Excellent consensus meetings are not accidents, they are carefully planned events. A good facilitator gives some thought to the agenda of the meeting before the meeting begins. An excellent facilitator carefully plans each facilitation, thinking about how to approach each agenda item, how to best use the energies of the group, and how to keep the group morale and self confidence high. When meeting go well, and difficult issues and emotions are handled comfortably it builds the groups confidence in its abilities. Using well thought out meeting planning will have long term positive effects on the groups morale.
The first step of planning is to gather together all the things that will be coming up at the meeting. If you need to, call people and cajole them to give you information. If getting agenda items is difficult, it can be helpful to set a deadline, items not coming to the facilitation group by X time may (will) not be added to the meeting. Some groups hold a agenda creation meeting a few days before the larger meeting to come up with agenda items.
As time goes on, you will become more and more aware of issues and agenda items that may be floating around in your group but never actually get put up in front of the members at a meeting. Make a list of these as you become aware of them and then convene a special meeting to talk about these “shadow” issues.
If you want to have a spontaneous agenda, which is developed on the spot of the meeting, you will need to be prepared to evaluate the agenda as it is finalized. In this situation, you might call for a 10 minute break after the agenda is created in order to do some quick planning. This is the hardest way to make a good meeting plan, but you can still provide a lot a good value in 10 minutes.
Once you have all or most of the things that will be in front of the group, the facilitator can triage the agenda items. This is a great activity to do with a facilitation team if you haveone. If your group has committees a task to do early is to evaluate if any of the agenda items belong to a committee rather than in the large group meeting. A common mistake of many groups is that issues and decisions that really belong to small groups end up in front of the big group and many peoples time gets wasted. Large group time is better used for items that are best served by the whole groups brainpower or that need approval by the whole group. The facilitator may need to work with the group to establish criteria for what is large group vs. small group decision making.
As you triage agenda items one thing to look for is the emotional load of each agenda item. Agenda items that are obviously controversial or are likely to have strong emotional opinions attached will need a different plan than routine and non-contested items. When a facilitator is not prepared and difficult issues go badly it can undermine the groups confidence. See Facilitating difficult issues.
The next step in evaluating agenda items is to define the desired objective for each item. You will want to ask the items creator, what they expect. Questions that help define the desired outcome will help you plan your process. You might evaluate items by asking: “When we are done with this item, what will have? Is this a decision item, a discussion, a brainstorm?” It is often a good approach to ask the originator of the item what their intent for an outcome is. If you do not understand what you working towards, it is hard to make a coherent plan to get there.
You will want to determine what participants will need to know to process each item. Remember, as facilitator its not your job to know the details, but you need to know who does have the details and be sure to tap them before the meeting so they know what they need to provide. Often one or more members may have a great deal of information, and everybody else in the group will need this information in order to effectively make a decision. A good question to ask is: “what information will participants need to be able to work with this item?”
The more you know about your group the better you will be able to determine the best ways to give participants information. The information transfer might be a brief written proposal paper, or just a verbal summary of the issue. Or it may require significant information transfer. If the information that participants need is large or very complex to explain, you may want to break it down into manageable chunks and provide enough time for participants to digest it. You may also need to get several members to contribute what they know, and in this case you will want a timely and effective way to do this. You want to be alert that the process to gather or distribute information does not eat up all the time and patience of the group. Maybe a quick brainstorm to generate the information, or maybe a quick small group session where you divide up the group into areas and they each consult and present to the whole group.
Having information written down is often very helpful for participants, so being able to write on the chalkboard or easel the key points and elements will be very helpful. If you use a pad type easel you can do this ahead of the meeting and then have it ready to present to the group. If the agenda is up ahead of the start of the meeting, then people with additions and changes can suggest them before the meeting starts. Some groups encourage timely meeting starting by posting the agenda 15 minutes before the meeting start and ONLY allowing adjustments to the agenda to occur before the meeting begins.
Use action outcomes to describe Agenda items. Write out each agenda item as a goal or an action. Rather than writing down "discuss budget" as an agenda item, analyze the goal for the item. Write it as a specific task that needs doing such as: "define budget categories and develop tentative amounts in each category". Making a task focused agenda helps to organize the thinking of the participants and makes it very clear exactly what is being done or asked for.
As facilitator your role in the agenda making process is defined by the group. The agenda, and what is on it, is a position of power in the group and you can easily end up in a power struggle over agenda items. Sometimes group members will have different ideas or desires about an agenda than what you were given to work with. You can check in the agenda with the group if that is how the group wants to work, or you can check in the agenda ahead of the meeting with the owners of it. You will want to have a plan if someone wants to make a change to the agenda you were given. For example, you can simply ask the group what to do with this and have the group decide.
Having an somewhat open agenda allows participants to have input to the groups work, but late or unexpected additions can be cause for some facilitation concerns because you will not be prepared to work on the items. It is always a good idea in this situation to ask questions to help clarify the objective of the agenda addition. You might ask the proposer a question like: “Can you clarify for me what you would like the group to do with this item?” You might also want to check on the priority of the agenda addition by asking where in the agenda the new item should go. If you need some time to plan for the new item you can call a break, or get the group involved in a task while you think up the next steps. For example, you might ask the group to take 5 minutes to write down their ideas, and then while they are writing, you can be planning what to do next.
Some groups are very time managed, and as part of the agenda creation you will make guesses about how much time to allot for each item. This timekeeping can be reflected on the printed agenda by placing a time next to each item. Then as you track time, when the group goes over, you can stop and check in with the group whether to continue with this item or not. You may end up making a recommendation here if you feel the group is close to the outcome and could achieve it in a few additional minutes or if the group is far away from the outcome and they should do this another time.
Having a time limit sets clear boundaries for the group and helps them prioritize their work. However, in some cases, a time limit may inhibit participation. A participant may avoid bringing up information or a topic because they know it will take additional time beyond what the group has set.
One common problem is prioritizing an overloaded agenda. Sometimes there are so many things to deal with that meetings may take hours and hours. As facilitator caution the group about their energy and use of time. A heavily loaded agenda can often mean that the items towards the end receive the least attention because participants will be tired and want to go home.
As facilitator, If you have not gotten any directions about the priority of agenda items, then you can make some suggestions and then check these with the agenda owners. As you triage the agenda, you might find agenda items which will work together, or see a pattern in the order of presentation which might be helpful to point out to the group. For example, you might stack the agenda so there is a mix between short, easy-to-deal-with items and more complex items. Or you might want to do some easy items on the agenda first to get warmed up and a build a sense of accomplishment.
You will want to take breaks when participants seem restless or lethargic. But you might also want to think about how to use breaks in the agenda. For example, sometimes a break allows participants to informally talk with each other about an issue and this can be exactly what is needed before the group can move forward. If an issue could benefit from informal discussion, plan a break for after a discussion item and encourage participants to eat some food and talk to each other about their issues. Breaks are very important to keep the energy level high. Some groups do physical activity at breaks, such a yoga, a dance or go out and do a work party effort to get the blood flowing again. Long meetings where participants sit for long periods of time really drain participants energy levels.
Once you have the agenda items assembled and know the objectives for each item, you will want to decide on a process that will work best for each agenda item. For example, for a complex issue with several parts you could use a large group open discussion to define the parts, followed by breaking up into small groups, with one group assigned to each part to further define specific issues. If the item requires prioritizing a large list, then you will want to have a process ready for accomplishing this, such as using stickers which group members can place on the list for their top five choices. The more you can move participants around during a long meeting, the higher their activity level will be.
As a facilitator, this is where your expertise and creativity adds huge value for the group. There are many different ways to accomplish any particular task. See the meeting techniques section for some specific ideas. Some work really well with certain groups, others fail miserably. I would encourage you to start and keep a process notebook with ideas, and evaluations of how certain approaches worked with the group. If you are just learning how to facilitate, there are several books in the bibliography which offer a variety of ideas.
Sometimes the process you thought would work well gets bogged down. A good questions to ask in the planning of a meeting is, If this doesn’t work, what will I do? Don’t be afraid to admit your failure as you work with the group. “This does not seem to be working very well, its taking us a long time and we are not going to get done. I want to switch processes in order to help us accomplish our goals”
It can be useful to run a quick evaluation with the group, and then call a break before making a change. It can be frustrating to the group to switch but if you can instill upon them that your goal is the best process for accomplishing the task, they will most likely give you that opportunity.
As you evaluate the meeting agenda, one good thing to do is put on your creative hat and brainstorm ways to make meetings more fun.
Fun? Yes, Fun! Meetings don’t have to be boring. In fact meetings can be so much fun participants get to the meeting early and stay late and want more meetings! Remember, a part of every meeting should be to maintain relationships in the group.
For example, the budget can be a real difficult meeting to get through and not go to sleep. Long lists of tedious numbers attract the real details oriented members but usually overwhelm or bore everybody else. One group made this fun by doing the budget as an auction. They all dressed up like they were going to a charity auction, and they had a nice potluck dinner on their fancy table cloths. Each budget item had a display, and each display had a group member who pitched their “cause”. After dinner, all the members got their percentage of the annual budget in play money and they “voted” by placing however much of their play money on the display where they wanted it spent.
This may be way more involved than a particular issue warrants, but think about creative ways to get the group into the issue and make it fun. The more dynamic and interesting the meetings are, the better attended and more alert the participants will be. Using drama, music and activities as breaks can charge up the participants.
As part of your meeting plan get participants moving around. Make them change chairs regularly, call them out to do some fun, silly thing between agenda items. For example, a good way to have a show of opinion on a subject is to have everyone line up on a number line on the floor, where one end is low interest, the other end high interest. This can quickly show a human graph and also gets participants up and moving. Activities called icebreakers can make transitions between agenda items into fun quick activities.
Meetings are too often tedious and boring. And when that is true, participants tend to stay home rather than come. Incorporate humor, dramatics, game playing, role playing or other fun and creative ideas to working through issues. Meetings can be fun, its all in your attitude.
Now you have the agenda and the outcomes planned you will want to do some pre-meeting preparations. Are there things that can happen before the meeting occurs that can make it go smoother? Are there participants whose opinions it would be good to know ahead of the meeting? Is there a small group that could meet to further work on a particular issue, gather important information before the meeting? This is a good time to think about things you will need for the meeting, such as supplies, snacks, music, games. If you are anticipating a difficult or tedious meeting, use a special meeting launching activity so the group has some fun and laughs before tackling the agenda. Some launches require materials, so be sure to list these.
The final piece of planning is to do some disaster planning. Think about past meetings that have gone badly and try to identify what happened. You may need to make some educated guesses about situations and why they occur but this will lead to better preparation.
For controversial agenda items it can often be very helpful to think through how specific members of your group may respond, based on what you know about them. For example, if a particular member has been really closed minded and not willing to examine all sides of an issue when dealing with particular issues in the past, right before you introduce the agenda item, you might encourage the group to use open minded thinking and open statements by writing a encouraging statement on the easel to call the groups attention to using I statements, and give the whole group a little pep talk about open mindedness.
Think through some what-if scenarios so you have a plan for what to do when:
· There is an negative emotional outburst.
· A couple of participants don’t like this, how will I get their concerns met?
· The group gets deadlocked
· Conflicts between members surface around this issue.
· A “difficult” member exhibits their “difficult” behaviors.
Having a what if plan ready will keep the meeting flow from being interrupted or derailed. Having a plan ready builds your own confidence, and also builds the groups confidence in you when you handle awkward situations with poise.
Now that you have done all this work, be sure to sketch out a meeting plan outline so you don’t forget something important on meeting day.. Generally you will want to keep your outline simple and direct and easy to read. The more experience you have planning, the shorter your outline becomes as you internalize your notes. It might be a good idea to look over a few previous meetings evaluations to look for any specific types of things you may be missing and add them to your outline as notes to yourself.
In your plan make a section called, Things to watch for. For example, if Mary often withdrawals and you want to encourage her but forget to because she is so quiet, make a note to yourself on your outline. Simple words in large letters work best, such as ENGAGE MARY.
The very last step should be to publish the agenda for the meeting. If you possibly can, get the agenda in front of group members at least a day before the meeting so they can think about it, and catch anything you missed. In some groups it is not possible to get members the agenda and you might want to include a time at the start of the meeting to evaluate the agenda.
As the final step of your meeting plan, you might want to come up with an activity to formally close the meeting. It might be a moment of silence, a group circle, an offering of appreciations. The purpose of a closing will depend upon the meeting itself and the things that occurred. You might want to do some kind of healing or bringing together type activity.