INTRODUCTION

After decades as consultants, teachers, and facilitators, we continue to see the need to provide leaders with tools, skills, and strategies for building more effective teams and organizations. Twenty years ago, Rod wrote the first of four books dedicated to translating strategic “designs” into a language accessible to leaders, managers, and particularly facilitators. These simple yet in-depth solution models were designed to help solve a problem, resolve a conflict, make a decision, or address anything else that might block the team, meeting, or organization from reaching a goal.

It should have been a no-brainer: proven ways to improve either team or meeting effectiveness, almost as easy as painting by numbers. However, it took years to discover a certain fallacy in this thinking: Leaders and facilitators would not even attempt our easy step-by-step approach if they had not had the opportunity to experience it firsthand. They had to see the strategic designs being implemented successfully before they would risk trying virtually any of them. The potential for failure or loss of face in front of their direct reports or, heaven forbid, their boss or client would never occur. Rather than chance success, they chose to continue with mediocrity. The keys to victory lay on the table, yet the risk-adverse leader or facilitator would not pick them up.

Suddenly we were faced with huge evidence of the need for a new and innovative way to teach facilitators—and through them, leaders—how to improve their team and meeting effectiveness. So during the latter part of this book, after some brief foundational work, we will bring the experience—the demonstration of our ideas—to you. Learning some accessible new skills should prove to be both interesting and enjoyable as you expand your facilitator repertoire. It will be like shining a new light on situations you’ve taken for granted for many years; suddenly, you’ll have new choices to excite you and your stakeholders. Our job is to make the facilitation process both interesting and fun—yes, fun.

The Extraordinary Dollar Cost of Mediocrity

Over the years, we have conducted several analyses of meeting costs for large businesses that have implications for anyone who has ever attended a less-than-satisfactory meeting. Each time, our rather conservative estimates proved to be mind boggling.

For example, the average executive spends at least 10 hours a week in meetings with an average of five people at each meeting. Each of those individuals would be priced out at no less than $100 an hour, which adds up to $5,000 a week in meeting costs. For larger companies, multiply that $5,000 times 50 weeks, then times the 50 top executives, and the cost is more than $12 million. Yet, of all these executives, only 10 percent said they’d received training in anything more than how to build a meeting agenda. One organization we studied had 300 facilitators at an executive level, and many of the meetings had well over 10 people involved. The associated cost ballooned to more than $100 million a year, with few of the meetings being evaluated, and rarely were the facilitators provided any feedback.

Even more challenging is the admission by a majority of these facilitators that they spend no more than 15 minutes preparing, such as by creating an agenda, for the average one- or two-hour meeting. The reason? They have a limited repertoire of strategies for such meetings other than PowerPoint presentations, or habitually defined approaches that make every meeting seem just like the last one: predictably boring. If you’re smiling or grimacing, join the thousands who would agree.

The need, we discovered, is a foundational one—the strategic development of trust and creativity across teams and organizations, through not only design but also the trusted facilitators upon whom organizational leaders depend. Without this strategic development, there are few high-performing teams or truly successful meetings. “Same old, same old” rules, and productivity and innovation suffer with little being done to alter the equation.

For 30 years, we have presented our consulting clients with strategies to facilitate differently, and now we are bringing these tools and skills to you with a new approach that enables you to witness our strategies as if you are in the room. Anyone who reads these pages and studies the accompanying animations will expand their repertoire of facilitation solutions. They’ll gain a new understanding of how to work effectively with highly diverse groups of individuals, begin to think diagnostically, and enhance their creativity as facilitators in support of moving teams, meetings, conferences, and gatherings of all kinds to new levels of effectiveness. And the benefits will continue to increase as they become more comfortable with these ways of thinking and acting.

Different Uses of Facilitation

During the past decade, the number of different roles and functions in organizations of all kinds has diminished dramatically, partly because of the economic collapse. The result is an emphasis on the bottom line, staff reductions, and the persistent theme of doing more with less. All three factors have conspired to raise levels of fear and urgency in a crisis-reactive work climate. “Just do it, damn it!” is increasingly the leadership mantra.

Command and control management has returned with a vengeance. More and more leaders have adopted a militaristic, “take the hill” approach. The last thing they want is to be questioned. Community-enhancing behaviors like engagement, collaboration, and open communication, while often discussed, have been shelved because they require precious time both to build the necessary skills and to execute. And there is the lingering fear that working in groups itself requires more time. It is confusing when people still use the words—the cooperative jargon—while doing the opposite. Simply getting people into a room with a demanding topic that shouts out for collaboration and deep discussion will not have a good result, no matter what the boss says. More often than not, the goal of the participants is to finish as soon as possible with a minimum of boredom or pain. A bit cynical, but often true.

Further, leaders are often lulled into believing that facilitation is a simplistic process of formulaic strategies. There are innumerable books pushing their wares on harassed managers, leaders, and their erstwhile facilitators. The “quick and dirty” prescriptive advice promises easy success if basic rules are followed. The 60-Second Leader, or 6 Tips to Success, or Eight Lessons From Genghis Kahn prey on the confusion in leadership today, while also placing greater emphasis on the marketing potential of a concept over its actual content.

Our view is that leadership and facilitation have never demanded so much or been under such challenging conditions. At the same time, never has there been such an array of tools and skills available to improve leadership effectiveness. And facilitators are in the crosshairs of that reality. It is for them to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Their leaders tell them what to do and what they expect, but they haven’t a clue how to deal with the contradictions and demands thrown at them.

For example, we observed a two-hour meeting with nine executives who were to identify obstacles to their organization’s operational efficiency. The meeting facilitator had each of the leaders write down their three greatest priorities and then opened the floor for discussion, dutifully going around the circle of leaders so each would feel involved. Of course, all hell broke loose as the executives argued for the issues that would cause the least disruption to their part of the organization. At the end of two hours, confusion reigned and little knowledge had been transferred, nor was there a commitment to further action.

In our debrief with the frustrated boss and facilitator, we suggested an alternative design that had each of the nine leaders go into one of the areas other than their own and interview 10 floor leaders about what they believed were the greatest operational deficiencies in the organization (not only in their area). The interviewing executive would return with critical issues that blocked organizational efficiencies and that the floor leaders thought needed to be addressed. Then, working in clusters of three, the leaders would identify the five most salient issues drawn from their three groups. Finally, the three groups would come together, making it relatively easy to identify the most critical issues as well as a few salient additional areas that caught their interest.

The design was diagnostic in nature, and it reduced the inherent competitiveness that had corrupted the initial meeting and reinforced the silos that had plagued the organization for years. The facilitator was used to going around the group to ensure that everyone had an opportunity to speak, but the same few leaders tended to dominate every meeting. Thus, the design used at the following session mitigated several deficiencies in the team’s working process.

The leader of the executive team hadn’t understood the value of the executives listening to the floor leaders, nor the value of the executives working for the good of the whole rather than their own interests. The interview design prepared leadership for eventually doing the heavy lifting necessary to solve the problems the floor leaders raised. Then, even better, the facilitator could engage some of these floor leaders in the problem-solving process. And that, in turn, would increase the probability that solutions would be owned by the floor leaders responsible for enacting them.

For the facilitator, improvement of such a dire situation begins with an awareness of your limitations. So, before digging into the opportunities found in the art of design, it is critical for any facilitator to know how they will affect the group. This means developing the philosophy of “intentional facilitation,” the principles of which we’ll be exploring. So, in this book, we promise to:

• Provide you with a greater awareness of your impact in your critical facilitation role.

• Add greater rigor and discipline to your role as a facilitator.

• Offer a new way of thinking about the teams and meetings for which you are responsible. We’ll also show how even a little additional time designing can enhance the productivity of a group and the individuals who comprise it.

The Purpose of Intentional Facilitation

The role of facilitators in the organizational leadership equation has two equally important sides. The first is being conscious of your own behavioral impact versus your intention. The second is extending your repertoire of what to do and how to do it so that you can respond strategically to any situation with calm, certainty, and creativity. This will forge the necessary trust between you and your leaders. They have handed you the reins for dealing with the widely differing challenges they face every day. As you become more skilled, so will they in their demands and expectations as well as their knowledge of what is possible in any given meeting.

This ability to respond with calm certainty is where the art of design becomes important.

An effective design is not, as you will see, some magical formula. It is a learned set of skills that can change your way of being a facilitator and a leader. Put simply, it demands that you are willing to be both a learner and an experimenter.

As a way of thinking, it’s fairly easy to understand. It’s based on the belief that virtually every situation demands something to move the team, group, or meeting forward in a positive manner so that those involved feel productive, and, hopefully, well utilized. Now, how many people leave meetings feeling successful, productive, and well utilized? In observing and evaluating meetings for nearly five decades, we’ve found that the answer is usually very few.

And yet, people do not intentionally create mediocre, boring, unproductive meetings or cultivate combative or passive members of their organization. The truth is that most people facilitating these meetings simply do not ask the right questions as part of the diagnostic narrative we will explore. Nor do they choose the designed activity that will best work for the group. After all, few of their colleagues model what we are suggesting. But our demonstration, through the use of avatars, of the successful designs that could strengthen their limited repertoires can help fill the gap experienced in most organizations.

Successful facilitation is one critical aspect of leadership, just like hiring, creating a compelling vision, or goal setting. It’s one way of thinking about yourself in relation to those you lead—it’s not as if you can turn off your leadership self at any given time. Intentionality is at the core of successful facilitation. It implies that everything you do is under scrutiny—by yourself and others—and makes a difference in how easily people accept your efforts to lead them through a particular designed activity. Living that simple definition can immediately improve your facilitation effectiveness. It requires no expensive books or seminars, no training program. It demands only a new rigor, a new discipline in how you see yourself and what you do as a facilitator at any moment.

It’s like the story of the young father who came to Rod after they’d been working together for a while and asked, “Rod, I have a personal question. My eight-year-old son seems to be afraid of me, gets emotional easily, and feels increasingly distant.”

Rod’s response, cutting to the chase, was, “Well, what do you do when you’re angry with him? After all, you are 6’2” and weigh around 200 pounds.”

He paused, as if trying to remember, and said, “We have a good relationship. In fact, I rarely get angry and I can only remember one time when I really lost it. He was five years old and did something stupid and I remember getting in his face and screaming at him. He ended up running out of the room.” He added, “I can’t imagine he’s still carrying that around.”

Rod reminded him that at that time, his son weighed, perhaps, 50 pounds, and after watching his seriously angry father fly off the handle, he would never want to see him get that angry again. He added, “Consequently, he has become watchful and cautious and a bit fearful whenever he sees you get red—which you do—and when that telltale vein in your neck starts to pound—which it does—he vacates the premises, emotionally, physically, or both.”

Just like the father, most facilitators or bosses become unconscious of their impact and of the signals they emit that say “watch out” or “danger” to others. Other employees, direct reports, or even peers become cautious, especially when they’re stressed, and, predictably, defensive. Under duress, pressed, and sometimes unsure of themselves, people become impatient or angry, or perhaps don’t feel understood. And, of course, all those little and not-so-little indiscretions are then noted by the individuals who are increasingly fearful of pissing the person off, or potentially losing their jobs. Such caution and fear are cumulative and, over time, can negatively alter a facilitator’s effectiveness. And you or other facilitators will likely never be told about your impact. How different is that from the dynamic between the father and his son? He hadn’t a clue and he loved his son dearly.

To be a facilitator today is like walking in a minefield, cautious of what you say and how you say it. But, by choosing to be the facilitator, it is your job to be intentional. What could I do differently to improve the situation the next time? This becomes your mantra. And, there will be a next time—count on it.

Yes, you can be angry and tell people how you feel. And yes, you can still be spontaneous. Nonetheless, who is to blame for the consequences of your actions? Only yourself, if you believe this way of thinking. That is the challenge. In the complex roles of today’s facilitators, these questions are key: What is your goal in the moment? What is the desired impact for those you lead or facilitate? How do you want people to feel when they leave your presence? Are you up to the level of effort this demands—becoming conscious of both your impact and your intentions? For many, this is a big order, but an essential one to be the most effective facilitator possible.

Doing Something New as a Facilitator

There are books on fearless facilitation, on facilitating to lead, and on ways of making it easier. Most talk about the what of facilitation more than the how, and few provide the tools to take you to the next level in your practice. Ours is devoted to the how of facilitation.

In doing so, this book offers leaders 13 classic design modules used effectively by our organization over and over for decades. Each is described in this book, and accompanied by a corresponding animated video (which you can find at www.TD.org/NotJustAnotherMeeting) to visually model the design for facilitators and team members. We believe that seeing leads to doing.

We encourage facilitators to read about the modules, watch the videos, and take notes. With these in hand, the intentional facilitator comes to the conference room ready to inspire increased productivity and creativity within the team and, over time, across the organization.

Following is a table with brief descriptions of the 13 designs. They are provided here to whet your appetite, before their full description (and accompanying illustrations) toward the end of the book.

Understanding the why and how of each design results in confidence that can be felt by those being led. It’s like the satisfaction gained when the last pieces of a complex puzzle fall into place. In the process, you as the facilitator will begin to feel more confident in creating your own designs based on the needs confronting you. By accurately assessing the need of the group in the moment and understanding design, you will find choices materializing almost instantly. Seeing a design as a creative act opens possibilities that may never have been considered. Witnessing the design unfold before your eyes transforms this learning process from one of telling you about facilitation to the exploration of new possibilities that will stimulate both you and those you facilitate.

The marriage of intentional facilitation and design should, at this point, be easy to understand. It is the specificity of intention, based on an incisive diagnosis, that drives design. It is for us to put the necessary meat on the bone of that principle that, in turn, provides the lessons of this book.

Most facilitators run their meetings and efforts to engage groups on the fumes of old habits and routines that have lost their meaning and zest. They reflect the remnants of boring teaching translated into boring meetings. Who, for example, has not gone to a weekly meeting that is completely predictable in how it begins, how it ends, how any discussion is conducted, and who talks and who doesn’t, along with the knowledge that there won’t be sufficient time to complete the agenda? Equally predictable is that those participating in the meeting will leave frustrated at best and angry at worst. To compound the problem, the facilitator, predictably, will virtually never seek or receive feedback about the perceived waste of time many people feel. It reminds me of those who have sat through a horrendously boring sermon in church and proceed to congratulate the minister on their way out on the wonderful service. The same thing often happens to meeting participants who survive a similar experience and then commend the boss or the facilitator for a job well done. One thing’s for certain: When we talk about engagement and a stimulating meeting, we will rarely find the answer in a presentation slide deck.

As a result, the first few chapters of this book will equip you with a new way of thinking and acting intentionally when facilitating meetings and working with teams. The second half of the book provides the following:

• It introduces you to 13 creative designs, using animation to demonstrate how to successfully implement the strategies.

• It allows you to experience each design on a visceral level in a risk-free environment, which will increase your confidence and motivation to use the new approach.

• It reminds you how adult learners learn, so you can enhance engagement and encourage them in your efforts to create your own inventive designs.

By using new animated technology to illustrate these designs, along with new communication strategies, we hope to spread the word among those inspired to bring creativity to their workplace and to groups of all kinds.

We expect to help all our readers bring interest, creativity, and effective outcomes to the workplace. To this end, the concepts of personal impact, intention, and design are highly correlated. The good news is that it begins with your willingness to break some old, habitual ways of acting. This book will help you expand your own possibilities every time you are faced with a group, team, or individual that demands something more than same old, same old and, as a result, will bring out the best in you. If you truly understand and use these concepts, you will never be boringly predictable or run out of possibilities.