enforce it throughout.
We’re keen on one useful variation of the conventional brainstorming technique. Sometimes we ask participants to record all of their ideas on sticky notes. When everyone has finished, these are then stuck on a wall and common ideas grouped together. This approach cuts out any opportunity for debating ideas before they are recorded and also stops the whole group following just one line of thinking.
It’s worth remembering that brainstorming is about generating ideas. It doesn’t help with analysing the ideas once they’re recorded. So you’ll usually want to follow up a brainstorming session with a technique that organises and evaluates the ideas you’ve collected.
Consensus building
It can be difficult and time-consuming to get individuals to make decisions when a number of competing factors need to be taken into account. This is especially true where the pros and cons are finely balanced, or people have taken entrenched positions and feelings are running high.
Even a brilliant project manager will regularly come across these situations during projects. In fact, you’d be right to start worrying if your team was in total agreement all of the time! Generally, healthy debate leads to an agreed decision. However, there are times when things are going nowhere fast and it’s time to introduce an objective and systematic approach to decision making. It’s also important to do this in a way that leads your participants towards some kind of group consensus. Our favourite by far is the criteria-based decision-making technique. It’s quite a mouthful, yet very effective and easy to apply.
Simple guide to criteria-based decision making
- Define the decision that needs to be made. For example, ‘What type of heating system should be installed in our new house?’.
- Identify and describe all the available options.
- Agree the best criteria for comparing the options and then agree the relative importance of the assessment criteria – known as weighting. For example, running cost is three times as important as the lead-time on delivery.
- Define a simple numerical scoring range for each criterion. For example: 1 to 10, where 1 is poor, 5 is average and 10 is excellent.
- Get the participants to score each criterion within each option. Make sure that they are consistent in the way in which they award scores.
- For each criterion, multiply the group’s score by the weighting. Add up all the weighted scores to calculate each option’s total score.
- Rank the options according to final score and use the order as a basis for reaching agreement on the preferred option(s).
This technique’s big selling point is that it breaks up decision making into simple, logical steps. The participants aren’t able to argue in vague or emotive terms about what’s right or wrong. Reasonable debate can only be had on whether the criteria being used need some refinement or whether the scores need adjusting. There’s nothing wrong with this fine-tuning – even after the initial scoring – as long as it’s not used to fix the outcome!
Criteria-based decision making also builds consensus step-by-step. First, it gets the participants to agree on what factors really matter most in making the decision. This is an important step in its own right. Then the technique requires agreement on each individual score. So by the time the final result emerges after the last step, no one is in a position to dismiss an option that’s scored well or to urge the group to go for something that’s -languishing at the bottom of the list.
Solving problems
There are only three certainties in life: death, taxes and problems on projects. Your project will be peppered with dilemmas, but the biggest problem with problems is that it’s easy to jump to hasty conclusions. You end up trying to fix what looks like the real issue, but which later turns out to be little more than a sideshow; worrying about a small wet patch on the bedroom ceiling when there’s a gaping hole in the roof.
Root-cause analysis is a really effective way of getting to the heart of a problem. It helps you to separate out root causes from symptoms. This is important for long-term success, as a brilliant project manager wants to deal with underlying issues and not just implement quick, short-term fixes. You can make root-cause analysis as complicated as you like, but we favour use of a simple approach based on asking the question ‘why?’.
Simple guide to root-cause analysis
- Produce a statement that defines the problem you want to work on. For example, ‘paper is peeling off the ceiling in the master bedroom’. Write it at the top of a flipchart or whiteboard.
- Ask your participants why this problem has occurred. Encourage them to focus on the immediate causes.
- Write their answers in a line across the flipchart or whiteboard, underneath your original problem statement.
- Now take each new statement in turn and ask them ‘why?’.
- Add the responses under the corresponding statement.
- Repeat the process.
- Stop when you start finding that causes are largely repetitive or they’re things you have to accept as a fact of life. For example, ‘because the house is a hundred years old’.
- Get the participants to review the underlying root causes and to agree which should be targeted as project priorities.
For this technique to be successful, it’s critical that you start with a problem statement that describes exactly the right issue. Your problem statement should be kept factual, objective and without any hint of underlying causes.
We’ve found that this technique consistently highlights what lies at the root of a problem. Then it’s up to you and your team to decide on the most appropriate, cost-effective way forward. More often than not the solution lies in dealing with the root cause. However, a note of caution here: there are times when dealing with the root cause costs far more than dealing with the symptom. So you’ll need to be pragmatic about the level at which you tackle a problem. Perhaps you could replace a few missing tiles on the roof rather than lay a completely new one!
Complementing techniques
The three techniques we’ve described provide you with an excellent grounding for dealing with most common project situations. Two of the reasons we like them so much is because they complement each other and they’re also very easy to combine.
There’ll be times when new ideas need to be generated but people have different opinions on which are best, and so you’ll need to get people with different views to reach agreement. On other occasions, when a problem needs to be solved and you’ve identified the root cause, you might be stumped for a solution. You might view this as a situation when new ideas need to be generated.
Combining facilitation techniques: an example
Imagine that our house-building project has discovered a massive cost overrun and this looks set to get worse. Your construction team needs to get to the bottom of what’s gone wrong and find ways of rectifying the problem.
You kick things off with a root-cause analysis to identify the factors that have contributed to the miscalculation. Having understood the underlying causes, you then run a brainstorming session to come up with ideas on how to turn the situation around. Once you’ve identified the most promising suggestions and developed them a little more, you use criteria-based decision making to pinpoint the top two or three ideas for a final team assessment. This combination of techniques is not the only way to reach agreement, but it’s structured, disciplined and highly likely to produce the right outcome.
After a while, you’ll be surprised at how often you use all these facilitation techniques together – sometimes instinctively without even thinking. Once you feel confident with using our favourite techniques, you’ll find it straightforward to master others.
Summary
Facilitation is all about helping your project to be creative when it needs to, to come to decisions when it should do and to remove roadblocks when it gets stuck. This gets to the very heart of brilliant project management, as facilitation skills are essential for the day-to-day running of your project. They’re also invaluable when tensions develop and you need to get people working collaboratively again.
For any situation there are some golden rules to stick to. First, take the lead in getting the right people together and provide them with a suitable process to work through. Then make sure that everyone contributes, not just those with the loudest voices. Once your team is beavering away, help it to reach the correct conclusions and to make sound decisions. Always be prepared to provide a bit of inspiration where this is in short supply and to give your team a head start where you can.
If you’ve mastered brainstorming, root-cause analysis and criteria-based decision making, you’ll always have practical facilitation tools to use in any project situation. Be imaginative in combining and adapting these, and supplementing them with other techniques you find work for you.
Facilitation skills give you the means to get the most out of collaborative working. They also arm you with techniques for dealing with difficult people-situations. So even if facilitation doesn’t feature in your formal job description, work hard to make it one of your core skills.
- You’re halfway to success once you’ve provided a process that’s spot on.
- Don’t leave home without your tool bag of simple and effective facilitation techniques.
- It’s not a crime to make working together fun and interesting! Start your sessions with an icebreaker or something suitably invigorating.
- Go in search of opportunities to practise your facilitation skills. There’s no substitute for hands-on experience.
- A brilliant project manager is a brilliant facilitator.