Step 2: Create a Facilitation Plan

By now you should have a better idea of how the day might pan out. It’s time to ensure that you have a solid facilitation plan in place well before your self-selection event. People can react strangely to new levels of autonomy, and while we’ve never tried locking them into a room and hoping they sort it out, we’re confident it would unlikely be a great outcome or experience for anyone.

As the facilitator it’s your job to provide the structure and boundaries for the event, and we highly recommend having a detailed agenda for the day, potentially with contingency plans listed or attached.

David describes how we came up with our first facilitation plan:

I remember standing in the Wellington office overlooking the waterfront with a blank piece of paper. Each of us had a Sharpie and someone said, “Well, we seem to have permission to do this now, or at least nobody is stopping us. What are we actually going to do?” We looked at each other and I said, “Um, I don’t really know.”

Originally we considered whether coworkers would email us their top three choices for squads they wanted to join well in advance. If we ranked them, we could simply assign points to them and assign people to squads in that way. But then we thought, is that actually self-selection, or are we just dressing up management selection differently and with more information? And wouldn’t people’s requests change when they saw what others had done or new opportunities opened up? We needed everyone to be directly involved in the process. After all, this really was all about them.

So, we started scribbling things down and tried to come up with some kind of supporting structure and process that would allow us to do this. We knew it would have to involve employees being present and physically making a choice while standing in a room with everyone else as the choices and opportunities developed. This would not be just be another meeting!

From the very first squadification event the basic running order hasn’t changed and usually follows these steps:

1. Welcome the participants and kick off the event.

2. Allow the product owners to pitch for their squads.

3. Facilitate several rounds of self-selection, usually three to four time frames of ten minutes, followed by a period to pause and reflect.

4. Wrap up, close the event, and clarify what will happen next.

Over time we’ve refined our facilitation techniques to guide groups through an iterative approach to self-selection and have incorporated learnings from our own experiences and those of others. The basic process and principles, however, haven’t changed since our very first Squadification Day. The process of working through a facilitation plan will cement a lot of the ideas in your head and help you identify any gaps that you should address.