Facilitation

A meeting facilitator's job is to guide a discussion towards a productive outcome. This often requires encouraging people to be direct, enforcing that people be diplomatic, and guiding people away from potential conflict.

Traditionally, a meeting facilitator has three main responsibilities: to state the agenda at the start of the meeting, to manage the discussion during the meeting, and to recap next steps and action items at the end of the meeting.

The difficulty of facilitation arises in the management of the discussion, as the facilitator must keep the meeting focused on the agenda, get everyone to contribute appropriately to the meeting, all the while making sure that no conflicts arise.

Keeping people focused on the agenda tends to only require gently reminding people that they are off topic, which may require nothing more than saying "Let's table that discussion for now," or "Let's put a pin in that," or, "That's an important point that deserves its own meeting."

Getting everyone to contribute can be a significant challenge, especially when there are imbalances in authority, expertise, experience, and tenure.

For example, if we had a meeting with a group of interns to discuss the effectiveness of a company internship program, it may be harder to get the interns to contribute if there were also members of the executive team in attendance. In this case, a good facilitator would need to periodically pause the executives, and call upon the interns to give their feedback, or else the interns may remain silent for the entire meeting.

Getting people to contribute is also a challenge on cross-functional teams, where people with different areas of expertise are all expected to contribute equally.

For example, if we have a meeting with the agenda to discuss a new feature request from a customer that has designers, engineers, and salespeople, it's inevitable that one group will tend to dominate the conversation at any given point in time.

Initially, we might have the salespeople doing most of the talking to explain what the customer asked for, then we might have the designers making proposals for how the customer's needs might be met, ending with the engineers providing a sense of what is technically feasible as well as the relative cost of different approaches. At the end of the meeting, the facilitator would read out loud the list of everything that was decided, and who was responsible for getting what done before the next meeting.

In a perfect world, such a meeting would have everyone giving everyone else ample time to express their ideas before the allotted time for the meeting expired. In the real world, however, this is rarely the case, as some people naturally tend towards dominating a conversation, and those types of people tend to be more or less common depending on their chosen field of work.

In our example, it would be natural for the salespeople to dominate the conversation, as conversation is what they do for a living. On the other hand, engineers who spend most of their time solving technical problems tend to have less opportunity for conversation, and so might tend to stay quiet in a room full of salespeople. Unless the facilitator intervenes, the meeting might be dominated by the salespeople explaining everything the customer wants until the meeting is over, thus resulting in no actionable next steps, which would necessitate another meeting.

Instead, the facilitator would need to encourage the engineers to contribute, which they might do by pausing the salespeople once they have repeated a previous point.

For example, if a salesperson said, "Customers are looking for quicker response times and lower costs, as they don't have time to wait around and don't want to spend a lot of money. One customer I talked to complained about how long we took to respond, and how much money they had to spend, and I understand why they're frustrated. Customers are always looking for ways to save time and money, so we should look into ways to get them what they need quicker, and not have them waste their money on stuff they don't need."

At this point, the salesperson has repeated the same point three times, but the engineers have said nothing, so the facilitator should say something like, "I think we understand the issue: Customers are looking for faster response times and lower costs. Would anyone from engineering like to speak to how we might accomplish this?"

If someone from engineering said, "Well, we might be able to start thinking how we could optimize some of the slower systems to try to increase throughput for the cases where the customer thinks things are too slow, which might be accomplished by applying a new set of dynamic optimizations which we've been looking at in a 3^rd party tool," at which point the facilitator might prompt the engineer to be more direct by saying, "I don't think we're clear on what you mean. What specifically should we do to address the slow response times?" at which point the engineer might say, "I think we need to increase our server capacity."

If in response, a salesperson were to say, "Increase server capacity? That's going to cost more money! The problem is you didn't write the system right! We're trying to save customers' money, not ask them to spend more. Customers are looking for..." at which point this would be where the facilitator should step in to prevent a conflict before it starts, as the salesperson lacked diplomacy in expressing their concerns. The facilitator might say, "I believe we still understand the need to save money, but I don't think it's productive to blame the engineers for a problem that we don't yet fully understand. Let's give them the opportunity to address the first concern of things being too slow, and see if we can find solutions that are cost-effective."

Proper meeting facilitation can be extremely challenging, but it is essential to the proper functioning of any collaborative organization. Making sure the right people are speaking about the right things for the right length of time is more of an art than a science, but everyone will appreciate a facilitator who got everyone to contribute appropriately, while also steering the conversation away from conflict.