Bring colleagues together to deepen your facilitation bench.
Before we focus on the small loops of facilitation in the moment, let’s look at a few more big loop design issues you can address before and during planning.
First, let’s think about how to design and form a facilitation team.
Even if you work independently most of the time, there’s value in thinking through how others can
- Facilitate similar work in similar ways.
- Contribute to your design process.
- Join you as a facilitator on an ongoing basis or just for a particular event.
The ultimate goal of your work is to help as many people as possible learn and experience success with the content you facilitate. Helping others do the same - and accepting help from others to improve your work - amplifies its reach and impact. You’ll reach more people by networking and collaborating with other facilitators than you will on your own. If you haven’t thought about opening your practice to share your work or ask others how to improve it, now’s the time.
You should be just as intentional about forming a team as you are about planning and delivering an activity. For example you might follow a design process like this to team-up with others:
- Define the problem. What are your strengths and weaknesses as a facilitator? How could others complement your skills and expertise? What is your goal for a project or event, and who can help you achieve it?
- Identify your audience. Are you especially effective with some audiences, but not others? Who has expertise they can contribute to your work with the audiences you struggle to reach?
- Brainstorm. Who can help you improve your work and reach more diverse audiences? Who might be a great mentor for you? Who seems as passionate as you are about your work? Who seems to have as much fun doing the work as you do? Who shares a similar stake in your audience’s success?
- Prototype. Ask for help from a few likely potential collaborators. See how it feels to work together and what you both get from the relationship. Thank them for their help and evaluate how well you might be able to work together again in the future to design and facilitate a specific event. Don’t force relationships that don’t seem to work, but count candor and constructive criticism as hallmarks of relationships that do.
- Test and iterate. After a few successful prototypes in collaboration and facilitation, consider extending a more substantial invitation to the people with whom you work best and learn from whom you learn the most. Think about what you can give back to them, too. The big idea is to form a team that can last and serve your audience better than you can alone, not to exploit people for your own professional gain. Anchor your invitation in a specific project or event and schedule a kickoff meeting to clarify your roles and coordinate your efforts.
You don’t need to do this all at once and you may change up your roster, so to speak, as you plan for different events or as you, yourself, contribute to other teams.
The most important part of assembling your facilitation team is improving the work you do for your audience. Surround yourself with people who can help you do that and give back to their work, as well.
Once you’ve brought together a team of co-facilitators for a project or event, it’s important to identify and fulfill your roles in the group.
There are times when everyone will wind up doing the same thing. You might brainstorm together or all pitch in to move around tables and chairs just ahead of an event.
However, during planning and any events themselves, you need to be able to depend on one another to accomplish specific tasks and deliver specific resources in a timely way.
For example you might divide work by activity and have everyone work on one piece of the agenda. You might form partnerships to develop an offline task and an online task for each topic you’ll cover at a workshop. You might have some people working on content and others migrating it to the web. You might have some people working on logistics for an event and others working on the particulars of any lesson plans and slide decks you’ll use there. Someone might be your go-to documentation and reporting person. Someone might be the lead facilitator for an activity while others serve as “table-wranglers” who circulate and troubleshoot around the room.
Setting up a role a set of responsibilities for each teammate helps make your design process and delivery more efficient and effective. You’ll have more time for testing and iterating before and during an event by working together in different roles than you’d have if everyone was trying to play every role or if just one person was.
This passage from “Teach Small” on Mozilla’s Read, Write, Participate blog illustrates how it looks to “play your lanes” during a workshop:
In team sports it’s crucial for players to stay in their lanes and play their positions. Things break down when teammates can’t find one another or get pulled out of position during key plays. This is true for facilitation teams, as well. Before your event, you should have a clear understanding of who’s in charge of making the ultimate decisions on “game day.” You should know who the lead facilitator is for each activity and which teammates will circulate around the room as table-helpers and trouble-shooters. It might help to identify a go-tech tech support teammate, as well. You want to define key roles ahead of the workshop to avoid confusion when it’s time to punt an activity and start a new one or when you finish way ahead or way behind schedule and need to adjust agenda items accordingly. During the event, it may be that different people lead different portions of the workshop. When that happens, the lead facilitator or an activity needs to remain in that role, no matter how tempting it is to go out and help people who are having problems. Facilitators want to help people. It’s natural to be drawn away from what’s working to help someone who’s stuck. Regardless, the lead facilitator needs to help the group move ahead as best it can. They should model trust and point co-facilitators towards raised-hands and calls for help. They should assure the group that once this part of the activity is finished, there will be time to go back and practice or get extra help. When a lead facilitator gets pulled into the weeds during an activity, it stalls out the activity and makes it difficult to surface and answer questions that might benefit the whole group. It makes sense for the lead facilitator to surface and answer questions that can benefit everybody , but it doesn’t make sense for the lead facilitator to try to answer everyone’s questions individually. As a facilitation team, be mindful of who does what, assign yourselves roles according to your expertise and strengths, and play your lanes on workshop day.
Use this organizer to brainstorm whom you might invite to help you improve your facilitation work before, during, and after an event.
Think of people who can help with design, delivery, or both. There’s no blocker to calling on different kinds of expertise at different moments of a project or event. Just be sure to recognize and value the contributions people make to your work and contribute back to those people, as well.
Customize this template to invite potential collaborators to contribute to your work. This might be a great time to evaluate potential relationships while testing your prototype activities from earlier in the section.