To improve facilitation, use iterative design.
The design process loops again and again. You identify a need, hypothesize how you might meet it, and then design, test, and change potential solutions until they work for the people who need them. Sometimes you get very close on your first try. More often than not, you fail and take what you learned from your failure to create and test something new.
At its best, facilitation is a design process from beginning to beginning to beginning.
In this section we’ll look at how the design process can inform our work and help us become better facilitators by
- Putting learners’ needs first.
- Using feedback loops before, during, and after events.
- Equating planning with reflection.
- Collaborating, delegating, and inviting contributions to make our facilitation more inviting (#mimi, or “make it more inviting”).
By the end of this section we should have a solid understanding of both the design process and the ways we can use long and short feedback loops to improve our work between and during events.