This post was co-written by Moni Gmitro and Emily Yost.
Facilitation is an everyday tool for VMware Tanzu Labs. We gratefully acknowledge Jason Fraser and our colleagues who have iterated on these practices since our origins as Pivotal Labs. This article adapts learnings of our colleagues at Tanzu Labs.
Whenever a team meets it is imperative for them to clearly prioritize how time is used in order to accomplish their goals. If a team walks away from a prioritization meeting feeling frustrated and even more confused than when they started, the activity can sow doubt within the team and make them hesitant to collaborate in the future. The secret sauce for effective team collaboration is known as facilitation—and this skill can be learned.
What is facilitation and why does it matter?
Facilitation is a skill that empowers groups to make better decisions, leading to better outcomes and progress toward reaching their team goals. It enables the creation of a safe space, allowing people the opportunity to speak up and feel heard, which leads to alignment and the group making effective decisions together. Facilitate means to make easier by definition, but it can be a challenging task. Good facilitation often goes unnoticed, but the impact is obvious when it goes awry.
Challenges created by poor facilitation
The following are common pitfalls caused by poor (or even non-existent) facilitation:
- No timeboxing – Without a time-management strategy, it is challenging to find a balance among all the things teams need and want to do—conversations and discussions can go on forever. Being realistic with the amount of time you dedicate to an activity and keeping to it is key!
- Difficult to participate – Without a clear structure to the meeting or prompts, participants may not know how to effectively contribute.
- No agenda – An agenda helps people understand why it is in their best interest to attend and contribute to a session. Without an agenda, a lot of time is wasted in unstructured discussion and opportunities to uncover roadblocks are lost.
- Shiny objects – Often, the facilitator will uncover a hidden agenda, fear, risk, power dynamic, etc. that becomes entangled with the stated goal of the day. The role of facilitation here is not to minimize or dismiss this distraction, but view it as a legitimate point of leverage for getting the discussion to find value in that time and place.
- No room for the quiet voices – If psychological safety does not exist, some voices may not speak up for fear of being judged. The quiet ones often have very good reasons to be quiet—it is a common survival strategy in difficult work environments. Facilitators must invite the quiet voices to try and contribute.
- Too many people – The larger the group, the harder it is to negotiate or make decisions.
If some of these pitfalls sound familiar, this might be a wake-up call to begin investing in building and fostering facilitation skills for your teams and organizations. But how might a team or organization start?
Facilitation at Tanzu Labs
At Tanzu Labs, facilitation is about helping groups move forward with alignment towards a clear goal and removing roadblocks that make progress difficult. Facilitation techniques are applied to elicit information from people, help them organize information in meaningful ways, and focus their attention on the parts that matter. Good facilitation supports decision-making by aligning the team on where they are at (Point A) and where they want to be (Point B).
Tanzu Labs has tested and iterated on these facilitation tools and techniques with hundreds of teams over 15 years. When facilitation is done well, you hear participants say things such as:
“This was the most productive day of my whole week.”
“We accomplished more in two days than we have in the last two weeks.”
At Tanzu Labs, software teams have autonomy. This means teams are empowered to make decisions that make progress towards a shared goal. When team members gather, there is a purpose and a facilitator to orchestrate the process and extract the knowledge from the experts in the room. Everyone is responsible for their participation and no one is a spectator.
So, how is it actually done? Let’s take a look at the Tanzu Labs secret sauce for collaboration: facilitation, which consists of five practices:
GET the right people in the room
Not everyone is right for the session and trying to make everyone happy is impossible. Falling into this trap will make it much more challenging for people to feel like they belong in the session. The right people are the people needed to achieve the outcome—no more, no less.
Ideally, facilitators are best from outside the team. This allows everyone who needs a seat at the table to contribute their thoughts, and the facilitator can focus on moving the session forward to support the goal.
EXTRACT all the ideas within domain
Elicit ideas from people in the room. People who are invited to the session are the experts in their domain. Techniques that can help extract ideas are silent generation, dump and sort, round robin, and whiteboarding (all part of a Design Studio!).
ORGANIZE the information
Organized information is easier for participants to retrieve efficiently and effectively. It removes the problem of information overload that is caused by lengthy discussions and irrelevant topics. Affinity mapping is a powerful tool to organize ideas in a way that allows people to better understand the information, promote equal opportunity for ideas, and creates a collaborative environment as well as a platform for creative thinking.
FRAME the questions as progress towards Point B
Know the goal the team is trying to accomplish and what they want to walk out with by the end of the session. Design the questions and activities that drive the conversation towards the destination. Clearly define Points A and B. Write them down big and bold on a whiteboard, and use them as a way to align the group on the goal of the session.
PROMPT incremental decision-making to focus on the bits that matter
A prompt is not created to be followed, nor is it a command. A prompt is a thought-starter technique to inspire great stories, responses, and better outcomes.
Do these five practices seem simple enough? Excited to try this out yet?
To get started, it is as simple as:
- Paying attention in your next meeting. Do you know what Point A and Point B are?
- Trying our Facilitation for Collaboration technique. Tanzu Labs has workshop templates to help your team to discuss and align on goals, and make decisions for next steps and continue to make progress. The templates are available on Figma Community and Miroverse.
- Joining Tanzu Labs office hours to work on a problem or challenge together!
Tanzu Labs partners with clients in coaching individuals and teams with this style of facilitation for collaboration. This approach of coaching will leave organizations with skills and techniques that last a lifetime. Connect with Tanzu Labs for more information!
